Potter had been helped in his crusade against change by The Chieftain, which put out a special report on plans for “The Re-wilding of the West.” It was accompanied by a very ominous-looking map of the three states in the Columbia Plateau, showing little islands where people would live and a large blotted-out red area that would be returned to nature—re-wilded, as it were. Judging by the map, it looked like the Red Menace all over again.
After stringing up likenesses of Kerr and Bailey, the crowd moved on to a weekend of hard talk about those forces swirling around the West, trying to make the map red and the land wild. You could not legally hang Kerr and Bailey, one speaker said; but you could certainly make life miserable for them. For one thing, they could urge all businesses to boycott them—just refuse them sales or service. All the big names in Wise Use, a movement dedicated to the idea that environmentalism has brought America to It’s knees, had been drawn to tiny Joseph for the weekend, for a price. Ron Arnold, a Seattle-area writer who coined the term Wise Use, gave a speech titled “The Dangerous Agenda of the Nature Conservancy,” referring to an old-line conservation group whose board of directors includes General Norman Schwarzkopf, the Gulf War leader. Another speaker, Carolyn Paseneaux, a member of the Wyoming Legislature, gave a talk on the Endangered Species Act, “the atom bomb of the war on the West,” as she called it. Understatement does not travel to these symposiums.
Potter had hoped that at least three hundred people from the valley would sign up for the weekend sessions. But only a hundred or so paid the forty-five-dollar fee. It was a bust, Potter said later. “I lost five thousand dollars bringing those speakers in,” he said. “I’m still paying for it.”
WHAT PROMPTED ranchers and timbermen in the Wallowa Valley to string a rope around the straw neck of two of their neighbors is the same thing that people have always clawed over in the West—the public domain.
Dale Potter may call those who work the land simple and unsophisticated. What he seems to be saying is that they are dumb and hick. But they know much more than he gives them credit for. They know the New West is inevitable; they just don’t know what their role will be in it. They fear change. They do not want to become bit players in a new economy, flipping buffaloburgers for mountain-bikers from the city. When a new sporting-goods store opens on Main Street, what comes to mind are unctuous urbanites in Lycra. They see the huge, glass-chested homes on the hill, the architectural sketches for Elk Trail Estates going up on the glacial moraine of a lake where they always took their kids fishing, and they cannot find a place in this future for themselves. Hunting for hope, they revert to the past—which at least is predictable.
Andy Kerr got into trouble because he spoke directly to this insecurity. Understatement, also, does not know Andy Kerr. He gave a speech in the heart of eastern Oregon cowboy country not long after he moved to the Wallowas. “The future is clear,” he told the ranchers gathered at a Rotary luncheon. “Soon, this county is going to be selling more espresso than barbed wire.”
Kerr had taken up residence in a large log home in Wallowa County, which is about as big as the state of Delaware, and where cattle outnumber people by a six-to-one margin. Having forced some of the nation’s most powerful timber companies to retreat from a binge of clear cutting that had left large sections of the Oregon Cascades naked of forest cover, Kerr had turned his sights on the arid eastern side of the mountains. Big ranches controlled most of the public land in the dry half of Oregon—reliably serviced by a congressman with the second-biggest district in the Lower 48—but their century of dominance had taken It’s toll. Salmon had vanished from streams overrun by cattle, water had been drained from marshes that were once magnets for millions of migratory birds, and bighorn sheep were dying in Hells Canyon, from a disease biologists traced to domestic livestock. Kerr wanted nothing to do with a slow transition from Old West to New; he wanted history to hurry itself along, casualties be damned.
“Advocating better grazing of the arid West is like seeking better beating of little children,” Kerr had written. “Better grazing is boring to work on. Abolition is much more interesting.”
Kerr said he rejected the stark choice between “old land abusers” and “yuppie scum.” Typically, these sides are presented as the only two choices for how to live in the West, two extremes, both unattractive. But Kerr, like many Westerners, had no idea what form the middle ground might take. So he waged his war on one side, and flourished like the people on the other side who are paid to stir up residents of depressed towns like Joseph.
