Ancient Places (12 page)

Other Kalispel pieces from Manning’s collection, such as a deer-hoof “spirit rattle used by medicine men,” touch the kind of proprietary knowledge that is considered unacceptable for outsiders to possess a century later. Cullooyah passes over these quickly, without comment, as if to emphasize the line between artifacts purchased in good faith and cultural trespass. All that can be said is that nothing on Manning’s list indicates he had any sense that it might have been wrong to broach matters of spiritual sensitivity and that his descriptions often attest to the full cooperation of the makers themselves.

Manning purchased several ancient stone instruments from Pend Oreille Valley farmers who had plowed them up in their fields. These he categorized with his geologist’s eye, providing a casual tour of the area’s complex outcrops and ancient tool quarries.

In the years that followed Manning’s Kalispel acquisitions, Masselow remained a familiar figure to both locals and visitors. When photographer Edward Curtis visited the Kalispel people around 1912, he took a dramatically posed portrait of Masselow wrapped in a blanket. The blind headman’s name appeared regularly in the Newport and Spokane newspapers. One article described how a
Jesuit priest traveled to the Pend Oreille Valley on Christmas Eve the year of Curtis’s photograph. The priest was rowed across the river from Cusick to meet Masselow and John Bigsmoke, the elderly chief’s appointed successor. During a midnight mass performed in honor of the season, Masselow, over eighty-five years old at the time, addressed the congregation in the Kalispel language.

Masselow was officially retired but still active two years later, when President Woodrow Wilson finally signed the
order creating a thin slice of reservation land along the Pend Oreille River that included the Kalispels’ traditional summer encampment. The canoe builder and leader was well into his nineties when he passed away in 1920. He had helped his people survive the fur trade, missionary, mining, and settlement eras, and he had steadfastly guided them to the return of their homeland sovereignty.

In September of 1906, William
Manning appeared before a judge in Colville to be sworn in as a naturalized US citizen. Two friends accompanied him to witness the proceeding. Age twenty-nine that year, he continued his bachelor lifestyle, maintaining a room at the Colville Hotel while traveling all around the region.

That fall, drawing on his technical mining experience,
Manning successfully ran for the joint position of Stevens County surveyor and engineer, and over the next two years he badgered the county commissioners into purchasing a new transit and other equipment so he could carry out his appointed duties. He laid out new bridges and condemned old ones. He recommended road improvements, often along tracks where large mining equipment needed to be moved. He created maps of roads and property ownership, and interacted with the public, attending local booster dinners to explain various projects on the county docket.

Manning also found time to pursue his hobby of collecting, and at some point may have decided to share his artifacts with the public. For one week during the summer of 1908,
“the display windows of the Stannus-Keller Hardware Company held an interesting and valuable display of Indian
curios,” announced the
Colville Examiner.
“Much attention was attracted from passers-by.”

After standing for reelection that fall, Manning mitigated a dispute between a railway company and the county commissioners over a road in the Pend Oreille Valley. He helped two college students create an eight-by-twelve-foot relief map of Stevens County for display at the fairgrounds. Then, much to the surprise of some of his Colville pals, he married a Spokane socialite and moved into her home on that city’s fashionable South Hill. By 1911 the newlywed sported a new business title to boot: an advertisement offering his services identified him as “U. S. Deputy Mineral Surveyor for Washington and Idaho” and noted that he could be reached through phone numbers in both Colville and Spokane.

Throughout this period, Manning’s duties as county surveyor required him to spend time on the Spokane Indian Reservation, where he developed a relationship with William Three Mountains the Younger. For a third time, the ambitious mining engineer came to know one of the seminal figures of a tribe involved in serious questions of territory, removal, and cultural survival.

The Three Mountains name predates the early missionary era among the Spokane people. Spokane elder Pauline Flett explains that the Spokane language renders it as
Chah-tle-hsote
(“three-bare peaks-snag”), which evokes the story of an epic journey.
“
Tle
means ‘mountain,’ ” Flett says. “We remember
hsote,
‘a forest of bare trees,’ maybe ‘a big burn,’ maybe ‘a storm of some kind.’ The original Three Mountains crossed through that bare forest three times going over the mountain. Probably to the coast, we think, because in those days when we said ‘the
mountain,’ we meant the Cascade mountains, and crossing over them meant going to the coast.”

As a teenager, around 1839, William Three Mountains the Elder lived with the family of Reverend Elkanah Walker at Tshimikain Mission. The lad left the mission after two years, but as the century wore on, many of his kin were baptized as Protestants. In time, Three Mountains assumed the leadership of a band of Upper Spokanes who spent a good part of the year at the mouth of Latah Creek (also called Hangman Creek), just downstream from Spokane Falls. William Three Mountains the Younger was born there about 1864. He grew into a tall man,
“always a head above everyone else” at gatherings.

After a bustling city began to form around the falls in the late 1870s, the elder Three Mountains led his band of Upper Spokanes to a new location on Deep Creek, south of the Spokane River.
Blending traditional and modern practices, the people developed a successful agricultural colony there. Three Mountains the Elder continued to play a chief’s role in tribal matters of all descriptions until he was killed while trying to mediate a dispute in 1883. His son, still a young man at that time, remained with the Deep Creek colony. He married a tribal woman known as Mattie and continued to farm. Early white settlers in the area remembered the couple well.

