For the many Nez Perce who had settled into the new regime, though, this was backwardness and heresy. Spalding’s way offered less strenuous and time-consuming sources of food, the possibility of wealth through trade and, most importantly, the guaranteed avoidance of eternal suffering in the fiery netherworld of which the reverend spoke so often. Learning English, cutting their hair, keeping pigs, reciting chapter and verse, the Christian Nez Perce were a roaring success — but by an entirely different measure to their traditional clansmen.
By the measure of the ignoble history of colonial missionary work, Henry Spalding was certainly a success. By 1843, profound and insoluble conflicts were beginning to appear in the Nez Perce community, scuppering their response to the next, decisive, wave of white arrivals. In June 1843 around a thousand people set off from the town of Independence on the banks of the Missouri, to make the 1900-mile wagon journey in search of free land and new lives in the Oregon Territory. After division, comes conquest.
Dancers at the Tamkaliks Celebration, Wallowa Valley, Oregon.
CHAPTER TWO
SETTLEMENT
‘All hail, thou western world! by heaven design’d Th’ example bright, to renovate mankind’
‘Greenfield Hill’, by TIMOTHY BRIGHT, 1794
‘Annuit coeptis — He has approved this undertaking’
The Great Seal of the United States
THE OREGON PRAIRIE dozed in the scalding midsummer heat, the only movement the irrigation machines hopelessly spritzing the Columbia River into the gasping dry air. The miles passed as the truckers, farmers and loggers showed the way eastwards and inwards through the crisp, lifeless wheatfields. The highway started to rise, weaving over the Blue Mountains then sliding down into another frying pan, the valley of the Grande Ronde, a river scarcely worth the name crawling through the drought-stricken farmland, dotted with the dog-eared little towns of Alice, Imbler (’We’re too blessed to be depressed’ proclaimed the church sign defiantly), Summerville and Elgin.
Finally, the road began to curve upwards again, a merciful breeze rolled in, the tan grass was dotted, then clustered, then shaded with pine trees, and the angles of the land tightened from lowland curves to alpine edges. The road was struggling to find a way now, clambering towards the high country, over the barricade of Minam Summit, the fading, clunking camper van beginning to strain and steam at the incline. The hill topped out at last to a broad-shouldered summit, revealing the treasures it protected, a view that had raised the spirits of homecomers, newcomers, guests and transgressors for millennia. This was Nez Perce country.
Steepling pine-covered slopes folded away to the horizon, falling swathes of meadowland breaking the deep green wash, and, below, the fast-running Minam River caught the last of the afternoon sun as it carved out its canyon walls. The road careered down to meet the river, where fishermen were chasing salmon and a family of deer was hunting out the shade within the riverbank willows. Soon, the Minam poured into the main event, the Wallowa River, and the canyon’s sides began to release their grip, widening and slackening until it was time for them to fall away entirely, and let the softening light flood across the full sweep of the Wallowa Valley. And then, the wonder of the place strikes in an instant, and it’s a dull heart that doesn’t echo the thoughts of Joseph E Johnson, one of the very first white men to drive their stakes into this land and claim it as their own: ‘As soon as I looked out into the valley I said to myself, “This is where I want to live.”’
You could find nowhere better. The heart of the valley is the river basin, corralled into farmland and pasture, speckled with lonely red barns and white ranch houses, with the Wallowa and Lostine rivers winding lazily through the greenery. Serving guard on one flank of the valley lies a bank of rolling, sun-dried grassland hills, while on the other the Wallowa Mountains shoot skywards in a precipitous flurry of forests, cliff faces and snowfields, suggesting adventure and isolation away from the homely calm of the lowlands.
The town of Wallowa itself, the first in the valley, is little more than a picturesque bend in the road, a few shops and a diner clustered between the gas station and the espresso shack, the kind of place where the teenagers do laps through the evening shade in their pick-up trucks, in search of something to do. It was only a short drive to the north edge of town, where the tepees were clustered against the edge of an irrigation ditch, mosquitoes plundering in the darkness, the craggy mass of Tick Hill looming over the encampment meadow like an unfriendly giant. Someone had lit a fire, and the lawn chairs were gathered for a chat.
The next day we busied ourselves with preparations for the annual gathering that would rouse this field to life, Tamkaliks: ‘From where you can see the mountains’. I joined the local youth conservation volunteers, gradually and messily mastering the art of turning a lodgepole pine tree into a working lodgepole, stripping off the bark with double-handled sickles, covering ourselves in pungent, tenacious sap. A circular wooden arbour lay in the centre of the meadow, with bleachers and hay bales stacked in the shade for the spectators. We worked all day, and, as the afternoon came to an end, a crowd gathered from their jobs in the valley to help in the raising of the arbour’s roof — an old army tank parachute, a billowing mass of military-green fabric that hung from a central pole to fill the centre of the circle, and shade tomorrow’s dancers from the fierce peak of summer. The men were enjoying the banter and sweat, but a woman, Sarah Lynne, was quietly running the show, allocating tasks, keeping an eye on the youth volunteers and hauling the hay in her pick-up. Her great-grandfather had come into this valley as one of the first white squatters, she said: ‘My grandfather said one of his earliest childhood memories was the sparks of the cavalry’s hooves when they rode into the valley, in 1877, the shoes hitting against the rocks in the dark. Because my great-grandfather could speak some Nez Perce, he helped interpret for Young Joseph when the cavalry came. Joseph even came down to my great-grandfather’s house before everything started and said, “Take your wife and your papoose, and leave — there’s going to be trouble.” My family were never all that happy with what happened to the Nez Perce — but governments do what governments do. They wanted to mine and log and pursue the so-called progress of the West — so there you are.’
Saturday bustled in the heat, the vendors on their summer powwow trail gathering their stalls around the arbour, selling jewellery, art, fabrics, ice cream, Indian tacos and countless gallons of lemonade to the growing, sweltering crowd, a mix of locals enjoying a chance to chat, flirt and gossip, plus pilgrims from across the western states, a group of greying military veterans in their pressed white shirts and, away from the stalls, enjoying the calm of’Tepee Alley’, the drummers and the dancers, dozing, sewing, unpacking, preparing.
I killed time at the taco stall with Fred Minthorn, a Wallowa Nez Perce, grinning widely beneath a capacious baseball cap and wraparound shades.
‘I look forward to Tamkaliks all year. I love it here, I can bring my grandkids, let them run free, let them be kids, you know? Not like back on the reservation, you have to look out for them all the time there, with all the drugs and the alcohol. We had a guy die last week on the reservation — OD’d.’
Fred worked as a maintenance man at the tribal casino, but his real passion was his horses and the journey they offered away from a present he had little time for and back to his ancestral past: ‘My great-great-aunt used to tell stories of how this valley was filled with our horses, so many of them, thousands. She was one of the last remaining survivors of the great retreat, when we were pushed out of here; she was raised here in this valley, and she was descended from Young Joseph’s father-in-law, and she helped raise us. So that’s our connection, that’s what makes us descendants, me and Brian, my cousin. We’re going to be buried up on that hill,’ he smiled wide again, pointing