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

Introduction: “Double Pictures Have Met Us All along the Way”

[271] Introduction “Double Pictures Have Met Us All along the Way” In early July 1903, Independence Day was observed in Kamiah, Lapwai, and Nespelem as it had been for decades past. The celebration in Kamiah seemed to exemplify the success of the recently completed allotment. Here about a thousand celebrants gathered for camp meeting festivities lasting nearly two weeks and observed by several hundred white onlookers.1 On the day of the Fourth a parade organized by James and Harriet Stuart (fig. 44) circled the campground, led by a small Indian marching band that “play[ed] patriotic airs.” The band was followed by a procession of “100 little Indian boys, marching in ranks” and “a liberty car . . . draped in national colors” carrying “50 little Indian girls dressed in white and waving flags.” Stuart, now a civil engineer and founder of a recently established town that bore his name, was the afternoon’s “principal speaker.”2 The words of those who delivered “addresses in English . . . were translated into Nez Perce by Rev. Silas Whitman of Kamiah church No. 1,” shown in figure 45.3 Six months later, in January 1904, when James Stuart traveled to Washington dc as “President of the Board of Trade of the Town of Stuart,” he visited Alice Fletcher and Jane Gay at their home (C, 448). He very likely told them about the celebration he and his wife had sponsored in Kamiah, for the trio certainly would have discussed the changes allotment had brought to the reservation. Gay fig. 44. James Stuart and Harriet Mary Stuart. Stephen Shawley Collection, Historical Photograph Collection, University of Idaho Special Collections and Archives, Moscow id, 38-0838. [273] had been thinking about those changes that January as she wrote the concluding words to the scrapbook that would become Choupnit -ki. Yet in the “Writer’s Note” closing the album, Gay memorialized not the Kamiah celebration but the Lapwai gathering. She effused , “Where the Indians at Lapwai camped at their Tal-lik-lykt [war procession] festival, they hold now, at the Fourth of July, a gospel meeting, and from the tents . . . , instead of war songs, hymns of prayer and praise echo through the valley.” She illustrated her point with a photograph, reproduced here as figure 46, captioned “Camp Meeting at Lapwai, July 4,” but did not specify the year in which the image was made (C, 448, 449). In fact, the terrain shown in the photograph establishes that the image was made in Kamiah, not in Lapwai.4 Gay likely received the details about the celebration at Lapwai included in her “Writer’s Note” from Kate McBeth, with whom she and Fletcher had exchanged letters since departing Idaho some ten years earlier. Like Gay, McBeth was busy writing a book: hers, The Nez Perces since Lewis and Clark, contained a chapter titled “Fourth of July Camp-Meetings Past and Present.” Here the fig. 45. Silas Whitman standing by a tipi. Stephen Shawley Collection, Historical Photograph Collection, University of Idaho Special Collections and Archives, Moscow id, 38-0268. [274] missionary chronicled her lifelong struggle against traditional observances associated with the “much-dreaded Fourth of July.”5 McBeth based parts of this chapter on accounts she had written in her diary, on letters in which she had described the celebrations to the readers of church missionary periodicals, and on newspaper clippings she had collected over the years, some of which she sent to Fletcher and Gay, and some of which she pasted into scrapbooks. One of her albums contains the three newspaper accounts of the 1903 Kamiah and Lapwai celebrations upon which my account here depends.6 One of these clippings, the Lewiston Morning Tribune’s account of the Lapwai celebration, suggests that Gay’s “Writer’s Note” was selective , at best. “Will Dance Again” makes it clear that in 1903 in Lapwai , as at Kamiah, the celebrations were attended by enthusiastic local observers, including “[m]any . . . ladies among the visitors [who] were perceptibly moved by the strange solemnity” of the war fig. 46. “Camp Meeting at Lapwai, July 4,” by E. Jane Gay, Choup-nit-ki, 449. This image is incorrectly captioned; the location is in the Kamiah area. The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. [275] dance, as Gay, Fletcher, and McBeth had been in years past.7 From Washington, distanced by space and time, Gay surely...