Never Defeated

The surprising truth about the first Idahoans who
survived the Oregon Trail

Todd Shallat, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Idaho History and Politics
Boise State University
tshalla@boisestate.edu

Idaho’s Shoshone-Paiutes were dislocated but never defeated by the wagon migration that forever remade the Snake River plain. Adapted from Shallat, et. al., Secrets of the Magic Valley and Hagerman’s Remarkable Horse (Black Canyon Communications, 2003).

Only now are historians beginning to understand that the people of the Middle Snake in the time of the Oregon

Trail were neither happy nor harmless, warlike nor peaceful, but human and idiosyncratic. Ethnically diverse,

they were a marble of many cultures, and they responded to the wagon invasion in bizarre and familiar ways. Some


Detail from Frank Tenney Johnson’s Oregon or California (1926). In 1849, near present-day Burley, Idaho, pioneers contemplated the Raft River trail to the California gold rush. Below, the desert trek between Shoshone Falls and the mouth of the Boise river was, said pioneer Basil Longworth, “a remarkably strange place.”

resisted. Some accommodated. Some died in the crossfire or fled. Never, however, were they unconditionally defeated. Never were they so brutalized that they abandoned a sense of themselves as an ancient civilization. Today more than 12,000 Shoshone-Bannocks and Shoshone-Paiutes remain ethnically independent enough to be counted by the U.S. Census. At the Fort Hall and Duck Valley reservations, where elders now use video and the Internet to spread the native language, the cultural life is vibrant and the legal claim to Snake River land and water resources is stronger than at any time since the era of the Oregon Trail.

So strong is the tribal claim that leaders of the Western Shoshone National Council recently rejected the Bush administration’s $145 million offer to settle land disputes. “The fight is not over,” said Raymond Yowell of Elko, Nevada. With his black hat and silver hair, Yowell, a U.S. Air Force veteran who heads the Western Shoshone National Council on the Duck Valley Reservation, claims 26 million acres of Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and California. “You cannot sell out a nation. The [settlement offer] does nothing to change our inherent rights.”

It’s a picture starkly at odds with the history textbooks. In the standard “Dances With Wolves” spin on the Indian wars, where the victims — alas — are doomed before the juggernaut of industrial progress, the story typically ends with the 1890 massacre of the ghost-dancing Sioux at Wounded Knee. “The progress of the white settlers meant the death of the Indians” according to The Pursuit of Liberty, a popular text for college freshmen. Another flatly maintains that the natives were exterminated. A third eulogizes that the Indians, after 1890, “lost their special distinctiveness as a culture.” Genocidal annihilation likewise pervades the published history of Idaho where timelines typically end with Chief Joseph’s “I will fight no more” surrender or the Bannock War of 1878.
Can these Indians be the ancestors of the same Idahoans still fighting for treaty rights to endangered steelhead and salmon? The same who repeatedly frustrate Air Force plans for training ranges in the Owyhees? The same who effectively used the Idaho Supreme Court, in 1996, to block non-Indian claim to Fort Hall’s headwater snowmelt? These are not the massacred Sioux. To draw their curtain at the Bannock War is to slight the success of the armed insurgents who capably defended their homeland. To equate their fate with annihilation, to assume that barbwire and ranching and war so traumatized the western Shoshone that they abandoned ethnic identity, is to rob from desert peoples the most remarkably enduring of all American characteristics: their talent for innovative adaptation — their capacity to cope.

