History
The History of Fire and the Human Use of Fire in the Northern Rockies

History
The History of Fire and the Human Use of Fire in the Northern Rockies

History
The History of Fire in the Northern Rockies

At first glance, the Swan Massacre may not appear to have a direct relevance to the history of fire in western Montana, but in fact it is directly tied to that history. The long series of events that led to the Swan Massacre reveals much about how and why the shape of the region’s forests changed dramatically long before the Great Fires of 1910.


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Camille Paul (Ɫkkam̓el), second from left, was one of four tribal members shot and killed in the 1908 Swan Massacre.

In the fall of 1908, just east of the Flathead Reservation in the remote Swan Valley, a tragedy occurred that to this day is spoken of by Salish and Pend d’Oreille elders only with great reticence and care. i On the morning of October 18, a Montana state game warden and a deputized citizen burst into the camp of a Pend d’Oreille family hunting party and shot to death four of its members — two middle-aged men, an elderly man, and a fourteen-year-old boy. The warden himself was then killed by one of the women as he attempted to reload and kill them as well.

The Swan Massacre was, in many respects, the violent culmination of decades of conflict between Salish-Pend d’Oreille people and non-Indian officials and citizens over tribal use of off-reservation lands. The Hellgate Treaty of 1855 guaranteed that the tribes would be able to continue to utilize “open and unclaimed land” across their vast aboriginal territories, and for tribal people, the exercise of those rights was both a practical economic necessity and a matter of cultural survival. Most Salish and Pend d’Oreille people still depended on game, fish, roots, and berries for most of their food, and many also felt strongly that the continued practice of those ways was an essential part of who they were, of how they were supposed to live, of the culture they wanted to pass on to future generations. For many tribal people, that way of life included not only hunting, fishing, and gathering, but also the traditional use of fire.

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John Peter Paul (1909-2001) whose father was the first victim at the Swan Massacre. AT the time of the massacre, John was in the womb his mother, Clarice Paul, who shot the warden in self-defense. Photo courtesy Thompson Smith, 1998.

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L to R, Stequeneh or Michael Thomas, Atwen Scwi, and Antoine Stasso, Pasoo. Atwen Scwi was shot and killed at the Swan Massacre. This photo was taken about 1905 at a celebration east of St. Ignatius.

During the years of conflict leading up to the Swan Massacre, tribal people insisted that the promises of 1855 should be honored, while many non-Indians increasingly dismissed or minimized the treaty as outdated or in some way irrelevant to the future they envisioned for the new state of Montana. With each succeeding decade after 1855, this fundamental tension increased, from the gold rush of the 1860s to nascent urban and agricultural operations of the 1870s to the industrial boom of the 1880s. As we have seen in previous segments of this fire history, Indian people, and Indian ways of life, were pushed more decisively to the margins of Montana society after the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883 and the virtual annihilation of the wild bison herds. Due to settlement, industrial development, and overhunting, Salish and Pend d’Oreille people found there were fewer places still available to them for traditional cultural and subsistence uses.

At the same time, government officials created many new laws aimed at regulating and controlling hunting by both non-Indians and tribal people. There was little official enforcement until 1889, when the first Montana state legislature authorized counties to appoint their own game wardens. In 1895, the Governor signed into law an act creating the first Montana Fish and Game Board. Then, in 1901, the legislature authorized the Governor to appoint the first state game wardens; eight deputies were put in uniform in 1901, and seven more by 1910. In 1905, the state began requiring resident Montana hunters to buy game licenses, at a cost of $1 per family.

The state hunting laws applied to all Montanans, but they were coupled with statutes and policy positions targeting Indian people in particular. The 1902 Montana Legislature, for example, passed a law prohibiting Indians from leaving their reservations with arms and ammunition. Now, in areas where Salish and Pend d'Oreille people had always hunted, a new kind of policeman began trying to exercise control over one of the few facets of tribal life that, until this time, had remained free and little changed from the ways of the ancestors. Tribal hunters and fire-keepers had always been honored and respected for their ability to harvest game and to burn the woods and prairies in ways that helped ensure the future productivity of the land. Now, suddenly, non-Indian authorities were arresting them as “criminals” for those same actions, which they now described as “depredations.” ii Tribal elders such as Pete Beaverhead have long commented on how warriors of that time found themselves suddenly regarded as pariahs by the dominant society for doing the same things that had earned them honor within the tribal community.

