Читать книгу Selling Your Father’s Bones: The Epic Fate of the American West - Brian Schofield - Страница 9

‘Let him who writes sneering remarks about the conduct of the people in the early days of the settling of Idaho remember that it was these brave, good old pioneer men and women that braved all the dangers incident to the reclaiming and planting of civilisation here. It would seem that they might turn their brilliant talent to some more onward and progressive movement, rather than attempt to reach away back to write sneeringly about the society of old times of which they knew but little, if anything’

JOHN HAILEY, Idaho State Librarian, 1910

CHIEF LOOKING GLASS: Will you mark the piece ofcountry that I have marked and say the Agent shall keep the whites out? SUPERINTENDENT PALMER: None will be permitted to go there but the Agent and the persons employed, without your consent.

Walla Walla treaty negotiations of 1855

‘WELCOME TO IDAHO — Now Go Home!’ Much of the public discourse in the town of Pierce seemed to take place through the medium of bumper stickers: ‘Forest products built America’; ‘This family supported by timber dollars’; ‘Earth Firsters Suck!’; and the eloquent image of a small boy leaning back to urinate expansively on the word ‘Environmentalists’. Though infused with the traditions of Western hospitality — the first hint of a foreign accent drew the calorific welcome of a free pancake breakfast from the local Lions Club — Pierce was clearly a community that knew its mind. The town council had recently built a shelter for public events in the district park, choosing to represent the establishing pillars of its community with four carved icons — a pickaxe, a fishing rod, a saw and a rifle. Just across the road, a local home-owner had endeavoured to embellish the tone by placing his own municipal trinity prominently on the front lawn: a twelve-foot-high crucifix, a flag of the Confederacy and a large orange No Trespassing sign.

Pierce was a one-street town hidden in the high pine forests north of the Clearwater River, just five miles from the grassland clearing where Lewis and Clark had first stumbled into Nez Perce territory. The town’s sloping main street ran from a couple of bars at the top of the hill to a couple of bars at the bottom, with little more than an old courthouse and a Laundromat between them. The prominence of the watering holes was fitting — Pierce had been proud possessor of a hard-drinking, hard-punching reputation for decades, a weekend-gathering and paycheck-blowing haven for the lumberjacks and millworkers labouring in the surrounding woods. The resolutely unpretentious programme of events for 1860 Days confirmed that local feet were still firmly on the ground.

The biggest draw by far was the ATV ride, a sociable convoy of four-wheeled motorbikes roaring and puffing their way into the forest for a morning of dirt-grinding and dust clouds, but the soft-ball tournament, at which tolerance for the sickly liqueur Jaeger-meister was being as rigorously examined as any ball skills, was also proving a hit. The pie-eating contest was less well attended, however, perhaps because there was only ever going to be one winner, a young man with a technique for obliterating a chocolate cake reminiscent of a wolf inside a buffalo’s guts.

As the morning wore on, a thin crowd gathered on Main Street for the parade. Fundraising stalls had been laid out for browsers (the local Drug Free Youth Club had baked its own cookies and brownies, but for those with bigger budgets they were offering a range of hunting knives) and a scattering of lawn chairs filled the sidewalk. The parade itself was, sadly, some way short of Rio (or, indeed, of Joseph, Oregon) — a few candidates for the upcoming local elections threw sweets from poster-covered convertibles, the high school’s cheerleaders waved languidly from the back of a pick-up and a truckload of lumber was parked up and sold to the highest bidder. One local young lady walked alone down the street, grinning and waving, dressed up as a Nez Perce maiden. Though well applauded, her smiling presence was perhaps a less than adequate acknowledgement that this entire pocket calypso — just as any other day in the history of Pierce, Idaho — was taking place on someone else’s land.

In the summer of 1860 what is now Main Street was covered with forest, with just a small, seasonal stream at the base of a shallow, shaded valley to entice the deer and elk. They in turn drew predators — wolves, cougars and bears, and Nez Perce hunting parties from their villages at the base of the escarpment. Within twelve months, however, this whole high-country valley had changed beyond all recognition, or redemption.

A Captain E. D. Pierce had heard rumours from the Nez Perce wife of an old brother in arms that the streams above the Clearwater glittered with the same soft rocks that had drawn the white men to California. He trespassed onto the reservation in September 1860 and, as promised, found gold in the riverbeds. The captain’s efforts to conceal the strike failed spectacularly when one of his party left the mountains carrying $800 in gold in his saddlebags, and within a year more than eight thousand miners had descended on the site, chartering every steamer in the Northwest to head up the Columbia, driving their pack mules through the spring snows, in some cases simply downing tools in California and walking north — and the flood of arrivals set Idaho’s first boom town in full swing. Pierce’s miners were making as much as Wall Street bankers, initially not even bothering to pan for gold dust because there were enough lumps of treasure, known as ‘lunkers’, to go round. Many miners employed Chinese salarymen to do the hard labour, to speed the rush to empty the mountain of its bounty; the unending flurry of gossip told of one prospector, known as ‘Baboon’, earning $500 from a single pan of gravel, and eventually riding off the mountain carrying half his weight in gold.

Speed was of the essence as miners raced to get their share before the strike played out. Every tree for miles around was cut down for firewood, shelter, or for the mining necessity of transporting water. Streams were diverted, divided, water was dropped through hoses from great heights to generate pressure and blast hillsides away, the rivers were silted up and drained to the point, as one miner recalled, where they were ‘too thick to flow and too thin to drink’.

Everyone was too busy mining to grow food, so supplying the camp became a lucrative business (and one from which several of the Christian Nez Perce, with their large cattle herds and well-run farms, profited handsomely) as pack trains arrived daily to deliver whiskey, meat and potatoes to the hungry cash economy. As another miner, W. A. Goulder, recalled, Pierce was no centre of culinary excellence: ‘uncooked potatoes sliced up and soaked in vinegar were far from affording an appetizing dish, but it proved a sovereign remedy for the scurvy.’ Soon, a supply town sprang up to serve Pierce and the handful of other mining camps that dotted the mountains; named after one half of America’s famous pioneering pair, Lewiston was a rowdy and lawless tent city of seven thousand profiteers and prostitutes squatting on Nez Perce land at the convergence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, as far upstream as a paddle steamer could navigate.