The Devil’s Backbone

          Above rapids thick with salmon at mile 1,367 of the 2,170-mile journey from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon, the trail humped over a bluff. Oxen struggled in the sandy soil of the Hagerman Valley’s fossil-rich flood Map of Odregon Trail where massacres occurred deposits. Jesse A. Applegate walked. “In getting away from this place we had a narrow escape,” wrote Applegate in Recollections of My Boyhood. Age six in 1843, he tugged at his mothers side in a train of 875 pioneers and twice that number of livestock — the largest caravan yet to follow the Oregon Trail. Dark cliffs above the Snake River at a rapid called Salmon Falls startled the Missouri farm boy. “We had to follow the Devil’s Backbone,” Applegate recollected. “It is a very narrow ridge with a gorge a thousand feet deep on the left hand and a sheer precipice on the right.” No child who could toddle or walk was allowed to cross in a wagon. Between iron-hooped wheels and certain disaster were barely inches to spare.
          “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life,” wrote Applegate in 1914, near death and quoting from Scripture. “Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction.” But this Devil’s Backbone was worse than either because, said Applegate, it was both narrow and crooked, and it was hard to tell where it might lead.
          In the era of the Oregon Trial the road beyond Hagerman often led to a West of graver hazards; it led, in Applegate’s recollections, to a swollen ford of the Snake at Three Islands, a scaffoldlike tomb of hanging corpses near Fort Boise, a near-fatal fall under a wagon wheel in Oregon’s Malheur Desert, a rock-and-spear-throwing brawl with Indian youths outside Fort Walla Walla, an early snowfall in the Blue Mountains, and then calamity at The Dalles of the Columbia where a skiff disappeared in a whirlpool, killing three. Shrouded in lore and idealization, the trail led also to myth. Oregon in the 1840s was national wish fulfillment. God’s Country. A window on the Pacific. A pastoral Eden beyond the Indian country where righteous yeomen staked claim to the fertile Northwest. Oregon, said the Alton Telegraph, “would contribute to our national honor. It would connect the North with the South, and the East with the West, so firmly that nothing but the power of Omnipotence could separate them or prevent the United States from becoming the leading nation of the world. ”First, however, Americans would have to drive an entering wedge through the Snake River’s lava landscape. Why go to Oregon? asked John Quincy Adams. “To make the wilderness blossom as the rose, to establish laws, to increase, multiply, and subdue the earth which we are commanded to do by the first behest of God Almighty.”

          The imagery demonized Idaho. Where the August heat left little forage for livestock and the buffalo had been hunted to near extinction, the Snake cut vertical chasms through a waste of ghoulish place-names: Gate of Death (renamed Massacre Rocks), Caldron Linn (the river’s boiling, seething cauldron that killed a trapper in 1811), Devil’s Scuttle Hole (the 35 miles of rapids above Twin Falls), Rattlesnake Creek (near Mountain Home), Malad Gorge (north of Hagerman where the French-named Riviere Malades, or sick river, entered the Snake). The not-yet Magic Valley seemed sinister, even satanic. “How old man Vulcan has played Havoc here,” said mapmaker Charles Preuss.
          Never mind that the ghouls were mostly imagined. And never mind that the drop from Hagerman’s hump — about 400 feet — was less than half what a farm boy recollected. Fear was a rite of passage on Idaho’s road to Canaan. Pioneer Elizabeth Miller Applegate, Jesse’s mother, hid a pistol in her apron. Her terror of the desert was genuine whether the dangers were real or not.
          And yet they continued to come, streaming toward Oregon sunsets. By 1846, at least 5,000 settlers had reached Oregon’s Willamette Valley via the Snake-Columbia basin. Already the wagon migration had spawned a folk genre of memoirs and guidebooks, of Currier & Ives prints and barroom murals, of prairie schooners breasting amber grasslands. Not until Frederick Jackson Turner, however, did the trail swell to mythic importance as a highway of national identity. The frontier, wrote Turner in an 1893 address to the American Historical Association, was the most rapid and effective line of Americanization. The Old West had consolidated national culture with enduring characteristics, namely “that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.”

The Oregon Trail, for Turner an idea more than a highway, was a vital stage of a sweeping process that year after year had replenished America’s virtue and strength.

Historians ever since have searched for America’s center on the frontier’s moving edge. Taking a cue from Turner, who compared the progress from savage conditions to Darwin’s theory of evolution, the WWI-era historian T. C. Elliott claimed that the Americans who settled Oregon were simply the fittest to survive. Likewise in 1929 the historian Agnes Laut called the emigrants Children of Israel, their trail a racial highway. Superior breeding, again, was the engine of civilization in the Federal Writers Project 1939 Oregon Trail guide: “The biological genes transmitting the characteristics that drained Europe of much of its vitality and made the United States an empire extending from coast to coast have not been bred out.” Territorial conquest, a biological imperative, was inevitable and therefore right.

