Deafened by protests, the federal government acted, and the early 1970s witnessed a raft of environmental laws, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, that remain the legislative foundation of all efforts to clean up America. It seemed that laissez-faire had finally fallen to people power.
The State of Idaho ignored the Clean Water Act for twenty-two years. Irreparably in hock to the logging, farming and mining interests that were soiling their landscapes, and almost congenitally indisposed towards regulating free enterprise, the local legislators declined to perform even the preparatory act of compiling a register of polluted streams. When they were finally prosecuted into action, the tests revealed that at least 962 rivers and streams in the state were unacceptably polluted. Stung into decision, Idaho announced a clean-up programme — but one so woefully funded that it would take 150 years to complete. That, in a nutshell, is the legal — and philosophical — environment Potlatch inhabited. Those were the rules.
More than thirty years after the Clean Air and Water Acts, Americans still subsidize their economy with their health to a degree unique in the developed world. One in every six American women has levels of mercury in her blood that pose a danger to her unborn child; America’s Food and Drug Administration has isolated fifty-three carcinogenic pesticides still at use in the nation’s food industry; in the year 2000 half of all Americans lived in communities where the air quality fell below safe standards at least part of the year; 40 per cent of the country’s rivers and lakes are considered unsafe for fishing or swimming, and forty-one states now warn fishermen to eat no more than one local catch a week; studies suggest more than a quarter of the country’s underground water is also seriously polluted (this should come as no surprise as two-thirds of America’s toxic waste output is injected straight into the continent). A quarter of the American population lives within a few miles of one of the country’s estimated 450,000 unstable toxic waste sites.
And for the army of grassroots anti-pollution campaigners that have coalesced since the late 1960s, by far the greatest barrier to protecting the modern continent, particularly in the battle to cleanse the West, remains the pathological dislike of outside meddlers and imposed rules which has characterized towns like Lewiston since their very foundation. In 1947 the essayist and historian Bernard DeVoto (whose columns for Harper’s Magazine are the most dispiriting companion any writer can take into the West, as they seem to contain every worthwhile insight ever written — only sixty years ago) noted that the West’s public discourse was dominated by the fear that the settler culture of ‘the axe-wielding individualist’ was being corrupted from Washington ‘by a system of paternalism which is collectivist at base and hardly bothers to disguise its intention of delivering the United States over to communism’. Every local editorial page in the West, DeVoto contended, contained a daily ‘ringing demand for the government to get out of business, to stop impeding initiative, to break the shackles of regulation with which it has fettered enterprise’. Thirty years later a former matinee cowboy would build towards an unprecedented electoral sweep of the West (followed by a concerted effort to weaken the clean air and water laws) on the back of a pledge to revive the independent pioneer spirit, encapsulated in one perfectly pitched one-liner: ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”’ Over two elections, just under 70 per cent of Idahoans voted for Ronald Reagan; only Utah posted higher numbers for the great apostle of flimsy government and axe-wielding individualism. The implications for the natural continent were made clear by the leader of Reaganism’s Greek chorus, the eminently quotable and undeniably influential broadcaster and author Rush Limbaugh: ‘The key to fixing the environment is unfettered free enterprise…. We have a right to use the earth to make our lives better.’ Welcome to Idaho — now go home.
Potlatch Inc. has at least modified its local act somewhat since the darkest days of the polluted continent. In the mid-1980s it invested in a burner that could capture most of the Lewiston paper mill’s particulates — enough to satisfy the local lawmakers, but not, sadly, enough to eliminate the smell of raw cauliflower. The locals call it ‘the smell of money’, although they’re unfortunately mistaken: as the town’s dilapidated Main Street, pawnshops and bainl bondsmen serve to testify, those parts of the US that allow high pollution don’t get prosperity in return: they actually have higher unemployment and greater poverty levels than the national average.
At least in 1994 the federal government concluded that Lewiston’s air was no longer carcinogenic, a vast improvement considering that in 1990 the levels of chloroform in the air were estimated to increase the cancer risk by forty times. (In 2003, the town still had above average incidence rates for at least nine cancers.) The Snake remains on the government’s list of fouled rivers: Potlatch is permitted to pump in up to forty million gallons of warm water a day, carrying sediment, alien nutrients and some carcinogenic dioxins (again, reduced in recent years, but the dioxins do collect in the local fish, giving them tumours and rendering it unwise to overeat them).
In the late 1980s the company also began to draw down its Lewiston activities, closing the sawmill and cutting staff at the paper mill, citing, in part, the cost of their new-fangled environmental practices. Now, like so many Western company towns, Lewiston waits, like a meek, abused spouse, for divorce: as several locals testified, ‘We all know they’re going to leave town, they’ll be gone someday soon.’ Those, as the people of Pierce would tell them, are also the rules.
The cause of the plucky pioneer had acquired a vigorous convert in Oliver Howard, who affected distaste for what he saw as the uncultured libertarianism of Lewiston’s settlers, while deferring to their every bidding. The findings of his commission were rapidly approved in Washington, troops were prepared to occupy the entrance to the Wallowa prior to a forced evacuation and a delegation of Christian Nez Perce were dispatched to break the distressing news to Joseph and Ollokot. Sensing that the situation was being driven towards a violent conflict they couldn’t hope to win, the two brothers spent the early months of 1877 in a frenzy of last-ditch diplomacy, seeking meetings with Howard, their Indian Agent, other neighbouring Agents, anyone who would listen to their pleas and counter-offers — they suggested the eighty or so Wallowa band members could move west to the traditionalist Umatilla Reservation, they wondered if the Umatilla themselves should be moved east to share the Wallowa, or perhaps the two reservations should be joined? They begged Howard not to deploy his troops, pointing out that they knew full well that any aggression on their part would cost the lives of their wives and children. Howard grew impatient — each time he met one of the brothers the local press ridiculed his indulgence afresh — and he finally drew a line in the sand. The leaders of the dissident bands — Joseph and Ollokot, plus White Bird, Looking Glass, and Toohoolhoolzote from the more easterly bands, and also the leaders of two roaming bands from the Palouse peoples, Husishusis-kute and Hahtalekin, were convened at Lapwai to talk once more, on 3 May 1877. The chiefs believed they’d been granted one last chance to plead their case; in fact, Howard intended to get down to brass tacks. Each band would be forced to choose the reservation land they would move onto, and to agree a deadline to leave their homelands forever.
The Lapwai Council was the last expression of Nez Perce freedom. Once more the bands arrived in full regalia, riding in strict formation and singing their traditional songs, and established their camps surrounding the meeting grounds. In a calculated display of unity, the leaders chose Toohoolhoolzote as their sole spokesman; a strict and militant traditionalist, he could well express the depth of their feeling.
Howard opened proceedings briskly, eager to demonstrate the balance of power and to subdue the dissidents with, in his own immodest phrase, his ‘fearless sternness’. Toohoolhoolzote countered with a long and impassioned speech on the simple wrongness of what was occurring: ‘I belong to the land out of which I came. The Earth is my mother. The Great Spirit made the world as it is, and as He wanted it, and He made a part of it for us to live upon. I do not see where you get authority to say that we shall not live where He placed us.’
As the peroration continued, Howard bit his tongue, but the noises of assent from the other Nez Perce grew worryingly loud, thoughts