A Priceless Little Leather Pocket Book

My concern that Durham, North Carolina, where I live is losing valuable artifacts and records every day that passes without erection of a full-fledged Museum of Durham History is personal.

One of my great (x2) grandfathers and a great-great-great-grandfather selected in 1846 as part of a small vanguard to blaze a largely new pathway into the Rocky Mountains kept a diary.

He wasn’t the official diarist for the company, but his notes shatter some stereotypes of what it was like as they marked and created infrastructure along the 1,100 route that others would follow through territory of the United States yet to be organized.

Before I touch on some of his revelations, I must note that when I was growing up, both sides of my family were pretty mum about my ancestral involvement on that wagon train.

I’m sure they were aware, but even as we passed through from Idaho to see family, my parents neglected to mention that the names of these ancestors were inscribed on a monument that was then centered at the Salt Lake intersection at Main Street and South Temple.

But none of us realized my great-great-grandfather had kept a diary until someone unrelated who had read it growing up, turned it over to family members in Idaho the year I graduated from college.

After memorial copies were made and distributed to descendants, the small little leather pocket book was placed for safekeeping in the Mormon Church Historical Department where then one of my professors was an assistant.

His prominence in the vanguard group was only as chief wheelwright due to being a carriage-maker back as a sixth-generation Quaker-American in his native Upper Providence, east of the Schuylkill.

In his diary, he describes being chosen as one of ten people to hunt buffalo along the trail when provisions were needed and standing as guard during stops.

But he was also one of the head cooks chosen by his group of ten men (they organized into 14 groups but there were only three women and two children.)

Meals included a hot breakfast and dinner with a cold lunch prepared in advance for a midday stop to feed, hydrate and rest the livestock.

The wagons weren’t all uniform and they didn’t travel single file like they do in the movies unless required by the terrain.  They traveled five vehicles abreast, some buggies and smaller wagons, some covered wagons, but not the big Conestoga wagons.

The diary covers several years including this four month journey, and a trip back to visit his mother prior to departure.  It includes a journal of services provided, detailing the date, for whom, the repair and payment if any.

These tended to be primarily converted farm wagons.  Usually people walked or rode alongside.  Mostly they used huge teams of oxen as draft animals to pull the wagons.

Oxen are mature, castrated male cattle, as compared to milk or breeding cows and bulls or beef cattle which are steers.  But at the time, a steer who reached four years old was considered an ox.

American oxen were generally 1,800 to 2,000 pounds of pure muscle, standing about six feet tall, about that long and eight feet around.  Oxen were preferred to draft horses because they were better in muddy conditions including when teams doubled up to cross rivers.

They could also survive on little food of poor quality which was common as they crossed the Great Plains of Nebraska and the High Plains of Wyoming, especially where overgrazed by huge herds of Buffalo that would stretch for a day at a time.

This vanguard unit circled their 73 wagons when possible at night with the livestock inside the loop, including 66 oxen, 52 mules, 93 horses (mostly saddle,) 19 cows, 17 dogs and some chicken.

A bugle sounded wake-up at 6 a.m. and when it was time to retire each night at 8:30 p.m.  Often they danced, played cards and sang at night, sometimes according to my great-grandfather, a little too loudly.

His dry sense of humor comes through when he mentions speeches that were sometimes “rather long” or “ not very edifying.”

He also describes in a passport application soon after this journey that he stood 5’8”, a little bald with grey eyes, a Roman nose, full mouth, ruddy complexion and oval face.

This ancestor’s favorite song was “leather breeches,” a jig danced with “controlled abandon” across America at that time.  But it would have been without musical instruments which were deemed too heavy to bring along.

Although these wagons could carry up to a ton and a half, the uncertainty of this vanguard journey would have meant they were kept as light as possible.

If they sang about their final destination, they would have used California, the term at the time for anything over the Rockies.

I’m sure an a cappella version of Come, Come Ye Saints, a hymn penned a year earlier and put to the music of an older camp revival melody earlier by a member along for that journey, was already as popular as it is still today.

Another was probably Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.

The diary records that the party stopped to help others traveling across the Platt River on the California Trail and that some were fellow Missourians who had some members of the group out of that state less than a decade earlier.

