Category: Oregon history

Sea Otter–filling in the pieces

The new issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly just landed on my desk—and sent me back to the Fall 2023 edition. I am always amazed at the scholarship and the range of topics in OHQ. And sometimes kick myself for not digesting them whole as they show up. There is always something new about the old that helps me understand where we are today.Read Rich’s Post →

Fear–and Reconciliation

Old friend Jonathan Nicholas sent me word of an incredible event at his former place of work, The Oregonian. On Monday October 24, the newspaper published a long piece outlining its racist past. Its own investigative reporter, Rob Davis, combed the Oregonian’s files, read its editorials, and concluded that

“The now 161-year-old daily newspaper spent decades reinforcing the racial divide in a state founded as whites-only, fomenting the racism that people of color faced. It excused lynching. It promoted segregation. It opposed equal rights for women and people of color. It celebrated laws to exclude Asian immigrants. It described Native Americans as uncivilized, saying their extermination might be needed.Read Rich’s Post →

A different Oregon history


We don’t know how things will turn out in Egypt, Libya, or Syria, don’t know where the Arab Spring will take the people who are in the midst of it, or, for that matter, what impacts it will have on us, living thousands of miles away but connected by war, trade, and the long threads of family and friendship.  At the same time, we assume an inevitability in our own national history, which we are taught to see as a series of iconic events marshaled and mastered by iconic men—yes, mostly men. 
Our textbooks start with Columbus and give us Washington, Jefferson, Lewis and Clark; Lincoln, Grant, and Lee; Carnegie and Rockefeller; the Roosevelts, Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. There is “discovery,” then pilgrims, frontiersmen, and the Revolutionary War; The Oregon Trail, The Civil War, Manifest Destiny, the Great Depression, “world” wars, etc. etc. etc.
Our friend Alvin Josephy spent a career putting a different face on American history. He wanted to know why the Indians were dispossessed—and how and why they have survived; why westward expansion took the routes it did, and how the Civil War played out across the entire continent.  He did this by paying attention to small things—the diaries of women, the notes of fur traders, the words of Nez Perce warriors spoken in sweats decades after their War.
Joseph Gale
I am thinking these things while I try to wring the lessons from Governor Joseph Gale and His Indian First Lady: Oregon’s First Governor, a book written by driven amateur historians Lillian Cummings Densley and Aaron G. Densley and published in Baker City in 2010. “Our family interest in writing about Joseph Gale originated in growing up in New Bridge, Oregon, near the Historic Gale home…… we did not know our research of Joseph Gale would lead us to cover the establishment of the old West.”
Eliza Gale-courtesy Oregon St Lib
Densley and Densley trace Gale’s life from his 1807 birth in Washington D.C. through years at sea, in the fur trade, as merchandiser and farmer across the West, to his death in Eagle Valley in eastern Oregon in 1881. They tell us that he did take an Indian wife, and that she was the daughter of Old Joseph, so the half sister of Young Chief Joseph and Ollokot. Her name was Bear Claws, but she took the Christian name, Eliza, after Eliza Spalding, on her marriage to Gale.
When the fur trade collapsed, the Gales moved to the Willamette Valley and took up farming. That was in 1839. There is a good story about building a ship and sailing it to San Francisco and trading it for cattle; the missionaries in the valley apparently had the livestock trade sewn up, and Gale and others broke it with the ship gambit.
The white occupation of the northwest was in its infancy, and governance—or at least control—of the territory, according to the white governments involved if not the Indians who lived here, was held jointly by the British and Americans. In 1843, spurred by the necessity of probating an estate and the problem of predation on livestock, 102 white men gathered to decide on forming a government. The Hudson’s Bay Company urged “Canadians,” mostly Frenchmen, to vote against formation, but the “Americans” were joined by two breakaway Canadians and won the vote, 52—50.
Because of the factions involved—Canadians and Americans—most of them with Indian wives, missionaries, and a new wave of white settlers with white wives coming across the Oregon Trail, an executive committee of three was selected rather than one governor. Joseph Gale represented the mixed families. He served for a year, but with growing pressure from the stream of white settlers and missionaries against mixed marriages—one accused the Methodists of condoning adultery by allowing such a marriage—Gale chose family and he and Eliza picked up and moved to California with the gold rush.
Etc. etc. the Gales eventually come back to Oregon and settle in Eagle Valley. He dies in 1881 and Eliza picks up an allotment on the Umatilla Reservation. She lives until 1905, and is buried in Weston.
But think of the “what ifs”: The ship might have sunk and missionaries’ hands strengthened towards a religious oligarchy. The vote could have gone against formation, and the British hand empowered in the Northwest. The mixed families could have dominated and formed a government and, one can imagine, a state that favored their kind. The happy amateur historians in Baker County might have entitled their book The Tale of Two Votes, and made the Frenchmen Oregon heroes. 
Driven by local curiosity, they tell a tale that, in its rambling way, rouses other possibilities in Oregon history.
# # #