In its heyday, Pierce was no less salubrious than its supply chain. A myth has built up around America’s early miners that has proved almost as tenacious as the historical glow which surrounds the pioneer settlers, a eulogistic mood perfectly captured by C. J. Brosnan, describing the men of Pierce in his history of the state of Idaho, published in 1918:

In addition to representing the vigorous young manhood of the nation, these argonauts were a singularly courageous and adventurous body of men…The pioneer miner was a genuine friend…A partner was affectionately known as ‘pard’, and the bond of friendship between cabin associates was something sacred…Their humour was sometimes grim, sometimes irreverent, but always picturesque and rollicking…Many a learned discussion on history, religion, philosophy or the classics was waged around the camp-fires.

An accurate picture, perhaps, but certainly an incomplete one. Pioneer mining was a youngster’s game — with over half of the great California gold rush consisting of men in their twenties, for example — and a robust one. Panning was a popular career for those on the run from the law, and in the early 1860s Idaho was a favoured destination for deserters from the Civil War; when the editor of the first newspaper in Lewiston attempted to raise the flag of the northern Union over his office in 1863, it was promptly riddled with bullets. Whiskey served as both an alternative currency in Pierce and as the only safe thing to drink, so fouled were the rivers, ensuring that quarrels and gambling debts were often settled violently, and indeed fatally. Until the courthouse was built, mob justice ruled, with the regular vigilante hangings accompanied by the miners’ favourite motto, relishing Pierce’s mildly infernal reputation: ‘If a man ain’t good enough to live here, he ain’t good enough to live anywhere.’ Considering the obliterated landscape, the mass alcoholism and the ceaseless violence, the Portland Oregonian was kind enough to describe Pierce in May 1861 as ‘the most disagreeable hole to be imagined’.

A darker streak also ran through the pioneer mining story- brutal racism. The Californian rush had been an international affair, with French, Mexicans, South Americans and tens of thousands of Chinese prospectors joining the great migration of 1849, but the white Americans had used a mixture of punitive taxes, violent intimidation and, ultimately, legal banishment to bully the other nationalities out of the mountains. The Chinese were particularly hard done by; initially exploited as cheap labour by both miners and railway companies, their work ethic generated resentment, particularly as they would often find gold where whites had given up looking, and they were considered fair game for sabotage, theft and intimidation. (In the end, anti-Chinese sentiment became a Western political movement, successfully persuading Congress to rewrite the country’s immigration laws in 1882, specifically to exclude China’s poor and huddled masses from Lady Liberty’s embrace.)

But it was the Native inhabitants of the gold fields who paid the heaviest price. Most of the tribes of the California mountains — such as the Pomo, the Yana and the Yuki — were simply obliterated in a frenzy of greed and loathing. Death squads of volunteer miners were organized to butcher unhelpfully located families. Children, perhaps as many as ten thousand, were abducted and sold for labour. Entire bands were enslaved to work the mines, then were starved or driven to death. The upstanding citizens of settler towns held collections to pay bounties on Native scalps. If any Indians retaliated, they were branded murderous savages, and the army would be sent in to teach them a terminal lesson. In a competitive field, the treatment of California’s indigenous peoples is probably the worst crime of the North American expansion; in the twenty years following the gold rush of 1849, the state’s Native population of around 100,000 was reduced to little more than 30,000.

Not surprisingly, the miners of the Idaho rush, many of whom were veterans of the California fields, did not bring with them an enlightened vision of Anglo-Indian relations. Despite the commonplace that the Nez Perce were the most ‘civilized’ and respectable of the West’s tribes, many miners had little compunction about stealing their produce or livestock, reneging on agreements and resorting to violence. In the decade following the gold strike, more than twenty Nez Perce were murdered by whites, often in cold blood — one elderly woman had a pickaxe driven through her back when she confronted a pair of young drunks, another tribe member was persuaded to help float timber down the Clearwater River to Lewiston, then was bound and thrown into the water to save paying his wages. The tribe suffered in other ways — the miners brought disease, they chased away game, they disrupted family life by taking and abandoning wives, and they turned the river of whiskey flowing through the Nez Perce villages into a catastrophic flood. When tribal leaders complained to the rare representatives of the government — about whiskey peddlers on their land, about unpunished murders, about the fact that many of the miners seemed to be ignoring the Nez Perce’s generous permission to camp temporarily on their territory, and were shaping to settle permanently — they received short shrift. The revenues from Idaho’s gold were helping Lincoln win the Civil War, the miners could do as they pleased — and in any event, the pattern of the West was set, and Idaho was just falling into line. Mining camps didn’t last forever, but their impact on Native peoples almost always did. In 1862 there were around 3500 Nez Perce living on their reservation, land legally protected for their sole use by the US government. They had been joined by almost 19,000 uninvited guests.

Sure enough, Pierce’s gold didn’t last forever. By 1870 the town’s population had plummeted to barely more than six hundred, over three-quarters Chinese, sifting through the dust in claims the white prospectors considered worked out. The town slipped into hibernation until, at the turn of the century, another bull market developed in these mountains — for white pine. As timber culture historian Ralph Space recalled: ‘In 1900 the rush to get Idaho white pine timberlands became a mad scramble. There was a race to locate and file on choice parcels of timberlands and long lines, sometimes two blocks long, formed at the land office in Lewiston.’ Another flurry of entrepreneurial spirit surrounded Pierce, with the woodlands besieged with saws and axes.

But the pioneer lumberjacks were soon ousted by corporate adventurers from the East, and Pierce was transformed once again, this time into a company town, surrounded by 700,000 acres of prime timber owned by Potlatch Forests Inc., the giant company that the great Minnesota capitalist Frederick Weyerhaeuser had formed. Now the wild times reminiscent of the gold rush rolled down Main Street again — work for any man who wanted it, either at the local plywood plant or out in the woods, wages on which to raise a family, and on Saturday nights the loggers would come in from the forest and tear the place apart. Folklore has it that there was so much money swirling around that those loggers who died unmarried left their savings to the brothel-keeper at the bottom of the mountain — who became one of the richest women in Idaho. In 1960 the Lewiston Morning Tribune sighed cheerfully, ‘Pierce has been one of the West’s few lucky boom towns. Its wealth, in one form or another, has never petered out.’