Each member of the vanguard was required to have a rifle primed and ready to fire (flintlock) at a moment’s notice, with a piece of leather to keep the firing mechanism dry.

They often encountered Nation Americans including Otoe, Sioux and Pawnee, the former at war with the latter, as well as Arapaho, Cheyenne and Shoshone.

The diary records a visit to a burned out Pawnee village and the huge size and construction of lodges.  Sioux visited and stayed overnight inside the circle of wagons one night.

But others bands often attempted to extort food and other supplies.

We are blessed to have this account, written in the hand of an ancestor, but I wonder how and when it slipped away for so long?  As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, this makes me concerned that families with deep Durham connections may be losing sight of the importance of artifacts and records so important to preserve.

Hopefully, officials in my adopted hometown will soon realize the same sense of urgency for a Museum of Durham History long shown among residents in public opinion polls.

Heritage is perishable.

Along a River Bank of Convergence

On one my first cross-country road trips west from Durham, North Carolina, where I live, I stood for awhile before crossing at a point along the Mississippi River of unusual ancestral convergence.

It was heavily wooded, nearly 900 river miles north of Vicksburg where Mugs and I crossed this year on our outbound southern route, where the trees seemed to get shorter and shorter before we crossed.

Then they disappeared altogether for an hour across Louisiana floodplain before reappearing and then growing taller and taller again up through east Texas.

More than ancestral convergence was crossing my mind that day of reflection on the banks of the river further north.  To understand signature moments in one’s gene pool, it helps to look at context.

I’m the sixth generation of Americans who settled along the western slopes of the Rockies, my two grandsons are the eighth, dating back to Puritan-Huguenots, Quakers, Remonstrants and Amish Americans dating to the 1600s.

But those Atlantic roots stretching from Maine to the Carolinas migrated across the Appalachians after the Revolutionary War, most by the early 1800s, to first create settlements in what are now Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi.

By 1840, nine of my great (x3) grandparents (one through adoption) and all but four of my sixteen great (x2) grandparents along with a few (great x4s) had all converged to within a mile or two of where I stood that day in reflection.

The river there juts out to create that little triangle “stub” of Iowa formed along the Des Moines River border with Missouri just before it empties into the Mississippi.

Even by the mid-1820s when the first set of my great (x3) grandparents began to purchase land in Illinois, everything across the river from me that day was called “unorganized” territory.

In 1824, when as part of an agreement to relocate the Sac and Fox people across the river, that little stub of what would become Iowa one day was “unorganized territory,” designated for people of mixed ethnicity, never to claim or own, just to live.

That year was also when the first of my great (x4) ancestors migrated to Illinois and a year before other great (x3s) bought land there in preparation.

That designation was withdrawn by Congress after the Black Hawk uprising by disaffected warriors.  By that time three sets of my great (x3) grandparents had migrated to north and central Illinois as settlers soon to be joined by a fourth set.

They were all contemporaries of future U.S. President of Abraham Lincoln who had just moved there, one or two who became friends.

But the land across the river from where I stood on that trip, in fact all of what we call Iowa, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin, were still not even territories yet.

“Unorganized” means no established order or structure other than occasional U.S. Army patrols, fit only for Native American peoples forced there and often at war with themselves.

Think in today’s terms of a highway sign, “no services for 2,000 miles.”

Beginning in 1831, all of my ancestors who had migrated to Illinois or who had been born west of the Appalachians had joined the Mormons, a “restorationist” Christian religion only organized the year before.

Three would then migrate to northern Missouri following the Missionaries who had converted them to settle an area where Mormons hoped to assemble at the edge of the frontier, safe from internal strife and persecution that had already begun to dog them.

However, soon their numbers would alarm some Missourians fearful of losing control of their county.  Counties then and even neighboring cities were becoming either anti-slavery or pro-slavery and the majority of Mormons there were quietly abolitionist.

Barely ten years prior, the territorial legislature there had petitioned for statehood but as a “slave” state, which was accepted by Congress but only after a compromise that also accepted Maine as a free state.  They also forbid slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase.

This included territory yet to be organized into Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana.  This also extended to what would become Idaho, Oregon and Washington, then jointly controlled but not yet organized by Great Britain and the United States.