Happy, harmless, depraved

          A braid more than a trail, the road to empire looped, sidetracked, and frayed through a tangle of byways and cutoffs. “Here we are upon a sage plain with roads running in every direction,” wrote Julius Merrill, Boise-bound and short-cutting through the Camas Prairie in 1864. “We are at a loss which [road] to take.”
          A trace of the nineteenth-century route onto a twentieth-century map shows 492 miles across the barrens of Idaho via Three Island Crossing. Those unwilling or unable to cross that dangerous ford could detour 505 miles via the mesa lands of Idaho’s Owyhee desert. In 1852 a ferry at Thousand Springs opened the Rock Creek or North Alternate Route that bypassed the Devils Backbone via Malad Gorge. Steep and stony in any direction, Idaho was tough going: “the most tortuous road I could ever imagine,” said emigrant Ester McMillan. Idaho was elsewhere an ash heap. Its serpentine river was mad. For an emigrant to enjoy the ordeal, said one, “a man must be able to endure heat like a Salamander, mud and water like a muskrat, dust like a toad, and labor like a jackass. He must learn to eat with his unwashed fingers, drink out of the same vessel with his mules, sleep on the ground when it rains, and share his blanket with vermin, and have patience with mosquitoes, who don’t know any difference between the face of a man and the face of a mule, but dash without ceremony from one into the other. He must cease to think, except to where he may find grass and water and a good camping place. It is hardship without glory, to be sick without a home, to die and be buried like a dog.
          “Hideous world, fearful roads, all grass poisoned, every day one to three head of cattle dying,” wrote William Keil in 1855. The wind-blown Idaho silt now famous for growing potatoes (geologists call it loess) could blind in the heat of August. The dust, said emigrant Jane Gould from the Middle Snake in the summer of 1862, was “even worse than Indians, storms, or winds or mosquitoes, or even wood ticks. Dust ... if I could just have a bath.”

The excessive dust was a good indication that the cattle-invaded steppeland was an ecosystem in shock. No longer a flowering diversity of bitterroot, goldenweed, balsam, clover, rye, wild onion, and camas, the palouse had surrendered to sage. As noxious weeds such as cheatgrass and Russian thistle (tumbleweed) displaced more edible species, nature, said emigrant Overton Johnson, was “wrecked and ruined.” Another witness to desolation was the 21-year-old Ohio man who later returned, eastbound on the eve of his 98th birthday, to make the case for preserving segments of trail. When the Snake River was reached, said Ezra Meeker, recalling the 1850s, “the heat again became oppressive, the dust stifling, and the thirst almost maddening. In some places we could see the water of the Snake winding through the lava gorges; but we could not reach it, as the river ran in the inaccessible depths of the canyon.” Approaching Twin Falls the desert was “burnt rocks ... damned bad dust ... horned toads, rattlesnakes and the damned Snake Indians,” said a pioneer in the 1850s. Five decades before Twin Falls boosters imagined a Magic Valley, Basil Longworth of Ohio saw only “a remarkably strange place.”