The federal government was also intent on trying to confine Indians to reservations — and in making the argument, they referred not only to tribal hunting, but also to tribal use of fire. In 1903, J.H. Fimple, the Acting Secretary of the General Land Office, recounted the government’s efforts over the previous few years in trying to keep Indian people out of the newly established national forests:

“On November 18, 1898, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs advised the agents of these [Salish and Pend d’Oreille] and other Indians in Montana that it was his desire that the Indians ‘refrain altogether from entering forest reservations for the purpose of hunting at any season of the year’, and that they be advised of the rules and laws and be cautioned as to fires. On June 22, 1899, their [the agents’] attention was again called to the matter [by the Commis-sioner], and they were directed to again call the Indians together to advise them to ‘refrain from entering the said reserves and wantonly killing game and causing forest fires’. The question is not, therefore, a new one to the Indians.” iii

The letter of June 1899, in fact, was a response to complaints from Forest Superintendents that Indian people were “roaming over the Forest reservations in Montana and Idaho.” The Commissioner responded by impressing upon U.S. Indian agents the need to enforce “the law positively prohibiting the causing of forest fires on the public domain, which includes Forest Reservations.”iv In a 1903 letter to William Smead, the US Indian Agent for the Flathead Reservation, the Commis-sioner of Indian Affairs asserted that Indians have “no right whatever to hunt or pasture their stock” in ways that might violate state regulations, and told Smead to order tribal members to “refrain from causing forest fires and killing large amounts of game.”v

Indian families who persisted in living by the traditional ways and exercising their treaty rights to hunt off reservation often encountered a deeply antagonistic white community. In 1885, U.S. Indian Agent Peter Ronan received a typical letter from a non-Indian in the Bull River area north of Noxon, who threatened to “put 2 Winchester Rifels and 2 .45 Armey Revolvos to work at them and i will make Short Work of uncle Sams pets -- i have plenty of firearms and plenty amonnishion and i wil Shote an indian as Soon as i would a Wolf or kiotey....take my Word for it it wil Cost the goverment something for lumber to box them up With after We get through With them or the Wolvs wil have a feast for a couple of months to Come.” vi

Ronan dismissed the letter as an idle threat, but tribal people too often saw those threats realized -- and too often with impunity. In July 1888, for example, four members of a family party from the Flathead Reservation area, including the nephew of the Pend d’Oreille head chief, were murdered during a hunting trip in the Sun River area. Though there was ample evidence implicating some nearby prospectors, the case was apparently never pursued. vii Tribal elders have spoken repeatedly of how non-Indian violations of tribal rights and tribal people were rarely prosecuted during that time, while the slightest infraction by tribal people was often met with harsh punishment.

In spite of this climate of violent hostility, many Salish and Pend d’Oreille people continued to utilize their traditional hunting grounds, even in places far east of the mountains, and long after the extermination of the buffalo. Tribal people hung on to their off-reservation hunting territories even more tenaciously in places closer to the Flathead Reservation, such as the Seeley Lake area and the Swan Valley, which adjoin the reservation on the east. Indeed, some elders said that as the treaty was originally interpreted to tribal leaders during the 1855 negotiations, the Seeley-Swan was supposed to be included within the reservation’s boundary; the eastern boundary, in that view, should not have been the crest of the Mission Range, but rather the Swan Range. Consequently, tribal people were particularly intent on asserting their right to hunt, fish, gather plants, and camp in this particular area.
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Tribal elder Feline McDonald picking huckleberries at the Buckhorn area, Kootenai National Forest. Photo by Thompson Smith 1996.

Salish and Pend d’Oreille people were also particularly intent on maintaining their traditional use of fire in the Swan Valley, in spite of intensifying efforts by state and federal officers to suppress that use. By 1900, the east side of the Mission Mountains was part of the newly estab-lished Lewis and Clark Forest Reserve; the west side, as today, was part of the reservation. Tribal people were apparently burning both sides of the range, taking care of the whole ecosystem as they always had, with little regard for political boundaries. On July 23, 1900, the Forest Superintendent, J.B. Collins, wrote to Flathead Agent Smead, saying that the Ronan postmistress had informed him that “the fire was set out by Indians who were picking huckleberries,” and he asked Smead to “instruct some of your Indians to watch this fire or fires, and to use every means to put same out.” Of course, the berry-pickers could well have been the intentionally burning the brush to revitalize their productivity, but this was of no concern to the foresters. Fire was destructive, and it had to be stopped.

The next day, July 24, Collins wrote to Smead with greater urgency:

“Forest Supervisor Moser wires me from Kalispell that some of your Indians are in the Swan Lake country slaughtering game and setting fire to the country, twenty[-]five fires have been set by them, as fast as our force of Rangers and others extinguish the fires the Indians set others. Will you kindly have your police see about this matter at once.”

