Rural towns claim their piece of the Lewis and Clark story

DAVID HORSEY
EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third in a seven-part series.

DISPATCH FROM WEIPPE PRAIRIE, Sept. 20 — I’m running late for a big event as I roll into this tiny town, so I hitch a ride on a school bus and plant myself among a class of 14 kindergarteners and first-graders.

Each of them is wearing a turquoise T-shirt imprinted with black letters reading, “Weippe, Idaho, where Lewis and Clark met the Nez Perce Indians.” A little girl with long blonde hair smiles from the seat across from me.

“Where are we going?” I ask her, curious what she’ll say.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s some kind of field trip.”

Two miles out of town, we are almost at our destination when the kids notice Indians and teepees standing out in a cut hayfield. The sight gets them excited.

“You know what?” a little boy with a crew cut says to the blonde girl, “I can kill Indians. I got a sword at home.”

The girl plugs her ears.

Good thing, too. Such violent sentiment is inappropriate today. For, at this place precisely 200 years ago, William Clark and his hunting party came down from the mountains, rode out on this prairie and were met in friendship and peace by the Nez Perce. [...read more...]