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.