On July 25, Collins wrote yet again to Smead, thanking him for promising to try to extinguish the fires within the reservation. But in a chilling foreshadowing of the Swan Massacre eight years later, Collins also announced that the full force of the law -- “every means necessary” -- would be brought down upon those who continued to hunt in the traditional way, and to burn the land:

“The setting out of fires by Indians in the different Forest Reserves for the purpose of driving the game out, must be stopped, and our force of Forest Rangers are instructed to use every means in their power to see that the law is obeyed by the Indians as well as by the white man. I earnestly ask your cooperation to see that the laws are upheld, and the guilty ones who oppose them, are punished.” viii

Collins simultaneously appealed to the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington, and their response to Smead was sent immediately by both telegram and telephone: “Take action immediately to have [Indians] returned to reservation.” In a letter sent the same day, they instructed Smead to “take prompt and energetic action in putting a stop to this state of affairs.” ix

The increasingly rigid stances of the state and federal governments against tribal practices were in part a response to private interests, which were demanding that the officers protect the Swan Valley timber that they now viewed as a commodity. Through the railroad land grants allocated by Congress, the Northern Pacific Railroad owned thousands of acres in the Swan Valley, and they were logging massive quantities of timber in those early years of the twentieth century. The Helena Semi-Weekly Herald reported on September 25th, 1900 that George F. Henry of the Northern Pacific land department had returned from “examining land” in “what is called the Swan lake country.” Henry was traveling with, among others, “B.P. Holland, who is one of the forest service rangers, as well as [a] deputy game warden,” who were “at the same time looking after the parties suspected of starting fires that raged in the latter part of July and the early part of August.” Henry claimed that “Flathead Indians...started the fires on the Lewis and Clarke forest reservation.” x

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Blackfoot River log drive. Photo circa 1908, by Morton J. Elrod, Elrod Collection, K. Ross Toole Archives, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, University of Montana, Missoula.

The Henry-Holland party came upon a group of “about 20 Indians,” who apparently were in no mood to show obeisance to the white men in the middle of their ancient hunting grounds. The tribal people, Henry said, were in fact “very saucy” — and when the white men tried to arrest them, they “showed fight, pointing their cocked rifles at the party.” Later, the wardens did briefly capture one of the “miscreants,” as the reporter described the tribal people, but he quickly escaped, “mounted his pony and fled up the Crook creek divide.” This was almost certainly the Crow Creek divide, one of the three most important passes for Indian people across the Mission Mountains. The reporter wrote that when the man “got to the top of the divide the party saw him deliberately start half a dozen fires. They gave chase but could not apprehend him.”

The white men next came upon a “small party of Indians,” whom they also tried to bring to heel. But again the ranger, railroad men, and game wardens were apparently repelled when “one squaw drew a knife and made a savage lunge at one of the party.” With little indication of irony, Henry remarked, “It is a burning shame the way these Indians acted.” He called on “the government to punish to the fullest extent the Flathead Indians that started the fires.”

Neither this article nor most of the other records from this time period, however, provide reliable detailed informa-tion about either the fires themselves or the tribal groups who were supposedly setting them. Each of these non-Indian observers held a rigid opposition to fire, a hostility to Indian people, and a host of assumptions about what Indians were doing and why; and consequently, they also shared a disinterest in more rigorous inquiry. At one point in the article, the reporter has Henry asserting that “four or five sections of valuable timber, pine, fir and tamarack, at least 16,000,000 feet, must have been destroyed;” but just a sentence or two later, he says “If it had not been for the rain there would have been a bad loss of timber.” Even Agent Smead — certainly no advocate of treaty rights and a dedicated opponent of both fire and traditional native culture — wrote that the alarms raised by Forest Super-intendent Collins “have been very much exaggerated.”xi There is little sense of how big the fires were, what kinds of brush or trees were burned and where, or how many fires and which ones were set by Indian people (as opposed to fires set by non-Indians — intentionally or accidentally — or fires resulting from lightning). Neither can we tell with any degree of certainty why tribal people were setting whichever fires they did set. Some of the documents say “Indians” were burning the timber to flush game out, but there seems to be no first-hand observation of this practice; according to the Helena Herald reporter, Henry said he “saw one Indian set fire to timber and saw others skinning and preserving meat.... of 75 deer and two elk.” All we really seem to know for sure is that tribal parties were in those areas hunting, and that there were fires burning through extensive areas. It seems likely that Indian people were setting at least some of the fires, but it is impossible to reach more specific conclusions on the basis of these documents.

