The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance

2. Another Beginning

[73] 2. Another Beginning A week or so after the meeting at the Kamiah Presbyterian Church, Fletcher announced she would establish a base camp in the field where she would meet allottees upon their lands and finalize their deeds. The allotting party—Fletcher, Gay, James Stuart, the surveyor Edson Briggs, and his workers—headed west to Cold Spring, near the present-day town of Reubens, where according to Gay’s account, “many of the Kamians had expressed a desire to be allotted ” (C, 132). Provisioned for six days, the party split: the surveyors went into the field, leaving the others at the base camp (C, 133). A few potential allottees dropped by, but the Kamians did not materialize . The women later discovered their clients “had gone to the mines [to sell summer produce] and would not be back for two or three weeks” (C, 144). Gay wrote, “In this way a week passes, then another, the Surveyor running out land farther and farther from the camp, until at length [the women and their interpreter] are left to the solitude of their own reflections, and still the Kamians came not” (C, 137–38). Their food dwindled to nothing and they began to fear they would starve. Then, miraculously, appeared a party of young Indian men from Lapwai: They had ridden sixty miles to find the Allotting Agent that they might consult with her about their land which they were now ready to take. [74] They were jolly young fellows who sang and told stories about the camp-fire and those among them who were “returned students” spoke good English. Learning the perplexities of the Cook, they went out at daybreak with their shot guns and, on rising, we found a brace of grouse laid at the tent door. . . . They did their best to make our weary waiting endurable; they donned war bonnets and posed for the Photographer; . . . [A]t last, tired of low rations, they formed in line . . . bade us an affectionate farewell . . . [and] rode cheerfully away. (C, 139–40; emphasis added) Gay’s charming story takes additional energy from its resemblance to other beginnings — those recounted in foundational national myths, for example—in which benevolent Natives rescue improvident whites. Every school child knows the tale of how Squanto taught the early New England settlers to plant corn and kept them from starving; every school child knows, as well, how Pocahontas rescued Captain John Smith. Both stories persist, and are persistently mistold, because they perpetuate an agreeable delusion: white settlers were providentially welcomed, rescued, fed, and nurtured by friendly Natives who taught them how to survive in the new world. Told in this context, the old story seems again to reassure its readers that the Nez Perces would eventually recognize that whites’ incursions on their lands and cultures were ultimately for everyone’s best advantage. Their offerings of food function as a kind of sacrament that seals the compact. Figure 8, the photograph Gay took of the posing men, is arguably one of her best-known images, if only because it graces the cover of the paperback edition of her letters. It shows two mounted warriors . One wears a full-length eagle feather headdress and carries a pole topped with an eagle feather, likely an honor pole. The other man wears a smaller feather headdress, has an ermine skin over his right shoulder, and carries a folded blanket and rifle. They pose in a clearing, looking as if they have materialized from the misty forest behind them.1 Despite its wide circulation, within Gay’s oeuvre, this image is an beginnings [75] anomaly.2 Since the purpose of her photography was to document the success of a program designed to civilize the Nez Perces, most of her portraits do not show Native peoples in regalia or in traditional attire. It might seem, then, that the most appropriate image to have resulted from this occasion would be one similar to the dual portrait of James Reubens and Archie Lawyer shown in figure 9. In this image both men are dressed in jackets, cravats, boots, and hats; Lawyer holds a rolled and tied document, perhaps the deed to his allotment. The two sit in a clearing in front of a wooden building , likely the McBeth cabin in Kamiah. All the details of the image —the seated poses, the clothing, the setting in proximity to the missionary’s home—combine...