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Soyaapo and the Remaking of Lewis and Clark

Mark Spence

One of the peculiarities of writing Native history is the un-conscious tendency to move back and forth between past and present landscapes. This might well be called the "what is now" trope, as in this recent description of Nez Perce country in the early nineteenth century: "The Nez Perce ... came to occupy approximately 13 million acres located in what is now north-central Idaho, southeastern Washington, and northeastern Oregon ... [with their] territory centered on the middle Snake and Clearwater rivers and the northern portion of the Salmon River basin."1 On the face of things, this is a fine and accurate description of conditions at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, yet it is also an odd abuse of the past. Eight generations ago people in these areas did not possess a collective tribal identity with broad territorial claims, and they certainly did not know themselves as Nez Perce. Nor did they think in terms of acres or future state boundaries, let alone center their lives on rivers called Snake, Clearwater, and Salmon.2 1
      How the people who call themselves Nimíipuu (Real People) or Iceyéeyenim mamáy'ac (Children of Coyote) came to be known as Nez Perce is something of a mystery. Lewis and Clark called them Chopunnish, which possibly derives from a Sahaptian word for piercing (tsoopnit), and both captains noted that some of the people they met had a single shell pierced through their nasal septum. French-speaking trappers in the employ of the North West Company were the first to use the term nez percé (pierced nose) in the early 1800s, but it is not certain to what extent ancestors of the Nimíipuu actually pierced their noses, if at all.3 Whatever the case, the term Nez Perce has little or no descriptive relevance for the generations of people to whom it has been applied, and — like references to acres and state boundaries — the term takes diverse peoples and their complex worlds and simplifies them beyond recognition. The same might also be said of the Snake River and almost all of the rivers, lakes, and streams in "what is now" Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. In the case of the Snake, the name derives from any number of possible translations and mistranslations of Native, then French, and then English references to Shoshonean peoples. To Sahaptian speakers it was, and is, known as himeeq'isnimewelepe or pik'uúnen (both roughly translate as "large flowing river").4 2


 
Figure 1
    This map, which William Clark titled "Sketch given to us on May 8, 1806 by the Cut nose, and the brother of the twisted hair—," was derived from Nimíipuu sources and included in the expedition journals. It shows the major river drainages from the "Lewis River" (also known as the Snake River, himeeq'isnimewelepe, or pik'uúnen) to the ocean.

    OHS neg., OrHi 99507
 


 
      The problems associated with the historical naming and mapping of Nez Perce territory are practically endless, and all are at play in varying degrees whenever historians try to describe the past conditions of any Native community. More than just the tricks that history plays on the dead, these issues reflect and exacerbate what might be called the "in-betweenness" of much contemporary Indian experience. On the one hand, this temporal dualism fairly captures the back-and-forth nature of living with and between two (or more) different cultures. Yet, implicitly equating Native places and experiences with current names and landscapes also commits a kind of double violence. On the other hand, it seems to prove the old adage that "history is written by the winners" by forcing a constant translation of past Native experiences into the very terms of their undoing. It also makes invisible the dynamic relationships among land use, culture, and ecology that Native languages represent. 3
      Think, for instance, of the meanings embedded in a place called lé·qew lé·qew, near what is now Elgin, Oregon, in the Grande Ronde Valley. While lé·qew roughly translates as "timber" or "trees," doubling the same word implies a particular abundance or significance. In this case, the term referred to an important annual encampment that was used during the hot summer months for gathering cous, berries, and various other plants and herbs, grazing horses, hunting, harvesting fish, cutting lodge poles, taking thermal waters, preparing foods for winter, and meeting with other groups in the well-used area. As William L. Lang has written, names like lé·qew lé·qew "come from within a lived space, where human events are connected to landforms, sources of food, sacred places, home. Some names reflect the physical appearance of the landscape, while others document the coincidences between human activity and natural resources. Others serve as guides for travel, locations of medicinal plants, and sites of danger."5 The name Elgin comes from a popular song of the 1880s called "Lost on the Lady Elgin" about a steamer that sank in the Great Lakes.6 4
      The in-between, neither-here-nor-there qualities that are embedded in phrases such as "what the Indians called" or "what is now Oregon" are often indirect references to periods and places of profound, even traumatic change. Such expressions tend to skim over the historical shifts they allude to, as if the change in terminology reflected a natural, inevitable unfolding of events rather than a distinct break between entire worlds and worldviews. In the worst cases, as in the founding of the town of Joseph, Oregon, in 1879, such renaming allows non-Indians to see their communities as extensions of the past that simultaneously eliminate, honor, and improve Native worlds. The town only came about after the qemúynu· (Wallowa Band of Nez Perce) were forced out of the area during the summer of 1877 in what came to be known as the Nez Perce War or Chief Joseph's War. Whether it is the kind of cultural cannibalism that leads to place-names like Joseph, the re-placing of lé·qew lé·qew by a popular ballad about the Lady Elgin, or the casual wording of historians, each of these forms of reference essentially frames a period of enormous consequence without filling it in. The names for things did not simply change; landscapes and peoples also changed in previously unimaginable ways. To appreciate the magnitude and nature of these changes as well as to understand the nature of the world we now inhabit, we need to focus on the cultural, ecological, and social transitions that altered the meaning and content of particular places. 5