What would become Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada Arizona, and part of Kansas were still a foreign country, the newly independent Republic of Mexico formed just a few years before my Mormon ancestors arrived in Missouri.

But what really set some Missourians off was the Mormon belief that Native Americans were descended from ancient Israelites.

Not everyone in Missouri was hostile to Mormons nor was the new state fully organized when the Mormons arrived and began to settle first around Independence which has been founded four years earlier, establishing the first school.

Much of northern Missouri above where the Missouri River diagonally slices that state from north of what would become Kansas City past Independence, trending south to empty into the Mississippi at Saint Louis was designated only as non-county area as Mormons congregated.

Two years later, just before that distinctive nose of land was added to Missouri and as another non-Mormon but soon-to-be great (x2) grandfather was being born much further southeast along the Osage River, angry mobs forced Mormons around Independence to abandon their homes, businesses and belongings and flee for their lives across the Missouri.

So the Mormons sought peaceful redress from state officials represented by a newly-minted defense attorney named Alexander William Doniphan, a future hero of the Mexican-American War.

Also representing another county in the Legislature, Doniphan engineered legislative creation of a new county specifically for Mormons, designating still more land north as they overflowed into nearby counties.

In those days and dating from colonial times, counties each raised mostly volunteer militias which in the hands of vigilantes were often used to harass people and groups that were out of favor.

Failing at peaceful recourse, just as Texans were revolting against Mexico and being overrun at the Alamo, the Mormons were forming a county militia to defend against units of other Americans from surrounding counties.

This resulted in bloody confrontations including a massacre of Mormons where one of my great (x3) grandfathers was killed.  So the Governor at the time, an Independence partisan, issued an order in 1838 for the Mormons to flee the state or be exterminated.

To pay honor was why I cut across northern Missouri along U.S. Route 36 on the return leg of this year’s cross country trip.

Fragments fled east along that route toward Hannibal and up to Quincy, Illinois, while others blazed a new road trace up into the just-organized Iowa Territory which ran clear to the Canadian border and back eastward along the border.

They settled in what they hoped would be a peaceful safe haven along both sides of the Mississippi River including land acquired by Mormon leaders in that little stub that is now Iowa, across from where I stood that day.

By 1840, all but four of my ancestors, who were yet to migrate from Ireland, Wales, Scotland and northern England, had converged at that very point along both sides of the river and began for the third time in just ten years to build anew.

But by late 1845, there too, Mormon leaders had been murdered by mobs, despite the intervention by Illinoisans from places like Quincy.

They were again threatened with genocide if they didn’t immediately flee.

Mormons rapidly organized and attempted to hurriedly build 2,500 wagons, enough to carry everyone in groups of five or six per wagon on the 1,300-mile journey to safety in the Rockies, part then in Mexico.

One of my great-great grandfathers, a former carriage maker and now chief wheelwright, played a key role while many Mormons tried to sell their homes and possessions to buy wagons or buggies, oxen and riding horses.

Preparations were cut short by mob violence and one of my great (x3) grandfathers was asked to be the first with his family to cross the river in early February 4, 1846, right at the point I was standing during that trip with Mugs to rendezvous with my grandsons.

Followed by others in the dead of winter, their mission was to set up a camp where others could assemble and get better prepared, the first of a series of camps across southern Iowa.

My Mormon involvement lapsed more than four decades ago.

But while we don’t get to pick our cultural heritage even if ancestral, it is always a part of us and I am very proud and respectful of mine.

I’ve provided the context in this essay because standing at that point of ancestral convergence along the Mississippi that day gave me a better understanding of what led up to that epic journey.

My great (x3) grandfather and my pre-teen great-great grandfather didn’t have to blaze a trail the day they led the exodus across the river.

Now traveling first through Iowa Territory, still a year from statehood, they merely followed that Mormon Trace blazed by other ancestors eight years earlier as they fled Missouri.

At Council Bluffs, they were two of three of my ancestors selected to blaze the Mormon Trail, another 1,100 miles through still “unorganized” country to the Rockies and among the first handful first ride down into the Salt Lake Valley.

That new trail largely followed the Oregon Trail, first opened to wagons at Independence shortly after Mormons had been forced out,but on the other side of the Platt River.