The incident shows clearly the fierce determination of tribal people to maintain both their treaty rights and their traditional ways — and in particular their traditional use of fire — even at the considerable risk of openly defying non-Indian authorities. Agent Smead, in reply to the admonishing letters from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, reported that he found “great difficulty in trying to prevent the Indians from peacably leaving the reservation, as their treaty of 1855 (12 Stats., 975), gives them a right to leave the reservation at will.” xii The persistence of tribal people in hunting, and also the frequency of harrowing run-ins with law enforcement officers, is something reflected in the stories we have been told by numerous elders. Harriet Whitworth and Felicite McDonald, for example, have told of first-hand experiences when they were small girls and their family hunting camps were visited — and sometimes threatened — by wardens. This is a narrative of great prominence in tribal oral tradition from the 1880s until at least the 1940s, when the legal right of tribal hunters was more firmly established in the courts.

Yet while tribal people often refused to bow and scrape before bullying authorities, they also sought to sidestep unnecessary conflict. Many tribal members in the earliest years of the twentieth century took to buying hunting permits just to avoid trouble; the leaders of the ill-fated Pend d’Oreille hunting party in the fall of 1908, Camille Paul and Atwen Scwi, had purchased state licenses just before leaving for the Swan Valley. Scwi’s son, Plaswe, also obtained a license. And Martin Yellow Mountain, an elder who went along to help in camp, went to great lengths to obtain a handwritten note from the U.S. Indian agent simply permitting him to accompany the group on an off-reservation hunting trip.

Tribal people felt that in return, the wardens should not bother them for living by the old ways, in the land of their ancestors, practicing ways guaranteed to them by the treaty that they and the United States had agreed to as sovereign nations. And indeed, some, but not all, of the wardens seemed to accept this arrangement. For example, the officer who succeeded Peyton in the Swan district, Harry Morgan, was known as a friend of the Salish people, who called him ¢molqn. He seemed to realize that the people would hunt in a sustainable way, taking no more than they needed. Perhaps he even realized there were beneficial effects from the tribal people’s ways of burning the meadows and undergrowth. On numerous occasions when he ran across family hunting parties, Morgan refused to strictly enforce game laws. He seemed to understand that peaceful coexistence between such deeply differing cultures required a degree of flexibility. But too many other officers, including the warden in charge of the Swan in 1908, Charles Peyton, pursued their work with a far harsher approach — one that led inexorably toward outright bloodshed.

In many ways, Peyton and similar law officers were reflec-tions of wider public sentiment that was both ignorant of and antagonistic toward traditional native ways of life, in-cluding both hunting and the use of fire. Peyton was based in the community of Ovando, some 40 miles southeast of the Swan Valley. It is a place known to Salish and Pend d’Oreille people as Sntntnmsqa — Place Where You Rein Back Your Horse — and it lies near the very center of their aboriginal territories, along one of the most an-cient and important of the trails that connected the buffalo country with the valleys west of the mountains. In Sep-tember 1902, two ranchers named Shoup and Howard from the Monture Creek area near Ovando wrote to Flathead Agent Smead. The ranchers complained that

For years the Indians of your reservation have been traveling through the country poaching and trespassing on others rights, such as going through bars and gates and leaving them open and knocking down fences, letting stock out and doing a great amount of damage, and the request has been repeatedly made that you keep them where they belong[.]

Shoup and Howard told Smead that “an Indian commonly called ‘Poker Jim’ ” (Pokerjim is a prominent Salish family name), accompanied by his son, had appeared at the Shoup house the night before, apparently drunk, “and demanded something to eat in a very insolent and insulting manner.” As in the story from the Helena Herald two years before, and as in the accounts of the Swan Massacre six years later, the lack of deference by the native people seems particularly galling to the non-Indians. Shoup and Howard say “we drove him away” — presumably with some show of force. According to Shoup and Howard, Pokerjim had knocked down a fence and left two gates open, allowing cattle to get out. These grave crimes were then compounded with what seemed to Shoup and Howard a capital offense — using fire:

Not being satisfied with this he went about _ of a mile from the house and set a big dead pine tree afire, which stood in a spot among bunch grass about 10 or 12 inches high and went off and left it.

