Category: Wallowas

Grace Bartlett, the Nez Perce, and the Wallowa Country

This summer we have been doing Friday conversations on local and Nez Perce history. This Friday was the last session for 2024. We focused on Grace Bartlett and her book, The Wallowa Country, 1866-76. I hadn’t read the book in years, remembering always that it was a day-by-day account of the first ten years of white tenure in the Wallowas—and the last ten years of Native, Nez Perce tenure. I’ve always thought the book a unique contribution to local and Nez Perce history, but had not remembered details and some of the book’s signature elements. I skimmed it on Thursday night, and was even more appreciative of Grace’s work.

Grace (Sawyer) Bartlett moved to Wallowa County in 1932, after schooling in Mrs. Catlin’s School in Portland, and Reed College. She married a Wallowa County rancher and moved here, soon becoming acquainted with Harley Horner, the early and important historian of the place. She helped Horner organize his “scrapbooks” and letters to and from early settlers and Nez Perce Indians. That work, now represented as the “Horner Papers” and available online from the Oregon Historical Society, is a treasure trove of stories about people and places in the Wallowa Country.

In 1965, Alvin Josephy, who had encountered the Nez Perce while working for Time Magazine in the early 1950s published The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. Grace, who had spent 30 years interviewing early settlers and descendants herself, and written—often co-authoring with Horner—numerous articles for The Oregon Historical Quarterly, told Josephy that he had not been fair to the early settlers. Josephy suggested that she write her own book, and she did.

The way she “redeemed” the reputations of some early settlers was to individualize events and people in the history. There were some villains—the newspaper editor of the Mountain Sentinel in Union County, two wise-acre youths who boasted intent to “scalp” Chief Joseph, and a few others she thought either ignorant or wrong-headed in their dealings with Indians—and with their settler neighbors—get strong criticism. The people she thought intelligent, fair, thoughtful, and interested in good relations with the Indians, she praised.

Here are a few notable Bartlett contributions to our history, some rarely mentioned in the many serious books of Nez Perce history:

The importance of geography. Grace begins the book with a one-page description of the geology and geography of the Wallowa Country. The acknowledgement of the severe physical isolation of the country behind mountains and across canyons and rivers led to later white settlement. The Oregon trail passed through the Grande Ronde Valley and the Umatilla in the 1840s. The earliest “looks” into the Wallowa Valley proper by White stockmen came in the 1860s, and the earliest actual immigration did not happen until 1871. In that quarter century, the Grande Ronde Valley and the Umatilla had filled with homesteaders, and pressures for more and better grazing land grew fiercely.

The Nez Perce kept track of whites’ actions. Grace mentions the various actions regarding the surveys of the country. First, the 1864 survey of the Oregon-Washington state line, and the later surveys of townships in the Wallowa. She argues that Chief Old Joseph, on seeing the state line monuments, put up his own markers above the Minam, often referred to in the Nez Perce histories as “Joseph’s markers,” or “Joseph’s deadline.” She gives first person accounts of Indians pulling up stakes of the later surveys.

Failed communications. An entire series of mixed messages and misinformation led to a failed attempt to allow the Nez Perce to have their own reservation in a large part of the Wallowa Country. First, reports were of a “small group” of settlers, which officials thought meant a handful, or at least in low double digit number of squatters and homesteaders. In fact, messages to and from Lapwai, Salem, and Washington D. C. resulted in an executive order “Reservation for the Roaming Nez Perce Indians in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon,” while land appraisals that showed 87 settlers and over $67,000 in improvements. Some settlers sold to neighbors, or just up and left, but new people keep coming in, and the money to buy out the Wallowa was never appropriated.

Meanwhile, the land markers described in the documents led to confusion between Western authorities and those in the East. Grace speculates that part of the problem was local geography. The “upper” valley was actually north, while the “lower” valley lay to the south and west. In mapping, upper is always north, and the actual document returned from Washington had the Indians retaining the north half of the Wallowa, which included most of the white settlers’ claims, and the settlers getting Wallowa Lake and the mountains. An impossible situation on all sides.

Roaming. Grace says that the earliest settlers were fine with the Indians coming into the valley with their herds of horses in the summer months of serious salmon fishing. The Indians stayed their few months and returned to lower river villages on their seasonal round. As the number of settlers increased, conflicts over grazing grew, and as negotiations for partition grew, white authorities’ insistence that the Indians settle down and “occupy” the country allotted them and stop their “roaming” grew as well. And the Nez Perce insistence that they wanted the freedom to travel and continue their own traditional uses of the country grew as well.