          Remarkably strange but wondrous. Along a prehistoric trail well used by the buffalo hunters, wagons looped north to the rim of the Snake and, if the salmon were running, one of the journeys most thrilling views. Here in May or June the Chinook returned by the countless thousands to challenge Kanaka Rapids. And here below thundering springs were dams and dikes of boulders and brush that diverted the leaping salmon through a gauntlet of fishing pools. “Fish rise in such multitudes that the Indians can pierce them with their spears without looking,” said mapmaker Preuss. Shoshone-Paiutes journeyed from as far as Oregon and Wyoming to fish for steelhead trout in the spring and Chinook in the early summer. Buffalo hunters rode west from Fort Hall en route to the Camas Prairie. Horseless Northern Paiutes descended from the Nevada highlands. Armed with nets, hooks, stone axes, and double-pronged fishing spears, the natives took mountains of fish. Applegate in 1843 saw among willow huts something red in color. Scarlet strips of drying fish hung everywhere like laundry on lines.
          A thousand springs freshened this trenchlike reach of the Snake, its canyons diked and piled with refuge from the Bonneville Flood. Rifleman Osborne Cross saw in these weeping fissures a singular freak of nature. Frèmont embellished: A subterranean river bursts out directly from the face of the escarpment, and falls in white foam to the river below. On October 1, 1843, “under the curious gaze of good nature[d] and unusually gay savages,” Frèmont set out in a rubber raft to study the foam at its thundering source. Ten miles upriver from Kanaka Rapids (called Fishing Falls in Frèmont’s journal) was a picturesque spot of singular beauty. Bursting like broken plumbing in the canyon’s northern wall were two crystalline springs that rushed together and fell 160 feet onto rocks whitened by saline. Blue water hugged vertical cliffs like a flowing apron. At 58 degrees Fahrenheit, the blue spring water measured seven degrees warmer than the river’s silvery snowmelt.
          Emigrant impressions were mixed and less scientific at trail mile 1,366 where a dozen squat Indian lodges or wigwams resembled a willow grove. The seasonal village at Upper Salmon Falls commanded the head of a roiling staircase between two sets of rapids about five miles apart. “The river on this [southwest] side and all the islands are lined with shanties and black with Indians,” wrote Theodore Talbot of Missouri, a greenhorn in the Frèmont party. “These Indians,” Talbot continued, “speak the same language as the other Snakes but are far poorer.” Copper-skinned, they were low in stature and ill-made. Some wore groundhog skins with a vest or maybe a shirt bartered from an emigrant’s wagon. Others were entirely naked. The women had thick crooked legs. The men had bad eyes. Preuss called them “miserable” but “happy and harmless.” W. H. Winter of Indiana reported natives “so poor and feeble [in winter] that they frequently die from actual starvation.” In summer, however, “they [were] fat as penned pigs, ... the fattest, most depraved, and degraded creatures anywhere to be found among the dregs of human nature.”
          Savages mostly hapless and feeble pervaded emigrant journals in the decades before the Snake River Indian Wars. In 1843 Preuss imagined the natives of the Hagerman Valley at peace in Lockean nature, too fat and complacent for Christ. “Wealth,” wrote Preuss, “makes them insolent and arrogant.” Six years later the rifleman Osborne Cross pondered the psychology of primitive man after trading for food at Salmon Falls. Why were two rifle cartridges worth more than a woolen blanket? Perhaps, said Cross, the Indians cared little for the material things and bargained merely for sport. Nearby another emigrant bartered a hook for a monstrous fish “as long as a wagon b[e]d. It was enough fish to make us wish never to see any more.” But elsewhere the market was glutted. “Dull sale,” Cecilia Adams remarked after Indians tried for a second day to unload a basket of glistening salmon.
          In rudderless commerce without currency or legal tradition, markets pitched and fell. What legality governed ownership and access to prairie resources? Was it stealing to gather wood? To forage and hunt? Indeed it was, said Chief Washakie of the Wind River Shoshone. This country, the chief reminded his people, “was once covered with buffalo, elk, deer and antelope, and we had plenty to eat, and also robes for bedding, and to make lodges.” Born in Sacagawea’s village a year before Lewis and Clark arrived, he had come of age on buffalo hunts at the base of the Grand Tetons during an era of unprecedented prosperity for Plains Indians suddenly enriched by the horse.

          But now, he protested in 1855, “since the white man has made a road across our land, and has killed off our game, we are hungry ... Our women and children cry for food and we have no food to give them.” Where the historian Turner lauded that frontier process, Washakie saw devastation: the cattle grazing that crushed edible roots and seeds so vital to Shoshone subsistence, the gold hysteria that stripped forests and pockmarked the hills, releasing mudslides. More ruinous still were the sportsmen and trophy hunters. Twenty-five million buffalo had roamed west of the Mississippi before horses and firearms. In 1883 a museum expedition searched the plains for a healthy specimen. Less than 200 remained.
          Emigrants of good conscience denounced the barbarous slaughter. Should a horse go missing, however, Indians were condemned. In 1851 a pioneer lost a horse, suspected theft, crouched behind a rock where Shoshone were lancing salmon, and shot an Indian dead. Nearby at Rock Creek that same year an emigrant company arrived to find Sho-Ban peacefully camped. The wagon master blasted a shotgun while his men charged cavalry-style. The next day a war party shot three emigrants, killing one.
          Arrogant treatment continued because the risk of retribution was small. Historian John Unruh has shown that the danger of Indian ambush has been greatly exaggerated, that more Indians than whites died in these confrontations, and that red-on-white violence accounted for less than four percent of emigrant deaths. Murder, indeed, was rare, but raids on livestock were common near Salmon Falls. Historian Donald Shannon’s chronology of Snake country massacres shows nineteen attacks on emigrant trains before 1863. Ten erupted within one hundred miles of the Devil’s Backbone. Of the very few non-mythical trail tragedies large enough to make historian John Unruh’s selective list of real massacres, the two most horrific involved Shoshone-Paiute who allegedly fished and pastured in the Hagerman Valley. Said Col. George Wright, the Oregon District commander at Fort Vancouver, “those [Indians] who are more hostile are near Salmon Falls.”

