Category: Hells Canyon Preservation Council

Lessons from a Nez Perce elder

Proposed High Mountain Sheep Dam

Silas Whitman was in town this week, and the conversations were wide-ranging. The purpose of his visit was to speak to our current exhibit, “Dams, Fish, Controversy”—Jon Rombach’s had interviewed Si in researching the High Mountain Sheep Dam for the exhibit—and we were not disappointed. And the “wide-ranging” conversation was our dessert.

Si had been called on by Tribal officials at the time—in the 1960s—to follow the developments on that dam—and others. High Mountain Sheep was just one dam possibility for the Middle Snake. A competing project somewhat lower on the River put forward by Washington Public Power System argued that public power and their proposal should trump the private Pacific Northwest Power Company’s High Mountain Sheep project. Ironically, their competing project would be called the “Nez Perce Dam,“  and the “lake” behind High Mountain Sheep would be called “Imnaha.” (It’s hard now to imagine the mindset of the American power structure one and two generations ago, a mindset that would alter rivers and landscape and put Indian names on the alterations without comprehending the irony!)

The Nez Perce Tribe fought, legal arguments flew, and eventually both dam projects—although the HMS had already been approved, with road developments and land speculation on the way—were scuttled. The Tribe had been joined by a new non-profit called Hells Canyon Preservation Council and public opposition had grown when local and regional leaders toured the proposed dam sites with celebrities from Arthur Godfrey to Pete Seeger. In the end, Justice William O. Douglas said that fish and all they needed and represented trumped the rights of development; HMS died, and the Nez Perce dam was stillborn.

Si Whitman told us about an undercurrent. The Tribe had been caught between government agencies, and “We were an afterthought. We tried to get the BIA to intervene on our behalf and it was like pulling teeth. Our treaty rights would have been underwater.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the government agency charged with “managing” Indian affairs for the benefit of Indians, had played possum while the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation flourished. Indian voices on behalf of fish and all that the River was and represented had to wait for sympathetic white voices to rise before their own could be heard. (Alvin Josephy’s 1969 “White Paper” on the BIA documented this situation across Indian Country—but that is another discussion!)

Si reminded us that treaty rights would have been underwater with HMS and other dams on the Snake, and salmon—the salmon runs on the Snake and Imnaha and the entire Grande Ronde watershed—would have been gone. Extirpated, to use the harsh and correct word.

It seems to me that the greater lesson that Si shared was how “thinking like a fish” has to be joined with science if we are going to remedy the rush towards development that dominated natural resource policy during much of the twentieth century. I have asked biologists for years what might happen if the land-locked kokanee of Wallowa Lake were given access to the sea. Would the “sockeye” salmon DNA send some of them back to the ocean? I have learned from fish biologists that the occasional sockeye, probably with some wild gene in charge, is found in local waters. But Si’s answer was simpler and seemingly even more apt: maybe some of those kokanee found at the base of the dam trying to get downstream have the stuff to make it to the sea. He’d start there.

And with the big dams along the lower Snake that many are now demanding be breached? Si worries about the huge buildups of chemicals behind them, but remembers that Indians, when beaver dams stopped salmon waters too much, would pull them apart along their outside edge, restoring a kind of free-flow to the river. Thinking like a fish: “what we need is safe passage around this man-made barrier… and we don’t need the mercury and other junk stacked up behind the dams.”

On lighter notes, I asked Si about the continuing post-War presence of Indians in the Wallowa Valley. He knew of course about the Indian CCC camp that built the wall around what is now the Joseph Grave Site at Wallowa Lake. And he confirmed what I had heard about Indians camped at the fairgrounds in Enterprise, working the hay harvest in the early 1900s. And later! Si worked hay harvest on Harold Klages’s farm out of Joseph in the ‘50s, and remembered fondly the lunch feeds that Ardis put on for the workers.

And he remembered Irma Tippett and the Gold Room, where he played in an Indian R&B and rock ‘n roll band. And stories of his father playing jazz and dance music in the county with the “Nezpercians.”

