Priest Lake History and Culture

Before the maps

The Kalispel people, whose name is often translated as camas people, lived and traveled through the Priest River and Pend Oreille country for thousands of years, following fish runs, camas meadows and game across a territory that stretched from present-day Montana into Washington. Priest Lake was part of that world: a place of summer camps, fishing and huckleberry grounds. The Kalispel Tribe of Indians remains a sovereign nation headquartered at Usk, Washington, a short distance west of the lake.

A priest and a name

Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, the Belgian Jesuit who traveled the interior Northwest in the 1840s, is credited with the lake's first recorded name, Roothaan Lake, honoring his order's Superior General. Locals and later maps preferred the simpler Priest Lake, and by the time settlers arrived the name was fixed. Kaniksu, the name of the national forest that surrounds the lake, is usually explained as a Kalispel word for black robe, another nod to the missionaries.

Timber, rangers and the CCC

Logging came to the lake in the late 1800s, with log drives down the Priest River and steamboats hauling supplies up the lake. The Priest River Forest Reserve was created in 1897 and the Forest Service became the lake's largest landowner and, in many ways, its town council. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps built trails, campgrounds, lookouts and cabins around the lake, including the one that now houses the Priest Lake Museum at Luby Bay.

Lookouts on the surrounding peaks, a fire-guard system, and the long tradition of Forest Service employees living at the lake year round shaped a culture of self-reliance that outlasted the timber boom.

Nell Shipman at Lionhead

In 1922 the actress, writer and director Nell Shipman moved her independent film company to the north end of Priest Lake at Lionhead, bringing a crew, a camera and a menagerie of trained animals. For three winters she shot silent features in the snow and on the lake, working conditions that eventually broke the company. Her time at Priest Lake is one of the most remarkable chapters in early independent film, and Lionhead is now a unit of the state park.

Cabin generations

Much of the private shoreline at Priest Lake began as Forest Service and state lease lots in the early twentieth century, small cabins built by families from Spokane and the Palouse who came up for the summer. Many of those lots were eventually sold to the leaseholders, and many of the cabins are still in the same families. That continuity gives the lake its character: people here talk about their grandparents' dock, not their real estate.

It also produced the lake's institutions: the Priest Lake Yacht Club, the volunteer fire departments, the snowmobile and trail clubs, the museum and the historical society. Priest Lake Cannabis Company is a new name in an old place, and we take the responsibility of that seriously.