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