 
Figure 2
    The distant viewpoint of the implied observer and the small encampment within a vast landscape in Indian village at Elgin site, called 'Lo Chow Lo Chow,' by Elva Spikes of Elgin, Oregon (April 1959) betrays a nostalgic and aesthetic perspective that is outside the lived experience of lé·qew lé·qew.

    OHS neg., OrHi 015206
 


 
   

Beginning with Lewis and Clark

 
For both Indians and non-Indians in the Northwest, the end of one world and the beginning of another are often traced back to Lewis and Clark. The Nez Perce Tribe states in a recent online publication:
While hands of friendship were extended [at the time of the expedition], U.S. Army officers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark have brought a "face" to a potentially devastating set of events, symbolizing much of the ambivalence, as well as threat soyaapo "civilization" would come to mean to the Nimíipuu. While benefits from the new soyaapo relationship are acknowledged, "discovery" has also come to mean loss of human life, loss of access to land and water, loss of wildlife habitat and endangerment of the salmon, and loss of cultural ways.7
 Silas Whitman, a strong critic of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial and the longtime director of the Nez Perce Tribe's fisheries program, is less ambivalent:
... what they call "the Corp of Discovery," when that came about that drastically altered and changed [things] forever.... And so today we have lost a lot of things. The advent of society, "civilization," the advent of the culture and the languages that have overwhelmed our people, Christianity and the churches, all those things that have been tantamount to ethnocide, genocide.... We probably would have been better off if we would have eliminated [Lewis and Clark].8
 		6
      Stephen Ambrose, who epitomized and inspired a great deal of the enthusiasm for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, also viewed the expedition as a pivotal historical event; but his sentiments were less complicated and more laudatory than those of Whitman and the Nez Perce Tribe. In an opinion piece for the Denver Post, Ambrose complained of his experiences
at a meeting about the upcoming bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. There were a lot of Native Americans present, and some of them had the attitude, "What in the hell did Lewis and Clark do that we should celebrate?" The Nez Perce representatives were saying, "We should have just wiped out that expedition. It would have been a lot better for us if we had. There sure isn't anything here for us to celebrate." That's not, it seems to me, the right approach.... I regret the popular attitude that there was some kind of idyllic world here in the new world before Columbus. It's altogether wrong. Indian tribes were always at war with each other.... Change was coming to these North American Indians willy-nilly.... I encourage North American Indians who were on the Lewis and Clark trail to take an attitude of pride. Lewis and Clark couldn't have ... gotten anywhere without the Nez Perce who rescued them when they were starving.... I think the Nez Perce ought to take pride in that.9
 		7


 
Figure 3
    The caption on this drawing, created ca. 1842–1846 by Nicholas Point, S.J., reads: "Grand conseil, compose de dix chefs nez-perces, pour répondre à cette question: Saifserons[?] nous le ministre des Grands conteaux, pour suivre la robe-noir des Français? —réponse affirmative" (Drawing of ten Nez Perce chiefs deciding to accept an agent [?] of the Long Knives [Americans] and follow the French priests).

