Category: Lewis and Clark

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 →

It’s the Water!

Photo by Edward Sheriff Curtis of Nez Perce Dugout Canoe

A couple of summers ago Allen Pinkham Jr. was here at the Josephy Center teaching workshops. He did a few days of beading and a few making drums with a handful of people interested in the crafts and the Nez Perce Indians who had developed them. At the end of his stay, Allen told me that “We Nez Perce were canoe people you know. I’d like to come back here and carve a dugout canoe.”

That conversation sent me on a journey that landed enough grant funds to bring Allen back—in fact, he’s due in tonight with his father and with Bob Chenoweth from the Nez Perce National Historical Park in Spalding, Idaho. Bob’s made a study of historic Nez Perce canoes— there are only a handful in existence, and the park has four of them—and will do a program based on his research. Allen Sr. will chip in with stories of canoes and Nez Perce traditions.

Without stealing any of their thunder, I’ll say that that initial conversation with Allen and subsequent talks, reading, and thinking have me looking at regional history in different ways.  I asked Allen Sr. one time if you stopped someone in downtown Lewiston and asked him or her what two words they associated with Nez Perce, what would they say. “The War and horses,” we almost answered my question together.

Water was here before the horse (which the Nez Perce didn’t get until about 1730), and Indians were using canoes on rivers and lakes well after the advent of the horse. Think about it. Lewis and Clark traveled a good share of their miles by water—rafts on the Missouri; and the Nez Perce helped them build canoes that took them to the sea.  In the Journals, they note few horses and many canoes on the Columbia.

David Thompson and the fur traders would pack trade goods on boats and horses, moving from one to the other with the terrain, building new canoes, trading canoes for horses, and on and on.  Locally, it’s obvious that historically, traveling the length of Wallowa Lake would have been a lot easier by water than horseback.

On the other end of the scale, Dr. Loren Davis, an archeologist from Oregon State University, told a recent audience at Wallowology next door that the first immigrants to the Americas probably came by sea, bouncing along the Pacific Shore to the tip of South America. That, and not the land bridge (the times of newer finds are pushing that date back and taking their toll on land bridge theory) is how the Americas were populated as extensively and widely as we now know they were.

Stories go on. This week’s local paper heralds the return of coho salmon to the Lostine River and the Grande Ronde Basin. Similar efforts by Nez Perce Fisheries, and by the Yakima Nation and the Umatilla have reinforced or reintroduced salmon populations across the region. Aaron Penny, a Nez Perce Fisheries worker and tribal member, says that the losses of fish over the last 100 years were like “losing your soul.”

The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation Natural Resources Department has a program called “first foods.” The tenant of the program is that if we take care of our foods in the way they are served in the longhouse, we’ll have a healthier environment and healthier bodies. And it all, of course, starts with water. Without clear, healthy water there are no salmon, and then no deer and the other four-leggeds and two leggeds that comprised traditional diet. And without clean and good rain there would be no strong roots and abundant huckleberries to finish the longhouse meal.

The biggest and most important water battle fought by tribes in the past 100 years was probably the fight on Northwest Rivers that led to the Boldt Decision and the determination that half the catch belonged to Indians. For their part, the Indians are restoring habitat and doing all they can with mitigation money to increase the size of that catch.

And simultaneously, from coastal tribes in Washington to these Nez Perce in their traditional Wallowa Homeland, Indians are building canoes again, reclaiming cultural heritage, showing the world that the water has always been and is still primal.

I’m tempted to go on, and tie it all to Standing Rock. But water is water everywhere, and you can do that.

Celebrating the Nez Perce

A few hundred Nez Perce Indians called this Valley home for thousands of years. They called themselves Nimipu (“the people”) and identified with this place, their families, their band and its headmen (Young Joseph, Old Joseph, Wal-lam-wat-kain, and on and on) more than any larger tribal group. European horses and diseases got here before Europeans did, and then the fur traders, who probably had seen a couple of Indians in buffalo country with dentalia they had traded for at Celilo through their nostrums, and put the Nez Perce name on them. This all before 1805 and Lewis and Clark. The fur men, migrants themselves, many from France and Scotland, trapped, traded, traveled and married with Indians. They had posts in Spokane and made it to the Pacific just five or six years after the Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery.  Historian Grace Bartlett says there were a couple of Frenchmen living in the Wallowa Valley with Indian wives when the first settlers came in—that was all the way up in 1871, when all manner of people were rattling around what some call Salmon Country—the lands from the British Columbian coast to the Northern California coast, and from salt water to the Rockies.