In their diaries, my ancestors mention stopping along the way to help those on the other side and in turn, those returning east would carry letters back to loved ones waiting to depart.

But they had learned by then to be extremely wary of other frontier Americans.

By 1860, all of my other ancestors had arrived and one set of great-great grandparents was creating the first permanent settlement in Idaho soon to be a territory.  Others had created settlements in Nevada, then a part of the Utah Territory, California and Arizona.

Westerns are resilient but none more than Mormons who had a lot of practice before finally finding refuge there.

Each July 24th, up and down that flank of the Rockies, they stop to celebrate the arrival of that first vanguard wagon train to arrive often when I was growing up with re-enactment parades.

On one of my visits I have promised my grandsons to visit the monument where their names are inscribed among the first to arrive.

When they are ready for context, this essay will be waiting.

Channeling P.J. De Smet

Descended from four sets of Mormon great-great-great-great grandfathers who were among the first to enter the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 through a gap along the Wasatch, my grandsons are not the first to attend one of many Catholic parochial schools there.

My mother, their great-grandmother, was sent there from Idaho to attend a Catholic high school in an unsuccessful attempt to cool her relationship in Idaho with my father as he prepared to enter the US Army and head to Europe in the closing months of WWII.

Ironically, as they made preparations for a vanguard journey the following year, those Mormon pioneer ancestors of ours gathered around a Catholic priest when he passed through the 1846 staging area they had established along both sides of the Missouri River in the land of Native Americans such as the Omaha and the Oto near Council Bluffs along the border of Iowa with Nebraska.

This Catholic priest was Belgian-born Pierre-Jean De Smet, or “P.J” as he signed his correspondence, and he had paused on a return leg of one of his many journeys throughout the upper Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest that began in 1842, four years after he had established a mission for Native Americans at Council Bluffs.

Before he would die in St. Louis nearly thirty years after his encounter with my ancestors, De Smet would travel over 180,000 miles by horseback and on foot during repeated trips across the northern Rockies, often at the invitation of various tribes of Native Americans who called Catholic explorer/missionaries as “Black Robes.”  In between expeditions, he would travel back to Europe eight different times both to recoup and to raise funds.

He had volunteered to come to America in 1821 just as the fifth president of the United States, James Monroe, was sworn to a second term and the US purchase of Florida from Spain was finalized.  He was ordained a priest in 1827.

Beginning in 1831 four successive delegations of Rocky Mountain tribes of Native Americans, including Salish Flatheads and Coeur d’Alenes traveled to St. Louis to request Jesuit missionaries. Finally, an 1839 encounter with Father Des Smet brought success.

One cannot travel the edge of the upper Great Plains or the Rocky Mountain portions of Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Idaho and Washington without being reminded repeatedly of the influence of De Smet beginning with his traverse along the fault line of my youth into the very Yellowstone-Teton nook of my origins.

There, along the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, in the corner of what is Idaho between Wyoming and Montana today, Father P.J. De Smet, of the Society of Jesuits, first joined up with the Flatheads to continue his journey over the Bitterroots to their homeland.

A trip last summer with my daughter and two grandsons to our annual lake-side rendezvous with family along the eastern Washington-northern Idaho, took us past the oldest building in Idaho.

Cataldo Mission, as it was known when I was growing up in Idaho, was designated a state historic site and park in 1975, during my early years in community-destination marketing on behalf of nearby Spokane.

Coincidentally, this was during a short period when Spokane took Coeur d’Alene under its wing until that community could form a marketing organization.

The distinctive building (shown in the photo in this blog) was erected in 1850 on a rise above the Coeur d’Alene River along what is now I 90, twenty-six miles from the town and lake bearing the same name.

The Mission of the Sacred Heart, as it was known, was established a year after De Smet had first met with the Coeur d' Alenes and established the Mission of St. Joseph along the river 35 miles south which he had given the same name.  However, the first location proved flood prone.

Less than a decade later the military used De Smet’s route to forge a wagon road past the mission and across the Bitterroots known as the Mullan Road after the officer who engineered the route, one that was later followed by I 90.

Father De Smet formed several missions on that first journey west of the Rockies and worked in a resupply trip to Vancouver, B.C. before heading back to St. Louis and his encounter in route with my Mormon ancestors as they prepared to head west.

