the life of the people. When they had had only dogs, the Salish had paid no special attention to the American bison, which they had hunted just like deer and elk. Newly acquired mounts made it possible to overtake the American bison and the secured meat and skins could easily be carried by packhorses. All other game lost in importance. Before they had had horses, the Salish had lived in conical tents covered with two to four layers of sewed tule mats, depending on the season. The tipi soon replaced the old lodge. Instead of rawhide bags of many shapes and sizes, the women made parfleches from now on. Forced west of the divide Both the Salish-Tunaxe and the Semteuse were almost "killed off in wars" with the Blackfoot and further reduced by smallpox. Some of the survivors took refuge among the Salish. With the near extinction of the Salish-Tunaxe, the Salish extended their hunting grounds northward to Sun River. Between 1700 and 1750, they were driven back by pedestrian Blackfoot warriors armed with fire weapons. Finally, they were forced out of the bison range and west of the divide along with the Kutenai-Tunaxe. History The Flatheads lived now between the Cascade Range and Rocky Mountains. The first written record of the tribes is either from their meeting with trapper Andrew Garcia, explorer David Thompson, or the Lewis and Clark Expedition (September 4, 1805). Lewis and Clark came there and asked for horses but eventually ate the horses due to starvation. The Flatheads also appear in the records of the Roman Catholic Church at St. Louis, Missouri, to which they sent four delegations to request missionaries (or "Black Robes") to minister to the tribe. Their request was finally granted, and a number of missionaries, including Pierre-Jean De Smet, S.J., were eventually sent. The Flatheads are also located in Sula, Montana. The tribes negotiated the Hellgate treaty with the United States in 1855. From the start, treaty negotiations were plagued by serious translation problems. A Jesuit observer, Father Adrian Hoecken, said that the translations were so poor that "not a tenth of what was said was understood by either side." But as in the meeting with Lewis and Clark, the pervasive cross-cultural miscommunication ran even deeper than problems of language and translation. Tribal people came to the meeting assuming they were going to formalize an already-recognized friendship. Non-Indians came with the