In the year 2000, with the forests nearing exhaustion, Potlatch closed the plywood plant, with the loss of 1200 jobs. By then, most of the loggers had already been outsourced, downshifted and mechanized into redundancy. A lot of people in Pierce didn’t even bother to sell their homes; they just boarded them up and left them to the debt collector. Unemployment in Clearwater County hit 22 per cent. It has fallen slightly since — but chiefly because more people have moved out. The area’s average age climbed five years in a decade, the surest sign that family-raising wages were as rare as lunkers. Even some of the bars had closed down.

On the Saturday night of 1860 Days Pierce’s few surviving drinking holes were doing a brisk trade to an increasingly slow-moving clientele. The softball tournament had declined somewhat into a succession of teary, Jaegermeister-fuelled marital tiffs, and the young man who’d ridden his ATV off the edge of a cliff had finally been pulled, bruised and embarrassed, from his ravine, so it was time for relaxation, with an option on melancholy oblivion. A few souls were sitting on the creaking balcony of a run-down bar, enjoying plastic cups of Coors and soaking up the last light of the day — a teenage boy who wasn’t allowed inside, but was bored with sitting in the car, waiting for his mother and her boyfriend to finish drinking; an unsteady fisherman venting his spleen on an out-of-town couple who’d been debating, perhaps unwisely, the ecological impacts of illegal sewage dumping within his earshot: ‘Screw Nature! Screw F—Nature! Do you hear me? Nature adapts! Do you have a problem with that point of view? Do you?’; and a couple of ATV riders from Colorado who’d misread Pierce’s hard-partying reputation as a guarantee of glorious carnal conquest, and were now drinking through the disillusion: ‘Seriously, British dude, do not go back in there, it’s a f—ing hog pen! I think maybe one of ‘em’s still got her own teeth, but she’s married.’

Hormonal off-road warriors might soon be more regular visitors to these bars. Desperate for an economic injection, the burghers of Clearwater County had spotted that ATV ownership had increased tenfold in the States in a decade, and were jealously eyeing the tourist dollars secured by neighbouring Utah’s decision to turn much of its backwoods into a motorized playground. The fact that significant swathes of Utah’s high country now resembled a smoggy, rutted, grassless speedway was a detail worth dismissing, and the pleas for federal funding for the all-new Clearwater ATV Trail had been filed — after gold and wood, Pierce badly needed to find another way to sell its landscape, and to start another boom.

The Nez Perce’s horizon was dark and uncertain in the years following the Pierce gold strike. Miners were sprawling over the tribe’s reserved territory, their trespassing unhindered, their crimes unpunished. The 1855 treaty had been sitting in Washington in-trays for four years, and even once it was ratified the flood of compensatory cash, housing, school construction, farming equipment and medical care that Isaac Stevens had promised failed to materialize, as a succession of Indian Agents, the bureaucrats charged with fulfilling treaty obligations on the ground, diverted the trickle of government funds into their own pockets. By 1862 the US government had realized that the flourishing settlements around Lewiston and Pierce, and the tension their illegality was fomenting, required a touch of federal muscle, and the leader of the Christian Nez Perce, Lawyer, was persuaded to accept the arrival of a permanent military garrison in Lapwai. The Nez Perce were told the soldiers were needed to ensure the integrity of their reservation, while the settlers were reassured that such a presence would protect them from savagery and their womenfolk from ravage; in reality, the troops were dispatched to ensure the orderly flow of Idaho’s mineral wealth eastwards out of Idaho. Finally, the exponential development of white towns and cities right across the Northwest had created a new and vocal political lobby, one steeped in settler mythology, singing hymns to the foot soldiers of Manifest Destiny, endlessly invoking the conqueror as victim, and forcefully reminding Washington that, having sold the West to its immigrants, it could never abandon them there. An inevitable, and very well precedented, process had caught the Nez Perce in its undertow.

In May 1862 the pioneer Senator J. W Nesmith of Oregon made it official, delivering one of the most notoriously nefarious speeches in the history of the great House. He spoke movingly of the raw deal the Nez Perce had been handed in recent years: their lands had been overspread, in violation of the 1855 treaty, their compensation had been late, derisory and often stolen, and should they ever breach their admirable pact of non-violence against the white man they faced immediate ‘exterminating war’. The only fair solution was an obvious one — as the United States was clearly incapable of keeping its legal obligations, a new treaty must be negotiated. And, as a bonus, such a pact could generously relieve the Nez Perce of their burdensome millions of acres: ‘The Indians are anxious to dispose of the reservation and remove to some point where they will not be intruded upon…’

The Senate concurred. A new treaty council was called for May 1863.

The precise details surrounding the council of 1863 remain shrouded in a fog of resentment and recrimination even to this day. What’s certain is that the United States negotiators, led by Calvin H. Hale, arrived with an ambitious shopping list — they intended to secure at least 90 per cent of Nez Perce land for white settlement -and a well-worn but effective playbook. Speaking with the original forked tongue, Hale opened the council by addressing himself to ‘the whole Nez Perce nation’ — despite the fact that many of the tribe’s more implacable bands, such as those of Tuekakas and White Bird, had yet even to reach the treaty grounds. His tactics were transparent — to drive a decisive wedge down the fault line that had been now growing in the Nez Perce community for a generation, between those who had embraced Christianity, modernity and a mercantile relationship with the whites and those who had favoured tradition and isolation.

