The "Greater Idaho" is the latest episode in a series of map-manipulation gone awry
Testing old borders—or making new ones—is a trouble-making business.
The Greater Idaho bunch is at it again, looking for ways to shift Oregon’s borders to make things align with their political preferences. They call themselves “Move Oregon’s Border for a Greater Idaho.” Jack Harvel writes in The Source, an online publication out of Bend, that:
[i]f successful, this would transfer 18 Oregon counties and three partial counties to Idaho, which is about 76% of Oregon's landmass and 21% of its population… The border would follow the Deschutes River from the Washington border, circumnavigating Bend and moving west along the Klamath County lines.
Maps are being drawn and lobbyists are working county courthouses from Klamath to Wallowa. We’ve been here before, and the same sentiments have driven border-shifters in other states over the years. It was Idaho and the posse comitatus reaching into Oregon a few years ago, and the State of Jefferson, which fantasized a new state made out of the rugged and non-urban places in Northern California and Southern Oregon, before that. More recently the Bundy crowd has raised boundary disputes in Oregon and beyond. And upstate New Yorkers have expressed a desire to divorce New York City and form their own state.
But these guys are pikers compared to the diplomats who drew new maps of Europe and the Middle East at the Treaty of Versailles following World War I. The British drew lines around oil fields to form Iraq and peel off Kuwait. Arabs were left on the Turkish side of the borders, while Turks were left in Syria and Lebanon. The Kurds were left with nothing. Some argue that the seeds of WW II were planted at Versailles, and I’ve no doubt that the current mishmash in the Middle East owes much to those European mapmakers.
Back in Oregon, which was The Oregon Territory before it was a state; From 1818 until 1846, the British and the Americans “jointly occupied” the Territory, which included Oregon, Washington, Idaho, parts of Montana, and places now in Canada. During the Joint Occupancy, the Hudson’s Bay Company tried to trap all the beaver east and south of the Columbia, envisioning a border at the Big River. Without the pull of beaver, American trappers would give up on the place. The British also brought David Douglas to the Territory to inventory the plants, and built forts and trading posts in order to secure a demonstrable occupation of the Territory—which was actually occupied by scores of tribes and thousands of American Indians.
When the British-American dispute was kind of put to rest in 1846, we—Americans—began serious treaty-making with the Indians. And Indian Treaties, and Indian law to this day, are based in part on the Doctrine of Discovery, promulgated by a pope in 1493, which said that good Christian nations finding lands inhabited by non-Christians could claim them for their sovereigns. The sacred origins of national borders!
The treaty-makers in the inland Northwest were Joel Palmer, Indian agent in the Oregon Territory, and Isaac Stevens, agent, governor, and surveyor of a northern railway route in the Washington Territory. In 1855, in Walla Walla, Washington Territory, a crew of Palmer, Stevens, the artist Gustav Sohon, a few translators, and 46 armed military men met with some 5,000 Indians. One admires the chutzpah, but imagines the certain knowledge the Indians had of the long march of fur traders, settlers, miners, and adventurers across the continent, and hears the words of Palmer—white settlers would come “like grasshoppers on the plains.”
After a complicated set of negotiations, the treaty-makers drew lines reserving 7.5 million acres for the powerful Nez Perce—the only tribe to get its own reservation. The borders were supposed to keep whites out, but they didn’t, and when miners discovered gold in 1860, new negotiators drew new borders, diminishing Nez Perce lands by 90 percent—7.5 million acres became 750,000.
Chief Joseph and many other leaders didn’t sign this treaty, and, as there was no gold in the Wallowa, Joseph was untested until surveyors and then homesteaders arrived. For a time, he thought there might be enough land for all, but whites kept coming, and when whites in Salem feared Joseph’s Indians would join the Modocs in 1872, they offered him a reservation in the Wallowa. Between Oregon and Washington D.C., the borders on the executive order reservation “for the Roaming Nez Perce of the Wallowa Valley” got shifted, and the Modoc War had subsided. President Grant “rescinded” his previous offer.
It was a quick two-step to the Nez Perce War of 1877. Joseph and other non-treaty leaders led a fighting retreat over five months and 1200 miles, stopping cold and hungry, 40 miles short of escape across the Canadian border.
Testing old borders—or making new ones—is a trouble-making business.
Rich directs the Library at the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture in Joseph, OR, and writes a column for the Wallowa County Chieftain.
Photo credit: "Snow in Nez Perce Camp area" by Bear Paw Battlefield is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0