    Archives des Jésuites, Saint-Jérôme, #1602, 1-157
 


 
      The concept of "willy-nilly" does not, in itself, have much explanatory power. What kind of changes, in accordance with whose values, and toward what ends? But the devil does not always have to be in the details if you believe historical outcomes are inevitable and if you believe the present is the ever-rising culmination of the past. As a self-confessed "unabashed triumphalist," Ambrose saw resistance in 1805 and resentment today as nothing more than looking backward in a forward-moving world. Such thinking gives rise to one of the odd contradictions that stand at the heart of American mythology: Ambrose considered Lewis and Clark two of "this country's heroes" because they were decisive individuals of great physical and mental prowess, but their individualism served to facilitate the workings of inexorable progress.10 Much like demigods, they were exemplary individuals who operated as instruments of divine will. 8
      In both Whitman's and Ambrose's reckonings, which share little else, the Lewis and Clark Expedition possesses a timeless relevance. The expedition was a primary agent of change that, for better or worse, set in motion a process that has been running continuously for two hundred years. As the heroes or antiheroes of an oft-told story that conflates the past with the present at each telling, Lewis and Clark represent the genesis of the world we now inhabit. In many respects, this understanding of Lewis and Clark is just an inversion of the "what is now" trope: there is no before or after the expedition, only more of the same. A formative historical process is explicitly acknowledged, but there are no subsequent transitions of any real consequence. When Lewis and Clark are viewed as discoverers who answered the call of "a frontier [that] begged for exploration," to quote the honorary chair of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, First Lady Laura Bush, then everything that preceded the expedition is erased or made irrelevant.11 When the expedition is viewed in positive or negative terms, as the result of "willy-nilly" history or the coming of soyaapo, "civilization," subsequent events lose their significance. 9
      As it turns out, Lewis and Clark's time beyond the bounds of the Louisiana Purchase was of little consequence to the peoples they met and practically irrelevant to the development of the Pacific Northwest for nearly a century. No Americans bothered to follow the expedition's path to the Pacific because easier routes were found within a few years, and almost none of the people who came to the Oregon Country over the next few decades were from the United States. Most were employees of British fur-trading companies from a variety of backgrounds, including Scottish, English, Métis, French, Cree, Spanish, Mexican, Iroquois, Hawaiian, Tlingit, and Haida. The Nimíipuu certainly remembered "Clarke and Lewis," as Aleiya (a.k.a. Lawyer) noted in 1863, but only as the first in a parade that soon included employees of the North West Company, "the Hudson Bay Co. and the French people ... and [the Canadians from] the Selkirk settlement."12 10
      When Americans did come to the Pacific Northwest in significant numbers during the 1840s, they found their bearings by drawing on information from fur trappers, missionaries, and Natives. This is apparent in the place-names that remain from the first decades of the nineteenth century, such as Yamhill, Grande Ronde, John Day, and Owyhee. These newcomers had no more interest in Lewis and Clark than their predecessors had, and they only further diminished the relevance of the explorers' brief presence in the Northwest. As the heroes of their own stories, the settlers were intent on transforming the Oregon Territory in their own image, frequently choosing to name places after themselves or the homes they had left behind. One only need think of Portland, Salem, Mosier, and any number of towns, counties, rivers, and lakes that dot the map of Oregon. In the process, they erased almost all remaining traces of William Clark's mapping just as the region became part of the United States.13 11


 
Figure 4
    This photograph of a Nez Perce group known as Chief Joseph's Band at Lapwai, Idaho, in the spring of 1877 was taken shortly before the outbreak of the so-called Nez Perce War. In the front center of the group are Hinmató·wyahlahtit (Joseph), Peo peo Hix hiix (White Bird) and Ala' limya Takaniin (Looking Glass).