The Nez Perce had indeed arrived in a fractured state, argument over religious orthodoxy and submission to United States’ law compounded by resentment over Chief Lawyer’s status as spokesman for the nation, and by perceptions of uneven generosity from the scarcely competent Indian Agents. But the tribe’s capacity to talk a problem into a solution revealed itself once more, and a united front was eventually formed. The Nez Perce, still represented by Lawyer, offered to sell the gold fields and the land around Lewiston to the government, but to retain the remainder of the territory which Stevens had promised would be theirs for eternity. It was a sane and fair proposal, which received a prompt response — Hale and his cronies began tirelessly sowing division. They held private meetings with the leaders of the Christian bands, emphasizing the generous compensation on offer, often including the promise of a large chief’s home and personal salary, showing them that the new shrunken reservation would displace others but in fact protect their village’s homelands, and reminding them of the eternal fires that awaited the heathen hold-outs. By contrast the traditionalist tribes were insulted in public, ignored in private session, threatened with penury and oppression as the only alternatives to submission and conversion. At the forefront of this noxious campaign was a familiar face, that of Henry Spalding, recently returned to his Lapwai mission having failed in his efforts to organize a fortune-raising expedition to the gold fields, and now using all his fire and brimstone to condemn the non-Christian tribes whom he had come virulently to detest. Even his old friend Tuekakas was declared damned.

Under such pressure, the fragile consensus between the disjointed bands collapsed. The gap between those who saw the new demands as onerous but bearable and those who felt them simply inconceivable was growing ever wider. At a marathon overnight tribal council, the leaders regretfully agreed that they could no longer act in unison — those bands who wished to sign a new treaty could do so, those who wished to head home and deal with the government later (or preferably never) would not be bound by what was agreed without them. Tuekakas, White Bird and others packed up their lodges and left.

Hale acted decisively and gleefully. The treaty was drawn up, handing over just under seven million acres of Nez Perce land to the US government, reducing the reservation by 90 per cent. The nugget of retained property surrounded most of the Christian bands around Lapwai and the Clearwater River, while the government claimed ownership of Tuekakas’ beloved summer and winter valleys of the Wallowa and Inmaha rivers, the White Bird band’s territories around the bountiful Salmon River, the elk and deer ranges of the great valley of the Snake River, much of the wide root-harvesting fields of the Wieppe and Camas Prairies, and the Lolo forest with its routes to the buffalo grounds. Hale then cobbled together fifty-one signatories, led by Lawyer and drawn almost exclusively from the Christian bands (there were fifty-six marks on the 1855 treaty, and Hale was clearly collecting Xs to make this new document appear just as universally accepted as that one — always eager to assist, Spalding signed) and brazenly declared that the entire Nez Perce nation had expressed its will. The reality is cloudy in some cases — a few dissident leaders may have agreed with the treaty but refused to sign out of personal resentment towards Lawyer — but is crystal-clear in others. The White Bird and Tuekakas bands, for example, had just had their homelands sold on their behalf, without a single village member being in attendance, let alone in agreement. Not for nothing is the 1863 compact still called the Thief Treaty.

That Hale, Spalding and their crew were acting in wholly bad faith is beyond debate, but the more complex and divisive figure in this scene is Chief Lawyer. Records of the discussions show that he made no effort to explain to the Americans that he no longer spoke for the whole tribe. Why did he comply with the conceit that the unified Nez Perce were still being represented, even after the dissident bands had left the treaty grounds? The least favourable explanation is preferred by many of the descendants of the bands whose land was lawlessly sold, whose characterization of Lawyer bears comparison with that of Napoleon the pig in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, corrupted until he became indistinguishable from his oppressors.

Chief Lawyer, seated centre, representing the Christian Nez Perce at a treaty amendment in 1868.

Lawyer was certainly on friendly terms with many white arrivals, particularly Spalding, and as a tribal leader he was legally entitled to a salary and house from federal money, but tenacious rumours of further enrichment also persisted. Some believed he’d taken a bribe to accept the construction of a ferry and warehouse at Lewiston; another evocative story tells of a young Nez Perce, Paukalah, stumbling into the local Indian Agent’s office one night to find Lawyer counting a tableful of gold coins by lamplight. Whatever his fiscal circumstances, it seems reasonable to state that Lawyer’s frequent outbursts of fury at the mistreatment of his people, particularly regarding the laughable failure to fulfil all those treaty promises of schools, doctors and farm equipment, demonstrated that he hadn’t sold out the Nez Perce. A complicating consideration, though, is the disintegration of his relationship with the other tribal leaders. The trust between the bands had rapidly eroded since the white arrivals, and in the years prior to the treaty Lawyer had often referred to the isolationist villagers as ‘children’, unwilling to accept the move to historical adulthood that modernity represented, while as a fast-improving preacher he could speak at length on the terrible fate that awaited the unconverted. It’s surely no coincidence that the return to Lapwai of Lawyer’s favourite Bible tutor was followed soon after by his decisive break with the intra-tribal bond.

Finally, a more sympathetic answer is on offer. Like the protection racketeers they were, the US negotiators had spoken of their desire to shield the Nez Perce from the threat of violence — while taking the sinister step of calling their troops to the treaty grounds. No one needed to explain that the tiny US Army garrison at Lapwai was the tip of a martial iceberg of a magnitude the tribe could scarcely contemplate. Military obliteration was never mentioned — Hale knew that to threaten violence, or ‘show the rifle’, was a scandalous breach of tribal council etiquette — but it didn’t need to be. As Rebecca Miles, the chairwoman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, said of the Thief Treaty in 2006: ‘Our leaders had no choice. They were being threatened with being wiped out.’

Betrayal or not, the Christian tribes received very few pieces of silver for their troubles. The treaty set a price of just £262,500 for almost seven million acres of land, plus the usual sweeping promises of education, healthcare, farming instruction and so on. Once again, the treaty got held up in Washington, and any money that did reach Idaho rarely got past the web of government graft and waste. In 1864 the governor of Idaho, Caleb Lyon, visited Lapwai and gave this assessment of what had been done for the Nez Perce by the Indian Agents employed to serve their needs and fight their corner:

I find no schoolhouse, church or Indians under instruction…I find that the farmers at the Agency have lived on the United States, seemingly in indolence, not raising enough for their own sustenance, neither devoting any time to instructing the Indians…I find the wife of one of the employees set down on the papers as a Blacksmith and the wife of another employee to be an Assistant Teacher, who has never taught a single hour…I find the name of a Physician on the papers at a salary of $1,200 per annum who is not at the Agency more than three hours per week …

The only work being done was dishonest. The Agents sold timber on Nez Perce land to local lumbermen, then realized that they could actually sell it twice — once as standing trees, then, after buying the felled logs back with federal funds (to build all those promised tribal buildings), they could then shift it again as firewood. Agents took bribes to let settlers occupy the buildings that were constructed for tribal purposes, or to use the mill and blacksmiths intended exclusively for tribal use. Appalled, the inspecting governor accurately summarized the US government’s record for keeping its treaty promises to Native America: ‘I find nothing but criminal negligence and indifference to the treaty stipulations with the Indians.’ His outrage, though justified, may not have been entirely sincere -Governor Lyon’s later career was dogged by the allegation that he’d faked a robbery in a Washington hotel room in order personally to pilfer $40,000 of Nez Perce appropriations.

