The turquoise totes snaked to the rear of the casino and backed into an open bay lined with shelves of humongous cans and twenty-five-pound bags of flour and sugar that were heavier, just barely, than the salmon. I parked and was escorted down a corridor to obtain a behind-the-scenes badge that read Visitor. When I returned, the dead had been unloaded in clear plastic tubs and carted into the commercial kitchen, where a dozen chefs awaited, all in white. They had donned a hierarchy of toques and berets, and on the stainless steel preparation tables before them, each had a V-shaped wooden carving board to cradle a fish. The casino had made these some years earlier for precisely this purpose, the annual pre-powwow cleaning. It was clear much bleach would be needed.
Several other tribal members arrived to help prepare the salmon, including Kelly Rondeau. He wore a faded T-shirt printed with a wraparound American flag and sunglasses atop his ashen hair tied in a ponytail. His face was tall, his nose broad and prominent, his rugged smile lines framed by a moustache. “So which one do I get to take home?” he said jokingly. Half-jokingly. The Rondeau family is one of the seven original. His grandfather had been instrumental in starting the casino, and now Kelly was on the tribal board. He told me of the 180,000 steelhead smolt the tribe had helped release into the South Umpqua over the last decade. “We’re going to have to start claiming some of them,” he said, wryly.
I spent time with Dennis, Buffet Captain, and Victoria, Sports Bar Cook. Dennis did the cutting. With a forceful cleave behind the gills, their heads, those sunken and rosy eyes, were the first to go. For those that had already lost their snouts, it seemed an act of mercy, aesthetic at least. In many of the salmon, this first cut revealed shining clusters of roe behind the shoulders: translucent orange orbs that, in another life, would have overwintered in the small crater of a redd to first become big-eyed alevin, which stay hidden under gravel with a yolk sack slung to their bellies. The chefs scooped these refulgent masses into gallon bags for those on hand and lucky elders. Kelly held up two bags as if raising the spoils of a contest. He would thread them like beads onto a hook and bait steelhead, but one could also flash-fry them with flour.
The fish were butterflied, from the anal duct upward. The glossy innards were slung into trash cans. With the knife’s tip—or better, a fingernail—the chefs scraped out the coagulated red that ran against those spines newly exposed to the fluorescent light. I asked Vicky what this spinal gunk was called. “Spinal gunk,” she answered with her signature staccato laugh. “I have no idea.” I’ve since learned that it’s called the bloodline: the river within the fish, those arteries and veins that allow these dense muscles to thrust and quiver, and fight their way home.
“I like fish,” said Vicky, “but not in the raw. Don’t think I’d want to do this for a living.” She did the washing in a stainless basin, her chubby hands swirling inside the open book of each salmon. “This is not how they get’m at Safeway,” she added. The steady sound of the faucets was like a recollection of a river and, rinsed, the salmon recovered some of their silver brilliance. They’d given up their heads, but not their tails; not their elegance. Teri, Kelly, and the other members of the tribe helped package them: shrouded in plastic garbage bags, wrapped in white butcher paper, stacked once more on a stainless cart. Some were marked with a Sharpie for the mid-July powwow, others were reserved for a second event. Teri selected a small fish, one to fit her oven. “Everything you do, you do with a prayer and good thoughts,” she said. (“What is that,” asked Kelly, “a trout?”) The rest were wheeled into the freezer.
Two weeks later, I found myself on the Rogue-Umpqua Divide, staring out from under a fleece cap at a vast series of drainages. The Cascades’ ridges seemed to live up to the range’s name: a long line of waves being pulled down, slowly, by gravity. The snow had just melted, the earth was soupy, and the mosquitoes whined. I immediately had to stoke a fire to ward off these evil spirits. But there were tiny yellow violets strewn across the wet jeep tracks, and I was otherwise alone. At dusk, I became apprehensive for a moment, thinking a truck was coming around the bend. But it was the moon.
In summer, the Cow Creek Band also climbed to these heights, which were known, almost mythically, as the Huckleberry Patch, as if it were the first and only berry-picking spot on earth. They felt closer to the Great Spirit at these heights, slept in the open air, and dried venison and berries for winter. Sometimes they descended to the Rogue to hunt and trade, and went across Natural Bridge as far as the Klamath Marsh. They roamed west into the Coast Range or through the Rogue watershed to the Siskiyous. They told origin stories about the cradle of Crater Lake, Mount Mazama, whose shield feeds the Rogue and so, with a little help from the government, gave life to the salmon frozen in Canyonville. Here on the divide, the idea of carrying fish between drainages suddenly didn’t seem so unnatural: From this edge, water ran two ways, arbitrarily, and as a result entered the sea one hundred miles apart. But this view described the Cow Creek’s territory long before it was renamed a “wilderness” even as surrounding hillsides began to lose their trees.
In 1853, the Cow Creeks became the second tribe in Oregon to forge a treaty with the United States, ceding more than eight hundred square miles of land in the South Umpqua watershed, though they had no idea something so essential could be signed away. They were compensated 2.3 cents per acre, and the United States turned around and sold those acres to settlers for a dollar and a quarter. Afterward, the Cow Creeks were literally and figuratively driven into the hills, toward the Rogue-Umpqua Divide. Though they were promised a reservation and more, the tribe was only truly recognized when, without notice, its sovereignty was dismissed by the Western Oregon Indian Termination Act of 1954. But in 1982, Congress reacknowledged the tribe and, two years later, the courts awarded it 1.5 million dollars for lands lost. The tribe’s leaders prudently rolled the sum into a trust that helped spawn the casino and, now, a growing empire in Douglas County.
Come morning, I drove in low gear down the swelling Umpqua, to the falls where the Cow Creek Band had long congregated for salmon and still gathered for its summer powwow. The campground was a clearing nestled against a ridge on the north side of the river, an old Forest Service camp ideal for large groups. Tribal members had arrived the night before and parked among the trees at the meadow’s edge, in the sanity of the shade, in their annual spots. Families stretched tarps between RVs and firs to bridge their camps and shelter their stoves. The two teepees present were vastly outnumbered and looked out of place (historic Cow Creek houses were dugouts with pine-board ceilings). Space was already tight, so I pitched my tent in the meadow, in the morning shadow of a lone oak tree, poison oak ascending its trunk. I should have thought about how that might make me stand out a little, but no one cared. The tribe welcomed me. When my unstaked tent blew off that afternoon, someone corralled it and tied it to my roof rack like a balloon.
Before noon, an assembly line began to gather around a long, pinegreen folding table, and there I reconnected with Teri and Kelly. Supplies were waiting: cylindrical cartons of Morton salt, fresh-cut lemon wheels in gallon Ziplocs, terrifying jars of minced garlic, and most important, an unopened case of mayonnaise. All to dress the fish. Also a box of sweet Walla Walla onions, which first had to be chopped. It was a merry affair with few tears. “Look at all these Indians, with all these knives,” said Kelly, “and everyone’s still got their hair.”
Then at the head of the table stood a man named Wade Wells, bare-and barrel-chested, in sunglasses, his slate hair crew cut. He lived in Sutherlin, just north of Roseburg, and coached sports at the high school from which he graduated; his upper arms were about as swole as the fish. He kicked off the proceedings by pulling a loud, blinding sheet of tinfoil over his head so that it