Put up a few pictures of dams and fish at the Josephy Center, invite Indian elders to come and remember, and all manner of the true history of this place I’ve called home for 47 years floats to today.

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What I forgot to say!

So last week I gave a little talk at the Hells Canyon Preservation Council’s Portland fundraising event on the Nez Perce in the Wallowa Country. Board Chair Pete Sandrock told me I had 30 minutes—and that he was a tough timekeeper!

There is no way to summarize the Nez Perce story in a half hour, so the job was to pick out some high points and connect them well enough so that newcomers to the subject would get something to whet appetites, and people with some knowledge of the business might get something new.
On the way home I kept thinking of high points I’d missed—and determined to send a message out apologizing and righting my wrongs. Alas, a week has gone by, and many of the “urgent” corrections have faded, but there are still a couple….
Alvin Josephy at war
Number one, I meant to mention how important I think Alvin Josephy’s wartime experience as a journalist in the Pacific was to how he met and handled the Nez Perce story. He was only a few years away from horrendous experiences on Guam and Iwo Jima when Time Magazine sent him to Idaho and he first learned about the Nez Perce. He knew about war first hand, and he knew to trust the warriors’ accounts of things (and not rely on the generals and politicians). Previous, pre-war experience in radio journalism had honed his ear. As Indian historian Ciff Trafzer says, Alvin Josephy knew how to listen.
So two things came together immediately for Alvin. First, he saw that the Nez Perce Story was a “great American Epic,” a noble people and a fighting and tactically brilliant retreat and near escape to Canada and an alliance with the legendary Sitting Bull. Second, most of the available material on the tribe and on the War was from the White man’s point of view. But there were Indians’ accounts out there in the records of a courageous and eccentric Indian friend named Lucullus McWhorter, who walked the fighting retreat trail with Indian participants and wrote down their accounts; and in family memories and the words of four veterans of the War still alive.
Alvin of course determined to tell the bigger story of the Northwest and the Nez Perce, which took him back to Hudson’s Bay Company records, to the reservation at Colville where many descendants of the non-treaty Nez Perce still lived in exile, and to original accounts scribbled by fur traders, sketched at the Walla Walla treaty council by Gustav Sohon; notes, letters, and maps hidden and obscured in libraries and state historical societies across the country.

I think Alvin Josephy’s experiences in World War II are a big part of what he saw and how he proceeded with the Nez Perce story.
Number two. I know that I touched briefly on the discovery of gold on the Nez Perce Reservation in 1861, and the subsequent flood of white miners—some 18,000 had crowded onto the rez by 1862. I talked about the importance of the concurrent Civil War—Lincoln needed the gold and the country was still pressing irrevocably West during the great conflict. What I skimmed over was the War’s aftermath, when President Grant, listening to some of the liberal critics of how Indians had been treated during the War, turned over the administration of Indian reservations to the churches (in what Josephy says was the biggest abrogation of the line between church and state in our history). The Nez Perce Reservation was given to the Presbyterians to administer as part of Grant’s “Peace Policy.” (The Presbyterians become important in later Nez Perce history as well, but that is for another day.)
Fortunately, Presbyterian Agent Montieth was sympathetic and worked on the Indians’ behalf. President Grant eventually, in 1873, signed an executive order designating roughly half of the Wallowa country to the “roaming Nez Perce.” Assessments were made to make ready for buying out the white settlers’ improvements, but by 1875 there were too many settlers, there was too much in the balance, and Grant rescinded the 1873 offer.
What I am sure that I failed to mention is that one of the screwy bits of history, and certainly a killer of any serious effort to give Wallowa land to Indians, is that Grant’s reservation gave the Indians the half of the Wallowa Country that had been settled by whites—roughly the north half of current Wallowa County, including the lower valley and town of Wallowa! The whites would get land that they largely had not settled.
Historian Grace Bartlett examined this closely, and determined that it was most likely “bureaucratic error,” mix-ups in communication between the field and the head office.
History has turned on less.

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