Читать книгу Selling Your Father’s Bones: The Epic Fate of the American West - Brian Schofield - Страница 8

‘All hail, thou western world! by heaven design’d Th’ example bright, to renovate mankind’

‘Greenfield Hill’, by TIMOTHY BRIGHT, 1794

‘Annuit coeptis — He has approved this undertaking’

The Great Seal of the United States

THE OREGON PRAIRIE dozed in the scalding midsummer heat, the only movement the irrigation machines hopelessly spritzing the Columbia River into the gasping dry air. The miles passed as the truckers, farmers and loggers showed the way eastwards and inwards through the crisp, lifeless wheatfields. The highway started to rise, weaving over the Blue Mountains then sliding down into another frying pan, the valley of the Grande Ronde, a river scarcely worth the name crawling through the drought-stricken farmland, dotted with the dog-eared little towns of Alice, Imbler (’We’re too blessed to be depressed’ proclaimed the church sign defiantly), Summerville and Elgin.

Finally, the road began to curve upwards again, a merciful breeze rolled in, the tan grass was dotted, then clustered, then shaded with pine trees, and the angles of the land tightened from lowland curves to alpine edges. The road was struggling to find a way now, clambering towards the high country, over the barricade of Minam Summit, the fading, clunking camper van beginning to strain and steam at the incline. The hill topped out at last to a broad-shouldered summit, revealing the treasures it protected, a view that had raised the spirits of homecomers, newcomers, guests and transgressors for millennia. This was Nez Perce country.

Steepling pine-covered slopes folded away to the horizon, falling swathes of meadowland breaking the deep green wash, and, below, the fast-running Minam River caught the last of the afternoon sun as it carved out its canyon walls. The road careered down to meet the river, where fishermen were chasing salmon and a family of deer was hunting out the shade within the riverbank willows. Soon, the Minam poured into the main event, the Wallowa River, and the canyon’s sides began to release their grip, widening and slackening until it was time for them to fall away entirely, and let the softening light flood across the full sweep of the Wallowa Valley. And then, the wonder of the place strikes in an instant, and it’s a dull heart that doesn’t echo the thoughts of Joseph E Johnson, one of the very first white men to drive their stakes into this land and claim it as their own: ‘As soon as I looked out into the valley I said to myself, “This is where I want to live.”’

You could find nowhere better. The heart of the valley is the river basin, corralled into farmland and pasture, speckled with lonely red barns and white ranch houses, with the Wallowa and Lostine rivers winding lazily through the greenery. Serving guard on one flank of the valley lies a bank of rolling, sun-dried grassland hills, while on the other the Wallowa Mountains shoot skywards in a precipitous flurry of forests, cliff faces and snowfields, suggesting adventure and isolation away from the homely calm of the lowlands.

The town of Wallowa itself, the first in the valley, is little more than a picturesque bend in the road, a few shops and a diner clustered between the gas station and the espresso shack, the kind of place where the teenagers do laps through the evening shade in their pick-up trucks, in search of something to do. It was only a short drive to the north edge of town, where the tepees were clustered against the edge of an irrigation ditch, mosquitoes plundering in the darkness, the craggy mass of Tick Hill looming over the encampment meadow like an unfriendly giant. Someone had lit a fire, and the lawn chairs were gathered for a chat.

The next day we busied ourselves with preparations for the annual gathering that would rouse this field to life, Tamkaliks: ‘From where you can see the mountains’. I joined the local youth conservation volunteers, gradually and messily mastering the art of turning a lodgepole pine tree into a working lodgepole, stripping off the bark with double-handled sickles, covering ourselves in pungent, tenacious sap. A circular wooden arbour lay in the centre of the meadow, with bleachers and hay bales stacked in the shade for the spectators. We worked all day, and, as the afternoon came to an end, a crowd gathered from their jobs in the valley to help in the raising of the arbour’s roof — an old army tank parachute, a billowing mass of military-green fabric that hung from a central pole to fill the centre of the circle, and shade tomorrow’s dancers from the fierce peak of summer. The men were enjoying the banter and sweat, but a woman, Sarah Lynne, was quietly running the show, allocating tasks, keeping an eye on the youth volunteers and hauling the hay in her pick-up. Her great-grandfather had come into this valley as one of the first white squatters, she said: ‘My grandfather said one of his earliest childhood memories was the sparks of the cavalry’s hooves when they rode into the valley, in 1877, the shoes hitting against the rocks in the dark. Because my great-grandfather could speak some Nez Perce, he helped interpret for Young Joseph when the cavalry came. Joseph even came down to my great-grandfather’s house before everything started and said, “Take your wife and your papoose, and leave — there’s going to be trouble.” My family were never all that happy with what happened to the Nez Perce — but governments do what governments do. They wanted to mine and log and pursue the so-called progress of the West — so there you are.’

