Coeur d'Alene lived in what would become the Panhandle region of Idaho and neighboring areas of what is today eastern Washington and western Montana, occupying an area of more than 3.5 million acres (14,164 km2) of grass-covered hills, camas-prairie, forested mountains, lakes, marshes and river habitat. The territory extended from the southern end of Lake Pend Oreille in the north, running along the Bitterroot Range of Montana in the east, to the Palouse and North Fork of the Clearwater River in the south, to Steptoe Butte and up to just east of Spokane Falls in the west. At the center of this region was Lake Coeur d'Alene. The abundant natural resources included trout, salmon, and whitefish. The tribe supplemented hunting and gathering activities by fishing the St. Joe and Spokane rivers. They used gaff hooks, spears, nets, traps and angled for fish. History As one of the Interior Salish peoples, the Coeur d'Alene people at the time of European contact (1793) subsisted on a combination of fishing, hunting, and gathering of plants, with seasonal migratory patterns and retreating to clustered semi-subterranean dwellings during the winter months. The prehistory of the Salish peoples isn't well known, but available evidence favours the possibility of a recent expansion from the coast to the interior, possibly related to an increase in coastal population about 600 to 900 years ago. The earliest written description of the Coeur d'Alene people comes from the journals of Alexander Henry the younger, a fur trader with the North West Company. He and British explorer David Thompson traded and traveled in the area from 1810 to 1814. He wrote about the Coeur d'Alene: The Skeetshue [Skitsuish] or Pointed Hearts [Coeur d'Alene] Indians dwell further southward [than the Kallispell or Pend d'Oreille tribes], about Skeetshue [Coeur d'Alene] Lake and [Spokane] River; they are a distinct nation, and have a different language [Salish] from the Flat Heads. They are very numerous, and have a vast number of horses, as their country is open and admits of breeding them in great abundance. Ross Cox, a clerk with the Pacific Fur Company and then the North West Company, spent considerable time at the trading post of Spokane House between 1812 and 1817: The Pointed Hearts, or as the [French] Canadians call them, les Coeurs d' Alênes (Hearts of Awls), are a small tribe inhabiting the shores of a lake about fifty miles to the