Lawyer’s frustrations were far from unique. The US government would soon lose patience with negotiating with Native America, but not before reaching a grand total in excess of 370 individual treaties brokered, drawn up, and, in every single case, breached.

Just as signing the treaty garnered no immediate benefit for the Christian Nez Perce, not signing was of little instant consequence to the dissident, or non-treaty, bands. They returned to their homelands and no effort was made to evict them, nor did any flood of settlers invade — the Idaho gold was already playing out, and many adventurers were moving on. Those who stayed, however, were putting down roots, either as farmers and ranchers claiming bottomland in the Salmon and Inmaha valleys or as traders and civic leaders in Lewiston, a town now on firmer legal foundations, well situated to serve as a mercantile crossroads for the Northwest. As one local historian put it in conversation: ‘Think of Lewiston as a Wal-Mart. It sold everything to everybody for miles around.’

Most vigorously, it sold Idaho, with newspapers and local politicians entering the most competitive fray in the West — boosterism. Immigration was the lifeblood of a newly founded town, and leaflets, exhibition stalls and newspaper articles eulogizing a new life in Western towns desperate for warm bodies were sprayed across the country in a Darwinian marketing brawl. An article in the Lewiston Teller — in response, as most such examples were, to a fictitious enquiry about the area from a potential emigrant back East — sets the tone: ‘Our soil cannot be excelled…Our climate is mild, healthy and invigorating…[Immigrants] will prosper and become more affluent more readily than in any other locality we know of.’

Taking up the familiar theme of divine design, another local paper offered this fragrant analysis of the just purchased Camas Prairie in response to another ‘letter to the editor’: ‘The Almighty never planned a piece of country so big as this with less waste land. Every element of prosperity lies at the doorstep of every man who has the good fortune to own a quarter section of this fertile soil. Tickle it with a plough and it will laugh you a harvest of flour.’

With luring new arrivals a prerequisite for survival, Lewiston and its farming outposts hardened towards the dissident Nez Perce -north-central Idaho had to appear placid and safe to outsiders, not a haven for, as they were now routinely called in the local press, ‘outlaw Indians’. The small number of sympathetic voices faced a chorus of antagonism towards the non-treaty tribes that grew louder by the year. And anyway, as the anglicized dress, language and financial success of a handful of Christian Nez Perce headmen was taken to prove, ’Indianness’ would, it was widely believed, prove an impermanent local feature.

In fact, the opposite was growing more likely. Bewildered and embittered by the Thief Treaty and harassed by settlers arriving in their valleys with fence posts and ploughshares, the dissident Nez Perce were returning to their traditional rites and belief systems with the zeal of the recently unconverted. Life had manifestly been better before the whites had arrived, so band leaders such as Tuekakas, Toohoolhoolzote and White Bird encouraged their people to replicate those times in their hunting and gathering, celebrations and prayers. The teachings of a local prophet, Smohalla, also chimed with this ambition: armed with a tale of his own resurrection, that borrowed from both a wyakin quest and the Easter teachings of his missionary rivals, the hunchback Smohalla preached that a return to traditional faiths and the ancient reverence for Mother Earth would rid the Northwest of the white newcomers and return to life those killed by their diseases and devil water. Considering the ubiquitous evidence that hymns and haircuts were not serving the best interest of the natives of the Northwest, Smohalla’s individual influence is hard to quantify, but the widespread revival of traditional Indian rites in the 1860s and 1870s came to be associated with his ‘Dreamer’ movement. This association was most widely promoted by white advocates seeking to belittle the claims of any discontented tribes -the Oregonian Telegram suggested that any tribal leader connected to the Dreamers should be banished from the Northwest, as the ‘cult’ was ‘teaching them to despise civilisation and ignore the authority of the United States’ while the San Francisco Chronicle offered this eerie analysis of their public enemy number one:

Smohalla, the Dreamer, is a sort of Indian Mohamet. His doctrine is a destroying one — to exterminate the palefaces, and to restore the whole country to the Indians. He has a most inspiring manner, and has thousands of followers. All the disaffected and renegade Indians who refuse to go upon the reservations…will wage war upon the whites, agreeably to the teachings of Smohalla.

Tuekakas, despairing of his efforts to make peace between competing faiths, had indeed torn up his Bible in 1863, and imposed strict rules of traditional worship, language and practice on his people. Protected by the natural isolation of their valley and the ample unclaimed land that still lay beyond their borders, the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce were now among the last Native peoples within the United States whose lifestyles remained largely unsullied by colonial influence. Tuekakas fiercely protected their independence, marking the boundaries of his homelands by building a line of cairns running over Minam Summit, refusing the offers of free government beef that were clearly intended to undercut the band’s hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and destroying the equipment of any speculators or surveyors who wandered in from the increasingly populated Grande Ronde Valley in search of unclaimed grazing land. His position was clear: ‘Inside is the home of my people — the white man may take the land outside. Inside this boundary all our people were born. It circles around the graves of our fathers, and we will never give up these graves to any man.’

But Tuekakas was growing frail, his sight now so weak that a Nez Perce boy was assigned to share his saddle, acting as his eyes. His sons would soon have to lead the band — the gregarious and vigorous Ollokot, revered as a hunter and warrior, and the more thoughtful Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, a name approximately anglicized to Thunder Rolling over the Mountains. Having accompanied his father to many councils and meetings, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, just thirty-one, had developed an impressive ability to handle the eccentricities of white people, one reason why he would soon acquire nationwide fame; another, in the rapidly simplifying world of the mass media, was that he had a second, recognizable and pronounceable name. He had adopted his father’s baptized title, and had come to be known as Joseph.

