CHAPTER THREE
FEVER
‘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