The WPA Guide to Idaho

The Gem State

Federal Writers' Project

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781595342102
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.While Idaho is well known for its potatoes, this WPA Guide introduces readers to many other facets of life in this Pacific Northwestern state. The first installment of the American Guide Series to be published, the guide documents the young state’s response to the Great Depression by reinvigorating its science, technology, and agriculture industries. Natural elements of the Gem State are recognized, as well as the rich history of the American Indians in the area. Great photography and detailed histories enhance this historically significant guide.

PART I

History and General Background

An Essay in Idaho History

AFTER three centuries of adventurous seeking, the American continent has been explored and settled, and the last frontier is gone. The lusty and profane extremes of it still live nebulously in the gaudy imbecilities of newsstand pulp magazines and in cheap novels, wherein to appease the hunger of human beings for drama and spectacle, heroines distressingly invulnerable are fought over by villains and heroes and restored to their rich properties of mine or cattle ranch; the villain, if left unslain, passes out of the story sulking darkly; and the hero, without cracking a smile, stands up with the heroine clinging to his breast and addresses the reader with platitudes that would slay any ordinary man. But these villains with their Wild Bill mustaches, these apple-cheeked heroines agog with virtue, and these broad adolescent heroes who say ‘gosh ding it’ and shoot with deadly accuracy from either hand are remote in both temper and character from the persons who built the West. They are shoddy sawdust counterfeits who would have been as much out of place in the old West as Chief Nampuh with his huge feet would have been among the theatrical ineptitudes of a Victorian tea.

It is a little strange, therefore, that many of the recent books about frontiersmen have been so painstakingly off the track. It is unfortunate that opinion runs to one of two extremes. There are, on the one hand, those writers who declare solemnly that the men and women who moved westward, conquering the last reaches of wilderness and danger, were either morons who had no notion of what they were doing or low-browed rascals fleeing from the law. Those who argue, as some have, that the frontiers were settled largely by vagrant shysters must be overwhelmed by distaste for their own anemic and stultified lives, and doubtless seek through perversity a restoration of their self-esteem. Nor is the matter improved, on the other hand, by those who, lost in glorification of ancestors, declare that nearly all of the pioneers were lords of foresight and courage, shepherded by wives whose gaze was everlastingly full of visions. The fable here is especially absurd when these writers are themselves the sons and daughters or the grandchildren of the pioneers.

Most happily, as a matter of fact, the frontiers were conquered by neither saint nor villain. The men and women who pushed by thousands into the West were quite like the people of this generation from whom all physical frontiers have been taken. A few of the old-timers came because they were unusually adventurous in spirit; a larger number came because they were shoved out to new anchors by privation and want; and others came as crusaders to preach the particular creeds by which they were trying to live. It is quite pointless for us today to extol those generations that moved westward, laying resources to waste or building their empires: they were neither villain nor hero except in the way that any person may be when driven to face a frontier and to try to find a meaning in it. They were not, with rare exceptions, even aware that they were laying the foundations for the future of a huge territory: they were trying to make a living, to survive, quite as these are the matters engaging the wits and energies of those who have come after them. And it is equally pointless to call them marauders and thieves: in a primitive struggle to survive there is no time for amenities. The men and women who blazed the trails and built forts and laid open the mines and the forests had zest and vitality, and there are no virtues more indispensable than those.

Of the persons who penetrated the unknown regions, none were more adventurous of spirit or less greedy of purpose than the explorers. Lewis and Clark and their party were the first white men to enter what is now Idaho, and it seems only plain fact to declare that the epic of their journey has hardly been surpassed in American annals. From the time they left St. Louis with a keelboat and two Mackinaw pirogues until they looked at the broad Columbia, they faced perils with resourcefulness and courage and with little complaint. Their intrepid undertaking is so bright a chapter in history that it needs no embellishment with legend; nor does it serve any purpose to canonize the memory of the Indian woman who acted in some small degree as their guide. From Manden in North Dakota they were accompanied by Sacagawea, the Shoshoni woman who had long before been stolen by the Crows and taken eastward; and it is from the name of her captors and not because she tripped lightly on her toes that she has passed into legend as the Bird Woman. Sacagawea rendered a service to white men, and has suffered under quaint indignities ever since. It seems not to have occurred to historians that she might have had as her only purpose in accompanying the party a wish to be restored to her people, and that all of her fabulous escapes from grizzlies and rattlesnakes were perhaps not at all related to the desire of Captain Lewis to reach the Columbia. Today she stands bright and terrible in legend as the Bird Woman who understood what President Jefferson wanted and led the invaders to her homeland so that the greed of the Hudson’s Bay Company could follow.

