Reading on Location: The Dying Grass (Part 1)

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for William T. Vollmann’s The Dying Grass. It also contains spoilers for the historical event known as the Nez Perce War. If you are interested in reading this novel, or visiting The Oregon/Washington/Idaho area once and always inhabited by the Niimiipuu (Nez Perce) unimpeded by a knowledge of how the war between the autochthonous Nez Perce and the invading US Army played out, please do not read this post.

A stick native to the Salmon River country with some ancient insect calligraphy.

The Dying Grass is volume five of the seven volume Book of North American Landscapes by Mr. Vollmann. The series tells the story of encounters between European/American colonists and indigenous populations. The Dying Grass recounts the 1877 Nez Perce War, in which Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce are bereft of their homeland by the United States Army.

This novel is of especial interest to me as an Idaho boy of European descent. Its pages and places serve as yet another realm in which I try to decipher my place in this land. I, who was born here, but whose blood comes from far away.

I did not find any answers in this book. I’m not sure I found any answers visiting the places that this book describes.

White Bird Canyon: June 16, 1877 and June-August, 2018

Lahmotta, or Sparse-Snowed Place, or Whitebird Canyon, June 2018.

If you drive US-95 through west-central Idaho, you won’t be able to help but drive along the western slope of Whitebird Canyon. Don’t worry, you won’t have to make even the slightest detour (I didn’t) to see the green wrinkles that used to belong to Chief Whitebird’s people. This is the site of the first battle of the Nez Perce War, a battle in which the Nez Perce won handily. But, sic transit gloria, as the saying goes.

A soldier’s voice from The Dying Grass, page 177:

That’s White Bird Creek way down there and the Salmon’s way past it,

the gorge softer than Hell’s Canyon, but still wide and deep enough to give

birth to any story

and a smell of water from the darkness:

I can’t see nothing.

A Nez Perce voice from The Dying Grass, page 187:

Shoot them,

the locusts singing tekh-tekh-tekh!

and riding up easily among the Bluecoats, who fall dead before they can finish loading their rifles, our warriors prove their hearts. As easily as a good knife swims through a crimson glob of buffalo flesh, parting it into two grinning lips, so the People have sliced right through their milling enemy. Cut Arm showed us the rifle. We shall be herded no more; I am telling you three times!

Now I’ll jump down on this one –

like an owl into a prarie dog town.

He’s dead now. Give me his ammunition.

Two months after taking that first photograph of Whitebird Canyon, I had no choice but to add my voice to the soldier’s. I couldn’t see nothing.

Lahmotta, or Sparse-Snowed Place, or Whitebird Canyon. August 2018

South Fork of the Clearwater: The Battle of the Clearwater: July 11-12, 1877 and June 2018

Along their path, fleeing first North away from General Howard and the US Army, the Nez Perce had camped along the South Fork of the Clearwater, just outside of present-day Stites, Idaho. Cort Conley, in Idaho: A Guide for the Curious, paints the picture of this “battle” thus:

On July 11, just after McConville’s men had retreated, one of Howard’s scouts, who had made a sortie out to the canyon rim, spotted the Nez Perce encamped along the opposite side of the river below. The unconcerned Indians had little warning, as they expected Howard to arrive from the west. A howitzer and Gatling guns opened fire from the rim.

Some soldiers’ voices from The Dying Grass, page 394:

Sir, they’re running their horses up the south fork.

Keep shooting at their stock.

A shame about them horses

as the wild deer go running like greyhounds.

Even our general hankers after Mr. Joe’s Appaloosies! Before this started,

Mr. Joe proposed to switch horses with the general, but he-

Getting awful dusty down there.

Injuns call it the Big Dust, when many rifles shoot into the

same place.

I can’t hear you; the Gatlings are too d—d loud –

And hurrah for our howitzer!

Sight higher. That’s right. Now you’re drilling them,

shooting into the Big Dust, roaring light funneling out of the

guns.

Actually he offered to give him his Appaloosa free and clear. But the

general was too Christian to take him up on it. And now he’s

Out of range now, sir.

