Last week on Wednesday I got up early, looked at Wallowa Lake’s east moraine and the mountain to the west now called Mount Joseph, and hit the road for an appointment in La Grande. It was a gorgeous day, bright, green with first tinges of browns and yellows. Light traffic. Enterprise bus coming to Joseph; the Joseph bus would be picking up students at the Little League field in Enterprise. I chuckled, as years ago when I was on the Enterprise school board, it was a big deal when a few students wanted to transfer from one school to another. Now, not so much.

No traffic in Enterprise, a glance at the fine Bowlby stone courthouse. Bowlby, I remembered, had owned the place a few miles from Enterprise where the stone was quarried and cut with crosscuts when wet, and then would dry hard. Several Bowlby buildings remain in Enterprise. Old Joe McClaran stopped me one day to translate the date on the courthouse, written in Latin numerals: “1909” I said. He thought that was about right, having lived here at the time, and disagreeing now with a friend about the year.

On through Enterprise and the curves west of town, a couple of flat stretches and up and down a hill and into Lostine. The best coffee in the county at the Blue Banana, and then through irrigated pasture, hay, and wheatland before Wallowa. It had all been flood irrigation when I came in 1971. I learned later that before the land had been drained and leveled, the Wallowa Valley was largely marshland and a braided river. The dam at Wallowa Lake, ditches, and, in the wake of WW II, D-6s “channeling” the river from Enterprise to the mouth of the canyon had changed all that.

Not as many cars in the Wallowa High School parking lot—there were 7000 people and 2000 students here in 1971; now close to 7500 people and fewer than 1000 students. Maybe 100 of them home-schooled. We have an older population, and young families have fewer children.

But what a nice remodel of their gym, with a workout space they are sharing with the community. Wallowa was hit hard by that ice storm a few years ago. There are still some battered west sides on buildings, but for the most part the storm and damage seem to have awakened the town. It seems more alive now than it’s been years.

Out of Wallowa and around the big curve on the two-year bridge—it took about that long to build it, by Dougherty’s hay barn that actually garaged log trucks. A small fishing pond. Johnson’s 100-year ranch.

The weather’s still grand, and I am thinking how gorgeous the drive, how lucky I am to live here, think too of a friend who recently moved back, because this is where she “feels safe”! Then I remembered the recent shootings in our country and the televised explosions and white-wrapped dead bodies in Gaza and Ukraine.

Is that cognitive dissonance? My joy at living here; the tumult in the outside world. But wait, it snows and storms here too; I rolled a car in the Wallowa River canyon just a couple of years ago; we’ve had murders and suicides too. The homeless are not so evident, but a look at some of the small old trailers and ramshackle houses and a visit to the thriving Soroptimist Thrift Shop tells me we have serious poverty issues here. I drive on.

I drove right by my rollover spot, didn’t even look, loving the curves, the water, the sharp hills and bluffs to the sides. And then Minam, and remembering a trip where David Weaver and I took several Nez Perce from Colville to the Minam State Park. David says it was a pit-house village before it was a park, that Old Joseph’s boundary markers are just up from the Park on a Minam hill. I visited them once, long ago, before they completely crumpled into the ground. Grace Bartlett wrote that Joseph had watched surveyors build mounds around center posts to mark the east-west baseline from Portland in 1866, so built his own markers. They were close to the 1855 treaty boundary that the Nez Perce agreed to; a boundary that was erased by the “Liars’ Treaty” of 1863. The markers are on private ground and not easily accessible. But I got in 25 years ago, and photographer David Jensen went before that and has a fine photo of a marker crumbling but still distinct.

The Nez Perce elders loved that village site. They could see fishing places along and above the river, Indian hemp plants for cordage on the other side, the colors in rocks, and we could all feel the nest-like old village, a place with all basic needs in walking distance. Camas and cous and huckleberries too—game that came to drink, and all the fish for fresh and dried in the Minam River.

The Wallowa County boundary is now at the foot of the long Minam hill that brings you from the Grand Ronde Valley into the Wallowa Valley. It’s just above the confluence of the Minam and Wallowa rivers.

As I drove up that Minam grade and topped out into the Grande Ronde Valley, I thought that they had misplaced the county marker. Even today, the Wallowa Country—not County—begins at the top of that hill, where Joseph put his markers a few miles north of the current highway, along the old trails into the country that dropped down to the Minam River and that ancient village site, that made its way across the river then up and over what settlers named Smith Mountain, and then dropping into the lush Wallowa Valley that I traveled on that Wednesday.

It is no wonder that Chief Old Joseph, tiwiteqis, set his markers and declared his side of the boundaries “Nez Perce country.” Six years after his passing, the Indians were forced to leave. That was in 1877, soon to be 150 years, but remembered by descendants as if it was yesterday.

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Photo of Joseph’s marker at Minam by David Jensen