Settlers came after fur men, missionaries, surveyors, treaty makers, and gold seekers. It’s a long complicated story—thousands of years long and the length of rivers and mountain ranges, and the Nez Perce National Historical Park collects the pieces and tells the story in places across four states—Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Montana. They’re headquartered in Spalding, Idaho (ironically, named after the early missionaries to the Nez Perce) and are celebrating 50 years of work. One of the ways they are celebrating is with a show of “gift art,” the beaded bags, cradleboards, flutes, and moccasins Indians made and still make for children, sisters, and friends. And, fortunately for us here in Wallowa County, the first showing of this work is at the Josephy Center on Main Street in the town of Joseph (named, of course, after the last Indian headman who lived here).
It came on May 30 and will be up until the June 28. On the opening day we celebrated with Indian singers and drummers and artists and interpreters telling us stories.  Happily, May would have marked the 100th birthday of Alvin M. Josephy Jr. the man who told the Nez Perce story in exquisite detail, told it with the background of horses, diseases, fur traders, “discoverers,” missionaries, treaty makers, gold strikes, the Civil War, etc., told it, as much as he could, through the eyes and voices of the people themselves. On May 31, we celebrated his centenary.
There were still three survivors of the War of 1877 alive when Alvin began his work, and he spoke with them. When the Nez Perce returned to the Northwest in 1884 from the place they still call the “hot country” (Leavenworth; Indian Territory), the young men and those closest to Joseph were sent to Colville, in Washington—there was still much fear of Indians in Idaho and Oregon. Alvin went to hear the stories in Colville too. And in 1965 he published The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, still—fifty years later—the acknowledged starting point for book learning about the tribe and culture. 
The drummers stayed and played for the Josephy party. Gordy High Eagle, one of the drummers, had been a “camper” at the Josephy house in the earliest days of the Chief Joseph Summer Seminar, then known as the Day Camp. Indian kids came for several summers, and always stayed at the Josephys. Another camper, Albert Barros, is now on the tribal council in Idaho. He brought a proclamation from the Tribe honoring Alvin. Betty Josephy, Alvin’s wife, was honored too—Albert called her “mom.”
Bobbie Conner, who is now the director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Reservation and is of Cayuse and Nez Perce descent, spoke movingly of listening as a child as Alvin talked with her grandfather. She also spoke movingly of this Wallowa land, thanked those of us who live here for loving it and taking care of it, reminded us why her people tried so hard to hold onto it.
Which reminded me that Alvin once told me that the Nez Perce claim to the country still had some merit. Now, in the library of books he left us, and in the writings of Grace Bartlett, the local historian who put together a day-by-day account of the last days of Indians here, I consider this. In 1873, President Grant came to the same conclusion, that the Treaty of 1863 was invalid. He rescinded the treaty, and determined that the Nez Perce should have half of the Wallowa Country. His agents went so far as to assess the improvements on the land in anticipation of paying off the settlers (some $68,000 on fewer than 100 claims).  
It didn’t happen of course. Some settlers were dug in, there were Indian haters in nearby Union, and there was fear of Indians engendered by the Modoc troubles. Finally, fears rose to fever with Custer’s debacle in 1876, and the Nez Perce War followed in 1877.
That is a too short history story. To learn more, one could follow the Nez Perce National Historical Park sites along the trail—some 1200 miles—that took the Joseph Band and other non-treaties almost to Canada, where Sitting Bull is supposed to have waited for them.
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Lewis and Clark, Pinkham and Evans, Josephy


Allen Pinkham and Steve Evans
On Wednesday night Allen Pinkham and Steve Evans gave the first of what we plan to be annual lectures in honor of Alvin Josephy. Their theme—following the title of their recently published book, Lewis and Clark Among the Nez Perce: Strangers in the Land of the Nimiipu—can be seen as a direct response to Alvin’s charge in a long ago NYT book review of Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage: “[we still await] an understanding treatment (perhaps by an Indian historian), not simply of what the explorers reported but of what was happening on the Indians’ side…”
In fact, Alvin’s last book, which he edited along with Marc Jaffe, was Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, and Allen Pinkham began the evening by holding it up—he was one of its contributors—and explaining that Alvin had advised the ten Indian writers that he and Marc Jaffe were not going to edit them, that they wanted unfiltered tribal stories of Lewis and Clark.
In their new book, Pinkham and Steve Evans (who is not an Indian, but a respected historian and biographer of Lucullus McWhorter married into the Nez Perce tribe and culture) follow Indian Eyes, concentrating on Lewis and Clark and the Nez Perce. They explained how they had checked the journals and other primary sources against tribal stories—and sometimes common sense. Did Lewis and Clark—and York and some of the others—leave progeny among the tribes? Although Evans pointed out that “fraternization was not allowed” and Lewis and Clark “were officers after all,” tribal stories had it otherwise.
The common sense is that armies everywhere, from the dawn of time, have left children in their wake. The twist—which takes just a bit more common sense—is that the Indians saw sexual relations as alliance building. These new white folks and the one black man represented new powers in tribal lives, and like European kings and queens and security and upward mobility seeking peoples the world over, Indians saw opportunity in making mixed breed babies. “Romantic love” probably played a lesser role in most of the world in 1805 than it does among United States readers today—another thing to consider as we interpret the past.
Pinkham believes mixed breeds of the fur trade penetrated the West in the early 1700s, coincident with the arrival of the horse, and that diseases had reduced a population of as many as 20,000 Nez Perce to 5,000-7,000 when the Corps of Discovery arrived. Indian trade routes, so efficient in moving obsidian, foods, and weapons great distances, moved things faster with horses, and moved the good and the ill with equal facility.
But the method might be more important than any individual findings in Pinkham and Evans’ work. Begin with elders’ stories, test them against one another looking for consensus, then corroborate with written records left by Europeans, and in some cases Indians who took up writing or offered up interviews in earlier times. Present a different, fuller picture of the American historical narrative.
It reminds again of Alvin, who sensed the missing pieces in the standard written Nez Perce story when he came on it, then resolved to do the work himself when he found McWhorter’s work—Yellow Wolf and Here Me My Chiefs—and a few remaining veterans of the Nez Perce War.
Pinkham and Evans, who dedicated their book to Alvin, were the perfect choice to lead off a lecture series honoring Alvin Josephy.
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