    Courtesy Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture/Eastern Washington State Historical Society, L94-7.105
 


 
      Oregon Fever — the frantic promise of "free land" in the Pacific Northwest — owed very little to the legacies of Lewis and Clark. Instead, the success of the new communities that sprung up at the end of the Oregon Trail largely depended on and contributed to the series of devastating pandemics that cut Indian populations by as much as 90 percent and left uninhabited vast stretches of land that had been well tended and kept clear over generations of Native use.14 The migration also occurred just as the British-controlled fur trade was collapsing. While these two developments ultimately secured U.S. claims to the region, they did not immediately affect the Nimíipuu as much as their neighbors. Because they had long occupied a powerful position in the region and because they lived away from emigrant routes and the lands that Americans initially coveted, the Nimíipuu managed to retain almost all of their ancestral homelands in an 1855 treaty with the United States. 12
      Efforts to force land cessions did not occur until the 1860s, when a sequence of gold rushes and violent land-takings in central Idaho and eastern Oregon led to a treaty that drastically reduced the tribal land base in 1863. Over the next two decades, Nimíipuu lands were carved into American towns and farms, the rivers made into federal waterways, valuable bottomlands and forests converted into railroad rights-of-way, and vast grasslands opened up to livestock interests. Despite language in the 1863 treaty that described the tribe's remaining lands as "reserve[d] ... for the sole use and occupation of" its members, these developments also occurred on the reservation, which soon resembled a checkerboard of mostly non-Indian landholdings.15 By the 1890s, the Nimíipuu world was literally made over into the ecological, cultural, and administrative conditions that have prevailed for more than a century. In short, "what was" Indian territory literally became "what is now" eastern Oregon and central Idaho.16 13
   

A Trail through New Worlds

 
The Nez Perce National Historic Trail commemorates what Alvin Josephy, Jr., has called a "sad and super-dramatic chapter of our western expansion," when the U.S. Army sought to force five bands of Nimíipuu who were not party to the 1863 treaty to leave their homes in the Wallowa Valley and the Salmon River country and move onto the Nez Perce Reservation.17 The trail might also be described as a fraying thread that, in the summer of 1877, moved through worlds that were rapidly being torn apart and put together in new ways. Winding from the Wallowas in northeastern Oregon through the Rocky Mountains and across the northern plains, the trail traces the route of a twelve-hundred-mile odyssey that pitted 2,000 troops against 750 men, women, children, and old people. After several violent conflicts with soldiers and settlers, the long, desperate retreat of the "non-treaty bands" ended just shy of the Canadian border on a cold morning in early October. One of the most poignant sites along the trail is the Big Hole National Battlefield, where on August 9 U.S. troops surprised the Nimíipuu in a pre-dawn raid, killing between 60 and 90 of the people camped there while losing 29 U.S. soldiers and sustaining 40 wounded. Nimíipuu warriors staged a successful rebuff, and the battle ended the next morning with the bands making a successful departure to the south.18 14


 
Figure 5
    This map of the Nez Perce (Nee-Me-Poo) National Historic Trail, which stretches from Wallowa Lake, Oregon, to the Bear Paw Battlefield near Chinook, Montana, marks the path that the Nez Perces followed in 1877 as they attempted to flee to Canada, pursued by U.S. Army troops.

    USDA Forest Service, NPNHT (modified for clarity)
 


