Category: Isaac Stevens

Northwest Fisheries: 50 years of Boldt!

Yesterday was Superbowl Sunday—and a fine game it was. Congrats to the Chiefs! Today is Abe Lincoln’s birthday, which we celebrated separately until we bundled him with Washington and made it Presidents’ Day.

Today is also the fiftieth anniversary of the Boldt Decision, made in Federal District Court, which upheld Northwest Indians’ treaty rights to fish off reservation in their “usual and accustomed places.” Read Rich’s Post →

The Last Indian War—Horses and Technology

Elliot West’s “The Last Indian War” was published in 2009, so it has been around. I’d not read it, but it was handy and I needed to check a date or name, so picked it up. And read a page or two. And decided I should read it. Read it because what West does is put the Nez Perce War in context of the Westward movement and US history.

We know that the War parties—Nez Perce and pursuing armies—moved through Yellowstone National Park. Some writers even tell us that it—Yellowstone—was a first, and that tourists were encountered and captured. But West tells us that yes, Yellowstone was the first National Park, and that it “reflected three powerful forces creating and defining the West.”Read Rich’s Post →

“Like Grasshoppers”

It’s grasshopper season, which in my time and place means mild annoyance at the invading insects and watching the cat play with and eat them. I’ve never seen a real grasshopper devastation, what is called a “plague of locusts,” what God told Moses to deliver to the Egyptians:

“God told Moses to stretch out his hand over the land of Egypt to bring a plague of locusts. The locusts covered the face of the land and swallowed up every crop and all the fruits of the trees. Afterwards there was nothing green in the trees, and all the crops in the fields had been destroyed.”Read Rich’s Post →

Living on Stolen Ground

Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Ground is Bette Lynch Husted’s memoir of growing up on a dirt-poor, white, family farm in Nez Perce Indian country in Idaho. Their meagre plot had once—and long—been Indian country. Nez Perce Reservation lands were reduced by 90 percent from those promised in an 1855 Treaty in an 1863 Treaty. The Allotment Act, which sought to put individual Indians on Individual parcels of land, declared “surplus lands” open to white homesteaders. Whites gobbled up 90 million more acres of Indian land, That, as I recall, was the origin of the Lynch farm.

Read Rich’s Post →

Tomatoes and trains

Students in my OSU class in La Grande were asked to from groups of two or three, pick a crop or animal now grown commercially in the Northwest, and make short oral presentations explaining their subjects’ botanical or biological and geographical roots, and then follow them to the present. This is all part of the discussion of the Columbian Exchange and establishing in their minds the idea that farming and agriculture did not just originate in the Tigris-Euphrates, but also in what is now Peru and Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil. (And Asia and Africa for that matter.) Over half of all “world crops” originated in this hemisphere—think maize, tobacco, rubber, manioc, potato, and tomato!

