from FUGUE
Winter in the mountains of central Idaho and the snow has let up. A slim horn of moon hangs in the gap between two peaks. I zip up my sleeping bag, pull on mittens.
It’s maybe twenty degrees. The lake I’m camped beside is just beginning to freeze—paper-thin sheets of ice are interlocking above the shallows. The clouds have peeled away. The sky travels through a long spectrum of purples.
Everything seems poised to become something else. Silhouettes of trees on the ridgelines might become men; boulders might stand and stretch and slink away. I am at 7,800 feet, five miles from a road, forty miles from a town, and yet here come whispers, six or seven syllables, carrying across the water.
I blink into the dimness. My heart roars. The lake I’m camped beside is still. The mountains glow. Nothing. No one.
Welcome to Idaho. We have ten major rivers, eighteen ski resorts, and fifteen people per square mile. We have hidden valleys where the wind pours through seams of aspens and makes a sound in the leaves exactly like the sound of rain falling on a pond. We have forests where the growing season is so short that fifty-year old trees are only four feet tall, and get so rimed with ice in January that they look like gardens of oversized, glittering cauliflower. We also have an escalating methamphetamine crisis, looming water disputes, massive agribusiness feedlots, and hour-long lines to eat dinner at The Cheesecake Factory.
Forget tourist brochures, forget airbmshed photos of sunsets, forget travel magazine spreads of flyfishermen at dawn casting into a smoking bend of Silver Creek. Idaho is bigger than eighty Rhode Islands and most of its boundaries are entirely arbitrary. Some parts get hardly any snow and some get eight feet. Vast stretches of the state are arid and yet inside these borders are almost 116,000 miles of rivers.
In January you can stand in a polo shirt outside a Starbucks in Boise and call somebody in Madagascar on a cellular telephone while 150 miles away a mountain goat stands on a mountaintop in the River of No Return looking down over an unbroken desert of snow twenty feet deep. Nothing I will ever write could do this place justice.
Among the quantities of peoples and tribes who have traveled, slept, and died in the topographical anomaly that is presently called Idaho, among the 12,000 years of their successive, unknowable generations, the great bulk of them marking time in ways we would only vaguely understand, was a small group of people who lived in the sprawling mountains surrounding the Salmon River.
They’ve been known by lots of names: Tukudeka, Sheepeaters, Toyani, Snakes, Arrow Makers. There probably weren’t ever more than a couple of thousand of them. They lived in caves, in clefts in the rocks, and in wickiups made of sticks. They wore snowshoes in winter, and their furs were expertly tanned. Sometimes, supposedly, they hunted while wearing the decapitated heads of animals. Their bows, painstakingly crafted by heating and laminating sections of sheep horn, were renowned: one witness describes one of these bows sending an obsidian-tipped arrow through a nine-inch pine tree at a distance of fifteen paces.
That any human beings raised children in this rugged, shattered country, so close to timberline, stupefies me. In winter, the temperature rarely climbs above freezing and it’s not uncommon for trees to snap in the cold. Summer is no picnic, either: not with bears and cougars, thunderstorms and forest fires; not with insects rising from the meadows in huge, throbbing clouds.
These people, these Tukudeka, have been called hermits, skulkers, and scavengers. A party of explorers who encountered them in 1819 described them as “truly wild men of the mountains. . . dressed in sheepskin garments, living among rocks in caves.” The 1937 WPA guide to Idaho called them “wily and treacherous, though cowardly.
I’d call them old-school, bad-ass. Intrepid. Remarkable. I’d say they were more involved in the natural world than any of us could ever hope to be.
A whirlwind history: In 1805, when Sacagawea led Lewis and Clark into what is now called Idaho, the explorers found legions of beavers. Back in Europe, top hats made of felt were getting unreasonably popular. And guess which kind of animal fur makes {he best hat felt?
For the next forty years, fur trappers slew Idaho’s animals by the hundreds of thousands. In one season in the 1830s, the Hudson’s Bay Company recorded taking 80,000 beavers from the Snake River.
On the heels of trappers were missionaries, and on the heels of missionaries were settlers. By the mid 1840s, by the time fashionable Europeans preferred hats made of silk, the Snake River had become a ‘fur desert’ and an east-west highway called the Oregon Trail had been established.