Getting along. One of Grace’s original purposes in writing this history was to show that not all settlers should be painted with the same brush. She gives numerous incidences of friendships, and tells us that even in times of trouble over the stolen horse and killing of one Indian by settlers A.B. Findley and Wells McNall in 1876, the event that many histories count as a major step in the move towards removal and, ultimately, the Nez Perce War of 1877, Chief Young Joseph visited and ate dinner with Findley in his home. And she claims it was not the first or only time. Other settlers are signaled out for their understandings of and sympathies for the Indians.

I could go on with other Bartlett gems—I love the way women get their own names rather than always being “Mrs. John” or “Mrs. A.B.” She takes pains to describe the early settlers as small-time farmers and stockmen who went to the Grande Ronde Valley and Walla Walla to work for cash money before coming home for later harvests. And the big cattle herds that caused friction on the Imnaha were out of the Grande Ronde and numbered in the hundreds, while local settlers counted their stock in much smaller numbers

In sum, by individualizing the actors in the early days of settlement and recounting the specific events in so far as possible by first person accounts, Grace Bartlett shows a human struggle that involved land AND culture, official and unofficial errors in geography and judgement, and individual personalities. She finds the good, the bad, and the stupid in her subjects.

But in the end, the fate of the Wallowa and the Nez Perce who had made it their home for millennia seems foreordained. The national government’s efforts to take over Indian lands with treaties and the promotion of white settlement were constant. And the inexorable pressure of that settlement, of white immigrants’ dreams of a better life than the ones they’d left behind in Ohio or in Europe were unstoppable. (Grace didn’t say it, but I will. The U.S. government derived a good deal of its income from the takeovers and sales of Indian lands over centuries, avoiding the imposition of income tax, enacted briefly during the Civil War and then, finally and officially in 1913.)

And the bad apples, the opportunistic characters with their spurious claims, and the out and out racist ones who played their lives out in Northeastern Oregon in the 1870s are most likely with us still.

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Photo on Wallowa County home page by David Jensen

Spectacular!

It was—and is—spectacular

On Wednesday before Thanksgiving I rode with friends from Joseph to Portland. I sat in the back seat and spent time just looking. Leaving the Wallowa Valley along the Wallowa River is always a treat; the canyon always changes with weather and seasons. And then emerging out of it and into the Grande Ronde Valley, with rolling fields and patches of timber. Up into the Blue Mountains on the Tollgate road, where a big winter snowpack is promised by the Highway Department’s high orange stakes that will soon be keeping snowplows on the road.

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 →

Another Nez Perce Book

William Vollman’s new novel, The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War, is getting rave reviews. I have it, have glanced at the first few pages and looked at the extended notes and acknowledgements—and hoisted the 1350 page and what must be five-pound volume—but have not begun reading it. I am waiting for a five or six hour piece of time to take the plunge—seeing it and reading reviews having convinced me that I cannot do it justice or give myself an honest go at it in bedtime snatches.

But I have been thinking about it, and thinking about how the Nez Perce story captured Alvin Josephy 65 years ago and continues to capture writers and readers 138 years after the Nez Perce War put it on the front pages of New York newspapers. So this is a quick—pre-Vollman book-read—meditation on the enduring and captivating nature of the Nez Perce Story.

1. The Nez Perce came to national consciousness with Lewis and Clark, an iconic event in American history. And, according to accounts, they saved the Corps of Discovery—from wrong routes across the mountains and starvation—and impressed the Captains with intelligence, physical appearance and stature. According to the explorers, the Nez Perce also impressed with their horsemanship—European-Americans could not match the Indians with gelding technique and selective breeding.

2. Many of the Nez Perce did convert to Christianity, and they did not turn on their missionaries as the Cayuse and others turned on the Whitmans. (I credit this to chance: the Nez Perce got Eliza Spalding, the only one of the first four missionaries who invited Indians into her home and bothered to learn their language. Her husband, Henry Spalding had a temper in the name of the Lord, and the Whitmans, in my reading, were distant and mean. And of course measles visited the Whitmans and the Cayuse and not the Spaldings and their Nez Perce hosts.)

3. This conversion gave one band of Indians—what would become the lead non-treaty band—a Christian name, “Joseph.” It was a name the public could pronounce and relate to; it was not “foreign” like Toohoolhoolzote, and not an unlikely name translation like White Bird or Looking Glass. It was your brother’s or father’s name.

4. The Nez Perce were strong and smart. A lawyer friend says that a careful reading of the 1855 treaty, a treaty that resulted in only one tribe getting its own reservation, shows skilled negotiators. And Looking Glass’s arrival at the Walla Walla treaty site from buffalo country, which occurred after the other chiefs and tribes were assembled and is commemorated in the Gustav Sohon drawing, must have been palpable in its demonstration of power and dignity.

5. The Nez Perce War is recent; some call it the “last” Indian war. As Joseph discovered after the War in North Dakota, by 1877 trains and telegraphs moved people and messages across the land, and photographers documented events. The Nez Perce War was covered by the eastern press. And when Joseph passed away in 1904, New York newspapers announced the death of America’s “most famous Indian.”