Horse trading gone bad may have been the spark that ignited the first confrontation lopsided enough to deserve Snake Country massacre status. On August 19, 1854, about thirty miles north of the Devil’s Backbone where Goodale’s cutoff dissected the Camas Prairie, eleven Sho-Ban approached a wagon train, demanded horses, and opened fire. Three emigrants died. Survivors said the attackers were Winnestah Snakes (mounted Shoshone) from Salmon Falls. Historians speculate that the attack was connected to an altercation of the previous day in which wagon master Alexander Ward of Lexington, Missouri, had tracked horses to a Sho-Ban camp near the future city of Boise. Ward and his men retrieved the horses, presumably at gunpoint. By midday on August 20, a war party of thirty or more had overtaken Ward as his five-wagon detachment crossed the Boise Valley near the future farm town of Middleton. A warrior jumped on a horse. Guns blazed. Thirty Indians charged. The wife of the wagon master had been ravaged with a hot poker. Three children were missing and another three, a newsman reported, had doubtless been burnt alive, and the mother forced to witness it. Outraged editorialists called for an everlasting treaty of genocidal retribution. Sixty-five federal troops arrived the following spring, corralled about 200 Indians, tried and convicted four, shot one, and at nightfall on July 18, 1855, noosed the remaining three to a gallows at the massacre site. Soldiers cut down the bodies at daybreak. The gallows, however, remained.

“I wish we had killed them”

Idaho’s second massacre began in late August 1860 when a one-eyed white man and two Indian companions tracked a forty-four-emigrant train from Rock Creek to Salmon Falls. Wagon master Elijah Utter (or Otter as historians have misspelled it) suspected the rough-looking three were spies. “We bought some dried salmon of them and hurried away,” said Emeline Trimble, the daughter of Utters new wife. Age 13 in 1860, she had already lost her father to typhoid fever and the middle finger of her left hand to an accident with an axe. While riding in her stepfather’s wagon, she had also lost part of an eye to a flying nail, but she was observant: the white man, apparently the leader, had a torn white hat, a thick stubble on his upper lip, and long hair pulled over his bad eye. His face was brown with war paint. One night the sinister trio approached the wagons and, said Trimble, “pretended to be glad to see us.” The pioneers consulted and thought the safest course would be to kill them. Instead they fled in the night via the Bruneau sand dunes. Seven days later, again with an axe, Trimble would fend off the one-eyed man and other attackers, escaping through the cover of sagebrush. “I often wish we had done as our better judgment had told us and killed them,” wrote Trimble in Left by the Indians, her account of the gruesome event.

The attack began Hollywood style. About 10 a.m. on September 9, 1860, at mile 1,450 on the South Alternate Route in the slabbed and terraced barrens of future Owyhee County, an Indian horseman in breechcloth and feathered headdress led one hundred braves against eight encircled wagons. Arrows tore canvas. Bullets and firebrands rained intermittently for thirty hours as emigrants dug in behind a breastwork of trail supplies. Charles Utter of Wisconsin, a towheaded lad of twelve or thirteen and an excellent marksman, killed five charging attackers as fast as he could reload. The wagon circle held until an hour before dusk on the second day when four of the defenders, all ex-soldiers who had fallen in with the Utters, promising protection for food, galloped toward the western mountains with emigrant horses and guns. Twenty overlanders and perhaps thirty Indians died or were mortally wounded in two days of withering combat. Three of the four deserters later fell in a mountain ambush. Eighteen pioneers escaped.

Col. Wright’s 1860 report from the Oregon Country had already boasted complete success in the protection of the immigration route. Now Wright thought he was fighting a phantom. “We have no fixed objective,” Wright wrote on October 11, 1860. “We pursue an invisible foe, without a home or anything tangible to strike at.” The best the army could do was dispatch a one hundred-troop relief force from Walla Walla. Second Lt. Marcus A. Reno — the same Reno later blamed for General Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn — led forty dragoons to Farewell Bend near Huntington, Oregon, where the young officer discovered six of the eighteen who had escaped five weeks before.

Reno found them “gleaming in the moonlight, dead, stripped, and mutilated.” Closer to the original massacre site were twelve others who had survived mostly on moss and the flesh of four dead emigrant children. Frostbitten and muttering blankly after forty-five days of exposure, the living were raving mad.

