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

8. The Ends of Nez Perce Allotment

[251] 8. The Ends of Nez Perce Allotment The complexity of such deceptively simple terms as end and allotment becomes apparent as one seeks to establish the event or events that might be taken as the conclusion of Fletcher’s work. Endings, a convention of storytelling, are not always apparent within the mass of records related to a given event or policy. Such was surely the case with allotment. As early as June 1891, anxious to conclude her duties as allotting agent so she might devote her full energies to anthropological research, Fletcher had begun to anticipate her work’s end, writing to Morgan that she had “allotted nearly all of the better class” of Nez Perces.1 Consequently she took much less care to ensure that those whom she did not deem to be of “the better class” would receive the lands they had requested. For example, several months later Fletcher wrote Morgan, “There is one man who wishes land run out for his young son and an old Aunt . . . that will require over one week’s worth of the surveying party. The land is worthless except for grazing. . . . The labor and cost of running out these two allotments seems to me too great to be undertaken.” Not incidentally , the land was being requested by “KipKapalikan, formerly one of the Judges and living at Kamiah,” a man who had caused Fletcher several petty annoyances earlier in the allotment, largely because he had been an associate of Charles Monteith.2 In June 1891, of course, Fletcher could not have foreseen the [252] difficulty she would encounter in the season ahead. Six months later she and Gay celebrated Thanksgiving with Kate McBeth rather than with their friends in Washington dc, but even though she remained at Fort Lapwai into the winter months Fletcher could not close the work. She returned to Idaho in early May 1892. Even then she encountered such serious delays that a white man, John C. Beelle, complained that the “work [had] been in progress for the last 4 years and to all present appearances it is liable to continue for the next 4 years.”3 Fletcher could not ignore the increasing discontent. In midAugust she admitted in a letter to Morgan, “[T]the allotment here should have closed early in July, and but for unforeseen difficulties . . . I should have been free before the close of July.”4 In a second letter written that same day she detailed a number of the “difficulties ” holding her in place. They included “errors and complications caused by the old survey,” the refusal of allottees to remain on the lands they had been assigned, and “the persecution of my best field hand Timothy Ryan, whom the agent has arrested upon false evidence for selling or giving liquor to Indians.”5 These were the “dif- ficulties” she publicly admitted; undoubtedly others plagued her as well. “[E]ven the Indians complain and are becoming restless under this unnecessary delay,” Beelle asserted. “I have talked with competent engineers . . . invariably they say that they would not ask for more than 2 years to have completed this work.” Beelle’s most damning sentences, however, were those concluding his letter: “We charge the parties in charge of said allotment dilatory and unnecessary delay of said work and we believe in misappropriation of funds and labor in rebuilding repairing the Kamia Indian Church, and that at a time when the men should have been in the field on alotment work. I do not [say] this because a lady is in charge of this work. From my youth up I have always been what is called a woman’s rights man in addition all Indians who know me know me as their friend.”6 Beelle spoke for many others. Even the Indian Office, shielded by distance and bureaucratic obfuscation from the local clamor, grew impatient. In late July 1892 Morgan sent the briefest of official letters to Fletcher, copying the secretary of the interior: “Madam: I desire your opinion as to whether it is desirable to commence neendings [253] gotiations now with the Nez Perce Indians for the cession of their surplus lands, and if not, at what time you think such negotiations might be undertaken, and your reasons for your opinion.”7 If the terse query were not a direct enough signal that even her close friend felt allotment should be concluded...