Although Lewis and Clark saw that fur-bearing animals were so thick they were in one another’s way, the fur companies did not follow at once. Military posts had to be built along the explored routes, and a good many Indians had to be killed or bribed or driven out. It was David Thompson who got there first. He built Kullyspell House on Lake Pend Oreille, the first fort in what was to become Idaho, and held thriving control over all the animals in the Columbia and its tributaries until another English company awoke to what it was missing. But the North West Company, managed by Donald McKenzie, merged with Hudson’s Bay in 1821, and together they slaughtered the furred beasts and outraged the Indians until 1846. After the merger, Hudson’s Bay held a monopoly for many years on all the trapping trade between Puget Sound and the headwaters of the Missouri. Its district overlord, now known variously as the Father of Oregon, Monarch of the Northwest Country, or plain John McLoughlin, was as astonishing a mixture of virtue and villainy as ever laid an iron hand on everything he touched. He was, like Brigham Young, an aggressive and somewhat terrifying genius who built empires as easily as most men build dreams. If he could not buy his rivals out, he exterminated them. And later, after devastating a large part of the animals in the north, he smelled profits southward and established Fort Boise in 1834. Two years later he bought Fort Hall to destroy his competitors there. Nathaniel Wyeth, another early Idahoan, says McLoughlin had good business methods; and doubtless he had, because his trappers took as many as eighty thousand beaver pelts from Snake River in a season, and his rivals quaked when they heard him speak.

When John Jacob Astor decided that he wanted some of the profits from fur, he discovered that wanting them was one thing and getting them was another. His first ship around Cape Horn was wrecked, and the crew of the second was set upon by Indians and scalped. After an expedition to the Boise River was destroyed, the Astor interests—the American Fur Company, of which the Pacific Company was a part—refused to compete with Hudson’s Bay and the Indians and confined their fur trade to areas east of the Rocky Mountains.

The first successful commercial enterprise in what is now Idaho was that of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company under General William Ashley and Major Andrew Henry. Instead of establishing trading posts, this company had an annual rendezvous at Pierre’s Hole (now Teton Basin), to which trappers came to barter pelts and gather supplies. This rendezvous, like any other in early days, was a carnival of drunkenness and brawls and sharp practice. To a Hudson’s Bay employee, Wyeth wrote: ‘I have again to repeat to you the advice which I before gave you not to come with a small party to the American rendezvous. There are here a great collection of scoundrels.’ There was a still larger collection east of the rendezvous, and in 1834 the Astor company forced the American out of business here. It was this Wyeth himself who organized an expedition in Boston and made the first continuous overland trip to Vancouver, though his supply ship was wrecked rounding the Horn. He established Fort Hall and went into business for himself, but the competitive emphasis lay too much in ambush and guns, and in 1836 he was forced to sell. The Missouri Company meanwhile had sent Andrew Henry to the Snake River country, and there in 1810 Fort Henry was built near the present town of St. Anthony. It was abandoned the next year and by 1822 this company was practically extinct. Manuel Liza, its founder, was accused of enticing Iroquois trappers from their employers and persuading them to sell to him, although on this matter historians do not agree. It is an unimportant matter, however, for no one could ever be credulous enough to suppose that these barons of greed and sharp wits gave much attention to scrupulous methods. Large companies became larger and small companies went out of business, and this, here or elsewhere in the West, is the history of trapping: there was no time for gentleness and there was no place for weaklings.

These hardy men who followed the explorers and preceded the miners were lusty freebooters whose only law was the law of survival. As Chittenden points out in The American Fur Trader of the Far West, the constant preoccupation of each group was to forestall and outwit its rival, to supplant each other in the good will of the tribes, to annihilate one another’s plans or mislead in regard to routes, and to place every possible disadvantage in the way of competitors. It was a tremendous epic of wits and brawn; and Nature, who abhors a weakling as much as a vacuum, had matters quite to her taste. The early traders were content to camp along the rivers or lakes and remember what they used to be; but after a little while they were all bearded savages living close to the earth and living mightily. In comparison with them, the trappers back along the Missouri were dandified gentlemen, who were getting neurotic from want of profanity and hardship. Washington Irving said no class of men on earth led lives of more constant exertion and peril or were so enamored of their occupation, and he might have added that the Indians were often apt students of the profane and indefatigable invaders of their land.

