-
Place and Ecology
- University of Washington Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Place and Ecology In the winter of 1811, an exhausted group of thirty-two white men, three Indian men, one Indian woman, and two children, allIed by an American named Wilson Price Hunt, crossed through a land of canyons and mountains east of the Snake River. They were racing the British to the Pacific, hoping to establish an American fur empire that would rival the British Hudson's Bay Company. Instead, they got thoroughly lost. Ignoring the advice of Shoshones who told them to turn back, Hunt's party spent a month struggling through snowdrifts into bewildering Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in North America. They expected the river to lead to the Pacific, but it took them into a nightmarish maze where nothing was what they expected. Canyons led to cliff walls, not to the gentle valleys they hoped for. The snows got deeper and they got desperate. One man fell off a cliff to his death. Marie Dorion, the Indian wife of the interpreter, bore a child along the Powder River, and nine days later the infant died. Finally, close to starvation , Hunt's party stumbled on a lovely snow-free valley filled with beaver and friendly Shoshone Indians, who obligingly saved their lives. This valley they named the Grande Ronde, and then they started over the hazy, snow-covered mountains just beyond: the Blue Mountains.! Two years later, Marie Dorion and her children spent an even worse winter in the Blues, after all the other members of her party were killed by hostile Indians when they were out checking beaver traps. Marie took refuge in a canyon near the headwaters of the Walla Walla River, keeping herself and her children alive for the winter on the smoked flesh of two horses. When she finally emerged with her story, the American fur traders began to get dis11 12 PLACE AND ECOLOGY couraged. They were no closer to their dreams of great wealth; all they had to show for their efforts were lost explorers and dead trappers . After a series of similar mishaps, the American attempt to establish a base for the fur trade ended in failure, and the British won control of the trade. People now tend to read these misadventures as purely political stories, but they are also stories written upon the land. What effects did extracting resources have on the local ecology, and what effects did the local ecology have on the people who tried to extract resources ? Different groups came to the Blues with differing ideas about what their relationship to the land should be, and these cultural ideas shaped how they saw the land and how they acted in the land. Some people fell off a cliff because they were convinced that all normal valleys ought to lead to outlets, not to cliff edges; others starved to death because they were convinced that a passable route had to exist to the Pacific. The history of outsiders in the Blues has been a history of people getting lost-lost in geographical space, lost in their attempts to quickly extract fortunes, and lost in their hopes of reshaping the landscape to fit an American ideal. Whites who first arrived in the Blues found a land completely unlike the humid forests of home. Most of the forest communities across the inland West were semi-arid and fire-adapted, and whites rarely knew what to make of these fires. What seemed familiar at first glance proved not to be, and this was unsettling. People expected forests to be moist and fertile, but these forests seemed too dry, too open, and not very fertile. Fires burned much more often than people thought normal or desirable, and no one understood how forests could survive constant fires. Sagebrush typically indicated poor soil, but the soil under this sagebrush seemed better than much of the forest soil. Rivers normally drained to the sea, but many of these rivers drained into the Great Basin-a salty, barren , frightening place-and never flowed out. The canyons were far too steep; people could not believe what they saw. Trees grew on top of these steep canyons but not down by the water, where trees were supposed to grow. It seemed like someone had turned the world upside down. [54.146.97.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:51 GMT) PLACE AND ECOLOGY 13 Outsiders came to the Blues to mine, to trap, to cross the mountains in search of land for farming, but these...