Saturday bustled in the heat, the vendors on their summer powwow trail gathering their stalls around the arbour, selling jewellery, art, fabrics, ice cream, Indian tacos and countless gallons of lemonade to the growing, sweltering crowd, a mix of locals enjoying a chance to chat, flirt and gossip, plus pilgrims from across the western states, a group of greying military veterans in their pressed white shirts and, away from the stalls, enjoying the calm of’Tepee Alley’, the drummers and the dancers, dozing, sewing, unpacking, preparing.

I killed time at the taco stall with Fred Minthorn, a Wallowa Nez Perce, grinning widely beneath a capacious baseball cap and wraparound shades.

‘I look forward to Tamkaliks all year. I love it here, I can bring my grandkids, let them run free, let them be kids, you know? Not like back on the reservation, you have to look out for them all the time there, with all the drugs and the alcohol. We had a guy die last week on the reservation — OD’d.’

Fred worked as a maintenance man at the tribal casino, but his real passion was his horses and the journey they offered away from a present he had little time for and back to his ancestral past: ‘My great-great-aunt used to tell stories of how this valley was filled with our horses, so many of them, thousands. She was one of the last remaining survivors of the great retreat, when we were pushed out of here; she was raised here in this valley, and she was descended from Young Joseph’s father-in-law, and she helped raise us. So that’s our connection, that’s what makes us descendants, me and Brian, my cousin. We’re going to be buried up on that hill,’ he smiled wide again, pointing up to the craggy edge of Tick Hill.

As the ten-minute call for the Grand Entry was delivered over the tannoy, the bleachers filled with spectators — but this was not a show, and there would be no hurrying. At the five-minute call, the elders took to their lawn chairs in the front row, at showtime the drummers took their seats (four or five men circled around each hide drum, young boys peering over their shoulders for lessons), then the absolutely last call came through, the drummers started to play — and only then was the floor filled with dancers, from toddlers to patriarchs, following the Stars and Stripes and the tribal staff into the arena, porcupine quills, eagle feathers, buffalo horns, neon shawls, bell-strewn jingle dresses, pristine fans, buckskin waistcoats, fur-trim boots, beaded bags and bracelets all in perfect order. From the crowd-melting Tiny Tots to the cold-eyed competitiveness of the Golden Age Men, the evening passed through the age brackets and dance styles, each rigid to a dress code and etiquette of movement, sometimes reflecting the wings of a butterfly, others the posturing of a prairie chicken, the action of warriors ducking cannon balls or flattening the long grass for a camp, while the drum groups took it in turns to control the floor like puppeteers, beating rhythm and straining for their stratospheric harmonies.

As night fell the crowd in the bleachers grew larger, the dancing more expressive, the darkness adding theatre and concentrating our minds on this unlikely circle of light. Brian Conner, Fred’s cousin, was serving as emcee and announced that the central moment of the weekend was due — the veterans’ honour dance. ‘This is a time for us to heal, a time for us to come together — and that’s what this ceremony is all about.’

Any veterans of military service, Indian and non-Indian, were invited to take to the floor and follow the flags of the armed forces in a circle dance (forty-eight men and women stepped up, many of whom, it transpired, had travelled hundreds of miles just for this moment), then the whole crowd, maybe three hundred of us, walked the circle shaking each hand and offering our thanks for their sacrifices, to starch-pressed veterans of Omaha Beach and Korea, bearded and Hawaiian-shirted baby boomers with Vietnam tours to recall, eerily fresh-faced returnees from the War on Terror. ‘The warriors are home,’ declared Brian as we circled, reminding us that Native Americans contribute a greater proportion of military servants than any other ethnic group in the US, that more than four hundred Nez Perce have served in the past century: ‘These people fought for the freedom to sing our songs, and tonight we pay tribute.’

The microphone was passed around, each veteran asked in turn to describe their service, each lengthily applauded, many unable to hold back the tears as they spoke of fallen friends and stolen youths. Steve Reuben, a Nez Perce, recalled, ‘I never met a single Native American in Vietnam — then I came home and went to a clinic for post-traumatic stress disorder, and it was all Indians — from twenty-two tribes!* And it’s all hard to forget, and we cry now, but these are tears of happiness, because we’re here with you all today, in a circle.’