Tuekakas died in August 1871. His son Joseph would later eloquently describe his final moments in a famous passage that, while possibly unreliable in translation, is piercingly clear in sentiment:

Soon after this my father sent for me. I saw he was dying. I took his hand in mine. He said, ‘My son, my body is returning to my mother earth, and my spirit is going to see the Great Spirit Chief. When I am gone, think of your country. You are the chief of these people. They look to you to guide them. Always remember that your father never sold his country. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few more years and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and mother.’

I pressed my father’s hand and told him that I would protect his grave with my life. My father smiled and passed away to the spirit land. I buried him in that beautiful valley of winding waters. I love that land more than all the rest of the world. A man who would not love his father’s grave is worse than a wild animal.

Tuekakas was buried near his favourite summer camp at the confluence of the Wallowa and Lostine rivers. Later, in 1926, his (probable) remains were moved to the head of Wallowa Lake in a sombre and unlikely funeral procession of costumed warriors and Model-T Fords, where an obelisk was erected in his honour. (Next to the monument there is now a patch of open pasture, whose owner has been campaigning for more than a decade for the right to turn the land neighbouring the likely resting place of one of Native America’s most important leaders into a subdivision of luxury homes, or, failing that, a trailer park. The memorial to a man who died proclaiming his people’s right to their homeland is currently overlooked by a giant Stars and Stripes, next to a large placard bearing the slogan ‘Private Property is the Foundation of Freedom’.)

Joseph’s pledge to his father would be tested within weeks. The well-settled Grande Ronde Valley experienced a drought in 1871, and the failing pastures forced a handful of enterprising cattle and sheep farmers to enter the Wallowa in search of lush grazing and a harvest of hay. Finding almost unlimited forage for their herds, as well as a river stocked with mysterious but delectable red fish and nearby forests crammed with game, they resolved to settle, and in 1872 brought their wives and children. By the end of that year seventy-five settlers had laid claim to a patch of land in the Wallowa. Joseph met these settlers at a series of good-natured but inconclusive meetings, where he would patiently explain that his father had never sold the valley, while they would insist that they had been informed that it was now United States public land, to which they had a rightful claim. Under the homesteading law designed to inspire westward settlement, you simply paid $16 at a registry office, took your fence posts and marked out 160 vacant acres; once you could prove that you’d occupied and worked on the land for two years, it was yours.

The next spring, the stalemate became slightly worse. Eleven of the less congenial settlers sent a petition to the local Indian Agent claiming that Joseph had ‘threatened to burn our houses etc. etc.’ and demanding armed protection. This inflammatory nonsense caught something of a nerve, for on the southern border of Oregon a charismatic tribal leader known as Captain Jack was cutting a swathe through neighbouring settler communities in the opening exchanges of what would be known as the Modoc War. Perhaps wary of getting too involved in another Indian dispute on the ground — Captain Jack had responded to the peace proposals of the government’s representative, General Edward Canby, by shooting him in the face, stabbing him repeatedly and stealing his coat — the responsible powers tried to impose a solution from a distance. In an office in Washington a map of the Wallowa Valley was divided in two: one end (the one with almost all the white settlements in it) was assigned to the Nez Perce, while the other (unsettled, and dominated by Indian fishing grounds and hunting trails) was handed to the whites. Back in the valley, both sides largely ignored the plan, confident that someone would eventually recognize its idiocy.

In fact, such a sane and sanguine attitude continued to characterize most white and Indian relations in the Wallowa. The Nez Perce were willing to tolerate such a small amount of settlement, provided their lifestyle remained sustainable, and the settlers, by and large, simply wanted their status confirmed one way or the other. Numerically, the settlers knew they faced only obliteration if trouble truly flared (there were fewer than 150 of them, actually only slightly less than the Wallowa band, but the Indians had access to fearsome reinforcements) and they were by no means wedded to the Wallowa — many admitted they were just hanging on for a government payout to leave the land to the Indians. One observer, Captain Whipple, noted the settlers’ willingness to ‘sell out at the first opportunity and move to a more promising locality. This shows how the white people who reside here regard this valley. On the other hand, the Indians love it.’ In this relatively level-headed context, friendships could form — a shared love of horse-racing (and gambling on it) offered a sporting common ground, while most of the settlers were happy for their children to hero-worship the playful Joseph.

Sadly, however, beyond the valley, hysteria reigned. The petitioners’ scaremongering fused with lurid newspaper reports of the Modoc War to convince the citizens of the surrounding towns of Lewiston and the Grande Ronde Valley that, in the words of one local paper, ‘another Indian scare is about to transpire’ in the Wallowa. In February 1873 the citizens of La Grande, the nearest large town west of the Wallowa, sent for two hundred rifles to put down the imminent uprising, while Joseph was mythologized as a kind of pirate king, certain to join forces with Captain Jack, and the settlers’ funeral eulogies were written, casting them, of course, as the pristine victims of the piece. When the government’s map-making folly was announced, the Union County Mountain Sentinel called it ‘the crowning act of infamy…actually driving earnest, honest and hardy pioneers from their homes’, before the editor, unexpectedly, slipped into blank verse: ‘The Wallowa Gone; Dirty, Greasy Indians to Hold the Valley; Two hundred white men and families driven from the beauty spot of Oregon…Citizens of Wallowa! Awake and Drive Joseph and his Band from the face of the Earth.’

Such enthusiasm for another man’s squabble should have aroused suspicion. In fact, this was the overture for a persistent theme — the image of the doughty, impoverished settler, keeper of the pioneer flame, was being invoked by those in less straitened circumstances, to force the hand of a government wedded to the homesteading myth. The reality was that the struggle for the Wallowa wasn’t being fought on behalf of a couple of hundred settlers, but for many thousands of cattle. The prosperous stockmen of the Grande Ronde Valley were growing dependent on the summer range of the Wallowa (the number of cows that summered in the valley trebled between 1873 and 1874, while human settlement at best stagnated) and they resented the competition for grass from the Nez Perce’s own herds of cattle, and particularly their thousands of horses. From early 1873 an alliance of influential stockmen, malleable local politicians and bilious newspaper editors, almost none of whom lived in the Wallowa and many of whom had never even seen it, waged a voluble campaign ostensibly upholding the rights of the valley’s heroic settlers over the demands of the transient, ‘roaming’ Indians. They got their way, and on 16 June 1875 President Grant signed a bill abandoning all efforts to redeem the map-making farce, and simply reopened the entire valley to white settlement. Most of the young warriors in the Wallowa band, in concert with the leaders of other dissident Nez Perce bands, such as White Bird and Toohoolhoolzote, many of whom were suffering far worse encroachment and depredation from settlers on their territories, took this as the signal for war. Joseph and the Clearwater chief Looking Glass, a forthright character who had learned much of the power of the United States from his frequent travels east to the buffalo country, successfully argued that that way oblivion lay. Whatever the solution, it would be found through dialogue.

