The Day Kootenai Put Itself on the Map

June 30, 1910. It was a warm, dusty afternoon when a few neighbors gathered in what passed for a town center and made it official: Kootenai was now an incorporated village. No brass band. No parade. Just a quiet sense of pride that their little railroad town—tucked between the mountains and the lake—was standing on its own two feet. Folks still heated their homes with wood and lit the streets with kerosene, but that signature went on paper, and Kootenai belonged to itself from that day on.