Beneath the Red and Blue: The Wallowa Country Changes and Grows

With pandemic and politics in turmoil around us, this reconciliation with our Nez Perce past and community growth is hard, but it is a good thing.

My new wife and I moved from Washington D.C. to Wallowa County in July of 1971. By fall, we were invited to an evening get together with some of the teachers from Joseph. I was excited to hear one of the teachers lambast the American war in Vietnam. We’d found like minds, I thought. Later in the evening the conversation turned to gun control, and the same teacher made a speech about someone having to take the gun from his cold, dead hand.

The lesson was clear. I shouldn’t judge an attitude or conviction on one issue along the political lines I’d followed in Washington. Fifty years have shown more independent thinking from some of the smartest minds I’ve ever met, and the years have also shown the importance of community cooperation and growth.

My perch then was the Oregon State University Cooperative Extension Service office on the second floor of the courthouse in Enterprise. At the time, there were far more Democrats than Republicans in the courthouse and on the local voter rolls. Al Ulman, a Democrat from Baker (not yet Baker City), was our Congressman and the head of the powerful Congressional Ways and Means Committee. Mike Thorne, a Pendleton rancher and a Democrat, was our state senator. The county sheriff, clerk, and treasurer’s offices—all partisan offices at the time—where held by Democrats.

And yet things were shifting—two of three county commissioners were Republicans. One was an old man from an old family who did not like the way the county bought its tires; he had little interest in partisan politics. Another was a recently retired Army colonel, relatively new to the county. He had begun his local career selling real estate, and it pretty much ended when he had the county road department pave his driveway. My Extension Service boss, an Army war veteran and strong but independent Republican, said the old colonel thought he was still at Fort Somewhere where the troops had to do as they were told.

In the late 70s I ran for county commissioner in the Democratic primary. There were four of us; I lost, and the primary winner became commissioner. A rancher who would become an important friend asked me how old I was. “Thirty-six,” I said, and he told me to come back when I was 46.

That rancher had grown up on the Snake River, and fought in WW II. “No one,” he told me, “should have to see what I saw when I was 19.” He’d seen tanks explode and he’d seen Buchenwald. He’d become a pacifist, although he did not shout that out in public; there he argued for school budgets and good treatment of the land.

Once, when Republicans loosened the inheritance laws, we argued on the courthouse lawn. Another time, as we both checked our boxes at the post office, he said he’d been on a tour of the Snake River dams, and an Indian elder from Umatilla had been on the tour as well. “Rich,” my friend said, “salmon mean something different to Indians than they do to you and me.”

I never did run for county commissioner again, but for over thirty years I’ve been involved with the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland. Our non-profit group, with board members from the county, and from the Colville, Nez Perce, and Umatilla reservations, owns 320 acres near the town of Wallowa. There is a dance arbor, horse corrals, and a beautiful longhouse, where I sometimes go to Indian church.

In 1971, my introduction to the Nez Perce in Wallowa County had been Chief Joseph Days parades and listening to nighttime taunts and even some fights on Joseph’s Main Street. Now there are powwow drums in summer, and Nez Perce elders speak to our school children. A bronze sculpture on Main Street in Joseph—the only one of a dozen on our Art Street done by a Native artist—depicts an Indian woman in bronze walking towards a granite slab with the outline of the mountains carved at its top, and the figure of the woman carved from its middle. Doug Hyde, the Nez Perce artist, born in Hermiston, raised at Lapwai, calls it 'etweyé·wise—an archaic Nez Perce word meaning “I return from a hard journey.”  

At the sculpture’s installation in 2019, Tribal members from the three reservations in three states where most Nez Perce live today talked, sang, and drummed, and we—Indians, local people, and tourists from everywhere—ate salmon together. It had been 142 years since Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce band were forcibly removed from Oregon and the Wallowa Country.  With pandemic and politics in turmoil around us, this reconciliation with our Nez Perce past and community growth is hard, but it is a good thing.

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Rich directs the Library at the Joseph Center for Arts and Culture in Joseph, OR, and writes a column for the Wallowa County Chieftain.