So one group picked the tomato, and in the course of their presentation showed a slide with present-day world production. I think the US ranks third—I have already forgotten one and two, but Turkey is number four.
Which reminded me that in 1970, when I was on the Peace Corps staff in Turkey, I met someone from Heinz or Del Monte who was contracting tomato plantations in Turkey. I remember asking “why Turkey?” And learning that the commercial section of the US Embassy had sophisticated soil, climate, and growing condition information on Turkey—better than anything the Turks themselves had. Heinz—and/or Del Monte—stayed in regular touch with the ag and commercial sections of the State Department and their minions across the world, and here they were growing tomatoes in Turkey.
It so happens that the theme for the next class session—which was yesterday—was Isaac Stevens and the Treaty Period. We have attempted to “discover” what the entire region was like pre-contact, and then are following subsequent disruptions to the ecosystem—or ecosystems. The disruption catalog includes the horse, diseases, fur trapping, missionizing, and, currently, treaties and wars. We still have fish wheels and dams, tractors and irrigation systems to look at in the next few weeks.
Isaac Stevens is a very interesting character: first in his class at West Point; experience with Army Corps of Engineers and in the Mexican-American War; and campaigner for President Franklin Pierce. At age 37, due most probably to his political involvement, he was named Governor and Indian Agent for Washington Territory. But this was not enough for Stevens. He wrote and lobbied for a third plum, the survey of the northern route for a transcontinental railroad.
Explorers had found no easy “northwest passage” by water, and Congress, deciding that rail transportation was the ride of the future, had, in 1853 and 1854 directed the War Department to explore and survey four Railroad Routes from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, the northern route roughly between the 47th and 49th parallels.
My guess is that prior to the Civil War, there was no way Southern legislators would approve anything other than a southern route—the potential for additional free states was too great.
But at the time, Stevens was smitten with the idea of being the man who filled the Puget Sound with people and linked the nation east and west. His treaty making makes more sense in this light—combine and clean up the tribal situation on the West side of the Cascades, and leave room for a rail route to the north on the East side of the Cascades. And negotiate with those pesky Blackfeet so that the route won’t fall in the middle of Indian conflict.
So what does this have to do with tomatoes? Well, we happen to have Volume VI of the survey, published in 1857. This volume explored and surveyed an end route, one that would connect the Sacramento Valley in California with the Columbia River. The book is beautiful, with plates—some in color—of birds, fish, mammals, trees, and plants along the route, and it is practical, with geographical and geological information, distances, altitudes, longitudes and latitudes.
It is all that railroad entrepreneurs would need—along with rights to land—to build a railroad.  So the aha here—going back to tomatoes in Turkey—is that our government has always and forever, from Lewis and Clark to the internet, Leland Stanford to Bill Gates, done the groundbreaking work that paves the way for the private sector. 

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Isaac Stevens’ Quest for Fame and Glory!


Isaac Stevens is known in the region as the architect of the 1855 treaties that created the Nez Perce, Umatilla, and Yakima reservations. He was Governor of the Washington Territory, which made him the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and, along with his Oregon counterpart, Joel Palmer, the treaty maker on both sides of the Cascades and all the way to present-day Montana.

Stevens was a West Pointer who used his experience with the Army Corps of Engineers, Mexican-American War heroism, and election support for President Pierce to lobby for and win the bid to survey the most northern route for a transcontinental railroad. Congress had commissioned the survey of four routes west, and, I believe, the northern route never had a chance in Congress before Southern secession, but in 1853, when he came West and war was still almost a decade away, Stevens did not know this. And in my recent re-reading of the treaty period and Governor Stevens, I am convinced that the railroad job was the one that he fancied most—because it was the one that meant a national reputation and legacy.
It strikes me in all of this re-reading of history that the quest for fame and glory counted for as much then as the quest for financial fortune or technological innovation does today. And that life expectancy, which was less than 40 when Stevens was born and hovered at about that in mid-century, was one of the drivers that led generals, prospectors, fur traders, and homesteaders to take big risks at young ages in pursuit of it.
For most men, the prospect of early death coupled with fickle climate and frequent hunger, getting a piece of the American pie, rising above the mining camp-cow camp-plantation land struggle and securing a bit of something for sons and daughters was as far as they could see. For women, who died in childbirth in such numbers as will make heads shake now, grasping the straw of a man in pursuit of something better for the next generation was what they had (the women of Butte, Montana watched their husbands die in the mines and wouldn’t let their sons work in them).
For people—mostly men—of some privilege and great ambition, the military offered something more—recognition beyond family and one’s own time. I think Stevens was a part of this—first in his class at West Point, eager and ready to grab the rings that came his way. And think of it, connecting the continent with a railroad when ships were slow and horses slower, would knit the nation and Stevens would be the hero of it. 
Here’s Josephy’s summation of Stevens in his American Heritage essay on the Walla Walla treaty council:

