The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance

1. A False Beginning

[55] 1. A False Beginning By the end of the nineteenth century the rationalized extension of 160acre individually owned homesteads into western territories seemed to demand that Native lands, enclosed in reservations thought to be too generously sized, should be similarly apportioned. In northern Idaho, where the boom-and-bust mining economy fed a climate of boosterism and “go-ahead” spirit, local newspapers routinely urged the federal government to pass an allotment law. An 1882 editorial in Lewiston’s Nez Perce News declared, “Nothing will transform this city from a sleepy hollow to an active, booming business center but the opening of the reservation.”1 After the Dawes General Allotment Act was passed in February 1887, these same papers touted the land’s potential and anxiously chronicled the preparations for the “opening” of the reservation. A headline in the Grangeville Free Press trumpeted “The Coming Boom!” and urged, “The People of Camas Prairie Should Prepare For It.” “[T]he Almighty,” the newspaper trumpeted, “never planned a piece of country . . . with less waste land. . . . [P]rosperity lies at the doorstep of every man who has the good fortune to own a quarter section of this fertile soil. Tickle it with a plow and it will laugh you a harvest of flour. . . . The railroad is coming. Do not trust to it alone to enhance the value of your land so that you can sell out on the boom, but cultivate your place and put in a crop.”2 The Nez Perce Reservation was seen as [56] beginnings enclosing “a vast quantity of taxable property” that could provide homes for hundreds of new settlers, enrich territorial coffers, and increase population to a number that would allow Idaho to claim statehood.3 The Free Press fretted that the reservation’s boundaries “hindered the development of this region more than if it were a desert .”4 The next month the same newspaper revisited the theme, asserting , “The slow growth of Lewiston and Camas prairie and all the Clearwater country is due solely to the fact that the key to it is sealed territory in the possession of the Nez Perce Indians.”5 Extending railroad lines through the Camas Prairie would bring new settlers and benefit current residents by allowing commodities to flow more easily from plateau farms via railroad and river to Pacific ports. Linking allotment to Idaho’s growth, economic development, and eventual statehood follows the familiar emplotment of Manifest Destiny: the policy seemed to promise the inevitable success of westward expansion, driven by visionary investors, white entrepreneurs , and hardy, virtuous yeoman farmers. This story characterizes Native peoples—in this case, the Nez Perces—as static, resistant to change, obstinately refusing to embrace progress, and insistent upon maintaining collective ownership. Such assumptions are given the lie when measured against the fact that within the boundaries of the Nez Perce Reservation some form of allotment had been in place for the past thirty years, as stipulated in the treaties of 1855 and 1863.6 The early surveys mandated by these treaties had delineated the boundaries of numerous twenty-acre plots, most of them in the river valleys.7 Many Nimiipuu had already fenced their fields, were farming these lands, and were selling their produce to gold miners. Long before Alice C. Fletcher arrived in Idaho, allotment had been actively discussed, debated, and experimented with on the Nez Perce Reservation. Some Nimiipuu men who had attended federal boarding schools, as had James Stuart, hoped to establish working farms with the help that had been promised them. In 1886 Stuart wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs, “I have seen some of the reports saying that all the graduates from the Trainning Schools will be helped with such things they need.” Desiring “to work and improve [his] land,” he requested that the local agent be directed to is- [57] a false beginning sue him a harness and plow.8 Early in 1887 Agent George W. Norris wrote to Washington dc asking “whether the Department will sustain me in assigning to the individual indians of this tribe upon their application 160 acres, 320 acres, or such other quantity of land as the indians applying for will themselves fence and occupy.” He reasoned, “Many would like to obtain the 20 acres already in possession , and take up more land at a distance, some for pasturage others for cultivation.”9 Such a request suggests that at...