Cataldo is the name of another “Black Robe” who, following some years later along the paths worn by De Smet, would establish a mission among the Upper Spokane Indians and would establish the first church in the nearby city of the same name about the same time one was first established in Salt Lake City.

Cataldo also initiated the humble beginnings of Gonzaga University in Spokane where I would attend law school at night beginning in 1973.

I guess you could say that my grandsons are following a 166-year family tradition of learning from Catholics.

The Fault Line of my Youth

The fault line for many of my 19th-century ancestors, as well as for my own early years, runs north-south along the mountains that form the border of southeastern Idaho and Wyoming from Montana to Utah, bookended by thermal geysers.

The fault line begins just north of the cattle and horse ranch my parents worked when I was born on the banks of the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River in the very Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho which had been homesteaded by my great-grandparents and grandparents.

The fault line ends just south of Soda Springs along the old Oregon Trail, where the verdant oasis of upper Cache Valley is formed between the Bear River and Wellsvile ranges of the Wasatch mountains.

I didn’t need the television westerns of the late 1940s and 1950s to get a glimpse of the real Old West.  We traveled its roots several times each year along this fault line between visits to the homes of my paternal and maternal grandparents located at each end.

The route was first blazed by bands of Northern Shoshoni and Bannock (a northern Paiute-speaking minority population among the Shoshone) Native Americans especially after the mid-1700s when they became the first of the northern tribes to adopt horses, a technology that enabled them to successfully pursue and harvest herds of Buffalo.

Following the expedition of Lewis and Clark, the first European American explorations of the north end of this fault line were conducted in the first decade of the 1800s by John Colter and then Andrew Henry for whom the North Fork of the Snake River of my origins is named.

By the 1820s when fur trappers such as the legendary Jim Bridger began to use full length of this route, the thinning herds of Buffalo were requiring members of these tribes to travel further and further north, always making sure to avoid the territory of the Blackfeet and Crow.

The Buffalo had all but been extinguished by the time three of my ancestors, two paternal (Shumways) and one maternal (Harper,) spent a day with Bridger (101 years to the day from the time of my birth) at the fort he had established (actually a small trading post with some out-building lodges) four years earlier on the Black Fork of the Green River in southwest Wyoming.

If my pioneer ancestors had headed northwest into Idaho, as Bridger first recommended, through the South Pass dividing the northern and central Rockies to settle in upper Cache Valley just below Soda Springs along the Oregon Trail, they would have passed by the future site of a small dam on the river feeding Bear Lake, later maintained by my maternal grandparents while I was growing up.

Instead, they initially headed southwest and deeper into what was then Mexican territory and through the Wasatch mountains into the 17-mile- wide, 25-mile-long Great Salt Lake Valley.  It may not have been as lush and fertile as Cache Valley but contrary to myth, Bridger knew the valley of the Great Salt Lake was anything but barren.

As two of my ancestors, who were among the first three to enter the valley, began to immediately plant crops, they would have looked out on high Rocky Mountain plateau, covered by not only sagebrush, a sign the soil was good, but tall grasses and trees and bushes lining the numerous streams that flowed from pine-forested mountains across the valley floor to the Jordan River.

But in 1860, just more than a dozen years after spending the day with Bridger and four years after settlers first entered the lower extreme of this 50-mile-long, 20-mile-wide valley, two other great-great-grandparents, Bowmans and Neeleys, pioneered the firsts settlements in upper Cache Valley after all, including Franklin, the first town in Idaho.

Centuries before, the fault line route of my youth had been blazed north from Cache Valley by Native Americans to the nook along the Henry’s Fork where another pass through the Tetons carried them into Jackson Hole and up into Yellowstone.

For the nearly 40 years before my ancestors settled upper Cache Valley, Mountain Men such as Bridger had further deepened this route of my youth, holding the very first Rendezvous’ during the mid-1820s at each end of this fault line.

Within a few short years of my ancestors pioneering the south end of the fault line, gold discoveries first in Idaho and then south-central Montana, meant the route north along the southeastern edge of Idaho was quickly converted into a stage line carrying carried passengers, supplies and gold to and from the east to fund the war intended to preserve the union.