Again, the Shoup-Howard account echoes the Helena Herald from 1900: “All that saved the fire from burning us out and starting a fire that would burn over sections and sections of timber and perhaps reach numerous settlers was the fact that we discovered it in time and watched it until the tree burned off and fell to the ground when we stopped it.” This scenario appears repeatedly in accounts of Indian fires: the flames miraculously do minimal damage, but only by the sudden appearance of rain sent by God, or by the fortunate action of some heroic non-Indian. In these portrayals of native burning, we can hear echoes of the early observations by missionaries, who were convinced that Indian people were simply naive children of the forest, unaware of the danger they were in, and always on the brink of outright starvation until they were saved — always at the last desperate moment — by divine Providence. Few non-Indian accounts of native modes of subsistence seem to consider that Indian people actually knew what they were doing, that there might be some method to a way of life that had sustained these communities for such a very long time, or that the magnificent country taken over by non-Indians was itself the product of millennia of native knowledge and care.

In any case, it seems clear that such considerations were far from the minds of Shoup and Howard in 1902. They simply wanted the government “to keep these Indians where they belong...and if you don’t do it we have a law in Montana that allows a person in the possession of real or personal property to use force to protect it from trespass and if it becomes necessary to make some good Indians out of your bad ones the law will allow it.” As in so many other letters about off-reservation Indians written to government officials by the citizens of western Montana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this one ended with a threat:

“Now this will be our last request to you about this matter, and if any more of them show up on Monture Creek they will do so at their own peril.” xiii

Shoup and Howard sent a copy of their letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, with the additional coda that “We have stood these Indians now as long as we intend to, and others are of the same opinion. Can you not unite with the agent to keep these Indians on their reservation and save future trouble?”

It was into this environment, and this already established dynamic of repression and resistance, that the Pend d’Oreille family hunting party ventured in the early fall of 1908, as they began their hunting trip to the Swan Valley. In addition to Camille Paul (´kka»e¶), 46 years old, Atwen Scwà (also spelled Stuwee, Stousee, or Stutsee), age 49, Plaswñ (Pellasoway or Frank Scwi, age 13 or 14), and Martin Yellow Mountain (MaltÛ îa¶àò Ìöå), about 70 or 80 years old, the party also consisted of Scwà’s wife, Mary Èapa¶, the Scwà’s six-year old daughter, Little Mary (´malà), Paul’s wife Klolà (Clarice Paul, aged 36, who was six months pregnant at the time), Yellow Mountain’s elderly wife, Mary or Malà SaòpÇnmÛ, who was also the aunt of Camille Paul.

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Mary Scwi, Joe Bigsam and Ellen Bigsam, c. 1922. Courtesy Doug Allard private collection.

The party camped and hunted at several traditional places before coming to a camp called Ep¸ Tàmu (It Has Skunk Cabbage) near the upper Swan River. For several days, they were harassed and threatened by Peyton, who — like the NPRR’s Henry, like Shoup and Howard of Monture Creek — became increasingly enraged at the party's refusal to cower in his presence. Finally, the Pend d’Oreille party did agree to leave, and their horses were all packed and ready to go early on the morning of October 18. But Peyton burst into the camp with a deputized civilian, Herman Rudolph, and after a brief, tense moment, began shooting. Peyton and Rudolph killed Little Camille, Atwen Scwà, the boy Plaswñ, and old man Yellow Mountain. The 34-year-old warden was in return injured by Plaswñ and finally killed by the pregnant Klolà, as she tried to prevent him from killing the other women in the party. She narrowly escaped being shot down by Rudolph.xiv

There had been years of tense encounters, but never anything like this. In the wake of the Swan Massacre, tribal people were forced to wonder if other wardens would now act more like Peyton, and maybe shoot them for doing nothing more than gathering their winter meat, or perhaps for taking care of the land with fire, as their ancestors had always done before them. As Louie Adams has said, “in some cases, [in the view of] the dominant society, the Indian's life was pretty cheap, you know. He could kill an Indian and not get in trouble for it. So naturally they didn't want to cause any ripples, or whatever, didn't want to go out and do things like such as burn a place off. They might get in trouble. Just like the Swan thing, you know. That wasn't so much — Indians were always doing what they have done for thousands of years, hunting, yet they were killed over that and nobody got in trouble. So from these kinds of things it didn't take much for Indians not to do something, because they were afraid.”

And indeed, after 1908 more families did stop making their old hunting trips. But others felt that if they abandoned their hunting rights, it would be surrendering to the injustice of these killings. So many did continue to hunt — some with a conscious sense of defiance. The elders tell how some people explicitly saw the enforcement of the state laws as an infringement of the Hellgate Treaty's guarantees of hunting rights, and even of the Tribe's general rights as a sovereign nation. Indeed, when Superintendent Frederick Morgan wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs regarding the Swan Massacre in March 1909, he said, “Something should be done [to find and prosecute Herman Rudolph], as the Indians as a whole are very much wrought up over the affair, since they understand that the Stevens' treaty gives them a right to hunt off the reservation without securing a hunting license.”xv On a number of occasions, traditional tribal people like Eneas Granjo made a point of defying what they saw as unjust laws. Non-Indian friend Bob Manchester remembered how Granjo, on his way home from hunts in the Seeley-Swan area in the 1930s and 1940s, enjoyed hauling his deer right through the middle of Missoula in the back of an open pickup truck, in effect daring anyone to arrest him.