 
      For all its sad and dramatic history, the Big Hole battlefield also serves as an important starting point for briefly assessing the late nineteenth-century transformations of the Nimíipuu world and how they relate to the subsequent remaking of Lewis and Clark. Located near the exact point where the Corps of Discovery began its push into what anthropologists refer to as the Nez Perce Aboriginal Use Area and marking the eastern end of a 330-mile overlap between the Nez Perce and Lewis and Clark national historic trails, Big Hole carries a name that fur trappers had given to a place the Nimíipuu knew as Izhkumzizlakikpah, in reference to the large number of ground squirrels in the area.19 When William Clark moved through the same place in 1806, he recognized it as a well-used entry to the buffalo country and as a camas-gathering site. The meandering stream that waters the valley — a small tributary of what Lewis and Clark had named the Wisdom River (Big Hole River) when they passed through the area a year before — inspired Clark to name it Glade Creek (now Trail Creek). These names did not last long and soon went the way of Clark's River (Bitterroot River), which he and the non-treaty bands had followed to get to this spot. More than names had changed by 1877, however. Squirrels were still in evidence and the non-treaty bands continued to use their own terms, but they now also had to get their mouths around names like Frenchtown, Stevensville, Corvallis, Hell Gate, and Grass Valley — places that marked a new order on the land. 15
      The non-treaty bands purchased and bartered for supplies in these towns, and their horses shared the grasses of the Big Hole Valley with cattle that belonged to nearby homesteaders and property owners. Such matters were hardly strange to the Nimíipuu, who also grew European crops and kept livestock, but they were new in both the Big Hole and the Wallowa valleys as well as most places in between. Moreover, they were part and parcel of the private property systems that were rapidly transforming the country and had driven the non-treaty bands into defensive retreat. As Tukulkú•t (Red Mountain), a respected band leader from east of the Wallowas, put it in a heated exchange with Gen. Oliver O. Howard, the trouble between his people and the Americans arose because "white people get together and measure the earth and then divide it.... What person pretended to divide the land and put me on it?"20 16
      Shortly after they fled the U.S. troops at Big Hole, the Nimíipuu would encounter a whole new kind of land division in the form of Yellowstone National Park. Reversing a century of federal public-land policy that was devoted entirely to converting Indian land into private property, Yellowstone became the first large section of the public domain to be "reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States."21 Like the growing number of towns, farms, ranches, mines, logging camps, and industrial sites that would spread throughout the region, public-land reserves proliferated over the next few decades, especially in the form of national forests. Within twenty-five years of Yellowstone's creation, most of the area between the Nez Perce Reservation and the Big Hole battlefield was set aside as the Bitter Root National Forest Reserve. By the first decade of the 1900s the Wallowas would also be added to the new system of national forests, and the Bitter Root would be augmented and reconfigured into four units: the Nez Perce, Clearwater, Lolo, and Bitterroot national forests. Though forest administration was initially weak and disorganized and the reservation of federal public lands was in many respects just an extension of the ordered surveys that also marked the bounds of private property and Indian confinement, these national forests signaled a new and more active management of western resources for the national economy. 17


 
Figure 6
    Big Hole Prairie from the North, based on a drawing by Gustav Sohon, from Reports of Explorations and Surveys for the Pacific Railroad, published in 1855–1860, offers a view of the area where U.S. troops raided a Nez Perce campsite.

    OHS Research Library
 


 
      In Yellowstone, the non-treaty bands also came across a new form of humanity, the western tourist — who, like townsfolk and foresters, would also proliferate in the coming decades. There was an almost comic strangeness to the encounter in which tourists in a national park were accosted and held hostage by Indians who were fleeing U.S. troops under the command of Civil War heroes that fairly captures the complete novelty of an otherwise dangerous situation. When something so new and peculiar occurs, it is a pretty good indication that something about the world has changed as well. Tourism is not just a matter of casual curiosity and pleasant diversion; it is also a product of wealth and the leisure that comes with affluence. In the decades after the Civil War — largely as a result of the "opening of the West" and the exploitation of western resources — the United States rapidly became one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in history. Increased tourism was symptomatic of this fundamental transformation, and its focus on western public lands reflected the sense of nationalism that Americans associated with the dramatic scenery of the region. The West seemed a repository of all that made America and Americans so exceptional, from celebrated frontier virtues and sublime vistas that surpassed anything in the Old World to the abundant resources and remarkable achievements in transportation that would ensure the future industrial growth of the nation. As historian Marguerite Shaffer has observed, tourism represented an effort to "reconcile [a] national mythology ... which celebrated nature, democracy, and liberty, with the realities of an urban-industrial nation-state dependent on extraction, consumption, and hierarchy."22 18
   

