Mount Howard and the other Oregon
Lines on maps and names of places change with time and events. But change the name of Mount Howard? Maybe. What did Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt call it?
Rich directs the Library at the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture in Joseph, OR, and writes a column for The Wallowa County Chieftain.
The noise about making Wallowa County and other parts of Northeast Oregon a part of Idaho—or some new Ida-Ore place—was in the news again. I didn’t read it, but people—especially new people—have asked.
I came to the Wallowa Country a little over 50 years ago. I came with the Oregon State University Extension Service, after five years with the Peace Corps in Turkey and Washington D.C. My Extension office was on the second floor of the courthouse in Enterprise, with big, sun and time-rippled windows that framed Mount Joseph and Mount Howard. New in town, I didn’t know the history. I didn’t know about the 1877 Nez Perce War, but I took pictures of the mountains named after an Indian Chief and a general from that long-ago war out my window and sent them to people still stuck in Washington D.C.
My boss was a Wyoming cowboy named Chuck. OSU Corvallis had sent me to him, so he had a few questions.
“Where’d you grow up?”
“Minnesota and California and…”
“How big a place?”
“Minnesota or California?”
“Where’d you start,” he scratched the side of his face hard; I’d soon learn that it was partially paralyzed from a wound in the big War where he’d done his last “backpacking.”
“Fosston, Minnesota and I imagine there were about 1500 people in the town.”
“You might make it,” Chuck said.
The contract was for one year, but I was already thinking of staying on much longer. Especially after Chuck and the Forest Ranger took me on a 10-hour tour of farms, ranches, logging sites, and old CCC-built ranger cabins and water troughs. I went back to the motel with wheat chaff and sticktights in my socks, and couldn’t wait for the next day.
At this point I didn’t know that I was in the “other Oregon,” rural and not urban, east-side and not west-side, conservative and not…
Wait a minute. This was 1971, and Oregon Governor Tom McCall, and Senators Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood were Republicans. Al Ullman, our District 2 Congressman, was a Democrat, as was State Senator Mike Thorne and the local sheriff, clerk, and county treasurer. In fact, in 1971 there were more registered Democrats in Wallowa County than there were Republicans.
Now I know that there are differences between wet-side and dry-side, rural and urban-suburban. I know that I was seeing the last of the Democrats who remembered FDR, and that the rise of the environmental movement and Ronald Reagan’s anti-government government would flip Oregon’s parties. Maybe there have long been two Oregons—or three or more—and the terms of difference shift with the times. I know now about the “State of Jefferson” in the other corner of Oregon, and have read our history of Indian removal and black exclusion. I’ve lived through the timber wars of the 1980s.
Now I know that I was part of a “rural migration” away from urban and suburban America in the 1970s. And I see the new one happening, see the 20 and 30 somethings and their children in the stores and on the soccer fields, eating their organic produce.
To get back to the Idaho question…When they ask, I tell them not to pay much attention to the Idaho talk. But I tell them about the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho, about the descendants of the proud Indians who lived here for millennia and are now scattered on that reservation and on the Colville in Washington and the Umatilla in Oregon.
I tell them about Ollokot and Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, Chief Joseph, and how their band of Wallowa Nez Perce and the other non-treaty bands of White Bird and Looking Glass fought the US Army across 1200 miles of the west and were stopped just short of sanctuary in Canada. How they were returned to exile at Lapwai and Colville—but not allowed to return to Oregon and the Wallowa. How Joseph made two trips here, the last in 1900, only to be rebuffed by the locals in his desire for a small piece of his homeland.
I tell them that a group of local people and Indians has acquired 320 acres near the town of Wallowa, built a dance arbor and a longhouse, and calls itself “Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland.”
A friend, the son of one of my first local mentors, himself a fourth or fifth generation Wallowa countian on both sides, wonders why we have a mountain named after the general that pursued Ollokot and,Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt. We looked it up. Mount Howard got its name in 1925, a time when the KKK was flying high in Oregon and white people with big eyes and ideas were developing the towns of Enterprise, Wallowa—and “Joseph.” He wants to change the name of the mountain.
Lines on maps and names of places change with time and events. But the argument that we can nudge the state lines of Oregon and Idaho to some current political concept is weak for any serious proponents—and how many squabbles about state lines across the rest of the lower 48 would there be?
But change the name of Mount Howard? Maybe. What did Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt call it?
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