Alvin and Grace: Nez Perce and settlers in the Wallowa Country

Grace Bartlett left Reed College in 1932 to marry a Wallowa Country rancher. She worked on the ranch, raised children, and apprenticed with Harley Horner, the unofficial county historian at the time. With Horner and on her own, she wrote for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, the Wallowa County Chieftain, the Walla Walla Union Bulletin, and once, on the sockeye salmon, for Sunset Magazine.

When Alvin’s big Nez Perce book came out, Grace quibbled with his descriptions of early people and events in the Wallowas. Alvin told her to “write it,” and she did. In the wonderful and, I am beginning to believe, unique, The Wallowa Country 1867-1877, published in 1976, 11 years after The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, Grace detailed the 10-year transition of the Wallowa Country from Indian to white occupation.

We learn about the early “open” winter (much like this one) when the whites first brought stock into the valley. They didn’t feed all fall and early winter and the news went to Union County newspapers and then to the Oregonian and the rest of the West that the Wallowas was a “Stockman’s paradise.” It was the first of many misunderstandings.

The settlers soon did learn from the Indians to move cattle to lower canyon ground in winter months. The Indians were not in the upper valleys in winter months—or even spring months. They generally arrived in August and hunted, fished, and gathered foods through the fall. There were meeting places—the forks of the rivers above present day Wallowa, where Old Joseph was originally buried; Indian Town on Chesnimnus Creek, and Wallowa Lake for the sockeye salmon harvest. They kept their own herds of horses and cows in the canyons, and moved there themselves after their summer-fall upper valley sojourns.

In general, Indians and settlers got along with each other. There were a few “Indian haters” among the settlers, and, according to Grace, they were known by their neighbors and not much appreciated. There was also a rabble rousing newspaper in Union County. But most of the settlers—even as war loomed with a conflict over horses and a white man killing an Indian, with subsequent “councils” of Indians and whites, movements of soldiers from Walla Walla, and meetings of Indians, generals, and Indian agents in Lapwai—were busy planting and harvesting crops, dealing with their livestock, arranging schooling for children, and going to the Walla Walla Valley to work for cash during the earlier harvest time there.

There were attempts to reconcile the treaty of 1855, which left the Wallowa Country to the Indians, and which the Joseph or Wallowa band Nez Perce had signed, with the 1863 treaty, which took away the Wallowas, and which they and several other bands had not signed. These attempts involved Washington D.C. and the Indian agency in Lapwai.

Without going into details, a division of the valley was envisioned, but Lapwai Indian agent Montieth, Washington authorities and the settlers could not seem to pull it off, because they could not get the “roaming Nez Perce,” as they called them, to agree to settle down. In other words, if Joseph and his people had just agreed to “become white” in their culture and
agriculture, they might not have been expelled from the Wallowa Country.

Alvin said many times that from the beginning of the European adventure in the Americas, we killed Indians with war and disease, but, more importantly, we overwhelmed them with Euro-centered culture. Often, it was the best intentioned who tried to assimilate them, and kill what he called “Indianness.”

Grace Bartlett’s book, written with Alvin’s strong encouragement, gives a blow by blow account of the way that played out in the Wallowa Country.