The Return of Lewis and Clark

 
Tourism and urban-industrial nationalism are a long way from the summer encampments at lé·qew lé·qew in the Grande Ronde Valley, but the non-treaty bands were also a long way from home. When they left the Wallowas, they did not start from "what is now" Oregon. Instead, they left what was then already the state of Oregon, moved through Idaho Territory, skirted the straight boundaries of the Nez Perce Reservation, crossed into Montana Territory, and then headed for the most important geopolitical boundary of all — the recently surveyed Medicine Line that marked the boundary between the United States and Canada. These lines were not abstractions but real entities that determined the bands' motions. For a short while, Montana seemed to offer a possible escape from their troubles in Idaho, and the Medicine Line, if reachable, would have been a boundary between them and the U.S. Army that was greater than any mountain range or river. The lines that Tukulkú·t protested were already deeply etched in the landscape, and they were multiplying in a rapidly changing world. 19
      By the time Hinmató·wyahlahtit (Thunder Traveling to Higher Places; the famous Chief Joseph of the 1877 conflict) died on September 21, 1904, during the first centennial year of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and almost exactly ninety-nine years to the day after the Nimíipuu first encountered the Corps of Discovery, his people's territory had been divided and renamed in countless ways.23 Although he died in exile on the Colville Reservation in northeastern Washington, where he lived for the last nineteen years of his life, Hinmató·wyahlahtit would no doubt have felt out of place if he could have returned to the place he said he "loved," "grew up on," and was "thankful for." In 1876, he tried to explain to a group of government officials that the Wallowa country, "as it was created, it was finished with power. There is nothing should supersede it." By 1904, however, places "clothed with fruitfulness" and filled with "riches given me by my ancestors" had been replaced — if not superseded — by the communities of Elgin and Joseph, the bustling town of Enterprise, and the newly created Baker City Forest Reserve. Almost everywhere in between, the high places echoed with the sounds of mills, railroad engines, mining dredges, lumber crews, and the bleating of enormous sheep herds.24 20


 
Figure 7
    Solon H. Borglum's First Steps to Civilization (1905), which was displayed at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, depicts an Indian chief clutching a Bible, his son at his side.

    OHS neg., CN 36311
 


 
      It would be this world, so far removed from the 1805 encounter between the Nimíipuu and the Corps of Discovery, that would suddenly give new relevance to the long-neglected figures of Lewis and Clark. Nowhere is this more evident than in the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, where the expedition was viewed as the foremost symbol of a century of territorial expansion that had just come to a close. While this symbolism reflected a certain sense of anxiety among some political and intellectual leaders about the "closing of the frontier" and future national growth, Lewis and Clark were more commonly portrayed as prophets of the new century's faith in material progress and overseas empire. Exhibits displayed the material abundance of the western landscape — from the forests of the Pacific Northwest to the mines of the Rocky Mountains and the new irrigated agricultural developments of Idaho — and the promise of enormous trade possibilities with East Asia. On this last point, Vice President Charles Fairbanks even found a way to equate Lewis and Clark with the commercial benefits of the Philippine War. In a speech delivered at the opening of the Exposition, Fairbanks claimed that Thomas Jefferson's
organization of the Lewis and Clark expedition ... opened the way to the expansion of the zone of American civilization.... The future has much in store for you. Yonder is Hawaii, acquired for strategic purposes and demanded in the interest of expanding commerce. Lying in the waters of the Orient are the Philippines which fell to us by the inexorable logic of a humane and righteous war.... We must not underrate the commercial opportunities which invite us to the Orient.25
 		21
      Lewis and Clark's newly acquired significance and their apparent advocacy for imperial wars had very little to do with their own actions or the times in which they lived. Instead, their relevance derived from a national need to make sense of the profound changes that were reshaping the United States. The triumvirate of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration deeply challenged and redefined American society at the turn of the twentieth century, while the rapid shift from an economy based on production to one based on consumption undermined the foundations of a much-celebrated national work ethic. Moreover, the conquest and administration of overseas imperial holdings repudiated the founding principles of the American Revolution. In short, the agrarian ideals that had inspired Thomas Jefferson to create the Corps of Discovery were gone. As a product of Jeffersonian ideals, however, the expedition represented the frontier characteristics that Americans would need to draw upon as they made their way through the twentieth century. By connecting a celebrated past with an unknown future, Lewis and Clark could also inspire hope and a sense of direction that made contemporary issues seem necessary and inevitable steps along the upward path of Progress.26 22
      No longer historical figures of small importance, Lewis and Clark suddenly became "heroes" in a "national epic" that had as little grounding in reality as the ancient works of Homer. Yet, the story of Lewis and Clark, if not the expedition itself, possessed a different kind of reality that was manifest in the physical landscape. The noted ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan has written poignantly about the relationships between Native peoples and their environments and about how the wealth of ecological information embedded in their languages can guide habitat restoration. "To restore any place," he writes, "we must also begin to re-story it, to make it the lesson of our legends, festivals, and seasonal rites."27 Nabhan's reasoning is compelling and no doubt correct, but it implies that only indigenous landscapes are "storied." All landscapes are storied, even ones that are measured out in survey grids and marked with clear-cuts, tourist cottages, and towns named Elgin — or Lewiston and Clarkston. Such landscapes are products of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century value systems that expressed themselves in stories about private property, abundant timber, frontier legends, pioneer festivals, and agrarian seasonal rites. They were also stories about race and savagery, industry and wages, class and ethnicity, "just wars" and "commercial opportunities." The resurrected figures of Lewis and Clark became all of these stories folded into one epic adventure tale that gave Americans a sense of historical continuity and a direction for the future of their world-changing endeavors. 23