After his speech to the cowboys, Kerr was lucky to get out of Rotary alive. There were hisses, some gasps and insults, and later—headlines. His comments grew, magnified in each retelling. Soon he was a pariah. Restaurants refused to serve him. Anonymous callers threatened his life. A rock shattered a window of his house. The manager of a gas station told him to get his gas somewhere else. Bumper stickers called on him to leave town. Kerr professed to be unruffled, telling people that his wife and he had brought “three mean dogs and a gun collection” to their new home. He intended to stay. He had a right to live in the Wallowas.
To deal with people like Kerr, and others with no political agenda but who had moved to the Wallowas because it was so beautiful, or because it inspired art and poetry instead of hamburgers and two-by-fours, the county commissioners came up with an ordinance. Like Dale Potter, the commissioners had long ago cemented their minds to the Old West; virtually everything new was seen as a threat. They drafted their own version of the Endangered Species Act. In their customized take, the law would protect loggers and ranchers, not bighorn sheep and salmon; it was modeled after the ordinance passed by the Catron County commissioners in New Mexico. In their minds, Wallowa County was just about perfect back when Walter Brennan, the stuttering character cowboy of so many films, had a ranch in the valley, and perhaps it was.
At the time the commissioners tried to turn back the clock in the Wallowas, the county had already lost two-thirds of It’s population of fifty years ago. The three commissioners, all sympathetic to the ranching and timber lobby, declared that Wallowa County—not the federal government—had control over the millions of acres of Forest Service and BLM land in their region. They could do with it what they wanted, they asserted. Any federal action, like restricting grazing in Hells Canyon National Recreation Area to protect bighorn sheep, could be ruled null and void by them, they asserted. They could do this, they believed, because the government had failed to respect the traditional culture of the land.
The traditional culture, as they defined it, was a narrow thing, belonging to perhaps a hundred entrenched white families, and it was nearly gone. In all the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, only a single commercial sheep rancher remained. Throughout Wallowa County, there were only forty-six ranchers and, after the Boise Cascade closure, two small timber mills. But the commissioners did not see anything before or after the cowboy and the logger; some of them were cow-centric in the extreme.
“I dare you to name one object that isn’t associated, somehow, with cattle products,” said Arleigh Isley, chairman of the Wallowa County Commission, when I spoke with him. “Name one. Everything you use in this world, just about, comes from cattle.”
The ordinance would not protect the two herb farms that opened in the valley, or the artists coop, or the microbrew pub, the jazz festivals, or the writers workshop—all of which were starting to bring money into the valley, without any help from the government or special ordinances. Nor would the law do anything to stop the rich from moving in, plowing up pasture for exclusive developments, or having their way. A southern-style mansion went up on the lake, to nearly everyone’s chagrin. A big condo development was planned not far from Josephs grave. The valley was slipping away, becoming another Golden Ghetto lost to the homogenizing forces of the gilded West. The old guard tried to hold on to a nineteenth-century fantasy, legislating clear-cutting and salmon-trashing for beef that nobody wanted, passing on Walter Brennan hom
ilies written on a movie-studio backlot. The more fair-minded people in the valley, genuinely struggling with one century slipping away a hundred years later than it should have, while another century pressed down on them without much warning, wondered if anything could really save the Wallowas.
Ric Bailey refused to be run out of town after he became a hanging object. Many businesses boycotted him, as the Wise Users had suggested, but just as many welcomed him. He kept up appearances around Joseph, his home of twenty years, sending out flyers on bighorn sheep deaths in Hells Canyon, playing poker once a week in public—his back to the wall. And instead of making himself scarce at public meetings, he became more of a nuisance. “No lynch mob is going to drive me out of the Wallowas,” he said.
At one meeting of the commissioners, where they were drafting the traditional-culture law, Bailey stood up to make a point.
“If you’re going to base your decisions on who’s been here the longest,” he said, “you had damn well better talk to some Nez Perce Indians.”
There was a name rarely mentioned in any way except as an historical oddity. What did they have to do with anything? a commissioner wondered. For a visitor entering the Wallowa Valley, the only official notice of an Indian presence is a sign outside one of the smaller towns: Welcome to Enterprise—Home of the Savages.
“They’ve been pissed off,” Bailey said, “a lot longer than you have been.”
