The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History

8. WARNER

8 WARNER I visit Curtis Warner—who calls Mae Parry his “great-aunt” though in European American genealogical terms she’s a distant cousin—on yet another in this string of hot days, the day after the death of Tamise’s African violet, which, in the end, had proved unsalvageable in this odd heat. Extra water was too much water. Less water was not enough water. Nothing I tried was successful in reducing the distress the poor darkening leaves were suffering. The purple and yellow bloom had closed days ago. I don’t know how I’m going to tell Tamise about her violet; but what I’m really het up about today is that this also happens to be the day after the Pioneer Days Parade in Pocatello. And it’s the day after the Aryan Nation stages a much-disputed march through Coeur d’Alene , in the northern part of the state. These two events may seem unrelated , but they take up the entire front page of the Sunday paper that morning, and the juxtaposition leads to jarring conclusions. Pioneer Days is not, as easterners might think, a time to celebrate the Oregon Trail or some such. It’s a reminiscence that runs the entire month of July, to commemorate the arrival of the Mormon settlers in Utah and Idaho. It’s an appreciation of hard work and sacrifice, a recitation of the terrible hardships those original pioneers suffered so that subsequent generations of Mormons might enjoy a prosperous, persecution-free existence. “Twenty-fourth of July Day” celebrates the anniversary of Brigham Young’s arrival at the mouth of Emigration Canyon (“This is the [right] place!”). These celebrations proceed with no recognition of the Shoshone who were ousted by said emigration; their persecution, sacrifices, and lack of prosperity go unnarrated. So 215 the existence of Aryan Nation activity in the state, while harshly decried by state leaders, is not quite the anomaly it might seem. Good fences make good neighbors. I’m OK, you’re OK. Thus do the northern and southern portions of Idaho, seemingly so politically disparate, peacefully coexist. In the late nineteenth century, it’s worth noting, Mormons in Idaho were not permitted to hold office. These days, many state leaders are Mormon. I use the newspaper to dispose of Tamise’s poor violet. Warner’s wife Mallory, then an accountant for a video store chain, keeps their two-year-old son Tyler at bay so Warner and I can sit at their kitchen table, under a ceiling fan, in their comfortable new home on the northeast side of town. We’re just a few miles from the border of the Fort Hall Reservation. They’ve just moved in, and one of those clocks that chimes each hour with a different bird call goes off twice while we’re talking. The clock was a gift for Tyler, he explains. Before him on the table Warner has a copy of the National Park Service study and a neatly organized, three-ring binder containing papers pertaining to the band’s business, separated by carefully labeled tabs. I ask him how he feels when he sees coverage of things like Pioneer Days dominating the local broadcast and print media. “I didn’t attend,” he says wryly. “I ignore it. I mean, what can we do? It’s something that’s gone on for years—we’ve never had any involvement with it, have never been asked.” Warner was himself baptized in the LDS church, “because it was the thing to do here. Everybody was. It was a thing you had to do. I had no idea what I was doing.” He was about twelve or thirteen at the time, he says, and all of his school friends were going to youth camps and other things that looked like fun. “But I never stepped foot in a church,” he says. His wife’s family was LDS, he says, but they’re no longer active. She has resisted the pressure to baptize Tyler, deciding that that should be his choice when he’s older. We change the subject to the Park Service project. Since Warner left his job as director of cultural resources for the tribe, and began working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a program technician , inspecting fields that have been put into fallow with the Conservation Resource Program, he understands the landowners’ objections to the proposed site a bit better, he says. Having spent a...