Following the reopening, more people (and cows) made their home in the Wallowa, around seventeen bi-pedal families arriving in the spring of 1876. An air of permanence began to settle — more log homes, post offices, churches, school houses, irrigation ditches, a petition for a county road. Soon, one of the more tangential products of a burgeoning settler community would appear: a marriage agency. The enterprising D. B. Reavis noted that ‘old bachelors are largely in the majority’ in the Wallowa, while further east ‘Missouri was full of young and old maidens and blushing widows’. He took orders from the valley’s lonely hearts, most of whom seemed concerned with matters other than moonlight and romance: one suitor requested ‘a good woman of any age or size; one who has a natural fondness for pigs, and stock generally’; another demanded his mate ‘not to be over 30 years old, weight 130lbs, be good looking, a good conversationalist, and fond of fish’, while the Tully brothers asked for a job lot of two, ‘with even temper, not particular as to size, large one preferred. One to be a good cook and the other with a suitable voice for cow calling.’

Another sign of encroaching ‘civilization’ emerged. Citizens from the Grande Ronde began visiting the valley on hunting and fishing expeditions, and a few enterprising locals even began building a boat to take the tourists onto Wallowa Lake to maximize their catch. The valley’s prodigious fauna, unscathed by the passage of an immigrant trail and well managed, both by design and circumstance, by the Nez Perce, was drawing widespread interest. As one early settler, Loren Powers, recalled:

Large herds of deer and elk were frequently seen crossing the valley, while bear were so numerous as to be a decided menace to the stock industry. Prairie chicken, grouse, pheasants, ducks and geese were also much in evidence. The streams also abounded with trout, salmon and red fish…One could stand on a bridge and see schools of these fish that would darken the whole stream.

Those unfamiliar ‘red fish’, sockeye salmon spawning from the Pacific to Wallowa Lake in their millions in early summer, attracted comment from almost every visitor; the match-making Mr Reavis recalled ‘red fish so easily caught and in such countless numbers’, while a passing soldier made a diary note that he and half a dozen comrades reeled in at least seventy salmon in a day’s sport: ‘killed red fish in leisure’.

It would take just one generation for the leisurely application of fishing lines, shotguns, rifles and bear traps to complete their work in the Wallowa. In 1905 a correspondent to the local paper moaned that the deer, elk and bears had been practically wiped out: ‘game has disappeared except to the wildest points.’ And as for ‘the peculiar species of Red Fish’ that once darkened Wallowa Lake — ‘the white settlers used them in such quantities as to destroy the species entirely’.

This efficient dispatch of the Wallowa’s wildlife was far from unique; in almost every valley and prairie the opening of the American hinterland to settlement had an impact on its fauna that almost belies description. The ecological historian Tim Flannery perfectly captures the teeth-clenched mood of those who have chronicled this quasi-military assault, describing the continental conquest as ‘a history of ruthless environmental exploitation, the audacity and imbecility of which leaves one gasping for breath’. In a national drama in which wilderness stood for evil and those who tamed and cultivated it doing God’s work, the fauna served as fall guy. Between the arrival of the first colonists on a teeming continent and the low point of North American biodiversity, in the 1950s, it’s estimated that the European settlers had reduced America’s wildlife population by no less than four-fifths.

The annihilation of the animal republic passed over each portion of the continent in a series of distinct, if sometimes coincidental, waves — all of which broke over the Wallowa. First had come the fur trade, with initially French, British and Dutch trappers, then newly liberated Americans, skinning beaver, martens, raccoons, bears, wolves, minks and otters as if they were (as was often the case in flighty European society) going out of fashion. At the height of the trade single French ports reported taking in more than 100,000 beaver pelts a year; London alone was importing 50,000 wolf skins and 30,000 bear pelts per annum. The whims of couture saved the beaver on the brink of extinction, while less prodigious species, such as the sea mink, weren’t so lucky.

The next wave was formed of pioneer settlers, killing for food as they faced starvation crossing and populating marginal lands. The followers of the Oregon Trail and similar routes had helped destroy the West’s great herds of tule elk, mule deer, white-tailed deer, prong-horned antelope and bighorn sheep, forcing the rump of their populations deep into the mountains. Once communities became more settled, pursuing these game creatures into their high country retreats then became a sustaining sport, and they were all but wiped out. The diarist Hamlin Garland recalled the impact of a single year of settlement on the Iowa plains where his family, surrounded by other homesteaders, had driven their stakes: ‘All the wild things died or hurried away, never to return…all of the swarming lives which had been native here for countless centuries were utterly destroyed.’

Next, with secure settlement, came reclassification. Any creature whose behaviour conflicted with yours, or whose numbers were inconveniently boosted by your environmental impact, could only be one thing — a ‘varmint’. And pests needed controlling.

The most vigorously persecuted varmints were those that were deemed capable of killing valuable calves and, later, sheep — namely wolves, coyotes, cougars, bears, golden eagles and, incorrectly, bald eagles. Most new stock-raising communities, including the Wallowa, organized volunteer committees for predator eradication, and bounties were placed on the ears of coyotes, cougars and, most importantly, wolves. However, the explosion of edible stock across the Western landscape ensured the resilience of small predator populations, so around the turn of the century the fiercely independent and self-reliant Western communities did what they were rapidly becoming accustomed to doing — they lobbied the federal government for help. Federal predator control began in 1914, opening an astonishing chapter of bureaucratic incompetence and insensitivity: agents scattered strychnine pellets across prairies, set cyanide guns to shoot into passing creatures’ faces, injected hens’ eggs with thallium and left poisoned horse carcasses in open fields to slay any passing scavengers, inadvertently intoxicating the soil and killing any creature which might later feed on the corpses of the intended victims. The murder was indiscriminate, inefficient (bureaucrats privately admitted, for example, that bobcats didn’t eat stock, but someone was getting work killing them, so they carried on) and remarkably unrelenting. (It was Richard Nixon, a president whose environmental legislation offers a considerable rebuke to his many detractors, who finally banned the poisoning of predators on public land -only for Ronald Reagan, a president whose environmental record serves as Exhibit A, to repeal the law.)