 
Figure 8
    This detail from a railroad map of northeastern Oregon published in about 1890 shows survey grid lines, towns, and counties.

    Drawer 36, folder 1, map collection, OHS Research Library
 


 
      For better or worse, it is this story — born a century ago and embedded in the landscapes of "what is now" and has long been Oregon, Idaho, and Montana — that continues to define Lewis and Clark. Every time the story is told, every time it is made "the lesson of our legends, festivals, and seasonal rights," the conditions that give the story meaning are reaffirmed and perpetuated. Lewis and Clark enthusiasts have taken to calling the bicentennial a "commemoration," largely in response to Native protests against the term celebration and all that it connotes, but changing a word does not really alter the basic meaning of the Lewis and Clark story. Commemorating or celebrating a two-hundred-year-old undertaking while assigning it the historical significance it acquired one hundred years ago is essentially the same thing. It obscures, and even excuses, the often violent and destructive values that created the world we now inhabit. 24
      Soyaapo may not have come with the Corps of Discovery, but it persists in the Lewis and Clark story. Whether we choose to celebrate, commemorate, observe, or ignore the bicentennial, our differences are not in the stories we tell, which are of common and fairly recent origin. They instead lie in how we variously experience the world-changing developments that remade Lewis and Clark a century ago. Whether we want to actively promote the conditions and values that first gave the expedition its current significance is another matter, but it is a question that needs to be asked. A good answer, as Nabhan suggests, would have to be a collective effort to re-story the physical and cultural landscape and to create a new story that no one can yet imagine — but perhaps one without reference to Lewis and Clark. 25


Notes

1.  Deward E. Walker, Jr., and Peter N. Jones, "The Nez Perce," in University of Washington, American Indians of the Pacific Northwest Digital Collection, 1998–2003, content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/walker.html (accessed November 16, 2003).

2. Clearwater and Salmon are actually direct translations for the Nimíipuu names applied to portions, but not the entire lengths, of these two rivers.

3.  Gary Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 13 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983–2001), 5:224–5; Walker, "Nez Perce" in Plateau, volume 12 of Handbook of North American Indians, ed. Deward E. Walker, Jr., (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1998), 437.

4.  Spellings and definitions largely follow Haruo Aoki, Nez Perce Dictionary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), and Haruo Aoki and Deward E. Walker, Jr., Nez Perce Oral Narratives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Pronunciation guides are available in both texts. On occasion I have used renderings that are even more current than those used in Aoki, as in the spelling of Nimíipuu, which follows more recent custom. Where names of individuals and places have no equivalent in contemporary texts, I have used spellings and translations from older published sources.

5.  William L. Lang, "Two Ways of Seeing the Columbia: Reflections on 'an Officially Designated Cultural Landscape,'" Columbia 14 (Spring 2000): 26. Also see Eugene S. Hunn, "Native Place Names on the Columbia Plateau," in A Time of Gathering: Native Heritage in Washington State, ed. Robin K. Wright (Seattle: Burke Museum and University of Washington Press, 1991), 170–1.

6.  Lewis A. McArthur and Lewis L. McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, 7th ed. (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 2003), 322.

