This third part of our series on the Downstream Effects of the Kilgore Project – which could just as easily, and perhaps more persuasively, be named Reasons To Oppose The Kilgore Project – is not so much a love letter as it is a reflection. Or a refraction. Or the opposite of a refraction. A braiding. A confluence. Like a rainbow passing through a prism backwards, revealing its many colors to be a single electromagnetic wave. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album cover viewed right to left.
Kinds of Confluence
Confluences are places on the land where two creeks flow together. Or where many creeks flow together. In some places creeks flow into rivers, and in other places it’s whole rivers that flow together.
And just as there are places where multiple waters flow together, there are places that are confluences of events. For historical events flow across the landscape and through time just like water flows through canyons and valleys.
Maybe, if we all had Eyes To See, the landscapes we inhabit would be more alive with the flow of historically distant events, much like they are alive with creeks and rivers and the habitats they create.
Camas Meadows
If you look at the map of the Caribou-Targhee National Forest – Dubois Ranger District, you will notice that area occupied by Kilgore, Idaho sits on a wildly braiding series of creeks collectively known as Camas Meadows. The various drainages of the Western Centennial Mountains converge here, slowly trickling together to form Camas Creek, which goes on to feed the wetlands at Camas NWR and Mud Lake WMA.
Camas Meadows, as luck would have it, turns out to be a place of extreme historical confluence, just as it is a place of multi-stranded hydrological confluence. And don’t just take my word for it. The National Park Service says the same. This place is one of the 38 recognized sites that pertain to the Nez Perce National Historical Park.
These places are joined also under the snaking body of the Nez Perce National Historic Trail, which was made a National Historic Trail by an act of Congress in 1986. This 1,500+ mile trail marks the path that the fleeing Nez Perce took as the United States Army chased them from their homeland in central and northern Idaho and eastern Oregon in 1877 to open up recently discovered gold fields and prime agricultural land to European American settlers.
As another potential victim of the Kilgore Project’s cyanide heap leach gold mine and perennial tailings dam, the Nez Perce War history that is already recognized by the National Park Service at Camas Meadows is a perfect Part 3 to the Downstream Effects series. Just as the creeks from the Western Centennials converge here to create this beautiful meadow, this same braided meadow represents a confluence of events and processes that define the American West and the history of the United States on this part of the continent.
Particularly, Camas Meadows represents a confluence of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, the Indian Wars that determined the present shape of the American West, and the National Park system that I and so many other tourists basically can’t get enough of.
Lewis and Clark – Tzi-kal-tza
In 1806, on their way back east after their voyage to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery spent the spring with the Nez Perce, who had saved the Corps’ collective bacon just one winter before on their way west. During this time, as they waited for the snows of the Bitterroots to melt enough to be crossed, amid naturalistic studies and recreating with the friendly Nez Perce, William Clark found time to “formalize the American-Nez Perce alliance through intimate relations.”
As a result of this quasi-diplomatic union, Clark’s son was born to a Nez Perce woman. This is what William T. Vollmann writes about the young Nez Perce Clark in the unbelievably helpful Glossary of Personal Names at the back of The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War:
Tzi-kal-tza – (Nimiputumit.) Also called Halahtookit, which means “Daytime Smoke.” A by-blow of William Clark’s by Chief Red Grizzly Bear’s sister, he was seventy-two in 1877. He survived the war and was deported to the Indian Territory, where he died.
To make a long story short, the presence of Tzi-kal-tza among those Nez Perces who were fleeing US Army aggression in 1877 makes him a direct link between the the Corps of Discovery’s initial push into the territory that is now Idaho, and the confluence of the sad story of the Indian Wars and the mostly happy story of National Parks.
Yellowstone – The World’s First National Park
In the generations that succeeded Lewis and Clark’s, European American settlers began to filter west, almost always seeking gold.
Nathaniel Pitt Langford’s 1905 book The Discovery of Yellowstone Park begins with the tantalizing statement about gold and rumors of gold in the new northwest:
When the rumored discovery in the year 1861 of extensive gold placers on Salmon river was confirmed, the intelligence spread through the states like wild fire.
After beginning his tale of discovery with the gold deposits illegally found on land that was legally protected as a Nez Perce Reservation in the 1855 Treaty, Langford goes on to describe rumors of a “Wonderland” of a different sort. He says:
Ever since the first year of my residence there [Montana Territory] I had frequently heard rumors of the existence of wonderful phenomena in the region where the Yellowstone, Wind, Snake and other large rivers take their rise, and as often had determined to improve the first opportunity to visit and explore it, but had been deterred by the presence of unusual and insurmountable dangers.
Langford accomplished his dream of exploring the land of “wonderful phenomena,” taking part in the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition of the area now protected as Yellowstone National Park in 1870. This expedition followed the Cook–Folsom–Peterson Expedition of 1869, which was itself the first organized expedition of exploration of Yellowstone Country by the United States Government.
