Category: Oregon territory

The Longest War(s)

My friend Charlie texted me this morning to remind me that President Biden will announce today that he has ended America’s “longest war.” Charlie says that the Indian wars went on longer, that his people’s war, what we call the Nez Perce War, was one of the last of a continuing string of them, and that the suffering caused by Indian Wars cannot be measured.Read Rich’s Post →

The Doctrine of Discovery and the Malheur Refuge

I’ve been wondering where to start in understanding the Bundys and the militia takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge—and I keep getting pushed back in time and place. My journey started with the obvious—the Paiutes, but it didn’t take me long to get to the Pope!

Let me explain: A couple of years ago, a group of us at the Josephy Center spent a few weeks examining the Nez Perce and early white settler history in the Wallowas. 
On the day we were talking about the treaties of 1855 and 1863 (the Paiute and US Indian treaties being my initial starting point in my Malheur quest) that led up to the 1877 Nez Perce War, Bobbie Conner, the director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute on the nearby Umatilla Reservation, showed up at the Josephy Center. We asked her to join us, and she jumped in immediately with the Doctrine of Discovery: “You can’t understand Indian treaties without understanding the Doctrine of Discovery.”
So we went on to discuss that doctrine, and how it played out in transfer from the Pope to protestant Englishmen and the ideas of Manifest Destiny, western expansion, Indian treaty-making, and the ultimate displacement of American Indians across the continents.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York has an early version of the document—pictured here—and this is what they say about it:
The Papal Bull “Inter Caetera,” issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493… stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be “discovered,” claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers and declared that “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” This “Doctrine of Discovery” became the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ western expansion. In the US Supreme Court in the 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in the unanimous decision held “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” In essence, American Indians had only a right of occupancy, which could be abolished.
So the indigenous people who had lived in the Americas for millennia had occupied it, but had no ownership of it. Ownership was reserved for good Christian nations, and, presumably, for their mercantile companies—Hudson’s Bay; Dutch East and West India companies, etc. Modern versions of these 17th century giants might be the Army Corps of Engineers and Exxon Mobil. Or beleaguered western ranchers who maybe trace holdings to the Homestead Act of 1862?
“Occupancy” was another road I tried in my understanding of the Malheur situation. That immediately gets one to “joint occupancy,” which is what we—the Oregon Territory, including the Malheur—lived under from the 1818 treaty that finally resolved territorial questions of the War of 1812, until 1846, when a new treaty setting the boundary line at the 48th parallel forestalled another conflict between Great Britain and the United States.
To summarize: the search for “original” owners of the land that is now the Malheur Wildlife Refuge—who the current hostile occupiers say they are looking for—took me first to the Paiutes. But that didn’t work, because they only lived there, occupied it and did not own it. Which took me to the United States and Great Britain, which, at least initially, only jointly occupied the land but did not own it (along with the Paiutes, who also jointly occupied in fact if not in law). 
Actual ownership of the Malheur country begins with the United States and the 1846 treaty, which rests on the 1823 Supreme Court Case, which in turn rests on a 1493 Papal Bull. The land in dispute was not included in the Northern Paiute Reservation, although the Indians are allowed by treaty to have access—occupy—for hunting, fishing, and gathering. It was never, in my brief exploration, homesteaded, so no private rancher has ownership rights based on that.
Which means that the land is “owned” by the US Government by treaty and law going back to the Pope. Which sets up some kind of religious battle between Catholicism and a long-dead Pope and the God who told the Bundys that they should undertake their mission.
If this is all bewildering, Alvin Josephy, who always seems to have something to say about current events involving tribes, says in several places that one of the initial mis-understandings between Europeans and indigenous Americans was the concept of private land ownership. He thought, correctly it seems, that that misunderstanding still prevails.

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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.
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