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Tribal pack string in the Mission Mountains, circa 1930. Courtesy Doug Allard Collection.

In later years, repeated court rulings upheld the position asserted by Granjo and other tribal members: the rights reserved by the Tribes in the treaty with the Federal Government did indeed guarantee their right to hunt, fish, and gather foods and other materials throughout unclaimed lands in the entire aboriginal territory, without permission or licensure from the state. And so, from the mid-twentieth century on, tribal members have been free to hunt in those areas without licenses.

Yet though tribal people continued to hunt, they did not, by and large, continue to burn the land. As volatile an issue as hunting was and still is, the issue of fire was hotter still. Most of the borings of ancient trees around western Montana — even in remote areas such as the Bob Marshall Wilderness — show a drop off in the frequency of fire in the twentieth century. The end of Indian fires in western Montana can be attributed to many things — increased settlement, increased fire suppression, increased anti-fire propaganda, even among younger Indian people. But the fact remains that while traditional hunting in some form survived the massive cultural and ecological shifts of the past century, the traditional use of fire did not. Even the memory of that use of fire was erased to a far greater extent from the oral tradition than were the memories of traditional but no longer practiced modes of hunting.xvi

The Swan Massacre and the suppression of Indian burnings in western Montana were both part of a far broader systemic transformation of the region, of its economy and culture and ecology. It was a transformation that was accomplished both with strokes of pens and with blasts out of rifle barrels. As we have seen in previous segments of the history segment, tribal ways of hunting, and tribal uses of fire, were intertwined parts of the tribal way of life as a whole. And that way of life was fundamentally different from the industrial market economy that was exploding across the region in the late nineteenth century. In that new way of life, neither subsistence harvesting of game nor traditional uses of fire had a place. Timber was no longer so much a direct source of food and shelter as a commodity, a source of cash. And besides that, like wolves and bears, it was something wild and untamed, to be feared and brought under control. For both of these reasons, among others, fire was seen by the purveyors of this new culture as a wholly destructive force.

In the end, the Swan Massacre was a great human tragedy for the people of the Salish and Pend d’Oreille communities. But it was also a tragedy for all of us. Charles Peyton’s rifle shots were announcing that there was no room for cultural coexistence in western Montana. Non-Indians, at least for a long time, would use even lethal force if necessary to disallow both Indian hunting and Indian burning. Today, as the choked forests are devoured by beetles and flames, we are reaping the bitter harvest of that intolerance. The project of restoring the forests that once existed here also requires the restoration of mutual respect.

iIn the years before he passed away, John Peter Paul (Æan Pye or ¡npnã — Holds on Tight to the Enemy), the last survivor of the Swan Massacre, decided it was finally time to teach younger people about what happened, and so he gave permission to the Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee to tell the full story. A book on the incident, The Swan Massacre and the Struggle for Cultural Survival, will be published in the near future.

iiSee, for example, J.B. Collins, Forest Superintendent, General Land Office, Missoula, MT to W.H. Smead, U.S. Indian Agent, Flathead Reservation, July 27, 1900. National Archives Rocky Mountain Regional Branch (Denver), Record Group 75 (BIA), Flathead Indian Agency, Misc letters received, Box 68, folder “WH Smead — Incoming Correspondence — Unarranged — 1899-1900 (1) FRC56168.”

iiiNational Archives, Washington DC, Record Group 75 (Office of Indian Affairs), Letters received by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1881-1907, Letter number 1903-62224.

iv Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Montana and Idaho Indian agents, June 22, 1899, quoted in letter from Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs to William H. Smead, U.S. Indian Agent, Flathead Agency, August 4, 1900. Commissioner of Indian Affairs outgoing correspondence, 1900 Lands Letter Book 448, pp. 326-327.
vIbid.

viNational Archives, Washington, D.C., Record Group 75 (Office of Indian Affairs), Letters Received by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1881-1907, letter number 1885-24767 (enclosure). Similar letters from the same time period can be found coming from virtually every corner of Salish-Pend d'Oreille aboriginal territory. In 1900, for example, citizens from St. Regis and Plains, two widely separated towns west of the Flathead Reservation, wrote to Smead demanding that he prevent tribal people from hunting or even traveling off-reservation. See National Archives Rocky Mountain Regional Branch (Denver), Record Group 75 (BIA), Flathead Indian Agency, Misc letters received, Box 68, folder “WH Smead -- Incoming Correspondence -- Unarranged -- 1899-1900 (2) FRC 56168.”