A dynamo of a man, still only thirty-seven years old, Stevens saw all three of his jobs complementing each other toward a single grand end. As a governor who wanted to build up the population and prosperity of the territory, he was intent on winning congressional approval for the railroad route he had charted from St. Paul to Puget Sound. That meant clearing the Indian owners away from the proposed route: buying what part of their land he wanted, tucking the natives away on reservations, and ensuring the safety of the right of way for railroad builders and travelers. At the same time, the Indian cessions would increase the territory’s public domain and make land available for more settlers. Stevens bore no ill will against Indians, and even fancied that he admired and respected them. But as an instrument of advancing American civilization, he had a job to accomplish, and with a flair for publicity, he expected to win notice in the national capital for what he would achieve.

Although his rail route did not win the day, Stevens did go to Congress from Washington—and then went to the Civil War. And this is how it ended (as described in Wikipedia): “He was killed in action at the Battle of Chantilly on September 1, 1862 after picking up the fallen regimental colors of his old regiment, shouting ’Highlanders, my Highlanders, follow your general!’ Charging with his troops while carrying the banner of Saint Andrew’s Cross, Stevens was struck in the temple by a bullet and died instantly.” He was 42 years old.
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Rail Routes West


For folks with a keen interest in Western history, our Josephy Library is a small treasure ground. And like any treasure field, the prizes show up almost at random.
Summer intern Erik Anderson, a bibliophile and student of Don Snow’s at Whitman College, suggested I take a look at this one yesterday. He guessed that it was one of our rarer holdings.
And I think he’s right: Volume VI of the Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economic Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, a twelve-volume mammoth undertaking exploring four prospective railroad routes to the Pacific, made by the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers to the Secretary of War, published between 1855 and 1860.
Volume VI is the report of Lt. Henry Abbot on potential railroad routes from Sacramento Valley to the Columbia River. At the time, this was one of the best government documents relating the natural history of the far west, including five lithographs of fossil shells and a color lithograph of a Ponderosa pine.  
Our copy came from Grace Bartlett, and to her, presumably from her father, Robert Sawyer, one-time editor-publisher of the Bend Bulletin and chair of the State’s Highway Department. In a biographical sketch from the Bulletin that I have saved somewhere, Sawyer is listed as one of the 50 most influential Oregonians of the first half of the twentieth century. His story, and Grace’s story—Grace was Wallowa County’s de facto resident historian for many years, the author of many historical essays and the book, The Wallowa Country, 1867-77, and was the first curator of the Wallowa County Museum—are interesting and significant in their own rights. But we leave that for another day.
Reading Josephy on the Civil War in the West, I realize just how important the issue of rail routes was in the run-up to the War. Southern Senators pressed for a southern route, hoping to pick up a slave-state along the way. They were encouraged by sympathies in Southern California, and the new New Mexico territory, recently “gained” from Mexico. Free-staters pushed for Central or Northern routes and a Homestead Act, with hopes for more free states, Congressional and Presidential votes, and, probably, with some early vision of manifest destiny that would carry the country—progressively—to the Pacific.
And all had an eye on Western gold. That prize would go to the Union—without the railroad—and one wonders how big an impact Western gold had on the economies of North and South and War’s outcome.
There is a fine web site with descriptions of the twelve-volume railroad route work at http://www.cprr.org/Museum/Pacific_RR_Surveys/. 
I am especially interested in Volume XII, with Governor Isaac Steven’s accounts of explorations for a route along the 47-49th parallels. Stevens wore so many hats—Territorial Governor, Indian Agent, and Rail Route Surveyor—but the impact of his treaty making, which I am sure he saw in terms of service to the grander goal of route to the Pacific, is what stays with us and influences events down to this day.
Back to our copy—Sawyer’s copy, and then Grace’s copy—of Volume VI of the work. It describes a side route, a line that would link California and the Northwest. But the study includes very early botanical, zoological, and geographical information of the region. As an added bonus, our copy includes notes, made by Sawyer in the late 1920s or early 30s, identifying early place names and their modern equivalents, painstakingly hand-copied into the margins of the book by his daughter.    
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A puzzle re the Treaty of 1863