One by one, the people whose ancestors had been hunting, fishing, and digging up roots in this country for centuries were displaced, excluded, or eliminated. By the middle of the nineteenth century, of Idaho’s original tribes, only the Tukudeka, with their hunting dogs and rabbit-skin blankets and year-round snows, could have remained fairly isolated.
But in 1862, prospectors found gold in the Boise Basin. Dozens of strikes were made. Boomtowns sprouted like mushrooms. Soon goldseekers were working up every creek in every mountain range, no matter how inaccessible.
Meanwhile diseases earned by domestic sheep were decimating native herds of bighorn. Smallpox was doing the same to native humans. Survivors were being relocated systematically. When they resisted, they were forced off their land.
It’s a familiar story: emigrants, eager to let livestock graze the camas meadows, depicted native people as bloodthirsty terrorists. Native people, hungiy, desperate, watching cows and hogs chew up roots their families depended on for generations, said they were only protecting their way of life.
The summer of 1877 saw the Nez Perce War. The summer of 1878 saw the Bannock War. Subduing troublesome Indians became an American machineiy unto itself. Military careers depended on it. Merchants in Boise were said to dread the prospects of a peaceful summer.
At the beginning of 1879, decimated by illness, their primary source of food vanishing, and their ancient hunting grounds invaded by armed prospectors, how many Tukudeka could have been left? Maybe thirty or forty families? They still dressed in hides, wove baskets, and cooked in clay pots. They still fitted their weapons with stone points. They were, perhaps, the last native Americans in the contiguous United States to live in a way their ancestors would immediately recognize.
And yet they had to know what was coming. In February of 1879, five Chinese miners were found murdered in an abandoned town twentythree miles north of present-day Stanley. Not long afterward, two white ranchers were found dead on the south fork of the Salmon River. In both instances, the Tukudeka, accused of harboring renegades from previous Indian wars, were blamed. Settlers roared for protection.
So on the last day of May, Troop G, First Cavaliy, soldiers of the United States Army, rode out from Boise to hunt down the last freeroaming native people in Idaho. The cavalcade did not have an easy time of it. Swollen creeks swept away mules and horses. They were assailed by lightning, snow, and hail; their animals were plagued by wood ticks and mosquitoes. Seemingly eveiy day a mule pitched off a precipice and tumbled hundreds of feet into a rocky drainage.
It wasn’t until mid-August, seventy-nine days after leaving Boise, that the soldiers in Troop G saw any real traces of their quarry: several empty wickiups, one of which had some firewood stacked beside it.
Two days later, reinforced by several dozen mounted infantrymen, they climbed to a diamond-shaped expanse of sawgrass and sagebrush, hemmed in by mountains, that is now a backcountry airstrip called Soldier Bar. There, at the base of a rocky slope, their scouts found a hastily-evacuated camp. There were ten wickiups, buckskin, beads, blankets, pots and pans.
Among the cavahymen of Troop G was a private named Edgar Hoffner, a novel-reading, pipe-smoking cavalryman who kept a daily diaiy. “We turned our horses out after getting to this camp, to await developments,” he wrote. “Gathered up every thing that we could find and consigned to the flames.”
So casual! So nonchalant! How do things get to the point where a person would think so little of burning the possessions of eight or nine families?
Any time you look for evil in an individual person, though, you’ll al
most never find it. In his diaiy, Hoffner is often funny, often wistful. He misses home; he gets in snowball fights with other soldiers; he pines “for a cottage by the sea, for a cabin in the wood.” When he has no food, he says he eats “wind pudding” for supper. Indeed, when he’s not burning the possessions of Tukudeka families, Private Hoffner behaves much as any of my friends might in similar circumstances, if my friends were better with horses and significantly tougher about missing meals. He is kind to his fellow soldiers; he manages to keep a sense of humor in any weather. '
And what about the settlers who demanded the Tukudeka be brought in? Isn’t it folly to judge them, too? They lived deep in snowed-in valleys in houses they had built by hand: purlin roofs, log walls, cold decanting through cracks and knotholes. The wind-wracked faces of big mountains stared down at them all day. And maybe once a year some utterly foreign man emerged from the snows in animal furs with a few possessions tied to the back of a dog? Surely that’d be enough to make any of us sleep with a shotgun under the bed.
All their lives they’d pumped each other full of terrible stories: Indians were attacking wagon trains and burning children in front of their mothers; Indians were ruthless and inhuman assassins. By the late 19th century, the Tukudeka were probably more legend than reality, anyway; they were yetis, sylphs, bogeymen. Anything happened—a rancher was murdered, a horse was stolen, a pie disappeared off a windowsill—and who were you going to blame?
It’s snowing; it’s freezing cold; you wrap your sleeping children in blankets and listen to the wind pour off the mountains. You think: The winter, the darkness, the fastness beyond my front door—it’s populated.
On the morning of August 20th, 1879, squads of cavalrymen started up the steep inclines surrounding Soldier Bar. Twenty men stayed behind with the pack train as a rear guard. By the time the riders were five miles away, they heard gunfire. They sprinted back, many on foot, as the slopes were too steep for horses. There had been an ambush. One of the men in the rear guard was shot through both legs and soon died.
That night the soldiers went to sleep in the grass at intervals of ten feet, clothes on, carbines loaded.
“The hostiles,” wrote Private Hoffner, “have signal fires on the mountains on two sides of us.”
That was August 20th, 1879. More and more lately, I am haunted by
that night. Twin fires bum on the mountainsides. Six dozen cavahymen panicky, keyed-up, pissed off—lay down to sleep in the grass, They had just buried a comrade and they were nearly out of food.
Above them on the rocky slopes, maybe forty or fifty Tukudeka— toddleis, adolescents, women, men—tried to keep the babies quiet. They were among the last of their people, among the last free native people in the entire United States. The Civil War was over, Edison had invented the phonograph, and these people were still living outside, still making theii homes in what any of us would call the middle of nowhere.
Maybe they were scared; maybe they were furious; maybe they were i esigned. Probably they were hungry. Probably there were some refugee Bannocks 01 Nez Perce with them, men who had so far avoided the reservation, men who had rifles, men who had known little in their lives besides deracination and subjugation.
It d be another couple of hours until dawn. If the sky was clear, the Milky Way would have been huge and dazzling, a sleeve of light draped acioss the sky. And in all that immensity, there was nowhere for the Tukudeka to go, no retreat, no quarter, the world had left them behind, somehow they had become strange and wrong, scattered amongst the hills, and everything was on the line: their idioms, their legends, their ancestors, their kids.
Maybe they slept; maybe one or two managed to forget their situation long enough to whisper to each other and smile, before the crystalline night reasserted itself and their aches and injuries came back and they were reminded again of the soldiers camped in the field below, bent on chasing them down.
One hundred and twenty-eight years later, I’m camped beside an alpine lake in December, not terribly far from Soldier Bar. For me nothing is more compelling in this country than the night skies: on winter nights the stars flicker white and red and blue, twisting and glittering in their places. In the same moment they can seem both astonishingly close and impossibly far away. This is not typically comforting: you feel the size of the Earth beneath your back, which is massive enough to hold all of its cities and oceans and creatures in the sway of its gravity, and on the far side of the Earth is the sun, 300,000 times more massive than the Earth, and slowly your thoughts begin to bump up against the enormity of the Milky Way, in which our entire solar system is merely a mote.
I close my eyes; I think of the brook trout in the lake beside me,
quick and sleek, little sleeves of muscle suspended in the black water, their fins and bellies fringed with orange, their backs aswarm with patterns. The snowy peaks gleam in the moonlight. In a few days this lake will be frozen over, and I wonder if the fish turn up their eyes, if they watch the lights traveling through the sky, if they sense that this could be the last time they will be able to see them.
There are claims the Tukudeka may have been a distinct cultural group for 1,000 years. Some of the sites they used suggest a cultural continuity that stretches back as far as 8,000years. But by August 1879, there were only a few families left, trying to get some sleep among the rocks.
A December night in 2007. An August night in 1879. Between me and them stretches an abyss, the automobile and the airplane, penicillin and the microchip, plastic furniture and space travel. Did the Tukudeka understand how fragile memory can be? Did they bury their memories on the hillsides around them, hoping someday someone might return to dig them back up?
