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"Hang Them All"
George Wright and the Plateau Indian War
By Donald L. Cutler UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5626-2
CHAPTER 1
A Land of Great Forces
The land is at the root of the war.
GEORGE GIBBS
The Columbia Plateau overlaps the boundaries of what today is referred to as the inland Pacific Northwest, also frequently referred to as the inland Empire. It has long been a quiet, relatively unknown part of the United States, a region that is today crossed quickly by cars heading west on I-90 to Seattle or on I-84, toward Portland, Oregon.
Until the 1850s the inland Pacific Northwest was literally off the beaten path. The Lewis and Clark expedition, explorers, pioneers, and settlers traveling west generally crossed the southern part of the plateau, following the Snake River to its confluence with the Columbia, then on to the Pacific. The land to the north lay like a quiet eddy, easily ignored. Maps made of the area in the mid-nineteenth century show some detail along waterways, but near Spokane the detail is replaced by cartographic notations like "Hilly country hidden from view."
Syracuse University geographer Donald Meinig (who was born and raised in the town of Palouse, in the Palouse region of the plateau) wrote, "One can search in vain through the standard of America used in schools, colleges, and universities for any mention of the Palouse, Spokane, or Inland Empire. ... By such accounts it seems hardly to have participated in history at all." Yet one historian claimed that despite the isolation, "in no other part of the United States was the conflict between red man and white pursued with more persistence or more bitterness than along the lonely rivers, in the mountain defiles, and amid the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest."
The boundaries of the plateau differ depending on one's professional and cultural perspective. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines the area as an ecoregion encompassing approximately thirty-five thousand square miles that includes northeastern Oregon, most of interior Washington, and an adjoining section of northern Idaho. From a geologist's viewpoint — which encompasses the underlying lava flows — it is much larger: perhaps sixty-three thousand square miles, the size of England and Wales combined. It is a region of unique topography, consisting largely of farmland, grass-covered dunes, basalt scablands, and pine-forested hills. It is also a land of water. Five hundred miles of the Columbia River and its tributaries meander through the Columbia Plateau. These life-giving veins once brought fish to the Native peoples, provided a network of transportation, and enhanced trade and communication between tribes.
ANCIENT FORCES
The birth of the current landscape began more than five million years ago, when lava broke through the earth's crust, beginning a long process of altering the surface. For several million years, molten waves, some a hundred feet deep, suffocated the land, sometimes creeping, sometimes moving at thirty miles an hour. Over millennia, basalt dams blocked streams, creating lakes and rerouting rivers. Molten bubbles formed and broke, producing shallow caves that would one day be used as shelters for animals and people.
During the Pliocene Epoch — two to five million years ago — shifting earth plates combined with the pressure of molten lava below to form the Rocky Mountains to the east and the Cascade Mountains to the west, the ranges that define the boundaries of the Columbia Plateau. Between the mountain ranges, the weight of the basalt — up to three miles deep — slowly nudged the land downward, creating a gentle slope from east to west, falling a thousand feet over a distance of two hundred miles, or one inch for every nine horizontal feet.
After the final waves of lava cooled and hardened, streams began carving paths through basalt. Two million years ago, persistent winds began sweeping loess from the west and south, depositing up to three hundred feet of fertile soil in the area known today as the Palouse, in southeastern Washington and northern Idaho. Periodic eruptions from Cascade volcanoes deposited ash, enriching the soil. Ancient winds sculpted silt and ash into great dunes, with smooth, upward-sloping south sides and steeper north faces that dropped off into sheltered nooks where pines took root and formed protected oases where Native people made shelters.
As the winds calmed, a few ancient mountains remained exposed. One became known by the Nez Perces as Yamustus, or Holy Mountain. Western settlers called it Pyramid Peak, and not much later its name would change again: it would become known as Steptoe Butte, named after Col. Edward Steptoe, the officer whose force was defeated in 1858 by a confederation of Indians, triggering George Wright's fateful expedition.
The next great force was ice, which began accumulating one hundred thousand years ago and retreated ten thousand years ago. The Cordilleran ice sheet crept as far south as present-day northern Idaho, stopping approximately sixty miles northeast of the City of Spokane. As the ice melted, it pooled behind immense ice dams, creating glacial Lakes Missoula and Columbia; at one time the lakes contained more water than Lakes Ontario and Erie combined. Over thousands of years, the dams underwent a series of breaks and reformations, releasing the greatest floods the earth has ever known. Walls of water two hundred or more feet high thundered across the land at speeds up to fifty miles per hour, ripping apart basalt columns, gouging canyons and coulees, and depositing some debris as far away as the Pacific Ocean, nearly four hundred miles to the west. Each flood emptied the lakes in a matter of days; each created a flow up to fifteen times the total volume of all the rivers on earth; each breach released energy equivalent to 225 Hiroshima bombs. The waters left behind what geologist J Harlan Bretz called scabland: a wounded basalt landscape, cut with cracks and channels. In some places — especially close to present-day Spokane, where Colonel Wright conducted most of his campaign — the floods were particularly powerful, leaving behind plains broken by craggy basalt formations and lakes rimmed with basalt columns and great heaps of rocky debris. Later, pine forests and nutritious vegetation spread over the area, providing food for people and animals.