However, at the time, this stretch of Idaho between the Montana gold fields and Utah border remained largely uninhabited.  Skirting, in part, what was known as Jim Bridger’s Bad Lands, the route was marauded by gangs euphemistically known as “road agents.”

These masked robbers on horseback often carried sawed-off shotguns and over just a two or three month period in the fall of 1863 they killed 102 people leading to a rise in vigilantes along the route and by the end of the decade regiments of U.S. Cavalry.

At the dawn of the 1860s, Native Americans along the route were becoming shell-shocked by the stream of migrant wagon trains crisscrossing their ancestral lands but more than that, they were starving as game was made more scarce and driven further and further away while grasslands used to raise horses was converted for cattle.

Any flare-ups were quickly contained as especially Mormon settlers attempted to peacefully co-exist, believing it was always easier to “feed than fight.”  One of my paternal great-great grandparents often served as an interpreter between settlers and Shoshoni bands as they resolved conflicts in upper Cache Valley.

However, as gold was discovered, interactions were convoluted by the bigoted treatment of Native Americans by those just passing through in search of riches including droves of pro-slavery secessionists as they confronted those seeking to create a homeland.

The Civil War back east had already recalled the “best and the brightest” talent from federal agencies in the west where events involving Native Americans were exaggerated by the desperate need for gold to finance the war effort.

As war broke out, another of my maternal great-great grandparents named Messersmith, left the Nevada goldfields where he had partnered with a Missouri boyhood friend, who would later become famous as the author Mark Twain, so he could enlist in a volunteer Union Army Cavalry Regiment formed in California and tasked with protecting the routes where gold was carried from that state through Nevada, Utah and Idaho to the east.

In the summer of 1863, as President Abraham Lincoln was delivering his unifying address following the turning-point Battle of Gettysburg, the United States was at war on two fronts, one against the slave-states of the south and another against Native Americans in the west.

The name of my Cavalry-trooper ancestor does not appear among those in a detachment that was surely witnessed by another ancestor as it rode past his Nashville farmstead north of Franklin, Idaho just five months before the Battle of Gettysburg.

A handful of miles further up the Bear River, these troopers conducted the first and largest of the massacres of Native Americans that would occur in the three decades before the declaration in 1890 indicating that the west was won after the Massacre at Wounded Knee.

A few decades later, when my maternal grandfather and his brothers and sisters formed a small horse-drawn wagon train behind my great-grandparents and headed north along this route to new homesteads near the Tetons, they passed that Nashville crossroads where my soon-to-be-grandmother lived.  They also solemnly rode past the site of the Massacre at Bear River.

During their 15 day-journey along that 200 mile fault line of my youth to their new home along the Tetons, they camped one night at Fort Hall, the reservation where Bannock and Shoshone tribe members retreated following a post-massacre agreement with the federal government brokered at Fort Bridger.

My then-19-year-old grandfather’s memoir notes that he felt uneasy that night as “Indians” gathered around their campfire, but with me as I was growing up, he was always in awe of Shoshone-Bannock prowess as fellow horsemen. 

With my daughter this summer, I traveled along portions of this ancestral fault line as we were returning from an annual lake-side family rendezvous along the northern Idaho border with Washington state.

We traveled Interstate 15 rather than the blue highways such as US 20 and US 30 that I traveled with my parents as we used to shuttle along the fault line between grandparents during holidays.  But the portion we did travel that afternoon took us through the Fort Hall Reservation, ironically now estimated to add more than a third of billion dollars each year to the economies along the route.

Two treaties in the aftermath of the Massacre at Bear River first created the Fort Hall Reservation but were never ratified, nor was peace along the route to the Montana gold fields guaranteed by President U.S. Grant’s 1868 and 1869 ratifications of treaties with some Bannock and Shoshone bands following a series of guerilla skirmishes known as the Snake War.

Native Americans who had once ranged over the part of Idaho roughly below where the Salmon River dissects the center of the state as well as eastern Oregon and northern Nevada and Utah and up into northwest Wyoming with occasional forays as far away as Mexico and Canada were now forced onto just 1.8 million acres at Fort Hall.

Encroachment meant the reservation was further distilled down to just 544,000 acres triangulated today by the towns of American Falls, Pocatello and Blackfoot.