On one level, the federal programme worked well. By the 1950s there were no more than six hundred grizzlies left in the contiguous United States (some ecological historians believe there may once have been 1.5 million) while the grey wolf, the creature that had taught the Nez Perce to sing, had been completely wiped out west of the Mississippi. Only the mercurial coyote, too clever for traps and stink bombs, could never be broken.

The final wave of attack probably accounts for the Wallowa’s mysterious red fish — industrial harvest. When the ‘free wealth’ of the American continent’s bountiful consumable fauna met the right technological innovation, oblivion came swiftly. For example, to the east, just as the Wallowa was being settled, the invention of the breech-loading shotgun was seeing off the most numerous bird on earth, the passenger pigeon. Single flocks of this elegant, fleet creature could number two billion, blocking out the sun as they passed over, their guano falling like snow. Breech-loading was invented in 1870 — and the last wild passenger pigeon fell to earth in Ohio in 1900.

Meanwhile, to the valley’s west, in 1866, another invention was being rolled out, when the first salmon cannery opened on the Columbia River.

It’s quite hard to fish a species to extinction, because you’ll normally stop making a profit before the last cod dies (as we’ll see later, there are much more effective ways of wiping out aquatic ecosystems). The salmon fishermen on the Columbia River did their best, though, their output peaking at over forty-five million pounds of canned salmon (considered, ironically, a base, working-class foodstuff) in a year at the turn of the century. For over twenty years the fishermen actually dumped tens of thousands of the red sockeye salmon belly-up into the sea, selling only the superior chinook -faced with what looked like a limitless supply, the early Pacific salmon industry allowed about half of their catch to rot — but over-fishing halved the chinook run between 1884 and 1888, so the sockeye started to go in the cans, and the species all but collapsed.

The red fish, just like the deer, elk, wolves and bears, were gone. The canneries wouldn’t be the last assault on the salmon runs that had helped define the Native tribes of the Northwest — nor would this be the last time the Nez Perce crossed paths with the technology of extinction.

While the pressure on the Wallowa’s wildlife was just beginning to build, the strain on the valley’s pastures had already reached breaking point. The seasonal grazing of the Nez Perce horse herd was a growing irritation to those settlers with dreams of cattle baronetcies, and as the year-round inhabitants and ‘improvers’ of the valley, the immigrants’ claims of rightful ownership grew more insistent by the year. Few were more obstreperous than Wells McNall, a violent-tempered Indian hater who was endlessly appealing for military protection for his farmland, and who took to corralling and castrating any Nez Perce horses that strayed into his fields. In June 1876 McNall’s running feud with the tribe took a fateful turn, as he stormed into a Nez Perce hunting camp and falsely accused a group of warriors of stealing horses. Alec Findley, McNall’s peaceable and popular neighbour, attempted to defuse the argument, but McNall and a young Nez Perce known as Wilhautyah came to blows. As both men scrambled for McNall’s gun (the Indians were unarmed), McNall soon found himself staring down his own barrel, and indeed at his Maker, as he squealed to Findley: ‘Shoot the son of a bitch! Shoot, you damned fool!’

Panicking, Findley let fly, killing Wilhautyah instantly. It certainly wasn’t the first murder of a Nez Perce by a settler (more than thirty tribal members had so far been unlawfully killed, with just one settler convicted of any crime) but in the tinderbox of the Wallowa it was by far the most significant.

The Nez Perce dressed for war and the settlers dug in for a siege. Warriors took target practice in clear view of Findley’s home; the whites sent for rifles and begged for military support. At a series of stormy meetings Joseph and Ollokot, close friends of Wilhautyah, demanded that Findley and McNall be handed over; the distraught Findley offered himself for surrender several times, but the other settlers resisted such capitulation. Government agents arrived to meet Joseph and Ollokot, and faced restrained but uncompromising demands — the camel’s back had been broken and it was time the whites left the Wallowa for good. The unlawful spilling of Nez Perce blood in the valley only made the land more precious, more certainly owned. An explosion seemed likely; many settlers left, and two cavalry companies were sent from Lapwai to keep the peace. Ultimately, though, a resentful compromise was reached in September 1876: Findley stood trial for the murders in the Union County Court, but, with the Indian witnesses unwilling to participate in the white judicial system, he went free.

An uprising had been averted, but the murder of Wilhautyah had focused federal minds, and all Washington agreed that the tense uncertainty of the Wallowa was no longer acceptable — chiefly because in twenty minutes, on 25 June 1876, the rules had changed forever. That’s how long the rebellious Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Crazy Horse, Gall and Sitting Bull are believed to have taken to cut down General George Armstrong Custer, at the time the most famous soldier in America, and more than two hundred of his men, at the Battle of Little Big Horn. It was a firestorm in which America’s national faith in the inevitability of continental conquest was painfully bruised, and the mood of the government was irreparably darkened, as the West was flooded with yet more troops with orders to drive any’renegade’ Indians into exile, extermination or surrender. The history keepers of the tribe that fought at the Big Horn now acknowledge that the finest hour of their resistance also marked the moment when their subjugation became inevitable — but for many other tribes of the West, the distant battle would prove an equally gloomy turning point. (Perhaps that explains why, according to several reports, Custer died laughing.)

All were agreed — the Nez Perce problem now demanded a permanent solution, and the roaming Dreamer bands needed to be securely tied down. It was the perfect task for that most predictable of historical arrivals, ‘the man from the government’, a distant appointee unencumbered with any basic understanding of the situation yet burdened with an absolute faith in his own compassion, wisdom and decision. General Oliver Otis Howard was just such a man.