Western science has known about the floods for fewer than one hundred years, but Native people have known much longer. One story, told by the Spokanes, speaks of a monster who, in a rage, had thrust his claw into a great lake in the east and ripped the land so fiercely that it created a river flowing toward the west. The lake is known today as Coeur d'Alene — a remnant of glacial Lake Missoula — and the drainage is the Spokane River, which passes through downtown Spokane, then flows westward to the Columbia. Thus, the monster created the valley through which Colonel Wright would travel during the most destructive part of his march.
The tribes remember the great torrents that changed river courses, uprooted entire forests, and killed animals and people. The Yakama Indians know of an "evil monster, Wish-poosh," also called Big Beaver, who lived in a lake in present-day central Washington. Wish-poosh prevented people from fishing in his lake, and they were starving. Coyote (also called Speel-yi) speared Wish-poosh, who dove deep into the water, dragging behind Coyote, who was tethered to the spear. They thrashed and fought, tearing through mountains and forests, forming what would later be called Union Gap in the Yakima Valley, and as they thrashed south and west, they burst through the mountains, creating the Cascades Rapids of the Columbia River. By the time they reached the sea, Coyote was unconscious, and Wish-poosh was dead. Coyote returned home to the lake that had once been protected by Big Beaver. On his journey, "He saw the muddy river flowing through the tunnel he and the monster had made. All the waters from all sides were flowing into this great channel and making land visible everywhere. The lakes that had covered the valleys of the Yakima had disappeared, leaving the ground wet. Indians were wading in the mud to the new ground." The tribes knew the great floods to be cleansing. The powerful waters destroyed some species of animals, which were called anakwi kakyama (thrown-down animals).
In 1878 the missionary and educator Myron Eells wrote, "When the earliest missionaries came among the Spokanes, Nez Perces, and Cayuses, they found that those Indians had their traditions of a flood, and that one man and his wife were saved on a raft. Each of those three tribes, also, together with the Flathead tribes, had their separate Ararat in connection with the event. In several traditions the flood came because of the wickedness of the people."
Sometimes, Indian and white traditions are supported by scientific research. Today, work by the Cultural Resources Program of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation integrates oral history with geologic science: "This story of Beaver and Coyote relates how the Bretz Floods would have looked to those who witnessed them over 12,000 years ago. ... How the trees and rocks were being destroyed along the river, can be interpreted as the roaring and rolling of the flood waters down the Columbia River Gorge."
By the middle of the nineteenth century, natural changes in the land gave way to those caused by newcomers. In 1858 topographer Theodore Kolecki worked with John Mullan to map the Columbia Plateau region. From atop Pyramid Peak, at an elevation of thirty-six hundred feet (approximately one thousand feet above the surrounding terrain), Kolecki described the land that was home to the Plateau Indians, the land over which the army fought the tribes. He portrayed a view that looks much the same today:
From the top we had a view of the whole country for eighty miles around us. The outlines of all objects were, for a very short time, very clearly defined by the last rays of the setting sun. The Blue Mountains, the high table-land stretching from new Fort Walla Walla to the Columbia, and beyond it the mountains around the Coeur d'Alene Mission and lake and the Bitter Root Mountains, were distinctly visible. The Palouse, as far as I could see, followed an east and west course. The spurs of the Bitter Root Mountains, from which it proceeds, were gently sloping and densely wooded. Pine timber, in scattered groves, reaches from them to within four or five miles of the foot of the Pyramid Peak. The whole country enclosed by the above-mentioned mountain systems is rolling prairie, very much resembling a stormy sea.
LIVING LAND
Native and white cultures held different values regarding the land. The non-Native collective narrative began with the assumption that the land existed in stasis, and its natural resources belonged to those with the will to take them. In contrast, the tribes viewed the land as having a past and future, believing that it had grown and changed and thus deserved to be treated like a living entity. Indian oral traditions about the region's natural history were part of each generation's legacy; it was the elder generations' duty to pass along the stories of how the land changed over time. The differences between the two views greatly impacted the relationship between Euro-Americans and Indians. One point of contention was the concept of land ownership. Ownership of the land involved establishing boundaries that were registered in official documents and often enclosed with fences, both legal actions that the tribes did not understand and abhorred. In order for logging, mining, and ranching to be economical, the land required boundaries. Yet when survival depended on following food sources, people had to be able to move with the fish and game and to harvest plants on nature's terms. Thus, land ownership and strict boundaries interfered with the flow of life.
