John Morton put up a cabin on Whitefish Lake in the early 1890s, and the logging families — the Bakers, the Hutchinsons — followed. They dammed the river to boom logs, then cut the water loose and floated timber down to Kalispell. The Great Northern Railway had been running elsewhere, but a 1904 reroute to avoid the grade at Haskell Pass dropped the main line directly through this clearing. The town incorporated in 1905. By 1910 it had reached city status, its streets still studded with stumps — enough of them that people called it Stumptown. The Kootenai, Pend d'Oreilles, and Bitterroot Salish had known this lake by a name that meant "has whitefish" long before any of this. The timber and the railroad remade the place. The stumps were the proof.
