Stand at Black Bay on a quiet morning and watch the Spokane River slide past, and a simple question comes to mind. This river drains a large, cold, fish-rich lake, so why has Lake Coeur d'Alene never had salmon runs of its own? The Schitsu'umsh, the Coeur d'Alene people whose homeland this is, have answered that question for generations with a story, and the story begins with Coyote.
As Peter Mahoney, the Coeur d'Alene Tribe's Cultural Resources and Protection program manager, told Lakes Middle School students in a presentation reported in April 2023, long ago a dam on the Columbia River kept salmon from reaching Spokane and Coeur d'Alene country, and three women who lived at that dam kept all the salmon for themselves. The peoples of the region asked Coyote for help. Coyote turned himself into a baby and was taken in by the women, and every day he slipped away to the dam and broke off little pieces of it, until he had dismantled it and salmon could swim into the streams of the Coeur d'Alene, the Nez Perce, and the Spokane people.
Pleased with his work, Coyote then asked the Coeur d'Alene chief to give him a wife. The chief laughed and refused him. Coyote went to the Spokane people and was given a wife, and the Nez Perce gave him a wife as well, but when he returned to the Coeur d'Alene people he was refused a second time. In Mahoney's telling, Coyote grew angry, stomped on the ground, and created Spokane Falls. He stomped on the ground again and created Post Falls. Those falls stopped salmon from getting up the river to Lake Coeur d'Alene, and that is why there are no salmon in the lake.
The story also explains the pattern of tribal life that followed. The University of Idaho's Lewis and Clark Rediscovery Project, prepared with the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, notes plainly that no anadromous fish were allowed to enter Lake Coeur d'Alene, pointing readers to Coyote and the Falls. At home, families fished the lake and rivers for cutthroat trout and mountain whitefish, using three-pronged spears, dip nets of hemp twine, and weirs built of saplings and poles. To obtain chinook and sockeye salmon and steelhead, they traveled to Spokane Falls, to Kettle Falls, and even as far as Celilo Falls to fish and trade, offering dried venison and deer hides in exchange. Fish made up a third of the traditional diet, and those journeys were also a time to renew friendships, play stick games, dance, and feast.
Mahoney told the students that the Tribe calls the lake the heart of its people, and that tribal members have always looked at the lake as a living being. It provided food, and it provided the tall tule grass that families harvested, dried, and sewed into the large mats that wrapped their houses and shed the rain and snow. Stories like Coyote's were part of that life, retold by elders on long winter nights in the villages along the lake and the Spokane River. The falls below Black Bay still pour over the rocks at Post Falls today, and in the Tribe's telling they are not an accident of geology alone. They are the mark Coyote left on the river, and a reminder that this shoreline was a homeland long before it was a neighborhood.
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