The last man to take the microphone wore a Purple Heart on his white short-sleeved shirt, his flawless ponytail falling beneath a US Marines cap: ‘I just want to thank you all; this is a heartwarming experience for me, and a healing…’ He began to weep deeply, quietly. ‘I was in Vietnam, and…I’ve still got the stress disorder, the dreams. When I think about some of the things I’ve seen…and when I think about some of the things I’ve done…’ Most of us are crying now…‘Well, this is the most healing I’ve done in a long time, and, just, thank you all.’

The dancing went on late into the night.

On Sunday Tamkaliks wound to a close, with a traditional Nez Perce religious ceremony in the morning, a friendship feast of buffalo, elk and salmon, then there was a final round of dances, a closing prayer, and that was that. The tepees started to come down, the vendors shut up their vans. As the heat of the day passed, I climbed Tick Hill, reaching the low summit and overlooking the meadow from beneath a hackberry tree that had forced its way through the rock face. Below, the arbour was still glowing at the centre of the emptying meadow, as a few sparks of dry lightning fled from the blood-red clouds to the east, and the local patrol of Canada geese cruised soundlessly over the river on their daily route home. The Wallowa band of the Nez Perce were packing their cars, facing the long drive home to Idaho, Washington, the Oregon Prairie and elsewhere, leaving the valley to its placid routine of yard sales, baseball games, fundraising breakfasts and coffee-morning gossip.

‘We ask the children to dance first,’ Brian Conner had said, ‘then the women and then the men. We do this to honour first those children, then those women and those men, who took part in that long retreat, when we left this valley, one hundred and thirty years ago. Because, as we all know, one hundred and thirty years is not a very long time.’

The wagon train was trapped in the Rocky Mountains when the blizzard struck, scattering the horses, enfeebling the children and obscuring the onward path. The emigrants had been travelling since spring, and for many this was the final straw. They had overcome the sapping monotony of the prairies, driven their creaking, oxen-hauled wagons through mud, marshlands and boulder fields, crossed the swollen Snake River, lost friends and family to sickness and accidents, and faced down the constant terror of Indian attack for the past five months. Some of the tribes they’d met had been friendly, and the settlers had followed the orders of their leader, the legendary scout and mountain man Breck Coleman, to ease their path through Indian Country — ‘They’ll probably bring their families to beg, so feed them well and feed them right.’ But other bands had been implacable, staging daring raids that had forced the wagons into a defensive circle, arrows and bullets filling the air. And now winter was approaching, the snow was falling ever thicker, and spirits were sagging — the heads of each family took a vote on turning back, and the decision to accept defeat was made. Dreams of a new life in the lush, unsettled valleys of the Oregon Territory were set aside.

Breck Coleman was having none of it. Knee-deep in the drifting whiteness, seemingly impervious to the cold, he urged the travellers not to lose heart:

‘We can’t turn back! We’re blazing a trail that started in England! Not even the storms of the sea could turn back those first settlers. And then they carried it on further, they blazed it on through the wilderness of Kentucky — famine, hunger, not even massacres could stop them. And now we’ve picked up the trail again — and nothing can stop us, not even the snows of winter nor the peaks of the highest mountains. We’re building a nation! But we’ve got to suffer — no great trail was ever blazed without hardship. And you gotta fight, that’s life, and when you stop fighting, that’s death. So whaddya gonna do, lie down and die? Not in a thousand years — you’re going on with me!’

With a mighty cheer the emigrants hitched their wagons and rolled on, finally coming to rest and building their new lives in the fertile, unpopulated valley of their fantasies. As for young Breck Coleman, his towering, lopsided figure would later be seen defending the Alamo, taking the sands of Iwo Jima, riding the Rio Grande and shooting Liberty Valance, in a fifty-year career for which The Big Trail (Fox Films, 1930, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring John Wayne and Marguerite Churchill) would prove a mere canapé.

Tuekakas’ favourite summer camp lay at the junction of the Wallowa and Lostine rivers, just a few miles south-east of Tick Hill. There was plentiful grazing for his people’s horses, the two rivers ran red with trout and salmon, and the narrow Lostine Valley led away from the flat-bottomed plain and up into the forested mountains where deer and elk abounded. In his time, when only the unreliable rains brought growth, the valley floor was a semi-desert of sagebrush and hardy, tawny grasses, mingled with pine groves and, where the rivers fled their banks, the odd patch of floodland, thick with migrating fowl. Now, however, the relentless tsk-tsk-tsk of the irrigation machines shared the rivers’ flow across a confected delta, turning the ceaseless pasture and hayfields an unlikely luscious green under the fierce sun. The pine groves were long gone, while the rivers had been straightened in places, dredged and divided up between each farmstead.

