THE EVOLUTION OF A WOLF TRAPPER
I began my trapping career like many young trappers, pursuing muskrats and water-dwelling furbearers on my grandparents’ pond as a young schoolboy. Th at eventually morphed into trying to trap larger furbearers and canines as I got older and started high school. Being of school age in rural western Montana in the ‘80s, there was no shortage of critters to pursue in the surrounding waterways and mountains.
It wasn’t far downstream on the Clark Fork River near present-day Thompson Falls where David Thompson established the Saleesh House. In 1809, racing to beat the Hudson Bay Company and American fur trading interests, he established this outpost for the North West Company to try to gain control of the region’s fur interests.
David Thompson was an accomplished fur trader, surveyor and cartographer, traveling more than 90,000 kilometers and mapping 4.9 million acres of North America along the way. He was affectionately known as Koo-Koo-Sint by the local natives, which translates to “stargazer,” and was probably given the name due to his reliance on a sextant to do most of his mapping. David Thompson was the first European fur trader to enter Northwest Montana and many local landmarks bear the name of Koo-Koo-Sint to this day.
After high school, I tried my hand at college for a couple years and in the summer months was employed by the U.S. Forest Service as a
