Think Out Loud

New book rewrites a chapter of the Paiute tribe of Eastern Oregon

By Sage Van Wing (OPB)
Dec. 5, 2022 4:26 p.m.

Broadcast: Monday, Dec. 5

In the late 1800s the Paiutes of Eastern Oregon were forced to march from their reservation near Malheur Lake to the Yakima Reservation nearly 350 miles away through the deep winter snow. It was a brutal trial for a nation that had already been through so much. The events that led up to that march have long been mischaracterized in historic accounts, according to a new book by David Wilson, “Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country.” Wilson joins us to discuss the history he uncovered, along with Nancy Egan, the descendant of a chief of the Paiute tribe.

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The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In the late 1800s, the Paiutes of Eastern Oregon were forced on a frigid 350 mile march from their reservation near Malheur Lake to the Yakima Reservation. It was yet another brutal trial for a nation that had already endured many others. The events that led up to that march have long been mischaracterized in historic accounts, according to a new book by David Wilson. It’s called “Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country.” David Wilson joins us now. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.

David Wilson: Good to be with you, Dave. Thanks for having me.

Miller: When did you first get interested in writing about 19th century Paiute history?

Wilson: It was about eight years ago. I was in line for a series of surgeries and I don’t do well without having something to keep me busy. I was always a writer in my law practice, so I decided I would write a book. I love the John Day River because I’ve rafted it so many times and I thought I would write about that river. That turned out to be a dud of a topic, but it led me to an account of a conflict between Northern Paiutes and gold miners on that river. I thought I would write an adventure story about that, but what I wrote left me profoundly unmoved. It was at that point I realized that I wanted to write about something that mattered.

As I continued reading about the Paiutes, I learned about the unbelievable adversity they had been through. Every account seemed to blame the adversity on the Paiutes themselves. I began to question these accounts, and over a period of years, I pieced the Paiutes’ story together from tens of thousands of pages of National Archives. It turned out that the Paiutes’ hardships were not their fault. They were nearly all the result of deception and dishonesty by the public officials who were supposed to be watching out for them.

Miller: We’re going to get to that deception and the war that you really focus on in the book, but I was wondering if you could read from a section early on in the book. It gets at what a Paiute scout would potentially have noticed if he were watching white miners arriving on Paiute land, because it serves as a really clear portrait of the Indigenous connection to that land. Do you mind reading us this paragraph?

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Wilson: I’d be glad to.

“On the last leg of their journey, which was along the north fork of the John Day River, a Paiute scout clandestinely watching them would have known landmarks along the way that the miners were blind to: The spot where the scout’s son shot his first elk; then the marsh that was a dependable source of goose feathers for the fletching of the arrows in his quiver; the scree field used for burial where his grandparents lay; a dead-end dry tributary where deer and elk could be trapped and where he found the obsidian piece that became his knife; a pool with the best washing stones at low water; a camus meadow; a pool wherein high water a channel could be dug to divert and trap fish; a stand of alders where a hunter could conceal himself when stalking game at the favorite watering hole. As the lead miners rounded a bend and disappeared from view, the Paiute scout knew that they would next pass through a meadow where women gathered bitterroot, lomatium, camus, balsamroot, and yampah. And around the next bend, the shaded spot next to the river where the women peeled and washed the roots. Then a slope of diatomaceous earth for war paint. A corral with walls of sagebrush, rocks, and tree limbs, and a patch of milkweed used to make the twine for the net for the annual mudhen hunt. The miners might ride that same stretch another day without realizing it. The Paiute could close his eyes any day and picture every turn and feature.”

Miller: Your focus is on correcting the record of what became known as the Bannock War, but the Paiute had been involved in an earlier war in defense of their homeland with white settlers. What were the results of the Snake War for the Paiutes?

Wilson: Well, in a word, disaster. In the first years of that war the American military was preoccupied with the Civil War. Once the soldiers and officers from that war were liberated from fighting the south, they turned their years of live training on Native Americans. For the Paiutes it was a disaster, because General Crook was able to attack their winter camps at dawn while the Paiutes were sleeping. Typically 20 or 40 or even 60 Paiutes would die and maybe one or two soldiers. By 1868, the Paiutes had had enough and they called a halt and the war was done. But they were completely traumatized. The number of deaths they experienced as a percent of their population was many times the worst of the Civil War, which was the most devastating war for the U.S. in terms of percent of population affected; the Paiutes’ impact was multiple times that.

Miller: So that was the Snake War, which led the Paiutes to be forced to live on the Malheur Reservation. What were the actual causes for the war that eventually followed, the Bannock War, and how were those causes different from the story that eventually became printed as official history?

Wilson: That’s a good question and it’s a tough one, and I spent many years on it. The Bannock War as it was called – and that was the second of the two wars – was not fought in defense of land. The stories, all the histories of it, say that the Paiutes planned in advance with Bannock Indians from Idaho to start a general Indian uprising; that the Bannocks from Idaho crossed over to Steens Mountain in Paiute territory, joined the Paiutes there and headed north to recruit the Umatillas from near the Columbia River, and were defeated and that the war basically ended there. That’s what all the histories say. But it seemed fishy to me that the Paiutes would go to war again against the very soldiers who had slaughtered them so mercilessly just 10 years earlier. And it was also odd that they supposedly began this war by abandoning their reservation on June 5. But on that day, almost all the chiefs were gone, they were doing other things. So it appeared to me that this uprising from their departure from the reservation was spontaneous and not planned.

Eventually, I was able to show that what really happened is that Bannocks came and took all the Paiute’s arms, threatened to burn their houses and steal their stock and frightened them off their reservation. So there was a small faction of Paiutes who were in cahoots with the Bannocks, a faction led by Chief Oyets of about 90, but there were 540 Paiutes in all on that reservation. The vast majority of them were basically conscripted into this war against their will.

Miller: What were the repercussions of this false narrative for Paiutes for the century and more that followed?

Wilson: After the war, they were imprisoned at the Yakama Reservation. Among those imprisoned were one group that had spent the whole time [inaudible] forts, in visible sight of soldiers. These were not participants. They were imprisoned at Yakama, which was a miserable experience because the Yakama Indians looked down on the Paiutes and scorned them and were able to steal from them with impunity. That was the way the Indian agent kept control over the Paiutes. Eventually when that agent left, the Paiutes had been trying to escape for four years in groups up to 200, and the agent sent Yakama police to bring them back. But once that agent, James Wilbur retired, the Paiutes found that when they escaped nobody chased them anymore, and they scattered in different directions. The biggest group went to the Burns area hoping to rejoin the territory that was their native land. But their reservation had been dissolved and the whites had occupied the land.

The only place they could settle without the whites forcing them off was the Burns dump. So they lived there. All benefits were terminated except for the bottom 10% and the most elderly. Unlike virtually all other Native Americans, the government had no connection with them, and they were left to starve and without any significant medical care, diseases ran rampant. In 1934, Indian Affairs sent Henry Roe Cloud to investigate. Henry Roe Cloud was Ho-Chunk, born on the banks of the Missouri River. But by the time he did this investigation, he had two degrees from Yale. He was the first Native American to graduate from Yale. He had four years of experience in a prestigious commission which exposed him to…

Miller: David Wilson. I hate to do this, but we are out of time. But thank you very much for joining us. I really appreciate it. That’s David Wilson, the author of “Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country.”

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