‘This is where I want to live’ — the Wallowa Valley, Oregon.

The sprays were working overtime as the heatwave had yet to lift; the radio warned that Oregon was under a state of emergency, and the haze beginning to fill the valley was evidence that the lightning on the last night of Tamkaliks had found the forests kindling-dry. At the site of the old camp, a family of deer was foraging in the shade of a grain store, and water was trickling over the edge of the narrow country lane — an enlightened rancher was trying to rebuild a portion of the long-drained wetlands, to help restore the salmon runs and secure a home for the valley’s sentinel geese.

The road streaked on to the town of Enterprise, a low-slung and likeable place with an air of hard luck about it that wasn’t significantly alleviated by the decision to pipe the local radio station through tinny loudspeakers along the length of Main Street. Like the rest of the valley, Enterprise was still battling to recover from a sucker punch delivered in the 1980s, when all but one of the local lumber yards shut down, shedding more than four hundred family wage jobs in the process, and the country music echoing thinly around the deserted, sun-bleached streets did little to raise the mood. Today, though, a feeble festivity was in the air — discount offers, special menus, live bands and more were being heralded throughout town, as everyone sought to capture a slice of the passing trade drawn in by the main event about to start a few miles down the road — Chief Joseph Days.

Out here, every town has its Days — an annual commemorative weekend when the chamber of commerce crams the calendar with tourist-enticing parades, barbecue cook-offs, fun runs and fundraisers, all hung on a local historical hook. And the town of Joseph, Oregon, at the far end of the Wallowa Valley, has its own fine example — the day before Chief Joseph Days was due to spring into action, the pavements and parking spots of this studiously cute little place were already filling up with gaggles of ambling, half-lost out-of-towners.

At first sight, Joseph seemed to be a town that had cheerfully accepted its fate. The Outlaw Bar, the Stubborn Mule Steakhouse, the Indian Lodge Motel, the spotless parquet pavements and the bronze municipal sculptures of noble chieftains, bucking cowboys and soaring eagles all colluded in the tourist-friendly Western tableau. Pleasantness washed over the place, and had clearly not gone unnoticed — the power-walkers, micro-breweries and cookie-cutter coffee/book/gift/chintz shops were but a hint of the influence of the last decade’s new arrivals in town, a wave of affluent retirees, down-sizers and summer-home shoppers. (The only disreputable, properly intimidating bar in town, the Hydrant, was up for sale.) Main Street ran in a steady incline from the cattle pastures on the edge of town towards the great bowl of Wallowa Lake, its waters, dotted with fishing craft and scored by jet skis, held in place between a featureless, grass-covered glacial moraine and the alpine silhouette of the Wallowa Mountains. To complete the familiar scene, many of the tourists were disappearing into a reverie of an alternative life, ice creams in hand, at the garrison of estate agents’ windows.

A marginally less cheery cameo was being played out at the registration table for the upcoming children’s parade. From a peak of three hundred entrants a few years earlier, the parade was now down to two hundred, accurate testimony to the Wallowa Valley’s altered demographics — the population had been stable for the last ten years, but the number of school-age children had fallen by almost a third, as all those Cornetto-dripping summer-home snatchers had priced the working (or not working) local families out of their home towns. ‘I remember when it took two buses to get the kids to school up this valley,’ one bustling grandmother muttered; ‘now you could do it in a van.’

Still, two hundred kids is enough for a mighty good parade. Effort was variable — tying a handkerchief around your dog’s neck and dragging it down the baking tarmac was never going to bring home the rosette — and the organization slipped on occasion: during the ten-minute delay while a young gentleman resolutely refused to abandon his mission to pogo-stick the length of town, the crowd lining the street in their lawn chairs grew slightly restless in the heat, but the mood was generally as sunny as the day. We applauded pirates, crusaders, hula-girls, cowboys, a young man in desert fatigues steering a cardboard tank — and, of course, plenty of pint-sized pioneers, driving balsa-wood oxen from beneath the canopy of their covered wagons, rolling west down Main Street.

