The Washakie Letters of Willie Ottogary: Northwestern Shoshone Journalist and Leader, 1906-1929 (review)

Those interested in American Indian history usually end up relying on primary sources generated by people of European descent. This collection of letters written by a Shoshone man early in the twentieth century therefore constitutes an interesting and useful contribution to the field of American Indian studies—although its editor does not do enough to help the reader interpret these rare documents.

Willie Ottogary, a Shoshone who resided in a Shoshone Mormon community in northern Utah, began writing newsy letters to small-town newspapers in 1906. Nearly five hundred of these letters had been published by the time of his death nearly a quarter century later.

Anyone who has worked their way through the minutiae of obscure newspapers of the early twentieth century will be familiar with much of the content of Ottogary's letters. We learn of comings and goings, baseball games and boxing matches, illnesses and deaths, the state of various crops and, of course, the weather.

What makes these letters distinctive is that they were written by an American Indian. Kreitzer has been unable to determine exactly why and how local newspaper editors decided to publish this material. But an obituary written by one suggests that white subscribers found them comical: "Many a reader has read the regular letters of this prominent Indian over this period of years and have been entertained and amused by the unique way in which he handled the English language" (240).

Yet Ottogary's less than perfect command of the English language did not keep him from communicating a great many details about his Shoshone community. The letters are especially useful for tracing economic activities. Ottogary chronicled the cultivation of sugar beets and grains, visiting experts who expounded on the possibilities of fruit trees and irrigation, rabbit hunts that netted thousands of pelts annually, young men who left for jobs tending crops or shearing sheep, and trips to gather pine nuts. Ottogary could be an evocative writer. Upon viewing his first film in 1912, he proclaimed: "them picture move as nature. The picture move like human being" (49). Four years later he watched his first football game and found it "too rough play and wild" (83).

Though he generally depicted his community as productive and sociable, the garrulous Ottogary sometimes broached controversial topics. He covered arrests and shootings and his wife's desertion. He wrote of his trips to Washington DC, where he sought more equitable treatment from the government and complained of unmet treaty obligations. In December 1924 he wrote: "We don't expect Santa Clause will stop our little town on account the people being so poor. He might going to next town" (155).

This collection would be both more interesting and more useful if its editor had provided a fuller interpretive framework. Kreitzer's introduction and conclusion do not adequately place Ottogary's life in its historical, cultural, and historiographical contexts. The annotation for the letters is spare, consuming just twelve pages. The book comes with some impressive bells and whistles: a pair of fine maps, scores of photographs, appendices detailing subjects as diverse as Shoshone treaties and Ottogary's travels, a detailed biographical register of those mentioned in the letters, and a useful index. But all of this simply adds to the weight of detail presented in the letters. One is left wondering what all of these bits and pieces add up to. Kreitzer mentions that he plans to write a biography of Ottogary. One hopes that book will do more than simply rearrange the facts of that man's life already presented here and will place Willie Ottogary and his community into some sort of interpretive context.

Nonspecialists will likely become mired in and tired by this book's particulars...