The Salmon Falls Massacre (so named in 1860 by survivor Joseph Myers; also called the Sinker Creek Massacre and the Otter Van Orman Massacre) erupted six days and seventy-nine trail miles west of the Devil’s Backbone in a desert too remote for a more accurate place-name. Twenty-two months elapsed before Abraham Lincoln’s army could properly search for the marauders and the four children allegedly kidnapped. At last in August 1862, the First Oregon Cavalry reached what Lt. Col. Rueben F. Maury called the principal haunt of the Snake Indians. Here at Salmon Falls, according to an army informant, a council of chiefs had recently divided over whether or not to make war on emigrant trains. But the Oregonians found no war council, only an encampment of impoverished natives too miserable to attack. Searching from Bruneau Canyon to Twin Falls in the summer of 1863, the cavalry collected about forty Shoshone who had no arms and a very small number of Indian ponies, and who expressed great desire for peace and a willingness to do anything or go anywhere they might be directed. Maury insisted that something should be done with these fishing people lest they be punished for the depredations of the roaming and more enterprising bands.
An American soldier of another sort was meanwhile too impatient for distinctions among Indian cultures and types. “Leave their bodies thus exposed as an example of what evildoers might expect,” said Col. Patrick E. Connor of the California Volunteers. “You [the troops] will also destroy every male Indian who you may encounter. ... I desire that the order may be rigidly enforced.” Shooting Shoshone on sight as his army marched eastward from Sacramento to Camp Douglas above Salt Lake City, Connor spoiled for combat. It came on the subzero morning of January 29, 1863, at Battle Creek off the Bear River north of Franklin, Idaho. Connor allegedly yelled “Kill everything—nits make lice” as 300 volunteers with two howitzers opened fire on a seventy-tepee encampment. Four hours of methodical fire killed an estimated 368 Shoshone, including perhaps ninety women and children. Twenty-two soldiers died.

          It was the bloodiest slaughter of Indians on record in the history of the American West. With a body count more than double the Sioux dead at Wounded Knee (146) or the Cheyenne dead at Sand Creek (130), the Battle of Bear River remains all the more tragic because its tale is rarely told.
          In the 1974 edition of Westward Expansion, a standard college-level textbook, famed historian Ray Allen Billington reduced the Shoshone resistance to a single, inaccurate sentence: “[In 1868] Shoshoni and Bannock tribes ceded their lands in return for annuities and two small reservations.” More recently, Jon E. Lewis’s Mammoth Book of the West found space for Buffalo Bill’s funeral and outlaw Butch Cassidy’s escape to South America but none for the army’s final solution to attacks on the Oregon Trail. Perhaps Idaho remains too remote for the publishers of history textbooks. Or perhaps Idahoans prefer the brevity of William Ghent’s account in Road to Oregon: “The weather was bitterly cold and [Colonel Connor’s] men suffered greatly. ... [Connor] attacked the Indian camp on Bear River, near the present Franklin, Idaho, killing most of three hundred warriors and capturing 160 women and children. For this feat, which brought peace, cleared the Trail, and opened to settlement a region that had been harassed for fifteen years, Connor was made a brigadier general of volunteers.”
          Alas the hapless savage. Peace and progress required a crushing defeat, or so Ghent contended in 1929. A poem published in Boise the following year bled for the brave pioneers who “suffered woe/ to bring the frontier westward ho.” The poet continued:

They braved dangers ever near,
In early days of Idaho.
Ah, who can say they did not fear
In Idaho, our Idaho
To meet the dusky, hidden foe,
With poison dart and trusted bow,
Whose purpose was to lay them low,
In Idaho, our Idaho?

Poison darts? So fogged was the road to empire that historians ignored the Shoshone resistance until the United States Army was again chasing a hidden foe through the jungles of Vietnam. Not until the late 1960s and 1970s did historians such as Merle Wells and Brigham Madsen begin to understand that the killing of Shoshone noncombatants accomplished about as much as door-to-door searches in Baghdad or the carpet bombing of Hanoi: it infuriated the enemy, redoubling the will to resist. “Instead of cowing the Northwestern Shoshoni,” wrote Madsen, “there is overwhelming evidence that the reverse happened.” In 1863, for example, a twenty-warrior attack near the boom town of Bannock City (future Idaho City) killed the gold miner who discovered the mother lode, George Grimes. Michael Jordon, the prospector who found gold in the Owyhees, met the same brutal fate. The emigrant road through Twin Falls County from Rock Creek Station to the ferry at Salmon Falls became a target of Sho-Ban resistance, frequently raided for livestock. In 1865 a battle near Rock Creek suspended stage service and left three Indians dead.