Dr Daniel Drake may have got his wish. Writing in 1815, in contemplation of the possibilities offered up by the wide open spaces of the freshly purchased West, this Cincinnati doctor dreamed of the civic fibre that the future inhabitants of such a spacious, separated province would be bound to possess:

Debarred by their locality, from an inordinate participation in foreign luxuries, and consequently secured from the greatest corruption introduced by commerce — secluded from foreign intercourse, and thereby rendered patriotic…the inhabitants of this region are obviously destined to an unrivalled excellence…in public virtue, and in national strength.

The idea that the American interior could serve as a kind of national health service for the United States was as old as the republic, and by the time that first wagon train set off for Oregon, it was a political commonplace that only the morality and patriotism of fresh rural communities in the West could keep this young country’s unique enthusiasm for itself alive.

The wagon trains were also seen as invigorating America’s nation-building in another way — as the winning move in that great nineteenth-century territorial board game. As Lucas Alaman, the Mexican secretary of state, ruefully observed in 1842: ‘Where others send invading armies, [the Americans] send their colonists.’

The settlers proved a roaring success in the expansion of America. More than twenty thousand farmers and ranchers had poured into Texas in the early 1830s, while it was still under Mexican control, their presence ultimately securing independence for the Lone Star Republic in 1836. The Mexicans were similarly overwhelmed by a wave of arrivals in California, leading to their retreat south to Baja in 1848. And as for the British in the Northwest, with their famous affectation of imperial absent-mindedness, they often told themselves that the territory was abandoned as a result of reports that the local salmon offered substandard fly-fishing, but the reality was that from the first caravan of families into Oregon, the land was lost. The Hudson’s Bay Company would read the runes and retreat north of the 49th parallel in 1846. America was nearing completion.

But such territorial endeavours cannot flourish if their mundane mechanics are on show; they need romance, poetry, narrative, a mission that can be evoked to justify the required investments, the compromises and, particularly, the crimes. And the expansionists possessed such a dogma, a creed of American chosen-ness, special-ness and divinely ordained progress that would be remembered by history as ‘Manifest Destiny’.

A cocktail of Puritan fervour, geographical predestination and, predominantly, political cynicism, Manifest Destiny proclaimed, in essence, that the American continent had been created by God for a single, obvious purpose — to host the greatest Christian nation in history.

The phrase itself was first coined by John O’Sullivan, a scholarly cheerleader to Andrew Jackson — a president whose principles amounted to a kind of territorial laissez-faire, with a deliberately inactive government simply holding the doors open to conquest by settlers. O’Sullivan wholly approved, citing in 1845, ‘our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated government’.

Just how much more was at stake was emphasized by the writer and orator William Gilpin the following year, as he gave full vent to the possibilities that God had laid before the Americans and, by extension, the burden of their duty:

The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean…to establish a new order in human affairs…to teach old nations a new civilization — to confirm the destiny of the human race — to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point…to perfect science — to emblazon history with the conquest of peace — to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind — to unite the world in one social family…to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world!

Gilpin’s ‘culminating point’ for humankind, of course, was Revelation, the divine return. As the planet’s final unconquered continent revealed itself in its entirety, and the calls to create from it a single, earth-shaking nation grew ever louder, apocalypse was often evoked. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, one simply had to conclude that continental America was ‘a last effort of the Divine Providence on behalf of the human race’.

With so much to gain and so much to lose, the troublesome fact of the prior occupation of the land could be dismissed as mere detail. One either felt sympathy for the fact that divine ordination seemed to have marked the Native Americans out to be steamrollered, or, more widely, one pointed to their failure to grasp the opportunity themselves. It was declared from the pulpits that the Indians had forfeited their claim to the land by failing to tame and exploit it, in breach of God’s very first commandment — ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; till the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’ President John Quincy Adams delivered a resonant sermon on this theme in 1839: ‘Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control the civilization of the world? Shall he forbid the wilderness to blossom like a rose? Shall he forbid the oaks of the forest to fall before the axe of industry?’

The settlers on that Missouri riverbank were thus armed with a sense of both national and divine purpose, a sacred mission on behalf of humanity itself — which added gravitas and grandeur to their more prosaic concerns. All they really wanted was land.

When people spoke in the slums of New York, London and Naples of the ‘land of opportunity’ of inland America, it was the first word that counted. In its formation, the US had elevated the sanctity of private property, almost to the level of a faith: ‘liberty’ referred chiefly to the freedom to own and use land; democracy manifested itself in equitable access to land; ‘no taxation without representation’ was a proclamation of property rights, not human rights. This gospel, combined with the realities of a literally immeasurable quantity of seemingly unoccupied territory, generated an unimaginably enticing possibility for the poor and dispossessed of Europe and the American East — if you headed out West, staked out a quarter-mile of land, built a home and worked the soil, then that property was forever yours.