viiNational Archives, Washington, D.C., Record Group 75 (Office of Indian Affairs), Letters Received by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1881-1907, letter numbers 1889-22118, 24744.
viiiAll letters from National Archives Rocky Mountain Regional Branch (Denver), Record Group 75 (BIA), Flathead Indian Agency, Misc letters received, Box 68, folder “WH Smead -- Incoming Correspondence -- Unarranged -- 1899-1900 (1) FRC56168.”

ixActing Commissioner of Indian Affairs to William H. Smead, U.S. Indian Agent, Flathead Agency, August 4, 1900. Commissioner of Indian Affairs outgoing correspondence, 1900 Lands Letter Book 448, p. 312 and pp. 326-327.

x “Bad Indians on Reserve,” Helena Semi-Weekly Herald, Sept. 25, 1900. Thanks to Mike Korn of Montana Fish, Wildlife, & Parks and Brian Shovers of the Montana Historical Society for this citation.

xi Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Secretary of the Interior, August 23, 1900, Commissioner of Indian Affairs outgoing correspondence, 1900 Lands Letter Book 450, pp. 68-69.
xii Ibid.

xiiiNational Archives, Washington DC, Record Group 75 (Office of Indian Affairs), Letters received by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1881-1907, letter number 1902-54475.

xiv In January, 1909, Klolà gave birth to her son, John Peter Paul. And in John’s life, we can see that the story of the Swan Massacre is as much a story of cultural survival as it is a story of loss and tragedy. By the time John died in 2001 at the age of 92, he had long been regarded as a revered elder, cultural expert, and teacher in the Salish-Pend d’Oreille community, and had served for many years as the Flathead War Dance Chief.

xv Flathead Agency Supt. Frederick Morgan to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, National Archives, Washington, D.C., Record Group 75 (Office of Indian Affairs), Central Classified Files 72298- 08-Flathead-175. The families of Camille, Scwà and Plaswñ, and Yellow Mountain were utterly forgotten by the press, which lavished its attention on the "unfortunate family of the deputy game warden," organizing charity drives for them that raised thousands of dollars for the Peytons. The state legislature entertained motions to give more support.

xviThe erasure of tribal oral traditions of the traditional use of fire may be a common phenomenon among many native communities. See, for example, Andrew Salvador Mathews, “Suppressing Fire and Memory: Environmental Degradation and Political Restoration in the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca, 1887-2001,” Environmental History, Vol. 8, no. 1 (January 2003), 77-108

At first glance, the Swan Massacre may not appear to have a direct relevance to the history of fire in western Montana, but in fact it is directly tied to that history. The long series of events that led to the Swan Massacre reveals much about how and why the shape of the region’s forests changed dramatically long before the Great Fires of 1910.


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Victor's Camp, Hell Gate Ronde, John Mix Stanley, 1853
Yale University Art Gallery | Credit: Yale University Art Gallery

For the first two decades after the Hellgate Treaty, Salish and Pend d’Oreille people continued to exercise some degree of political and economic power in western Montana, and they lived much as they had in preceding decades — albeit amid steadily dwindling populations of bison and other game. And the tribes continued to manage the land, including off-reservation areas, with fire. Non-Indian population was low, and industrial development was virtually absent due to the lack of easy ways of transporting goods to and from national and international markets. Indeed, native people continue to control numerous key nexuses, such as ferries on major rivers, in that early economic landscape.

But some important shifts began to happen with the discovery of gold in Montana in 1864, and with the ending of the civil war in 1865. Shortly before, the Mullan Road had been built — a rough wagon track running from Fort Walla Walla to Fort Benton. Settlers began to come into Montana — not only to boom towns like Bannock and Virginia City, but also to places like the Bitterroot Valley in order to grow crops and raise livestock to supply the miners. Encroachment on tribal lands increased, and so did the threats and actual violence against those who exercised their off-reservation hunting and fishing rights, let alone those who burned the land in the traditional way. As historian William Farr has noted, in 1869 a grand jury of Montana’s Third Judicial District “met to address Blackfeet depredations and the threat of ‘roving Indians.’ White settlers accused the Pend d'Oreilles of stealing horses, setting prairie fires, and possibly even committing murder while on their way to hunt on the Yellowstone. The grand jury, hoping to call attention to the ‘exposed condition of the people,’ concluded its report with a recommendation to both the military and the Office of Indian Affairs: ‘Their passage throughout settled valleys should be prohibited by the authorities.’ ”i
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Tipis at New Perce Pass

But for the tribes, who throughout the nineteenth century continued to subsist primarily by their traditional ways of life, the off-reservation rights guaranteed by the treaty were vitally important, and they fiercely resisted these pressures. Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai people — in large tribal parties, in small family groups, and as individual people — continued to move across their vast but intimately familiar territories, hunting, gathering plants, fishing, grazing their horses, visiting other tribes and the places and placenames they had used from the beginning of human history.