One white family who built a log cabin close to a well-used tribal trail that wound through the plains south of the Spokane River grew used to Indians dropping by their place, including a man they called Chief William or Three Mountains William.
“He told father and mother to tell Indians they were friends of Chief William’s if any Indians ever bothered them,” one of the daughters later recalled. She and her siblings often wore moccasins fashioned by William’s wife, Mattie.

In 1888, under pressure from the increasing numbers of homesteaders moving into the area, the Deep Creek colony relocated to an area called West End, north of the river on the established Spokane Reservation. Three Mountains the Younger and Mattie developed a farm near the Detillion Bridge, eight miles upstream from the mouth of the Spokane River. “There was a
distinctive rock in the river there—we called it Detillion Rock,” recalls Pauline Flett, “with the old A-frame Presbyterian church nearby. William Three Mountains’s house was just a stone’s throw from Detillion Rock.” In 1900, the younger Three Mountains was elected as chief of the band his father had led. Like his father, William took active and sometimes controversial stands according to his beliefs. He maintained the respect of both the Indian and white communities, and when he was in his early forties, he accepted a call to serve as a tribal judge.

In 1907 and again around 1912, the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ local agent, Captain John Webster, assessed Three Mountains the Younger’s work as a judge:
“Intelligent, serious, dignified and straight-forward, with courage and integrity,” wrote Webster. “By temperament an old time Indian who recognizes … the new conditions thrust upon his people … he brings to his duties intelligent observation, keen analysis of evidence and strict impartiality.”

In carrying out his job as county surveyor, Manning would have met the tall chief soon enough. One of the maps Manning crafted in the course of his duties plotted the lands within the Spokane Indian Reservation, including the location and title-holders for all the original allotments. Census records show that in 1905, Mattie Three Mountains was living with her husband, William, near the proposed road between Detillion Bridge and the Turk Mine, which lay inside reservation boundaries.
Manning surveyed this road three years later, and in 1911,
Mattie affixed her thumbprint to an agreement giving consent for a new wagon road twenty feet wide to open along the south boundary of her allotment. In return, an existing wagon road that crossed the northwestern corner of that allotment would be closed.

At some point during these years, Manning purchased a pair of beaded moccasins from Mattie and entered them into his collection records as item number eighty-eight.

Mattie had applied the utmost care to those shoes, and the top of each one bears a red rose on a blue panel sewn over with tiny seed beads. Even Manning would have admitted that such showpieces could not qualify as Mattie’s everyday footwear.

The collector also purchased at least two other items from the Three Mountains family. The first was an extraordinary flat-twined root storage bag, eighteen by twenty-five inches in size, woven from native Indian hemp cordage and so well used that the traditional geometric pattern worked into the outer wrap had almost completely faded away. The second was a

Ironwood, the tribe’s familiar name for a shrub white settlers called ocean spray, creamwood, or arrowwood (
Holodiscus discolor
), was well-known for being tough enough to serve as stock for digging sticks or bows. Once again, Manning’s description of an item in his collection perfectly matches a detail in one of Paul Kane’s field watercolors from 1847—in this case, Kane’s portrait of a Spokane hunter he calls Tum-se-no-ho, or The Man without Blood. Tum-se-no-ho holds a beautifully fashioned, cupid-curled strung bow in his massive right hand. The short bow barely touches the ground from his waist, and a second companion bow pokes out of a quiver draped across his back. In a separate watercolor, Kane sketched details of a similar quiver trimmed with bear fur and grouse feathers. Both the bow in Tum-se-no-ho’s hand and the one in the quiver look perfectly suited to the open pine woodlands and basalt scablands where the Spokanes hunted for such game.

While Manning appreciated traditional designs and craftwork, he was not shy about mixing in ideas from his own culture. As an active member of the Spokane Shriners club, he commissioned a Spokane woman to weave the Shriners emblem of a crescent moon and star hanging from a scimitar onto one side of a traditional flat bag. Manning did not identify the name of this craftswoman, but he did describe the bag.

The world of Shriners and road surveys continued to encroach on William and Mattie Three Mountains, even on their remote corner of the Spokane Reservation. In the summer of 1911, when William strenuously objected to agency attempts to erect a sawmill on the West End, agent John Webster seemed to understand his concern, reporting that
“like most of the old full bloods he is adverse to the introduction of certain devices of the white man on the reservation—such as railroads, sawmills, etc.” The following year, when Webster proposed a West End community center based around athletic endeavors,
Three Mountains balked again, convinced that the club atmosphere would promote more drinking, which he saw as the bane of reservation life. “He is a ‘teetotaler,’ ” wrote Webster, “has a fine ranch he takes excellent care of and during the Fall, after his crops are harvested, he looks for work among white people and can be found busily engaged in the orchards picking fruit, or close to ground digging potatoes.”

In 1916, Three Mountains led a council meeting near Detillion Bridge calling for action on the nondelivery of government funds that had been earmarked for the tribe. Over the next two decades he remained a constant presence in gatherings of Spokane and Plateau leaders as they discussed matters of importance to their people. In photographs of these meetings, he always cuts a fine figure, usually wearing a dark shirt and distinctive neckerchief. His head always rises above the rest of the crowd.

William Three Mountains the Younger died at his home near Detillion Bridge in January of 1937. He was survived by his widow, Mattie, and one son. Mattie lived in the house until the backup of Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1941, forced her to move higher up on the hillside. Today, although the old bridge is drowned beneath fifty feet of water, the top part of Detillion Rock still rises above Lake Roosevelt, and a campground on the reservation side recalls the Three Mountains name.