And to achieve this fantasy, the men, women and children who left their homes and rode the Oregon Trail in search of free land took on a mission no less fearsome or uncertain than any of those flag-planting endeavours whose leaders still decorate the bank notes and piazzas of old Europe. They surely deserved at least some of the avalanche of praise that would soon be heaped upon them, typified by this eulogy in a 1918 history of the pioneer days: ‘The early settlers were as noble, patriotic, industrious, unselfish, intelligent, good, generous, kind and moral people as ever were assembled together in like number.’ The trail was, to a degree, mapped out — the adventurer and self-publicist John C. Fremont had tapped his father-in-law, the expansionist congressman Thomas Hart Benton, for government funds for a settlers’ route-finding mission in 1842 — but the families who gathered their wagons on the banks of the Missouri in the spring of 1843 had no idea what lay ahead of them. The gap between expectation and reality is well illustrated by the recollection of the diarist Francis Parkman midway through the 1900-mile journey:

It is worth noticing, that on the Platte one may sometimes see the shattered wrecks of ancient claw-footed tables, well waxed and rubbed, or massive bureaus of carved oak. These, many of them no doubt the relics of ancestral prosperity in the colonial time, must have encountered strange vicissitudes. Imported, perhaps, originally from England; then, with the declining fortunes of their owners, borne across the Alleghenies to the remote wilderness of Ohio or Kentucky; then to Illinois or Missouri; and now at last fondly stowed away in the family wagon for the interminable journey to Oregon. But the stern privations of the way are little anticipated. The cherished relic is soon flung out to scorch and crack upon the hot prairie.

The challenges of the five- or six-month journey were indeed impossible to anticipate, a situation not helped by Fremont, whose best-selling trail notes pitched the expedition as exactly the kind of jolly family house move for which one would pack a walnut dresser. The privations of the prairie were specific: thirst, starvation, boredom and murderous Indian attack, the seemingly endless days of westward travel across the waterless grasslands permanently undercut with fear that a band of plains Indians would descend on a horse-stealing raid, or to deliver fatal punishment for trespassing on their hunting grounds. Watches were posted every night, the wagons circled for scant protection. Once into the mountains, river crossings brought the threat of drowning and precipitous trails crumbled, hurling oxen, wagon and driver over the edge. Illness, finally, was the greatest scourge, with precious few trail parties bearing medicine of any note. It’s estimated that one out of every ten Oregon Trail pioneers died on the route — one diarist recalled seeing ‘a grave every 80 yards’ on the way. The mythology of the West would almost instantly memorialize the optimism and stoicism of the Oregon Trail immigrants, but Parkman’s diaries speak more of melancholy suffering, of ‘men, with sour, sullen faces’ dragging their families through unimagined hardship, more refugees than empire-builders: ‘It was easy to see that fear and dissension prevailed among them…Many were murmuring against the leader they had chosen, and wished to depose him…The women were divided between regrets for the homes they had left and apprehension of the deserts and the savages before them.’

The struggle proved no deterrent, however; the year after the first wagon train, almost twice as many immigrants gathered at the Missouri, to set off as soon as the snows had melted and the prairies had turned green. By 1850 more than 13,000 non-Indian people had taken up residence in Oregon, with many more forking south from the trail into the California gold fields, and by the time the railways had fully overspread the West, at the turn of the century, fully 300,000 people had rolled their wagons along the Oregon Trail.

Route-finding soon ceased to be a challenge: by the late 1840s the trail was an unmistakable swathe of overgrazed grass and churned-up mud, several hundred metres wide in places. Bent on survival and ‘just passing through’, the emigrants thought little of housekeeping. Every tree within miles of the trail had been chopped down and burned, waterholes were fouled by rubbish and the swollen carcasses of cattle and horses, ‘trail trash’ littered the ground, and every creature that came into rifle range was felled. One emigrant, Esther Macmillan Hanna, took the long ride in 1852, and recalled: ‘I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of so many dead animals seen along the trail. It was like something from Dante’s Inferno.’ The Shoshone chief Washakie described the experience of an Indian whose homeland was on the route: ‘Before the emigrants passed through his country, buffalo, elk and antelope could be seen upon all the hills; now, when he looked for game, he saw only wagons with white tops and men riding upon their horses.’