The trappers were enamored because they were doing a man’s work in a way that the world is now rapidly forgetting. More than half of these hard-fisted freebooters were killed, but those who survived went right ahead taking life with enormous relish and spending little time grieving over what was gone. Many of them married Indian maids; and if the tribe said no, as likely as not the girl was abducted and married anyway. And because these men trapped only in late fall and in early spring in regions where the snow was deep, they had much time heavy on their hands and no disposition to use it gently; and because they usually set their traps with a rifle ready or a companion standing guard, they grew accustomed to danger and took a narrow escape in a day’s stride. Henry lost twenty-seven men on his first trip into the wilderness; and of the two hundred men Wyeth started with, only forty were alive at the end of three years. They were killed by Indians, or they died infrequently from disease or even from starvation. But when not starving or murdering they learned they could get a valuable fur for a ten-cent string of beads, and with their greed whetted they graduated from experimental trickery to bolder methods that more expediently served their ends. To call them scoundrels is to misunderstand them entirely. They were men fighting against death and hunger and they fought with the weapons that served them best. More than that: they were men standing four-square upon their ancient heritage and their primitive rights, and in their lusty power is recorded the early epic of Idaho’s emergence from a wilderness of Indians and beasts.

But the story is not alone one of mighty men who slew animals by hundreds of thousands. Some of these early brigands became as savage as men have ever been, and not infrequently betrayed or butchered the red men who approached seeking peace. Captain Bonneville, one of the hardiest of the early adventurers, gives instances, one of which turns on Jim Bridger, long since a legendary hero, who with his party sought trapping grounds in the land of Blackfeet. When they came upon the Indians, a chief drew near and extended his hand in greeting, but Bridger thereupon cocked his rifle and was knocked off his horse for his pains. Whether the story is true hardly matters: it declares the temper of the times. Another instance is one of brutality on the part of white men that many Indians would have been abashed to consider. Bonneville sent a scout with twenty men to hunt on the margin of the Crow country. The scout and his party came to a Crow village, a notorious assortment of rogues and horse thieves, who persuaded most of the scout’s men to desert him and to sneak off with all the horses and equipment. When the scout attempted to retake the deserters, he was warned by the Crows that the scamps were their friends, whereupon, with the few men who had remained loyal, the scout went to another fort. Here, too, he learned, the white men were everlastingly hotfooting it out of camp with whatever they could steal. He went next up the Powder River to trap, and one day, while the horses were grazing, two Indians rode into camp. While they affected friendliness, the horses disappeared. The two Indians were at once made prisoners by the white men and threatened with death. The robbers came back to bargain for the release of their comrades and offered two horses for each man freed. Upon learning that they would have to restore all their booty, they deserted the prisoners and moved off with most lamentable howlings, and the prisoners were dragged to a pyre and burned to death in plain view of the fleeing pirates.

This story may be an extreme in white brutality, but it is understandable inasmuch as these men were isolated from the East, with their mail going to Vera Cruz and across to the Pacific and then out to the Hawaiian Islands and then back to Vancouver and from there inland if there was anyone to take it. They were men who were more solitary by nature, as trappers are today, than any tribe who went before them or came after, more courageous than any save the explorers, and more resourceful than any group that followed them into the forested empires. They sank quickly to a rugged elemental level of eating and sleeping and slaying their enemies; and it was inevitable that missionaries should come to rebuke their zest and confuse the Indians.

Missionaries then, as now, were of all kinds. Some of them were earnest persons of courage and kindness, who wanted to convince the lusty trappers that they were headed for the devil and to lift the Indians from their anthropomorphic level. Many of the explorers and trappers had already intermarried, and some of the Indians had heard of the Christian religion. Jason Lee had accompanied Wyeth on his second journey into the West and had held the first religious service (in what was to be Idaho) at Fort Hall in 1834. In the next year the Reverend Samuel Parker, sent out by the Dutch Reform Church of Ithaca, joined Marcus Whitman in St. Louis and traveled with members of the American Fur Company to Green River. Here the need of the Indians was so apparent that they decided to remain in the West. Whitman returned to enlist volunteers, and Parker went on to the Nez Percé country and thence to Walla Walla, where he chose a site for the Whitman Mission. While traveling across country, it is said, he taught his Indian companions the Ten Commandments and persuaded some of them to spurn polygamy and retu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword to the First Edition
• Foreword to the Second Edition
• Contents
• Illustrations
• PART I. HISTORY AND GENERAL BACKGROUND
• PART II. TOURS
• PART III. THE PRIMITIVE AREA
• PART IV. IDAHO LORE
• PART V. APPENDICES
• Bibliography
• Index