ONE OF those Indians, Earl (Taz) Conner, is a direct descendant of Old Joseph, and he is one of the few native people to be seen in Wallowa County on a regular basis. He was working for the Forest Service when he was approached by a community leader with a suggestion. The commissioners had ignored Bailey’s idea of talking to the Nez Perce, as they did with everything Bailey said. But quietly, other whites in the valley began to give a second thought to the vanquished tribe. Every year, by the thousands, visitors from an ocean away made the hard trip to the Wallowas, asking about the long-dead Indians. In Europe, there are Chief Joseph clubs, dozens of them in Germany alone. The name is gold. But in the Wallowa Valley, it has always meant something else.
Taz Conner got his nickname when he was a toddler and he liked to hop around to the razzmatazz sound coming across the radio. He grew up as an outsider, a Nez Perce among Cayuse and Paiutes in the dry Umatilla Indian Reservation in central Oregon. He joined the Navy, did two tours of Vietnam. It was only when he left the Pacific Northwest that he realized what it meant to be a Nez Perce.
“I was in Spain, and this guy said to me, ‘You’re Indian, right? What are you, Sioux? Apache?’ I told him I was Nez Perce and his face lit up. He said, ‘Nez Perce! Chief Joseph!’ ”
Wallowa County was suffering the highest unemployment rate—near 20 percent—of any county in an otherwise booming state, and one in six lived below the poverty line. The Pacific Northwest was on a roll, building the prototype of a global economy, one that whole countries could only imagine. There was one glaring exception to the general prosperity: those areas such as the Wallowas that were tied to an imagined past. In this island of failure in far northeastern Oregon, out of desperation, a handful of people now turned to the Indians. And Conner was the only Indian with anything other than a spectral presence in the county, though he lived in a neighboring region.
“This man from the community development office, he thought the Nez Perce could save this county,” said Conner. “How’s that for irony—asking us Indians to return after booting us out in 1877?”
AFTER LIVING in the Wallowas for perhaps a thousand years or more, the Nez Perce were given thirty days to pack up and leave in the spring of 1877. Thirty days to say goodbye to the dead. Thirty days to gather up thousands of head of cattle and prize horses. Thirty days to close up all residences for all time. Thirty days to look again and then no more. Then they would be off—babies, toddlers, teens, grandparents, the hotheaded, and the passive, about 750 people in all, the followers of Young Joseph. In their place would come ranchers lusting for the waist-high grass, dairy farmers looking for free land, merchants with tourist plans for the lake. The Nez Perce would not receive a dime for their land. They would simply have to walk away, give it up. And they would have to do so knowing they had a treaty, barely twenty years old, that promised the Joseph band of the Nez Perce that they could keep their home in the Wallowas for as long as the waters of the Columbia rolled to the setting sun, a treaty signed by the president, backed by the Senate. Imagine holding a deed to a house that you have lived in your entire life—and then a stranger comes along and orders you out, without compensation. That was the Nez Perce predicament of 1877.
“We have respect for the whites,” said Earl Conner’s great-grandfather Ollokot, a son of Old Joseph, who had died in 1871. “But they treat me as a dog.” Ollokot had reason to be perplexed. In all the disparaging history written about American Indians, the Nez Perce had stood out as a breed apart. The shorthand description of Indians for most of the nineteenth century had them pegged as squat, filthy, poor, with no future. Not the Nez Perce. They were invariably described as tall, handsome, prosperous, athletic, industrious, articulate. “The most friendly, honest and ingenuous” of all tribes, Sergeant Patrick Gass of Lewis and Clark’s expedition had written.