The rim above the canyon of the South Fork of the Clearwater River. Beyond the fence, the old trailers and trucks, the cows, back in 1877 there were howitzers and Gatling guns. June 2018

I stood somewhat distanced from the canyon’s rim where once the Gatling guns and howitzers were so effective; too coward to jump a fence and risk having to explain myself to a land-owner. The land, being a great EQUAL SIGN, might as well have transformed the truck into a howitzer and the trailers into Gatling guns. Just as if I had stood with the US Army in 1877, the howitzers and Gatling guns would have taken the shape of Ponderosa pine and wild rose through the same equalization of the land.

Looking-Glass’s Country: June-July 1877 and June 2018

Turning 180 degrees in either direction from the South Fork’s canyon rim, one is faced with the traditional land of Chief Looking-Glass’s people.

A Nez Perce voice from The Dying Grass, page 441:

–for just as COYOTE once died and then transformed Himself into a Salish brave so that He could come back and marry His own desirable daughter, so Looking-Glass, having died to us by fleeing to his painted land, has now returned to take up a place that should not be his.

An archivist’s voice from The Dying Grass, page 1237:

But he [Looking-Glass] if anyone was a true victim of the war, having first obediently trundled off to his reservation, which Howard treacherously violated, then trusted to the apparent friendship of the Montanans who repaid his forbearance toward them in the Bitterroot Valley with the Big Hole Massacre.

A rose bush becoming a Ponderosa pine in Looking-Glass’s country.

As I drove a large pickup down the winding road that vivisects Looking-Glass’s country in 2018, I found a wild rose bush creeping up a Ponderosa pine. I thought of Looking-Glass, a man who had trusted with US Government to follow through with their promises. By so trusting, he was forced to become two men in the eyes of his people: a formerly great chief and one who had died to his people in surrendering to the ‘painted land’ allotted to him by the US Government. I thought of The Dying Grass, a grand novel crept through with Vollmann’s strange verse. I though of myself, a foreigner born to this land, but unavoidably separate from it.

At the bottom of the road through Looking-Glass’s country, I was pleased to see evidence of my nation’s improvements on the land we shed so much blood for:

Near the place where Looking-Glass’s ancestral country abuts upon the Clearwater. Improvements to the land by the Americans. June 2018

The Heart of the Monster: June 1877 and June 2018

The Heart of the Monster, birthplace of the Niimiipuu, June 2018

An archivist’s voice from The Dying Grass, page 1252:

[MONSTER] swallowed up nearly all the ancestors of animals and people. COYOTE managed to be gulped down and then killed Him from within. As the MONSTER was dying, everyone fled through His anus. (The MUSKRAT has a hairless tail because the anus closed just as He was coming out.) The heart of the MONSTER, an important site in Nez Perce folklore, is a great rock near Kamiah.

This large rock is unassuming only in form. This place is the remnant of the great Monster that COYOTE slew and from whose body He made the various Native Peoples of the region.

You might think that I’m lying if I told you that I saw a muskrat in Clearwater River a very few feet from the Heart of the Monster. I am telling you so, and it is no lie.

The Untold Battle of the Nez Perce War: June 2018

My last evening in Kamiah, I sit on the corner of No Kid Avenue and Cedar Street. A man who appears to be of European descent wanders toward me. His head is in his hands and he is sobbing theatrically.

A woman follows him down the street. She looks indigenous to my untrained and often-insensitive eye. The man collapses into his tears in the street not far from me and the woman goes to him. She lifts him off the ground and holds him.

His hand slides south onto her left buttock, which is the only one that I can see from where I sit. She moves his hand back up onto the small of her back. They walk past me, back toward where they came from.

I ask if everything is OK. She gives me a knowing look and says, “We’re fine,” the way a mother explains that her tantrum-ridden child is Fine after not getting the right breakfast cereal at a grocery store. The weeping man looks toward me as well. He wipes a tear from his eye. “Nice pants,” He tells me.

While this episode somehow escaped the chronicling of William T. Vollmann in his otherwise expansive novel of the Nez Perce War, The Dying Grass, perhaps he alluded to what I saw play out before me on page 185: