Contact High Tracing: Part IV
Part IV — What Traces RemaiN
“I started to question my manifest destiny
my claims to this frontier”
On September 6, 1805, more than 200 years and across the Sapphire Mountains from when and where I met Gary the alleged hot tub repairman, the Bitterroot Salish chief Three Eagles, or Tcleskaimi, and members of his tribe were camped up the Bitterroot River when they spotted a band of twenty or so riding toward his camp. Two men led the party. "They must be two chiefs," Three Eagles is said to have pondered. "But what are they after? And why does one of their men have a black face? Who can he be?" Three Eagles watched the party, determined they meant no harm, and welcomed them into his camp, giving them each a buffalo hide to sit upon and placing blankets over their shoulders. The tribe offered the two chiefs some of a “strange plant” they were smoking; they didn’t like it. They offered the Salish their tobacco. “It made all of them cough,” it is said, “and everybody laughed.”
It’s unlikely Three Eagles ever recognized the significance of his meeting Meriwether Lewis and William Clark that day or the fact that York, the Black man that puzzled him, was brought on the expedition as an enslaved man. Eventually, the Corps of Discovery traded for twenty horses and were given directions to Lolo Pass and an eventual route to the Pacific, following the Columbia River down the path carved by the breaking of glacial Lake Missoula.
The encounter, however brief, served to engender friendly relations between the U.S. government and the Salish, which would result in peaceful interactions for several decades. In a twist that should surprise no one, the U.S. government eventually broke the 1855 Hellgate Treaty that had promised the Salish they could stay in the Bitterroot Valley. Then-president Ulysses S. Grant sent future-president Andrew Garfield to oversee the tribe’s removal. In response to this violation, Chief Charlo, the grandson of Three Eagles, wrote, “Since our forefathers first beheld [the white man], more than seven times ten winters have snowed and melted. Most of them like those snows have dissolved away.” He went on to regret the Salish tribe ever helping the Corp of Discovery or the waves of white settlers that followed, ending his lamentation with a reflection on the artifice of the white man. “His laws never gave us a blade nor a tree, nor a duck, nor a grouse, nor a trout,” Charlo wrote. “No; like the wolverine that steals your cache, how often does he come? You know he comes as long as he lives, and takes more and more, and dirties what he leaves.”
Although the city and county of Missoula, the University of Montana, and the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula each have adopted land acknowledgements claiming gratitude to and respect for the Salish people, none acknowledge the duplicitous manner in which their real estate was acquired. They’d all read as far less trite if they included Chief Charlo’s word.
In 1911 the Montana legislature commissioned western artist Charles Russell to paint a depiction of the initial meeting of the Salish tribe and the Corp of Discovery. At twenty-five by twelve feet, the work is Russell’s largest—he had to expand his studio to fit the canvas—and offers a detailed depiction of that first encounter. The painting focuses on several Salish on horseback, with Lewis, Clark, York, and Sacagewea in the background to their right. To their left, in the distance, an array of teepees are visible as well as the Bitterroot Mountains. Smoke from unseen fires hangs low in the valley and the blue sky above serves as a final backdrop to billowing clouds. Art Historian Patricia M. Burnham notes that “[b]y relegating Lewis and Clark to the quiet of the middle ground at right, Russell gives over the most important part of the picture space to Montana's original inhabitants. Nowhere else in the Capitol is the Indian presence in Montana so celebrated."
I can’t read that quote without wondering if it applies to all of Montana and not just the Capitol, where the magnificent painting is sequestered behind the dais of the House of Representatives, unable to be viewed except on tours in the summer and never long enough to take in its grandeur. Don’t get me wrong, Montana at least pretends to care about Indian education. My Native American history lessons back in Texas mostly involved floppy disks of Oregon Trail or ridiculous stereotypes. More often the first peoples’ stories were ignored entirely. And here I am now, unable to feel satisfied I’ve learned enough, considered their stories enough, to feel worthy of sharing them.
When Gary told me the story about folks in Missoula getting high from the drugs burned at lumber mill teepee burners—and claimed that it resulted in a happier populace—I imagined the story might take me a while to run down. I never imagined how many threads I’d end up pulling on, or how much I’d learn about my new home in the process. The story told here is creative nonfiction. I aim for as much accuracy as possible, but I am limited by demands on my time and the fact that I can’t always muster up enough creativity to warrant the label. Clearly, I’m not a reporter. Or as one former editor put it while giving me feedback on a different story (never published): “Can you make this sound more like journalism?”
No, I did not got to J-school. I care deeply about getting the facts right while treading ground I find compelling. This is to say I’ve enjoyed writing the story very much, and I know a slew of writers and reporters who could have wrapped this tale up in a few weeks. I take more time—here, three years—to percolate on what it all means.
Perhaps it’s best if I let one of my literary heroes define the versimilitude of this story. Here, risking ridicule by many a former workshop companion, I offer a block quote from the introduction of Goodbye to a River by John Graves:
Though this is not a book of fiction, it has some fictionalizing in it. Its facts are factual and the things it says happened did happen. But I have not scrupled to dramatize historical matter and thereby shape its emphases as I see them, or occasionally to change living names and transpose existing places and garble contemporary incidents. Some of the characters, including at times the one I call myself, are composite. People are people, and if you put some of them down the way they are, they likely wouldn’t be happy. I don’t blame them. Nevertheless, even those parts are true in a fictional sense. As true as I could make them.
As true as I could make them. And as true, it seems, as I’ll be able to make them.
Unlike Gary, who—despite many calls and texts—never came back to our house to fix our hot tub, this story has had a way of refusing to leave me alone. Most recently, my daughter’s classmate’s dad asked me if I was still looking for leads. I didn’t recall ever telling him about the story, but I guess it’s become somewhat of a stock question for me when I meet people who, like this man, are from the area. “I asked my dad about it,” the man said. “He says he was there once when they burned the drugs.”
And just like that, I was hooked again. Nevermind the man’s father refused to talk to me (“He’s had bad experiences with writers,” the son demurred.) or that the son was worried his father might have dementia. The tale of the drugs burned in teepee burners has done much more for me that start conversations. It’s helped these valleys feel like home.
On winter mornings when the sky is clear, I watch the light sweep across the Clark Fork Valley, bathing the confluence with the Blackfoot and eliciting a fine mist from the frost on the golf course. Because of where our house lies, on the eastern slope of Mount Jumbo just outside of East Missoula, Montana, I can watch the light fall down the mountain to our west. In the winter, I look for the elk herd that ranges above us in the colder seasons before turning my gaze down the canyon, the dividing line between our small community and the city of Missoula. Most mornings, it seems, fog fills the canyon, seeping eastward like an ephemeral glacier.
I know on these mornings that Missoula, on the other side of the Hellgate Canyon, must be sopped in. It reminds me that clear skies are often a valley or two away, or at the very least atop the nearest mountain.
I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure if Gary’s story is true or not. My leads have fizzled out like puffs of smoke; even gathered they leave little more than a shadow of the truth. Within that mist, though, are the things I learned along the way, an understanding of this land I now occupy that I might never have known otherwise. In a way, I owe it all to Gary, who did once pick up the phone after I figured what the hell and tried him one more time. “You’re still on my radar,” he told me, six months after we’d first met. He’d been busier than at any point in his career. The population boom that began with the Corps of Discovery was hastened by the forced migration of the Salish and other Native tribes. People talk about the pandemic bringing about this influx of new residents to mountain towns all over the west, but folks who have been around a while know it started long before that.
Gary apologized again and I told him it was fine, even though the water at the bottom of the hot tub had a layer of ice on it. I resisted the urge to ask him about the story his father told him about the drugs and the burner, not because I didn’t want to hear it again, but because I already knew the truth, or at least as much of the truth that I cared to know. Differentiating between fact and fiction can feel like trying to see the unseeable in the air around us. Occasionally a haze hovers above and then we can assume that it’s there, somewhere amongst the smoke and water.