Clark himself fathered a Nez Perce child. He called the tribe “expirt marksmen and good riders.” During the months that the Corps of Discovery spent with the Nez Perce, they staged horse and foot races, shooting contests, games of skill and chance. The Nez Perce won almost everything. The Pacific Northwest might well be part of British Columbia or Russian Alaska or belong to some other sovereign, had not the Nez Perce opened their arms to the first Americans to cross the continent. Had they bumped into the Blackfeet, perhaps the most feared tribe of the West outside the Sioux and Apache, Lewis and Clark might well be footnotes instead of names of counties and high schools in the West. It was their luck to stumble, at their lowest point, upon a tribe whose “hearts were good,” as Lewis wrote. The whites gave the Nez Perce medallions with the likeness of Thomas Jefferson and some tobacco—both largely worthless items from a place, Virginia, that might as well have been Jupiter. The Nez Perce gave the whites canoes, horses, women, shelter, and food. And what food it was: chi-nook salmon, the fresh fall run from the Clearwater River, elk steak cooked in a stew of camas bulbs—the garlic of early Northwest cuisine. And for dessert, four kinds of berries, topped with honey. At the time, the Nez Perce numbered perhaps six thousand, living in dozens of bands, in what are now three states of the Columbia River Plateau. The whites numbered no more than three dozen, and possessed good blankets, cooking utensils, and guns that could have given the Nez Perce an edge over their traditional enemies, the Blackfeet. In a swift, ugly moment, the Nez Perce could have wiped out Lewis and Clark, or at least stripped them of their goods and sent them packing. Instead, they smoked with them, ate with them, made love with them, raced with them. Then they gave them canoes and showed them how to find their way to the big ocean. They promised to hold on to some of their goods through the winter, and to give them enough horses in the spring, when they returned for the trip home.
And what’s more, in the spring of 1806, when the rain-soaked, somewhat dispirited Corps of Discovery returned, the Nez Perce kept their word. Horses and goods were waiting. The horses were not the lame, half-mule rejects that other tribes tried to pawn off in trades. The Nez Perce had refined the practice of selective breeding of fine horses; the Appaloosa is perhaps their best-known product. For all the toffs in Virginia horse country, the plantation gentlemen who bored many a dinner party with details of their own animal husbandry, Meriwether Lewis had some news from this distant corner of the wild: the Nez Perce method of horse-breeding, he wrote, “is preferable to that practiced by ourselves.”
And so a pattern developed for most of the nineteenth century, from the early encounters with muddle-headed Christian missionaries to the rescues of confused and frightened Oregon Trail travelers and lost trappers—the Nez Perce were guardian
angels. They liked the Americans, or at least had enough self-interest in them to take pity on them. The Boston men had better trading goods than the English or French. They came, at first, without missionaries, unlike the Spanish. Seldom did any American letter back home describe a Nez Perce as anything less than glowing. “They are certainly more like a nation of saints than a horde of savages,” wrote Washington Irving, in his account of Captain William Bonneville’s epic roaming around the West. Bonneville, the first white to see the Wallowa Mountains, was hungry and lost (a pattern for Americans stumbling upon the Nez Perce) when he found a band of Josephs people living in the splendid setting in 1833. Old Joseph was then called by his pre-Christian name, Tuekakas. And how did they react to Bonneville? They gave him “the hospitality of the golden age,” Irving wrote.
The stage was set for what the nations of the Pacific now aspire to: free trade, based on mutual respect of treaties and sovereignty.
Even when other Northwest tribes declared war after a fraudulent treaty conference in 1855 had opened Indian country to settlement, the Nez Perce fired not a shot nor an arrow. Indians from other tribes were being killed for sport, their leaders lured into truce conferences and then hanged. The Nez Perce resisted the conflict, because they had a very clear document, the treaty that explicitly stated that no white could be allowed on Nez Perce land without Indian permission. Joseph possessed his own parchment map, showing the boundary lines. “The line was made as I wanted it—not for me but for my children that will follow me,” Joseph said. “This is where I live and this is where I want to leave my body.” And to make the point clear, he established a line of poles planted in rockpiles, so that stray cattlemen, prospectors, or other potential trespassers would not be confused.
Alas, this story, whether it takes place on prairie, mountain, or seacoast, has only one ending, a familiar one. Prospectors and cattlemen ignored the treaty. The grass was good in the Wallowas. And on the Idaho reservation, gold was discovered. A flood of miners, with their instant whorehouses, instant liquor mills, instant land claims that would later be defended by politicians as the most sacred of property rights, overwhelmed Nez Perce land. The treaty, they told Congress, would have to be rewritten, the Nez Perce moved. Joseph and a few other bands refused. The Idaho communities, the more Christianized Indians, living among the boom of miners, caved in. A new document in 1863—later dubbed the “thief treaty,” or “the fools treaty”—was signed by some of the chieftains and some white Christian missionaries. It reduced the Nez Perce holdings to one-tenth of those in the original treaty. The Wallowa band would have to go to Idaho, to live among those who had sold out their land.