7.  Quotation is from the Nez Perce Tribe, "Nimíipuu Perspective," in Lifelong Learning Online: The Lewis and Clark Rediscovery Project, 2002, www.l3-lewisandclark.com/ShowOneObject.asp?SiteID=34&ObjectID=80&ExpeditionID= (accessed November 19, 2003).

8.  "Silas Whitman offers his perspective on the impact of the Corps of Discovery on the Nimíipuu" (interviewed by Josiah Pinkham in January 2002), in ibid.

9.  Stephen E. Ambrose, "Perfection Isn't a Requirement," Denver Post, June 7, 1998.

10.  Ibid.

11.  "Remarks by Mrs. Bush at Meriwether Lewis portrait/Lewis and Clark Commemoration" July 3, 2002, available online at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/07/20020703-19.html (accessed December 19, 2003).

12.  Quote is from "Official Proceedings of the 1863 Council. May 13-June 9, 1863," reprinted in The Nez Perce Nation Divided: First Hand Accounts of Events Leading to the 1863 Treaty, ed. Dennis Baird et al. (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 2002), 357.

13.  See Wesselius "Doc" Allen, "A Lasting Legacy: The Lewis and Clark Place Names of the Pacific Northwest," pts. 1–4, Columbia, The Magazine of Northwest History 15 (Spring 2001): 37–43; (Summer 2001): 23–31; (Fall 2001): 23–31; (Winter 2001–2002): 17–23.

14.  See Robert T. Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 116–71; and William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 23–78.

15.  "Treaty with the Nez Percés, 1863," in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1904), 2:843.

16.  See Alvin M. Josephy, The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest (1965; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Allen P. Slickpoo, Sr., and Deward E. Walker, Jr., Noon Nee-Me-Poo (We, the Nez Perces): Culture and History of the Nez Perces (Lapwai: Nez Perce Tribe of Idaho, 1973); and Emily Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 59–89.

17.  Alvin M. Josephy, foreword to Nez Perce Summer, 1877: The U.S. Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis, by Jerome A. Greene (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2000), xii.

18.  Greene, Nez Perce Summer, 129–40.

19.  The spelling and translation of Izhkumzizlakikpah come from L.V. McWhorter, Hear Me My Chiefs! Nez Perce Legend and History (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1952), 368; McWhorter's information was based on interviews with a qemúynu· (Wallowa Band Nez Perce) man known as Hími·n MaqsMáqs (Yellow Wolf), who participated in all of the conflicts along the Nez Perce Trail and eventually fled with others to Sitting Bull's camp in Canada rather than surrender to U.S. troops. Big Hole is also referred to as Iskumtselalik Pah (Place of the Buffalo Calf). See Greene, Nez Perce Summer, 133, 419n60.

20.  As recorded in Oliver Otis Howard, "Report of Brigadier-General O. O. Howard," in Report of the Secretary of War, 1877, quoted in Greene, Nez Perce Summer, 21. Aoki translates Tukulkú·t, which is frequently rendered as Toohoolhoolzote, as "antelope" in the Nimíipuu language. His name was of Salish (Flathead) derivation, however, and meant "red mountain," which may refer to the mountain by that name on the Washington–British Columbia border.

21.  "An Act to set apart a Certain Tract of Land Lying Near the Headwaters of the Yellowstone River as a Public Park," in America's National Park System: The Critical Documents, ed. Lary M. Dilsaver (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 28.

22.  Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 5.

23.  After the expedition's trying passage over the Bitterroot Mountains, William Clark and an advance party of six others stumbled onto Weippe Prairie on September 20, 1805, where they received food and assistance from a group of Nimíipuu.

24.  Quotes are from a transcript of the proceedings in Board of Indian Commissioners, Eighth Annual Report, 62–3, quoted in Greene, Nez Perce Summer, 17–18. The Baker City Forest Reserve was created in the spring of 1904. For a good overview of land use in the Wallowas, see Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 42–85.

25. Oregon Journal, June 1, 1905.

26.  See John Spencer, " 'We are not dealing entirely with the past': Americans Remember Lewis and Clark," in Lewis and Clark: Legacies, Memories and New Perspectives, ed. Kris Fresonke and Mark Spence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 159–83, 219–38.

27.  Gary Paul Nabhan, Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1997), 319.

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