6. Nez Perce Country. The lands of the Nez Perce, from the Wallowas north and east, across the Grand Ronde and Snake River canyons, are rugged and, in comparison to most traditional Indian lands, unchanged from the eons of Indian occupation. One can approximate the 1200-mile Nez Perce fighting retreat in a car, but foot or horseback one can make it—and some do, even today, across the same landscape with most of the 1877 landmarks.

7. The Euro-American ambivalence towards Indians: From the first meetings in Jamestown and New England, new settlers’ attitudes towards Indians were confused and confusing. Settlers depended on tribes for survival, did not understand or want to understand different cultures, feared what was different, admired what was different, but in any case wanted the land, the beaver pelts, the tobacco, fish and the whales. Indians were paraded in front of European courts. There were white women who were captured by Indians, and, in some cases, did not want to return to their own; and white men—think of the fur traders, who happily married Indian women and in many ways became natives; and there were also Indians who demonstrated that they could learn white ways. When the Nez Perce evaded American armies, Joseph—who, as historians have labored to show was not a war chief—was depicted as the “Red Napoleon.” Our advanced armies could not have fallen victim to uneducated savages! He must be brilliant. The Nez Perce gained supporters in the Eastern Press.

I’ll stop at 7—the number of drummers at a traditional ceremony.  And this one, number 8 it would be, is primarily a white issue, because most importantly, the Nez Perce War came near the end of 200 years of growing white dominance of the continent, and has raised and continues to raise feelings of guilt for injustices done the Nez Perce people—and to all Indians. The guilt is accompanied by admiration for Indian courage in the face of mistreatment, and astonishment that Indians have survived.

Now I think I am ready to start reading Vollman.

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Invisible women


Alvin Josephy cried loud and often about the omission of Indians from textbook histories, and often thanked the amateur historians—the “history buffs”—for keeping Western history alive when serious historians busied themselves with government reports and people and events considered major and somehow central to the American story.
Alvin’s Civil War in the American West pulled together material from across the region and integrated it with goings on in Washington and the Eastern War. That is the war that still plays on the main stage in American popular history and American film, but Gordon Chappell has pulled together a 24 page bibliography of books and pamphlets on the subject—he omits journal and magazine articles in the interest of brevity—that includes material “since Josephy.” Interesting that it appears as a National Park Service document: http://www.nps.gov/history/history/resedu/civil_war_west.pdf.  So the history buffs keep plowing the turf in the shadow of “Lincoln” and Daniel Day Lewis.
Although he did not write specifically of women in history, I know that Alvin encouraged others who did. He introduced me to Patty Limerick, who now directs the Center for the American West at the University of Colorado, and to Sue Armitage, who broke ground with The Women’s West in 1987. Diaries, photos, paintings of women—Indian women and white women—are prominent in the books and papers we are sorting at the Josephy Library.
Alvin would have loved the current exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society, “Tough by Nature.” Accomplished portrait artist Lynda Lanker, now of Eugene, spent 19 years traveling the West with notebook, sketchbook, and camera, and produced a wonderful series of paintings, drawings, and prints of 49 women working the West. There is a young Indian barrel racer and a grizzled cowgirl who rode broncs almost 100 years ago, mothers with daughters, and sometimes wives with husbands. But one knows from these images and the brief quotes that accompany them that these women were and are “actors in their own lives, not passive participants in their husbands’ ventures.” That line is from an early review of Sue Armitage’s book. I can’t put an image on this page, but you can get a bunch of them here: http://lyndalanker.com/.  Unfortunately, the exhibit closes this week, so if you are in the Portland area, get on down there; if not, you can catch it next in Texas, or in a book called Tough by Nature with a foreword by Larry McMurtry.
In over 40 years discovering my own West from my perch in the Wallowas, I have met rodeo queens, women ranchers and potato farmers, women who drive trucks and tractors, rope and brand—and cook and dance. But even here stereotypes persist. I remember a play written by an Eastern Oregon woman about growing up with the ranch and the Pendleton roundup—sorry I can’t come up with name or title—performed by Whitman College players. When they kicked women out of the bucking events in the rodeo in the nineteen teens, the heroine explains, it was supposedly in the interest of safety. Why then did they turn them to trick riding, where injury and death were even greater possibilities? The daughter in the play can’t have the ranch—there are no sons—until she finds a suitable man to marry. Etc. etc. etc.
There are some things that we need to be constantly reminded of: Indians are part of our history and part of our present; the West and all that happened and happens here was and continues to be as important in the American story as are Eastern and Midwestern events and stories; and women were here all the time, and are still here, ”actors in their own lives,” and actors too in the ongoing American story. 
 

Lynda Lanker’s 49 women should give courage to women still fighting stereotypes and pause to men who further them.

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