The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History

7. PARRY

7 PARRY The heat continues to build. It’s record-breaking hot, they say, and Pocatello has now completely sold out of fans, with no hope of getting more. On my way to see Mae Timbimboo Parry, I stop at a Kmart in Ogden and find tons of the things. All varieties: floor, ceiling , rotating, oscillating. They know how to do air-conditioning down here in the hole that is Salt Lake Valley. Already sweating, I’m a little concerned about meeting Mae Timbimboo Parry. Brigham Madsen has warned me that she can be very distrustful of whites. Allie Hansen has told me that Parry is a wonderful person, but warns that my experience may depend on what sort of mood I find her in. Hansen advises me to write a letter first, explaining my project, and to call later to make an appointment. I do this. On the phone, Parry tells me she isn’t feeling too well, and that she’s not sure she’s up to visitors. But she seems reluctantly willing to speak to me anyway, and gives me an appointment. Speaking to visitors about the Bear River Massacre seems to be what she does. She mentions two doctoral students she’s seeing that week as well. She’s not in the least surprised to hear about my own project. She’s used to this sort of thing. But there’s a note of irritation in her voice. I know this could be a challenge, but I lecture myself on the ride down. I remind myself that she sounded welcoming enough on the phone, and remind myself that the two of us may have different styles of speaking. I dust off a basic tenet of journalism from the old days: shut up. If you 199 fill the silences, I bark at myself, she won’t. Take it easy, I tell myself. Easy. And shut up. When I arrive at her home in a suburb north of Salt Lake City, she’s in her kitchen speaking with a man who seems to be a lawyer and who seems to be talking about tribal wills. Parry’s husband Grant, an elder gentleman, shows me to a wide living room, and I ask where I should sit. “Anywhere but Mae’s chair,” he jokes, and points to an upholstered rocker next to a table. A floor lamp shines on a large box strewn with papers and documents that have been sheathed in plastic covers. Parry’s husband and I are laughing about where he sits—“Wherever I can find a spot,” he says—when Parry comes in. She’s a small woman with a set jaw and a powerful presence despite a slight palsy caused, I’ve been told, by Parkinson’s disease. She doesn’t greet me. She just sits down in her chair and begins to hand me documents, talking about what she’s handing me as she gives them to me. This must be what she does with her doctoral students. Clearly, she has a set routine she’s going to want to follow. On the phone, she had told me she couldn’t give me copies of anything, but would let me look at what she had. I thumb through a thick, typed manuscript, the first thing she hands me. It’s the story of her people, the Northwestern band of the Shoshone. She explains that she’s currently involved in a project organized by the Utah Historical Society, a book to be published by the University of Utah, about the tribes of that state. “Some of the Indian tribes went and hired Ph.D.’s and master’s degrees, professors, to write their history from the white man’s point of view, and turned that in. The project was supposed to be an oral history from the Indian’s point of view and now it’s got out of hand. It’s getting to the point where it’s not an Indian’s point of view. I told them I don’t want them to change one single word of the things I have written because this is an Indian’s point of view. They’ve been real good about it.” (This book would be released in 2000 as A History of Utah’s American Indians, Forrest S. Cuch, editor; it is distributed by Utah State University Press.) We talk about whether the state of Utah has been more hospitable to the Shoshone than...