Indians have a message: “We intend to be here forever”

By DAVID HORSEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth part of a seven-part series.

DISPATCH FROM KAMIAH, NEZ PERCE RESERVATION, Sept. 22 — Few people can tell you where their world began, but the Ni-Mii-Puu can.

A big mound rises on a grassy slope above this Idaho town. Myth says the mound covers the buried heart of a great monster that gobbled up all of the animals in the world. Coyotes killed the monster, cut up his heart and, from the blood, created the Ni-Mii-Puu, better known as the Nez Perce tribe.

The Heart of the Monster site lies just across U.S. 12 from the Lewis and Clark Resort, an RV park with log cabins set back in the trees and a motel office, gift shop and restaurant built to resemble a stockade. The restaurant is the Sacajewea Café. The Lewis and Clark theme is ubiquitous in this part of the country.

This morning, I check out of the resort, drive down the hill and cross the bridge over the Clearwater River. A little farther downstream is a sprawling sawmill built on the place where Lewis and Clark camped out for several weeks in the spring of 1806 on their return trip to the United States. Mountain passes were still blocked by snow, so the explorers had little choice but to stay here in what they called their Long Camp and enjoy the hospitality of the Nez Perce.

Now, as I drive into town, the Corps of Discovery II is situated at the city park. I toured this traveling exhibit yesterday and heard yet again about the meetings between Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery and the native tribes who helped them on their trek to the ocean. Today, I have my own meeting with the Indians. [...read more...]

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...]

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

DAVID HORSEY
EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

DISPATCH FROM LOLO HOT SPRINGS, Sept. 19 — I am riding through a forest of skinny lodgepole pines and thick ponderosas on a fine black horse named Buff. We are on the daunting Lolo Trail where Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery struggled with snow and starvation as they sought a way through these endless mountains.

I’m almost ashamed of myself as I think of those wet, cold, malnourished men who rode here during those September days 200 years ago. Today, the sun is bright and the sky is blue. I’m not wearing a jacket but I’m still feeling a little too warm. The three-egg omelet I had for breakfast is not giving me any sense of deprivation (nor is the memory of the rack of ribs I had for dinner last night or the Montana-sized prime rib I had the night before). [...read more...]

On the path of Lewis and Clark from the Continental Divide to the Pacific

By DAVID HORSEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

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

DISPATCH FROM LEMHI PASS, Sept. 18 — Depending on which side of the Continental Divide I stand, it is either 1:30 Pacific Time or 2:30 Mountain Time. I am in either Idaho or Montana. Time and place are that elastic on this mountaintop.

Here, it takes very little imagination to move from the 21st century and go back 200 years — 200 years and 37 days to be precise — to the moment when Capt. Meriwether Lewis climbed up this ridge with a three-man scouting party and took a step as momentous in its way as Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon. With that step, he brought the Northwest into the history of the United States.

Very little has changed at Lemhi Pass since that day. The Indian track that Lewis followed was replaced by a stagecoach trail that now is a dusty forest service road. Discreet power lines run along the hills to the north. But to the east, the Rockies still stand like a snowcapped granite wall. And, to the west, the view is the same as it was: range upon range of mountains fading into the distance — a panorama that, in an instant, told Lewis he and his Corps of Discovery still had a long, long way to go before they would see the churning waves of the Pacific Ocean. [...read more...]

Have you ever pondered, “Who said that?”