A few months after Grant’s treaties and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, army surveyors passed through the Fort Hall Reservation along the fault-line route of my youth, accompanied by an official documentary photographer and joined later by a guest painter courtesy of the soon-to-be Northern Pacific Railroad.

At the northern end of the route, where I would be born nearly eight decades later, the team surveyed first the Idaho approaches to Yellowstone and then entering the northern gateway from Montana, what would result less than a year later in an act signed by Grant to create the world’s first national park accompanied by euphoria and hyperbole around its potential for tourism.

However, less than a decade after Bannocks and Shoshone were cornered onto the Fort Hall Reservation and a handful of years following the creation of Yellowstone National Park, news announcing the 1876 defeat and massacre of General Custer and his 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Big Horn was delayed by a telegraph malfunction in Bozeman, Montana so the dispatcher cut south down the fault-line route along the southeastern edge of Idaho.

At Eagle Rock (now called Idaho Falls) his purpose was thwarted again by an equipment malfunction so the rider continued south past Fort Hall and past the farmsteads of my ancestors to Franklin in the upper Cache Valley where he was finally able to announce the tragic battle’s outcome to the world.

Custer had been tasked with protecting survey and construction crews building the Northern Pacific, in part to open Yellowstone Park to tourism.  Ironically, less than a year after Custer’s last stand, during a 115-day inspection of the Pacific Northwest, Union Civil War hero and then-US General of the Army, William Tecumseh Sherman took a few days with his son to be tourists in Yellowstone Park, noting how vulnerable it was to desecration.

At the same time, inflamed when the government reneged on agreements and attempted to force them onto a still smaller reservation, a very peaceful, eloquent and reluctant Chief Joseph along with nearly 800 Nez Perce rebelled along the border of Oregon with Idaho.

Joined by a few bands of Palouse and Northern Shoshone allies, over a five month period, these descendants of tribesmen who 70 years earlier had guided Lewis and Clark through north-central Idaho, repeatedly clashed along the same route with US Cavalry as they fought their way 1400 miles across central Idaho and then crisscrossing down the Bitterroots where Idaho and Montana divide.

The warriors and their families passed just a few miles north of what would later be the ranch of my boyhood and into Yellowstone Park where some renegade members encountered 22 tourists, killing two, before turning north into Montana and finally surrendering just short of the Canadian border.

Halfway through the dramatic 1877 flight of the Nez Perce, fearful of starvation during a famine, Bannock and Shoshone bands at the Fort Hall Reservation on the southern end of my fault line route along the southeastern Idaho border, grew impatient with the failure of agents to deliver food and other treaty promises.

The warriors broke out of the reservation and waged a series of conflicts across southern Idaho along the Snake River plain and into eastern Oregon known as the Bannock War before surrendering again to Fort Hall.

The Snake River is named for Shoshoni not because that is the meaning of their tribal name but because of the undulating sign they would make whenever identifying themselves.

I was born a little more than 50 years after the so-called end of the American frontier which was declared 122 years ago in 1890.  Memories were still very fresh along that 200 mile north-south fault line of my youth as I came of age.

During my grandparents lifetime, tourists in Yellowstone were entertained with staged-attacks by “Indians” during during horse-drawn “observation” wagon tours of the Park’s wonders.

I felt a sense of reflection and remorse as my daughter and I traveled once again this past August along that fault line and past the Fort Hall Reservation.  If only we had fully incorporated Civil War general-then-President Grant’s policy for not only the reconstruction of the southern states but also the peaceful integration of Native Americans.

Based on the findings of the then-relatively-new science of social anthropology espoused to Grant by Lewis Henry Morgan, a Republican state senator and the Quaker, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, the enlightened policy was all too soon undermined by those seeking only revenge.

All of this is to say, that as a nation, not only are we still trying to resolve the issues at the heart of the Civil War, but we’ve never fully come to grips with what was done to Native Americans as the west was settled.

(As sources to help piece together this family history backgrounder, I have used  background and memoirs related to personal ancestors such as Harper, Shumway, Neeley, Messersmith, Bowman and White as well as personal memories.

I’ve also studied and gleaned perspective from The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre by Brigham D. Madsen and fascinating and highly-recommended new texts such as Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone by George Black and Atlas of Yellowstone by Marcus, Meacham, Rodman and Steingisser.)