Salmon, Idaho - {Print text }
I must read history wrong:
A line or two about Natives,
countless so-called founders.
Why does a tiny set tell the story?
A river has its own history, its own way of telling time, and its own flow for those stories.
The stories we choose to tell are narrow. They are the stories that we know, the ones we’ve heard, stories based on a human understanding of time.
We forget that a generation – even ten generations – is only a tiny stream in that flow called time.
The Salmon River is the mostly the same today as it once was. It starts in the headwaters as a trickle and grows stronger as its rushes downhill toward confluence.
But all the stories of that river’s journey change depending on how they’re told. And on who tells the stories.
I once heard a Shoshone story about how the world changed.
“Everything used to be Neme or like a human-being,” the storyteller said. “Everyone talked Indian. We saw those trees and all growing things talking Indian. This is the way I heard it: Everything talked in human form. Things like the eagles, talked Indian. Eagles flew, just like the ones we see today, but they talked Indian.
“Across the water the white man was also created. They came swimming; they came riding on the water in boats. It seemed like the first thing they did was to clear away everything and build roads. Indian feet just made tracks and that was good enough. But then came the roads. The roads changed everything.”
The roads that changed everything are so much a part of the whole Salmon River experience, even in the 21st century. Sometimes it’s as if there are two rivers: the river melded with a highway, winding its way toward the towns and cities far away, and the river that’s far from traffic.
It is the river by the highway where limits were created. Land became property, public or private, reserved for some special use.
But tracks of native people in the Salmon River country are endless; Shoshones, Bannocks, and Nez Perce cross highways, creeks and channels along paths that have been followed for some ten thousand years.
“Neme people also held a conception of territoriality quite unlike European-Americans,” writes historian Gregory Smoak. “The Shoshone verb nemmi means both ‘to live’ and ‘to travel.’ Quite literally, to live was to travel across a huge territory utilizing a wide range of resources.”
Shoshones lived and traveled across the American West, from the deserts of what is now Southern California to Wyoming and Montana. Shoshones, often allied with Northern Paiutes, called Bannocks, lived and traveled where the food supply was best. Bands were even identified by what they ate most: root-diggers, sheep-eaters, or salmon-eaters.
The Neme of the mountains and valleys along the Salmon River say this was always their home.
Then came a new kind of road.
On August 13, 1805, not all that far from what is now Salmon, Idaho, Capt. Meriwether Lewis first visited with Shoshones – a band that happened to include relatives of Sacajewa.
“I now had the pipe lit and gave them smoke; they seated themselves in a circle around us and pulled off their mockersons (moccasins) . . . this is a custom among them as I afterwards learned indicative of a sacred obligation of sincerity in their profession of friendship,” Lewis wrote. He was later served berries, boiled meat and salmon. The salmon was proof that they were near the Columbia.
The encounter was portent on both sides of the road.
The very success of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery was probably saved right then and there. The explorers learned that the rapids of the Salmon River were too dangerous – and they were told about an alternative route through the mountains that would lead the party to Nez Perce country. Indeed, Sacajawea’s brother, Cameahweit, provide Lewis and Clark with a guide and horses for their journey.
It was a big deal, says historian Stephen Ambrose. “Without Shoshone horses, without Shoshone information, the expedition might as well turn around and go home.”
However, on the other side of the road, the repayment of the generosity of Sacajewa’s people remains one of the great tragedies of the Salmon River country.
The bands that made up the Lemhi Shoshones were promised a reservation. President Grant signed an executive order in February of 1875 for a 100 square-mile reservation in the Lemhi Valley.
But the newcomers, now called local residents, wanted the Indians banished and the reservation boundary erased. Beginning a century after the Shoshone encounter with the Corps of Discovery, Lemhi Shoshones were forced to leave their homeland for the reservation at Fort Hall.
“They packed their meager belongs on horses, strapped the ends of their wick-I-up poles to the sides of their horses and they dragged them along,” wrote historian, Orlan Svingen. “They were very sad and passed through the valley, crying. The ranchers along the way could hear their crying for some distance before they passed their homes.”
A few stubborn Lemhi families stayed anyway, remaining in or near Salmon, Idaho.
Yet the road, even today, leads back to the Salmon River Country. This is as true for the descendents of the Lemhi families as it is for descendents from other Shoshone bands.
And some of us come to fish.
It’s important to remember that at one time the Snake River, at least as far as American Falls, was full of salmon. Then came civilization – more people, dams, cows and mines--wiping out the riches that had been a part of that river system.
So for a people whose diet included salmon, it became only natural to join those who historically always fished in the Salmon River. Or better: hunt salmon.
Hunting salmon was so important that tribal leaders included many traditional fishing grounds into the first treaty with the United States in 1863 and then five years later, when forced to give up more land in a later treaty, reserved the right to hunt in the usual places.
This tradition continues: the salmon hunt involves chasing the salmon, often at night, with a long, thin tree, fashioned into a spear. Two barbed hooks are fastened to the top of that pole, so that when the fish is struck, the hooks attach to the fish.
Our visits, however, were road visits. We traveled to the fish. We hunted. We lived. Then we traveled back to Fort Hall.
But other members of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes have a different, more permanent, connection with the Salmon River.
Every trip I’d hear about the native folks who lived in the city of Salmon – by then it was down to a family or two. But the extraordinary thing is how those families kept alive their connection to that place; a connection that remains powerful and current. Just like the river itself.
Of course Shoshones and Bannocks are not the only people with a rich history on the river. The lower Salmon was – and is –Nez Perce Country.
But the stories I tell today are the ones I’ve heard.
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