For young Joseph, viewed through the prism of Sitting Bull and Captain Jack, had been transformed into something of a hate figure in edgy Lewiston (and, indeed, across the Northwest), a violent rebel-in-waiting whose dignity and intellect, in a suitable phrase for a town densely populated with Deep Southerners, made him ‘uppity’. He was characterized in the local press as ‘haughty, insolent and defiant’, of ‘wanton and independent spirit’, a man who ‘manifested a degree of dignity and reserve importing more with the character of the chief of some great nation than that of a leader of a small band of outlaws’. Crowds would gather in towns that Joseph passed through, the locals fascinated by their local warrior king and possible bloody nemesis (ironically, they were often actually looking at Ollokot, who was a prodigious fighter, and a fearsome sight). There were even slanderous conspiracy theories that Joseph had already taken a house and salary from the government, or that the Wallowa in fact belonged to another band. So when Howard chose to call the commission rather than summarily put Joseph in his place — on the reservation — it was argued that he only increased the renegade’s insolence, and thus the likelihood of a fatal conflagration. Howard’s patriotism, and by extension his masculinity, were volubly called into question — one Oregon paper proclaimed that the Nez Perce felt nothing but love for the Christian General: ‘just as they love their squ-s* for their inherent willingness to submit to all things the buck commands’. Successfully baited as being ‘soft on defence’, whatever charitable ambitions Howard had brought with him to the Northwest rapidly evaporated, the fix was in, and the Nez Perce’s last chance for justice passed. The man from the government had done his worst.
It’s an irony that cheers few of Lewiston’s modern inhabitants that their home town’s defining characteristic remains its smell. The composition of the air has changed considerably — but it still reeks. The eye-watering miasma that envelops the city daily also serves as unignorable proof that the Western settlers’ folk philosophy of self-reliance, unfettered individual freedom and bitter distaste for external meddling is very much alive, though not, perhaps, alive and well.
The timber boom that enveloped Pierce at the turn of the century also re-energized Lewiston, restoring it as a trade hub for the Clear-water Forest lumber that floated downstream into giant log ponds on the edge of town. The area’s corporate behemoth, Potlatch Forests Inc., opened a large sawmill in town and then, in 1950, a paper mill, efficiently converting Idaho’s woodlands into everything from milk cartons to kitchen roll. Work was plentiful, the city grew fast, but paper production is a burdensome enterprise — it requires the use and fouling of huge quantities of water (the paper mill used three times more water than the entire city) and generates a large quantity of airborne particles that happen to smell of raw cauliflower, possess the capacity to rot paint and metal and can make people very sick. The story goes that Potlatch’s scientists spent a suitably biblical forty days divining the prevailing wind before locating the mill — and for every one of those forty days the wind blew in the opposite direction to its normal path, ensuring the smokestacks were built precisely upwind of the town centre. For the thirty years after the mill opened, as a tiny sample of the news reports from the Lewiston Morning Tribune amply illustrates, Lewiston served as an ailing case study of what happened when Western laissez-faire, a philosophy built around the plucky little farmer, met the equally plucky giant corporate polluter …
‘Potlatch Corporation’s main wastewater pipeline burst twice Sunday, sending more than 1.5 million gallons of effluent into two levee ponds…The coffee-coloured wastewater is the end-product of the pulp and paper process.’
‘A malfunction at Potlatch Corp. pulp mill at Lewiston Monday evening and a minor temperature inversion Tuesday morning reduced visibility in the valley…A Miller Grade resident who said he was “choking to death” called the Tribune Monday evening for information about the pollution.’
‘Failure of an air pollution control device at Potlatch Corp. may cause an increase in visible emissions for several weeks.’
‘A leak of deadly chlorine gas at the Potlatch Corp. pulp mill at Lewiston forced the evacuation of hundreds of workers.’
‘Bits of fuzzy, brownish fluff drifted across the Lewiston Clarkston Valley Wednesday. The culprit was the secondary treatment ponds at Potlatch Corp.’
‘The big noise from the Potlatch Corp. plant will start again this afternoon.’
‘Alice Swan, a Colfax nurse, testified that her doctor advised her to leave the valley. Her symptoms, including nausea and congested chest and sinuses, disappeared when she left.’
Her doctor had a point; in the 1970s Lewiston was labelled a ‘non-attainment area’ for consistently falling below federal healthy air-quality standards. For thirty years the town had well above average rates of allergies, respiratory illnesses and worse — 15 per cent of all lung cancer in the United States is caused by industrial particulates. Perhaps the finest gift from Potlatch to Lewiston came in Christmas 1971 when the plant shut down its effluent disposal pipe for cleaning, and simply dumped all its wastewater directly into the narrow, shallow Clearwater River. A fisherman notified the authorities that the entire river had turned a thick brown. In 1970, unsurprisingly, the Council on Economic Priorities had described Potlatch as a firm with ‘records indicating no concern for environmental protection’.
But this is no cause for an exclusive hatchet job. As one local journalist with more than thirty years’ experience of covering the region put it to me: ‘Potlatch is not a particularly bad company. These are just the rules.’ The founding principles of the West offered considerable leeway to those wishing to pollute the new continent -and this was never more true than in the last corner to be colonized.
The history of this epidemic of fouling begins when the Industrial Revolution crossed the United States at a stupefying speed — national pig iron production rose 1300 per cent in the six years from 1850, oil output rose from just two thousand barrels to 4.25 million in the decade from 1859, and from 1867 to 1897 steel output rose from just 1643 tonnes to over seven million, outstripping the supposed industrial heavyweights of Germany and Britain combined.
From 1850 to 1900, America’s population trebled, but its economy multiplied twelvefold — an expansion unknown in human history. With individual corporate kingdoms earning more money than the weakling federal government’s entire budget, the impact of this largely unmanaged, unregulated industrial growth on the country’s air and water was predictable (the easiest crystal ball would have been, of course, a visit to smog-bound industrial Britain). And by the time the economy underwent another startling boom, following the Second World War, the continent’s natural elements were undeniably in a truly parlous state.
As the post-war boom proceeded a series of scandals revealed the toll that the continent’s compromised air and water were taking on America’s human and animal health. In 1959 a group of St Louis physicians discovered worrying levels of the radioactive contaminant strontium-90 (one of the main components of the Chernobyl disaster’s fallout) in local babies’ teeth, and realized that American children were being poisoned by their mothers’ milk. In 1962 a group of fisheries managers were caught pouring poison into more than four hundred miles of Wyoming’s Green River, purposefully exterminating all the local species prior to dropping in scores of rainbow trout, which were more fun to catch. In the same year Rachel Carson revealed that the agricultural industry’s witless use of military-grade pesticides was wiping out everything from freshwater mussels to peregrine falcons, as well as filling Americans’ bodies with yet more carcinogens. Soon after, Lake Erie was declared ‘dead’ by the national press — this wasn’t quite true, but the water was so clogged with phosphates that the fish were, unnervingly, drowning.