Haunted by Waters: A Journey through Race and Place in the American West

Chapter 1: The Innocence of our Intentions

In all your intercourse with the natives treat them in the most friendly & conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit; allay all jealousies as to the object of your journey, satisfy them as of its innocence. Thomas Jefferson, Instructions to Meriwether Lewis, June 20, 1803 I can conceive a community, today and here, in which, on a sufficient scale, the perfect personalities, without noise meet; say in some pleasant western settlement or town, where a couple hundred best men and women, of ordinary worldly status, have by luck been drawn together, with nothing extra of genius or wealth, but virtuous, chaste, industrious, cheerful, resolute, friendly and devout. I can conceive such a community organized in running order, powers judiciously delegated—farming, building, trade, courts, mails, schools, elections , all attended to; and then the rest of life, the main thing, freely branching and blossoming in each individual, and bearing golden fruit. Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas” The imposed view, however innocent, always obscures. Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams We had only an e-mail message—a protestation in response to my friend’s query about information on flyfishing in Montana. It came from some professor at Idaho State: “Take out a map. Look at the Continental Divide west of Montana. Notice how ALL the rivers flow west into Idaho! I don’t understand it. Why would you go to Montana with everyone else?” Indeed. I should have known from the moment I sat down in my seat in that climatecontrolled 727 at Logan and noticed the three guys in front of me—cowboy hats, special flyfishing glasses, cases of expensive Sage rods, and thick Boston accents—my escape to wide open Big Sky Montana might lack some elbow room. With the deep snowpack just starting to melt that July and most of the big rivers unfishable, or not fishing well, it seemed as if every visiting fisherman in the state had herded onto Rock Creek. Fred and I turned to one another, “Hell with this. We’re going to Idaho!” Thomas Jefferson, the Corps of Discovery, and the Natural Progression of Idaho the innocence of our intentions Chapter 1 10 the innocence of our intentions We bought a map in a gas station outside Missoula. He was right. Running up the western side of Montana like a granite wall, the Bitterroots provide a formidable natural barrier between Montana and Idaho, in fact, the longest stretch of the Rocky Mountains found in any state. This geologic feature, the Idaho batholith, is a near-solid mass of granite that oozed out of the earth’s crust some hundred million years ago when Idaho was violently shaped by the collision of continents. Out of these mountains flow the rivers he had mentioned—the Lochsa, the Clearwater, and the St. Joe. They pulled us, filled us with expectations, with the delectable anticipation of the traveler. The spaces of the imagination filled with images , ideas of the Pure West. We stopped in Missoula for more flies and for a rain jacket to replace the one I had left at work back in Boston. Inside Bob Ward’s, the salesman offered some dry flies for Idaho and carped about the crowding of his home waters. “Hell, I hardly fish now until the fall.” Ranches, oddly placed suburbanlike homes, and gas stations eventually gave way to stands of white pine as we climbed into the Bitterroots through one of only three paved roads that bridge Montana and Idaho along a two-hundred-mile stretch. It was just over these mountains that Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery would measure up their own expectations of these places during a far less comfortable experience: where Lewis would realize that the Pacific was not just over these mountains , that the trail the Nez Perce followed each summer to hunt buffalo out on the plains of Montana would not, as other Indians had assured them, be an uncomplicated five-day journey. It was, instead, a harrowing and nearly disastrous push through snow and hunger. The names they gave to the places here recall that September trek in the Bitterroots—Colt Kill Creek, Lonesome Cove, and Hungery Creek. Over Emmylou Harris crooning, “roll . . . roll a long way on,” Fred read aloud passages from the journals of these previous travelers, our predecessors , the Corps of Discovery: “The road through this hilley Countrey is verry bad passing over hils & thro’ Steep hollows, over falling timber &c. &c. continued on & passed Some most intolerable...