From the vantage point of Minam Summit, on the western edge of their homelands, the Nez Perce watched the wagons roll past, more numerous each summer. The Oregon Trail didn’t trespass on their central territories, but it did head straight up the outlying Grande Ronde Valley, through traditional Indian meeting and trading grounds. Some Nez Perce profited from the desperation of the pilgrims for supplies and horses, but others urged caution, particularly when increasing numbers of settlers chose not to push on north-west to the famously fertile Willamette Valley, but elected instead to stay and cultivate the Grande Ronde. But it was one hundred or so miles further up the trail that the most fateful impacts would be felt — in the Walla Walla Valley, home of the Cayuse and, for the past ten years, of the Whitman mission.

Almost as charming as Henry Spalding, his rival in love and salvation, but considerably less ingenious or industrious, Marcus Whitman had singularly failed to convert the Cayuse people to the good word, and was considered little more than an irritant and an ingrate by his hosts. Much of this was in fact due to the fickle hand of romance. Eliza Spalding had turned out to be a natural carer and teacher, who had learned the Nez Perce language, while Narcissa Whitman was a prude and a fusspot, who had barred the Cayuse from her house for fear of parasitic infestation. As soon as the first white settlers began to pass by their house, the Whitmans rewrote their mission statement, concluding that life in a parish vicarage would far exceed the isolation and stress of continuing as an outpost for the Lord. ‘I have no doubt,’ Whitman wrote in a report to his paymasters, ‘our greatest work is to be to aid the white settlement of this country.’ The missionaries offered food and prayer to the families that passed by, even taking in seven children who had been orphaned on the route, and encouraged travellers to unhitch their wagons and build a life in the growing white community that surrounded their mission. As for the Cayuse, they were no longer a potential fresh harvest of Christian souls, Marcus rationalized, but the heathen casualties of destiny: ‘I am fully convinced that when a people refuse or neglect to fill the designs of Providence, they ought not to complain at the results; and so it is equally useless for Christians to be anxious on their account. The Indians have in no case obeyed the command to multiply and replenish the earth, and they cannot stand in the way of others doing so.’

Ignored and encroached upon, the Cayuse simmered with resentment until, in 1847, the wagons brought an outbreak of measles to their homeland. Whitman tried his best to administer care but could do little, and more than half the tribe died — while the evidence of precious few white fatalities spread rumours that Whitman’s doctoring was actually spreading the disease. On 29 November of that year rough justice was applied: Marcus Whitman was shot then hacked to bits on his front porch, and Narcissa met the same fate on the living-room settee. Eleven more settlers died in the subsequent bloodletting. Oregon’s tiny white population flew into a panic (among them Spalding, who quit Nez Perce territory) and demanded military protection, an army of four hundred arriving on a punitive mission against the Cayuse. The Nez Perce were instrumental in defusing the situation (especially Tuekakas, who had Cayuse blood) but while the Whitman massacre didn’t spark a full ‘Indian war’, it did set the Columbia Plateau, and the Nez Perce, on a very familiar course. As the settlers began to return to the Oregon Territory, they were now burnishing one of the most potent myths of American expansion — the conquerors as victims. The pioneer yeoman farmers, fulfilling the demands of faith and history and carrying the soul of the nation, were forever on the brink of being massacred, kidnapped and (for complex psycho-sexual reasons that need not detain us) getting ‘ravaged’ by Indians. This image, immortalized in numerous newspaper accounts of attacks and hostage takings, insisted upon two conclusions: first, that the settlers’ mission warranted military protection, a demand served by the growing number of army forts dotting the West’s immigrant trails; secondly, that the white and red man were as oil and water, incapable of safely sharing a landscape. As Oregon’s valleys began to fill more rapidly with settlers in the early 1850s, drawn by rumours that the California gold fields might have a northern outcrop, and by a law passed in 1850 clarifying the offer of 320 acres of free Oregon land to any family who could till it, the Northwest became the last corner of America to develop its own ‘Indian problem’. Savagery and civilization needed to be separated, and the solution was one that had long been established on the continent: the Columbia Plateau tribes belonged on a reservation.