In 1863 the Joseph or Wallowa Band Nez Perce lived quietly in the Wallowa Country, isolated by mountains on three sides and the Snake River Canyon to the east. There were no white settlers—though a couple of French trappers married to Nez Perce women had lived among them from time to time—just a few hundred Indians who gathered summers in the Wallowa valley and at the Lake to hunt and socialize and catch and dry fish, and then spread out in family groups along the tributaries of the Snake River in colder times. 
In 1863, to the north, over high timbered country and across what is now called the Grande Ronde River and then more high country and then about at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, white men made new lines on maps drawn at Walla Walla in 1855 that had promised the Wallowa Country and a total of almost 8,000,000 acres total to the Nez Perce people forever. The new lines would exclude the Wallowas and whittle the Nez Perce Reservation down to fewer than 800,000 acres.  
Nez Perce arrive at Walla Walla in 1855
The reservation lines of 1855 had been made impossible by the discovery of gold and the intrusion of 18,000 white miners on the Reservation and a Civil War in the East that needed the gold and left no time or desire on the part of the federal government to understand and protect Indians from the economies and the greed of its white citizens. 
I had wondered why the new lines needed to omit the Wallowa Country. The Wallowa Nez Perce were not engaged in all that was going on in the outer world—the mission churches, the alcohol, the gold commerce that was growing like cancer to the north. Old Joseph, who had once invited the Reverend Spalding in, had given up his Bible after the doings in Walla Walla, no gold had been found, and there were no white settlers demanding land in the Wallowas. 
If the 1863 treaty had allowed the Nez Perce to keep the Wallowa country, I reasoned, the War of 1877 might not have happened. What were Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Washington Territory Calvin Hale and Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the new state of Oregon, W.H. Rector, and their white colleagues thinking? And Lawyer and the other Indian treaty signers?
In the end, after carefully reading the Josephy chapters in the big Nez Perce book and related chapters in his Civil War in the West book and looking at a map, I realize that I was the simple thinker. Joseph and his small band and the Wallowa Country were an island in a growing sea of whites and rapidly changing economies and religious activities that were transforming the region
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The Nez Perce, who had escaped with ceding only small portions of their territories in the 1855 Treaty, were awash in white miners, missionaries, and, maybe most importantly, changing attitudes towards land. At Walla Walla, Indian chiefs argued that the land was their mother and could not be divided and sold. But others had started talking about the sale of land, and, in essence, agreed to compensation for ceded lands. Some tried to hold both ideas in their heads simultaneously. 
In 1861 gold was discovered on Nez Perce lands, and soon the Nez Perce, some of whom now spoke and wrote in English, many who called themselves Christians, met and traded with the hoards of white miners. They operated ferries and sold them meat, and took their gold. Of course whites didn’t wait for the Nez Perce to build their cities and overrun their land, and 3,000 Indians had little overall power over 18,600 whites who had bounded onto reservation lands by 1862. The Indians were divided, and increasingly powerless, people.
And the white miners weren’t only on the Clearwater to the north, but also east, across the Snake River, where the city of Florence boasted 9,000 whites. To the south, there were gold strikes in Powder River country—not Nez Perce land, but land bordering the Wallowas. 
To the west, in the Grande Ronde Valley, settlers were growing crops, building towns, raising cattle, and looking for more grazing ground over the mountains. Joseph and the others had been told at Walla Walla that the whites would come like grasshoppers—and they were. 
Old Joseph did not sign the new treaty in 1863, but left Lapwai and came back to the Wallowas. He lived until 1871 or 72, long enough for the Civil War in the East to end, for the surveyors to come into the valley, long enough to see the first grasshoppers, but not to see the War that would drive his people away. His sons, Young Joseph and Ollicot, would have to deal with the swarms and the armies—released now from that other War—who would come to take the Wallowa country from them.
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