Due in large part to the publicity by the men on these expeditions, Yellowstone became the world’s first National Park in 1872.
Nez Perce War: Big Hole and Camas Meadows
A short five years after Yellowstone National Park was created, the Nez Perce War began after a series of bad-faith actions on the part of the US Government toward the largely peaceful Nez Perce. Among the most egregious actions by the US Government was the 1863 Thief Treaty, which reduced the Nez Perce Reservation set out in the 1855 Treaty by 90 percent. The gold discovered on the Salmon River in 1861 was, in fact, on the Nez Perce’s 1855 Treaty Reservation. Its discovery and the influx of miners from Oregon and California were the main factors in the United States’ replacing the 1855 Treaty with the much reduced 1863 Thief Treaty.
I’d rather not attempt an even semi-complete narration of the events that sparked the forced exodus that we call the Nez Perce War (William T. Vollmann used up 1356 pages in his fictionalized account). It will need to suffice to say that those bands of Nez Perce who did not consent to being removed from their 1855 Treaty-recognized homelands to the much reduced 1863 Reservation around Lapwai, Idaho were pushed over 1500 miles across Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Montana, until they were forced to surrender in September, 1877 just 40 miles shy of the Canadian border near the Bear Paw Mountains. Among the bands who were chased across much of the American West was Chief Joseph’s band of Wallowa Nez Perce.
In August of 1877, about halfway through their forced march, there was an especially bloody encounter between the fleeing Nez Perce and the pursuing US troops along the Big Hole River in Montana. According to Peter Cozzens’ book The Earth is Weeping, “between sixty and ninety Nez Perces died at Big Hole, most of them women and children.”
According to the Nez Perce National Historical Park’s website, here’s what happened next:
After the horrific attack at Big Hole on August 9th and 10th, the nimí·pu· (Nez Perce) went south, crossing back into Idaho over Bannock Pass before heading east towards Yellowstone National Park. In the meantime, General Howard’s troops, which had not taken part in the attack at Big Hole, had taken a circuitous route roughly parallel to the nimí·pu· in an attempt to head them off. In an effort to slow down Howard, a small group of warriors decided to raid the army camp to steal horses and disrupt Howard’s advance.
The site where the US Army made this camp spanned the various creek beds that flow out of the Western Centennial Mountains, just south of present-day Kilgore, Idaho. In other words, at Camas Meadows along the same Camas Creek that now sits imperiled by an open pit cyanide heap leach mine.
Nez Perce War: Yellowstone National Park
After their small but significant victory at Camas Meadows, the Nez Perce headed west past Henry’s Lake and across Targhee Pass into the newly designated Yellowstone National Park.
This confluence of Indian Wars and National Parks – the only such confluence with which I am familiar – represents a maddening collision of events and places that seem to belong to totally distinct periods of US history.
The coming together of these seemingly distant strands of history is perhaps most apparent in the Nez Perce encounters with tourists inside the National Park. As I myself have been a tourist inside Yellowstone many, many times, this fateful week at the end of August, 1877 strikes me as particularly fascinating and surprising.
Encounters between the fleeing Nez Perce and recreating tourists took place in the Lower Geyser Basin, on the slopes of Mount Mary, on Mount Washburn, and at a cabin-hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs. I won’t describe these encounters, but they can be read about in Nez Perce Summer, 1877, available to read on the Nez Perce National Historical Park’s website.
A Long Awaited Conclusion
This post has already grown well beyond the Fun-Fact-type post that I initially planned to write. The complications of the landscape and human history upon it unrolls and and gets more tangled up in itself the more one tries to examine it. Understanding or engaging with the land and its history demands respect and time, and this post is just a short intimation of what I hope to continue to learn about the unique Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Camas Meadows represents a confluence of events that appear so distant in time that no one would probably even think to put them in the same chapter of a history textbook. Camas Meadows links (at least) the Corps of Discovery, the Indian Wars, and National Parks.
The real point I’d like to be understood from the many stories briefly referenced here, is the importance of preserving the places where our collective history is most clearly experienced. Such preservation is the intention of the Nez Perce National Historical Park.
And at Camas Meadows too – just as is the case with Mud Lake Wildlife Management Area and Camas National Wildlife Refuge – the protection of upstream waters is unfortunately beyond the scope of the National Park System with the Nez Perce National Historical Park.
So it is up to us, the citizens who have a say in the way our public lands are managed and respected, to oppose those actions that threaten not only the mountain landscapes that we love, but all the precious downstream places that would not exist without the mountains and their streams and creeks.
Please follow this link to make your voice heard against the Kilgore Project to deny permits for exploratory drilling that could lead to a cyanide heap leach mine at the top of the watershed that houses these historic and important landscapes.