Violence trapped the Salmon Eaters like wayfarers battered by storm. More than 400 Shoshone from various places spent the bitter winter of 1867-68 under armed guard at a refugee camp near Boise. But no trail of tears forced the refugees to abandon ancestral homelands.

When the army in 1869 attempted to caravan the refugees to the new Fort Hall Shoshone-Bannock Indian Reservation, most dispersed into trackless canyons. When again in 1877 the U.S. Indian Bureau used every possible means to entice homeless nomads to a second Sho-Ban reservation at Duck Valley in the Owyhee highlands, two-thirds refused to go. Some returned to the Hagerman Valley under the protection of friendly whites. For decades they ranched, sold baskets, worked the ferries, fished the seasonal salmon, camped along the river, and learned the ways of the whites without forsaking all tradition. When Swan Falls Dam opened without fish ladders in 1902, they subsisted on suckers and trout.
“The Shoshone had little to lose,” wrote anthropologist Peter Farb in an essay that tried to explain why horseless nomads were spared the wrenching dislocation experienced by other Indian groups. For centuries they had purposefully migrated from resource to resource without trade goods or military escort or even the pretense of sole ownership to any particular place. Warfare reduced the Shoshone-Paiute to the bare minimum of human existence—a familiar state. Acculturating without assimilating, the fishing people of the Middle Snake acknowledged the emigrants world without forsaking native religion or language and without conceding defeat. Thus they weathered the Oregon Trail in much the same way their ancestors had braved the trauma of smallpox or the ecological ravage of lava flows and floods. They coped with the catastrophic, adapting to survive.

Stand at Hagerman

“Stand at the Cumberland Gap,” said Frederick Jackson Turner, “and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file — the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by.” Turner continued: “Stand at the South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between.” Stand at Hagerman and deconstruct that linear progress. See not one society consuming another but strata upon strata of human experience, not a process remaking a nation but a homeland, an actual place.
Stand where Applegate stood and see the historical importance of a ridge more famously known for fossils of mega fauna. Much has changed. An Idaho Power Company dam has silenced Salmon Falls, reducing Class III rapids to an annual generating capacity of 60,000 kilowatts. Likewise the fury at Shoshone Falls and Thousand Springs can today best be appreciated by flicking a light switch in Salt Lake City or Seattle. But the mystery of the steppeland remains atop the Devils Backbone where sandy soil preserves a metallic record of rings, rims, pins, chains, and square nails of the sort that partially blinded farm girl Emeline Trimble. The Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument is one of only three park service sites with Oregon Trail remnants. Largely undeveloped and undiscovered by vandals, the torturous grade preserves in its graveyard of broken hardware a maze of trails and cutoffs. Some are straight and rutted with hardship enough to support the well-worn mythology of the West as Americas triumph. “The blazing of the Old Oregon Trail will stand forever as one of the greatest achievements of man,” said Boise’s Capital News as moviegoers packed the Egyptian Theater to watch John Wayne kill Indians for civilization in the 1930 release of The Big Trail. Other trails, however, resemble the historical record: faint and distorted, a progression thoroughly twisted by what Americans choose to forget.

“How did the United States get title to Shoshone territory?” Chief Yowell of Elko continues to ask from his Duck Valley reservation. Refusing to concede an 1863 treaty-protected claim to the steppe at the foot of the Rockies, he fights the government still. “If you say we’ve been conquered, show us where the battle took place. Show us the terms of surrender and show us the signatures of the Shoshone chiefs who signed the papers.”

Yowell is right historically speaking. And wrong. No juggernaut rolled in from the East to smash his civilization. In the battle for historical understanding, however, the Sho-Ban defeat was a rout. So completely was history conquered that Americans cheered when President Herbert Hoover lopped thirteen years off a century to make 1930 the official centennial of the 1843 Oregon Trail. Boiseans celebrated on June 12, 1930, with a day of horseshoes and baseball. At dusk the festivities closed with what the souvenir program called an exact historical reproduction of an emigrant train being attacked by Indians and their timely rescue by a troop of United States Cavalry uniformed in authentic military style of 1860. Whooping savages fled before soldiers on polo ponies. The phantom had been vanquished at last.

Center for Idaho History and Politics