While Indians did not believe land should be owned, they did have a strong sense of place. A specific location, such as a mountain or stream, might be sacred. One tribal elder recently said, "We have to know where we came from, who we are, and where we're going. When it is an Indian's time, he takes things that are important to him and places them in meaningful places. In the future, descendants will visit those places, and their ancestor's spirit may appear to [them]."
Places were given names much as were people. One researcher has recorded over one thousand place names in the Sahaptin language family, one of the two most prominent languages spoken by Plateau tribes. To native people, the land was a means of survival, but it was also a part of their being. The land is woven into the fabric of their identity, and their lives move in unison with the flow of the rivers. The tribes viewed the land as a gift from the creator, and they literally drew breath from it. The Coeur d'Alene tribe, one of those forced into submission by Col. George Wright, call themselves the Schitsu'umsh, translated as "the ones who were found here." To members of the tribe, the name "reiterates and affirms an identity anchored in a specific landscape." Like other people of the plateau, the Palouse bands occupying land along the Snake River and northward into the rolling hills believed the creator made the earth for all living creatures, and the land and all life were inseparable.
OUR GARDEN
For thousands of years, the Columbia Plateau had provided sustenance for the tribes. Perhaps ten to twelve thousand years ago, the Indians hunted mammoths, mastodons, bison, and numerous other large mammals. In more recent times, the forests yielded deer, bear, elk, and mountain caribou. The people harvested roots and berries and caught fish; and along the Snake, Columbia, Palouse, and other rivers, they cultivated wheat, corn, and vegetables. The Spokanes, with villages along the Spokane River, held salmon to be a gift from the Great Spirit. In addition, they depended on camas fields to provide a winter staple for their diet. In spring, at the beginning of the camas season, they would hold a ceremony to give thanks for the harvest provided by the land. One elder recently expressed his tribe's view of living in harmony with the land: "Take care of the land, and it will take care of you." Today, it is a way of living that both guides day-to-day use of natural resources and forms a philosophical base for long-term scientific projects to protect fish populations, land use, and other efforts aimed at restoring and protecting the environment.
Several chiefs, including Garry of the Spokanes, met with Washington territorial governor Isaac Stevens at an 1855 council on the Spokane River. Catholic Missionary Joseph Joset was in attendance, and wrote, "All the chiefs were agreed in one point: they begged that the troops should not come across Lewis [Snake] River. ... The territory between Lewis and Spokane Rivers is our garden, they said; it is there our women dig the roots on which we live; if the soldiers come into these parts, the women will not dare to go and there will be famine." This warning foretold what would later happen on the upper plateau, causing great disruption and tragedy.
Today, the land continues to form and change. In May 1980 Mount St. Helens blasted out 520 million tons of ash that drifted east, darkening the skies over Spokane, causing streetlights to turn on in mid-afternoon. Ash settled across the Columbia Plateau, and even today, each time the wind blows, clouds of ash and dust drift across the plateau, settling over the Palouse and Spokane areas, continuing the eternal process of transforming the land.
CHAPTER 2
An American Birth
The question which has thus suddenly arisen is, what right had the first discovers of America to land, and take possession of a country, without asking the consent of its inhabitants, or yielding them an adequate compensation for their territory? ... Until this mighty question is totally put to rest, the worthy people of America can by no means enjoy the soil they inhabit, with clear right and title, and quiet, unsullied consciences.
WASHINGTON IRVING, 1809
In 1803 the new nation was looking forward and westward. The Louisiana Purchase added 820,000 square miles for a land-hungry population to settle. Meriwether Lewis was making preparations to explore the West. On October 21, in the village of Norwich, Vermont, on the Connecticut River, George Wright was born to tough, adventurous farmers. His early story laid a strong foundation to support the heroic narrative created by nineteenth-century white America: he was raised in New England, educated at West Point, became a decorated war hero, and, above all, he passionately supported God and country.
For centuries, the land on which Norwich was located had been part of the homeland of the Abenakis, an Algonquian-speaking people. The Abenakis depended on the Connecticut River for fish and grew corn in the fertile land along the river. Two centuries before white settlement of the Pacific Northwest began, they suffered drastic change when their population was decimated by at least two epidemics. In 1617 plague swept from the New England coast inland, and in 1633 smallpox devastated more than 50 percent of the region's population. During the first half of the eighteenth century, periodic battles with settlers and British forces resulted in the Native peoples being pushed north into Canada. Hence, by the time of Norwich's founding, the Native population had been reduced to less than a quarter of its total a century earlier, and the colonists met little, if any, resistance when they established the town.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from "Hang Them All" by Donald L. Cutler. Copyright © 2016 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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