Wondering what it must have been like has been a growing yearning as I’ve lived in this Wallowa Country for 54 years and met old-timers, history keepers, and Natives from the three reservations in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon that have stories and questions about their ancient homeland.
What was this Homeland like before White Settlement? Before dams and canals, drainage ditches and field levelings?
I thought it might be a fairly simple task. Take away the Wallowa Lake Dam, think some meander back into the rivers, and reconstruct a map of tule marshes, wild spring floods, glaciers still sliding in the high mountains, and a wild and free Snake River. I wrote a grant and called it “naming the Wallowa Country.” We would invite tribal members to come to sites in the valley and the north country and see whether there was memory passed down from generation to generation. We would see if old names—Indian names or settler names—could help us construct this map.
That old grant was five or six years ago, and in fact we made some great field trips to an old village site on the Minam, to Chief Old Joseph’s original gravesite near the confluence of the Wallowa and Lostine rivers, and to a tool-making site at Starvation Ridge in the North Country. With another small grant we took seven Nez Perce elders, native speakers to one degree or more, from all three reservations, on a trip up the Snake River. That trip led to an exhibit, “Heads and Hearts: The Landscape Through Nez Perce Eyes,” that showed at the Josephy Center Gallery, and, in an expanded version, is wrapping up a very successful run at Portland’s OMSI. Special thanks to geologists Ellen Bishop and Roger Amerman for their work in putting those exhibits together.
All the while I have continued to read old accounts, and developed relationships with some old hands—David Weaver at the Wallowa History Center; Ralph Anderson, the old man of the Forest Service who has been tromping these grounds as long as I’ve been here, and knew many resident old-timers and Nez Perce “informants” on Forest Service projects; and Bruce Womack, the retired Forest Service archeologist, who has made and/or supervised hundreds of “digs” in the Wallowa and Snake River country.
That simple question, “What was this Homeland like before White settlement?” has now evolved into a braid of information and further questions that could keep me and a team of investigators going for another 54 years—that would only spiral into more information and questions. Still, I’d like to take stock and tell you a little bit of what I have learned. Any errors are mine, and not the responsibilities of people named above or of Nez Perce friends who have joined in this search in conversation and on the ground.
Maybe the most important thing I have learned is how much the horse impacted the tribal people here—and across the country, but that is a subject way too big for us to think about here. Before the horse, the people lived in pit-house villages along major waterways. We know that there was a large population along the Imnaha, and that one of the meanings of that word is said to be “people of Imna,” meaning a headman or chief of that name and his followers. Early informants count as many as five bands of Nez Perce living in the Wallowa Country, living along the Snake, the Minam, the Grand Ronde, and Joseph Creek, and undoubtedly along other rivers and creeks as well. I think now that the numbers and names of bands must have changed organically over centuries. That what is now called the Joseph or walwa ma band grew from smaller bands, and maybe grew as smaller villages faded away over decades with the advent of the horse in the late 1600s.
Bruce Womack now thinks that people living along these rivers and streams pre-horse could have made their “seasonal rounds” within a 15 or 20-mile radius of the home village. He thinks there was a string of villages along the Minam. I think the story I have told, of Wallowa Lake being part of a seasonal round, a fishing time in June and July matching the sockeye run, which was then followed by mountain trips for huckleberries and then descending to the lower rivers for wintering before the climbs of spring to root fields, was all a post-horse story. People from the Imnaha probably did not make annual trips to Wallowa Lake before they had horses to get them there!
The seasonal round was only augmented by the horse. The same plants—camas and cous, wild carrots and celery, huckleberries and chokecherries, fish and game—could be harvested within that 20-mile radius, and tule for mats, plants and rocks for medicines, tools, and colors were, for the most part, available in the smaller circles. Fish and lamprey were seasonally available in their home waters, as were fresh water mussels. Game used fresh and dried was a major food and clothing source—again available in the smaller rounds. Womack says that “middens,” the remains or old campfires and eating sites, are always heavy with freshwater mussels and the bones of bighorn sheep. Sheep were, says Bruce, the primary game food, although deer, elk, antelope, and, by some research accounts in earlier years, bison, would have been used. (This might be a reason for the naming of “Sheep Creek”). Before the horse, trades and marriages could be made up and down the rivers without making the long trips to the Lake and the Valley every year. Or to Buffalo Country across the big mountains. Once they had the horse, the Nez Perce went east regularly.
The Valley itself. Without dams and ditches, would have roared with water in the spring, and then bloomed with grasses and tule and cattail marshes and seasonal lakes in the spring. Dry and warm summers, I’m sure. Imagine, as you drive from Joseph down valley through Lostine and Wallowa and into the mouth of the canyon, how it might have looked without fields flattened and drained, different at every season. I remember old-timer Cliff Collingsworth saying that when his family arrived in 1919, the rivers were full of salmon, often swimming among drinking cows. It was the post-WW II dozers in the late forties that got into the river at Enterprise and straightened it all the way to the mouth of the canyon, knocking out all the spawning beds, that was the first big hit locally on salmon runs (Fishwheels and commercial fishing in the Columbia in the 1800s had already done their work). Did I not mention the warm springs along the base of Smith Mountain at the mouth of the canyon? A favored camping spot, apparently. And I forgot to mention that century farmer Dale Johnson, whose place is near the canyon mouth, said that things were brushier and wetter when he grew up there over 80 years ago. His mom would send him to the creeks for the mussels. He blames the experts for bringing in cheat grass to stabilize stream banks for choking out mussels and ruining spawning beds.
Back at that village site on the Minam that is now a state park. David Weaver took us there, me and a group of 20 or more Nez Perce. They spotted the obvious fishing places; we noticed the marker for A.C. Smith’s toll bridge that settlers used—after 1871—to cross the Minam on their way into the valley. When you visit that site, look up the draw and realize that Chief Old Joseph’s markers, the burnt posts he buried in rockpiles as the surveyors had done in the Valley in 1866, were at the top of it. They sat near the line of the 1855 treaty, the land that had been promised Joseph at Walla Walla and then taken away at Lapwai by the Treaty of 1863. The one the Nez Perce still call the “Liars’ Treaty.” Imagine how, before any treaty, and before the horse, the Indians could have lived here happily, fishing, finding plants for their bows, arrows, fish weirs, pit house and sweat house frames, climbing to higher ground as plants ripened, retreating again to the river in fall. Maybe they visited other villages up and down the Minam, maybe they made a lifetime trip to Wallowa Lake. And then came the horse. Imagine how that would have changed everything.
Ah—it was a different world, and we keep learning more about it. In a conversation with Vic Coggins, the retired Fish and Wildlife biologist, we talked about the impacts of horses—and diseases. Lewis and Clark estimated 6-8,000 Nez Perce, but they did not visit the Wallowa, or other far-flung Nez Perce lands. A recently passed elder told me that he thought that there might have been as many as 20,000 Nez Perce in the country prior to a big disease outbreak in the 1780s and 90s that came across with the fur trade before the Nez Perce and othe Plateau peoples met Lewis and Clark or any White men. When I said that to Vic, he calmly reflected on the game and non-game animals he has followed for decades, and places he’s seen and the wildlife people from other places he’s talked with. The 20,000 population didn’t faze him. “There were plenty of resources to support that many people,” he thought.
More to learn; more to come. And, as I said, don’t blame anyone but me for mistakes or misinterpretations you find. But please let me know!