The Walla Walla grand council of May 1855 must have been a sight to scorch the memory. The Nez Perce arrived first, more than five hundred warriors parading the treaty grounds in full regalia before establishing camp, followed two days later by more than four hundred Cayuse men, dressed for war, beating their drums and firing their rifles in the air. The Yakama came next, then the Umatilla and Palouse — around five thousand Indians were present at the opening of the council, their tepees clustered across the grassland in temporary townships. Representing the United States of America was a young man called Isaac Stevens, whose prodigious energies and ambitions as a soldier and administrator had secured him the governorship of the Washington Territory of the far Northwest at just thirty-seven. Under pressure to guarantee the safety of the settlers, and eager to secure the land for his grand plan of a north-western rail route, Stevens had set off on a whirlwind treaty tour of the territories in late 1854. His negotiating tactics were simple — he would offer almost anything that came to mind — from free education to free healthcare, cash, farming equipment, fishing boats, apprenticeships, a blacksmith’s shop, a carpenter — until the tribes of the Northwest agreed to limit themselves to reserved lands, leaving the remainder open to settlement. The Walla Walla council was Stevens’ sixth in five months, and the mission was going well — at his first meeting the coastal tribes of Puget Sound had handed him more than two and a half million acres of homeland, limiting themselves to less than 4000 acres, and only a handful of tribes had refused similar deals since. Now he and his right-hand man, Superintendent Joel Palmer, spread out the map and told the Nez Perce and their neighbours where they were being asked to live.

In the context of nineteenth-century Indian-American treaties, the Nez Perce were offered a reasonable deal. Their reservation would at least be within their traditional territories, covering an area of 7.5 million acres, just over half of the aboriginal homelands, and it contained many of their most treasured areas, such as the Wallowa Valley, the Camas Prairie and the junction of the Clearwater and Snake rivers. Stevens promised financial compensation for the ceded land, government protection from trespassing settlers in the form of a federal Agent, and the freedom to leave the reservation to hunt, fish and gather in the tribe’s ‘usual and accustomed places’. There were a few voices of dissent, particularly from the still-fractious Cayuse, led by Young Chief: ‘I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said? I hear what the ground says. The Great Spirit appointed the roots to feed the Indians on. The water says the same thing. Neither Indians nor the whites have the right to change these names. The ground says “it is from me man was made".’

But the Nez Perce leaders were eventually united in the belief that this treaty held the best hope of a secure future. In fact, just as it had been for tribes stretching across the continent, this was the beginning of the end.

The US government’s treaties with the peoples of Native America rested on the flyweight foundation of two huge misunderstandings and one bald lie — and the Nez Perce had just placed their future on such a footing. Firstly, by exchanging land for money and gifts, they had accepted the white man’s ideas of property- Mother Earth could be owned, and sold, and what had been negotiated for money once could be negotiated again, regardless of any promises of permanence. Secondly, they had been driven into the white concept of representative leadership — fifty-six chiefs had signed the treaty, the Christian ‘head chief Lawyer first on the list, and under the white man’s law the whole tribe was now bound, whether or not they agreed. The freedom to walk your own path had been signed away, and the Nez Perce had just become a nation.

A sketch of Tuekakas drawn by Gustavus Sohon during the Walla Walla Treaty Council of 1855.

Finally, they had been deceived. Stevens knew the government had neither the reach nor the desire to control the movement of settlers, who would take what land they wished as they struggled for survival in the unfamiliar, inhospitable Northwest. The settlers had been sold the West as a sacred national mission, a haven of individual freedom, inviolable property rights and determined progress, and the government was irretrievably committed to serving as their protector and facilitator. To frustrate their dreams — particularly in order to protect a reservation whose inhabitants still enjoyed more than 1000 acres of land per person — was unthinkable. The nearby Yakama tribe learned this lesson sharply: within six months of signing their version of the Walla Walla treaty their new reservation had become overrun with settlers. When the Yakama violently affirmed their property rights, Stevens crushed them in a punitive war.

Tuekakas saw the future. After signing the 1855 treaty he returned to the quiet of the Wallowa Valley, and resolved to have as little contact with the white man as possible, to raise his sons, Joseph and Ollokot, according to the traditional Nimiipuu beliefs, and to encourage his people to follow the ways of their ancestors. For a few more years, the Wallowa Nez Perce could live in peace.

The advertisement took up most of a page in the local paper, promising a huckleberry bake-off, a Dutch-oven cooking contest, a softball tournament, a parade, a firewood auction and more. The town of Pierce, just across the border from Oregon into Idaho, tucked away in the north-east corner of the 1855 Nez Perce reservation, was throwing its own Days the following weekend. This time, the historical hook to draw the punters was the event that brought the state of Idaho into being, and that ultimately brought the Nez Perce nation to its knees. ‘Come and Join the Fun at the Pierce 1860 Days!’ — from noon to 7.00 p.m. on Saturday, in the parking lot of the Cedar Inn Bar and Grill, you could even try your hand at panning for gold.