“The conquest of the earth,” wrote Joseph Conrad, “which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
Territory and gold, civilization versus wilderness, Rome versus the barbarians. Out of the history of Idaho comes the whispers of the Tukudeka; comes Private Edgar Hoffner with his tobacco and rifle; comes the relentless brooms of progress.
Fifty-one native Americans from that area eventually surrendered to the United States Army in October of 1879. The following year they were moved to the Fort Hall reservation, a good 200 miles from the Salmon River country. Whoever remained in the folds of the mountains might have hidden there another ten years. But the Indian Wars were over, and the last of Idaho’s tribes had been relocated.
The Northern Pacific laid rails across the panhandle in 1882 and the Union Pacific sewed up the southern part of the Territory in 1884. In 1890, Idaho became a state.
Even to neighboring tribes, some historians say, the Tukudeka had seemed like druids, gnomes, elves. They were blamed for bad luck and big storms and lost objects. They were the Old Way, the hard way, the unknowable. They lived a life that was hard to believe.
Sometimes, in the winter, I stop at an intersection in Boise and watch the sleet coming down in slow sheets, raking across the foothills, all
browns and whites, the cars splashing past around me—even the trees looking miserable, dormant, waiting, uncomfortable—and I think: thank God I don’t have to sleep outside tonight.
And Idaho? Many of the places the Tukudeka knew are still here: cold green forks of rivers and here-and-there copses of cottonwoods and great broken slopes of volcanic scree aglow with lichen, and clouds like vast men-of-war dragging tentacles of rain across the ridgelines. Idaho still has the most roadless land in the Lower 48 and the largest single designated wilderness area, too. We have two gorges deeper than the Grand Canyon. We have sagebrush prowled by skinny foxes with the pilfered eggs of songbirds clamped gingerly in their teeth, and whole hillsides skittering with grasshoppers the color of straw.
Every life here, no matter how sequestered, no matter how impounded, is still informed by the land, for better or worse. And that for me is what Idaho continues to be about, this territory, this state, this country, the stripe of the Milky Way printed across a velvet sky and the silhouettes of mountains strobing in and out of view during lightning storms.
I live here because, even if I only have one afternoon, a few hours between obligations, I can ride a bike up into the hills above Boise, into cooler, more watered places, where wildflowers color the hillsides and the remains of old bums are still plain—the great blackened skeletons of sentinel ponderosa, granite blocks half-tumbled on the hillsides, spring creeks carving through the gulches. After twenty minutes of pedaling, the city of Boise will be far enough below that its features will have faded and become a wide green blur, bedded between mountain ranges, a haze over it, maybe the first evening lights winking on.
The history of our planet is one of absolutely relentless change. “There is nothing stable in the world,” wrote Keats. “Uproar’s your only music.” Everything—mammoths, short-faced bears, western camels— eventually goes extinct. For about two million years, every August, tens of thousands of salmon poured into the rivers of Idaho. Redfish Lake, 900 miles from the Pacific, supposedly turned crimson with sockeyes. Last summer, only four fish made it back, and they were bom in a hatchery. And there’s no reason to think it won’t happen to us, too; that, someday, some final band of humans will build signal fires among the rocks, and look down at who or whatever has come to finish us off.
The country the Tukudeka lived in, craggy, hazardous, hammered by snow, near-holy in its beauty, is still here. A person can go see the Sawtooth Mountains and the Salmon River and even hike to Soldier Bar,
where Private Hoffner helped bury his comrade, and where some of the last free Tukudeka rested among the rocks; and there are even lesstraveled places, like the Lost River Range, or the Lemhi Mountains, which are about as far as you can get nowadays, in the Lower 48, from anybody.
A person can still go into the country and find a few ghosts, some pictographs, a stone hunting blind, a stick or two from a forgotten sheep trap.
“You people of low lands,” wrote Private Hoffner in 1878, “have no idea how loud thunder can roar or how bright flashing the lightning is on the mountain tops.”
A person can still walk into the mountains and stare up at the welter of stars.
Nominated by Fugue, Kim Barnes