And they also continued to use fire — if perhaps in gradually less expansive ways — as an integral part of that way of life, shaping the landscape and nurturing the plants and animals upon which they depended. Some of the evidence for this can be found in the tree rings examined in recent years by forest scientists. In study after study, they have generally found a consistent record of burning throughout the nineteenth century in western Montana.ii

In addition, the federal government’s presence in western Montana was also relatively minimal, including on the Flathead Reservation itself, where the “Jocko Agency” consisted of little more than the agent, a clerk, and a few employees. Through most of the 1860s and 1870s, the government operation did little for the Indian people it was supposed to be serving, but on the other hand, it also exercised little repressive control over them. The agent and his small crew could do little to stop tribal leaders and the warriors alongside them on their way to buffalo — or on their way to light fires.

In the decades following the Hellgate Treaty, the tribes had by no means been marginalized yet, and western Montana was still contested terrain. And it was also still a regularly burned terrain.

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i William Farr, “Going to Buffalo: Indian Hunting Migrations across the Rocky Mountains. Part 2, Civilian Permits, Army Escorts,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 54 (1) (Spring 2004), 26-44.

ii See, for example, S.F. Arno, H.Y. Smith, and M.A. Krebs. Old growth ponderosa pine and western larch stand structures: Influences of pre-1900 fires and fire exclusion (USDA Forest Service Intermountain Research Station, Research Paper INT-495. Ogden, UT: USFS, 1997), S.W. Barrett, S.F. Arno, and J.P. Menakis, Fire Episodes in the Inland Northwest, 1540-1940, Based on Fire History Data (USDA Forest Service Intermountain Research Station, General Technical Report INT-370. Ogden, UT: USFS, 1997), and Stephen F. Arno, The Historical Role of Fire on the Bitterroot National Forest (USDA Forest Service Intermountain Research Station, Research Paper INT-187. Ogden, UT: USFS, December 1976).

At first glance, the Swan Massacre may not appear to have a direct relevance to the history of fire in western Montana, but in fact it is directly tied to that history. The long series of events that led to the Swan Massacre reveals much about how and why the shape of the region’s forests changed dramatically long before the Great Fires of 1910.


My Image

Victor's Camp, Hell Gate Ronde, John Mix Stanley, 1853
Yale University Art Gallery | Credit: Yale University Art Gallery

For the first two decades after the Hellgate Treaty, Salish and Pend d’Oreille people continued to exercise some degree of political and economic power in western Montana, and they lived much as they had in preceding decades — albeit amid steadily dwindling populations of bison and other game. And the tribes continued to manage the land, including off-reservation areas, with fire. Non-Indian population was low, and industrial development was virtually absent due to the lack of easy ways of transporting goods to and from national and international markets. Indeed, native people continue to control numerous key nexuses, such as ferries on major rivers, in that early economic landscape.

But some important shifts began to happen with the discovery of gold in Montana in 1864, and with the ending of the civil war in 1865. Shortly before, the Mullan Road had been built — a rough wagon track running from Fort Walla Walla to Fort Benton. Settlers began to come into Montana — not only to boom towns like Bannock and Virginia City, but also to places like the Bitterroot Valley in order to grow crops and raise livestock to supply the miners. Encroachment on tribal lands increased, and so did the threats and actual violence against those who exercised their off-reservation hunting and fishing rights, let alone those who burned the land in the traditional way. As historian William Farr has noted, in 1869 a grand jury of Montana’s Third Judicial District “met to address Blackfeet depredations and the threat of ‘roving Indians.’ White settlers accused the Pend d'Oreilles of stealing horses, setting prairie fires, and possibly even committing murder while on their way to hunt on the Yellowstone. The grand jury, hoping to call attention to the ‘exposed condition of the people,’ concluded its report with a recommendation to both the military and the Office of Indian Affairs: ‘Their passage throughout settled valleys should be prohibited by the authorities.’ ”i
My Image

Tipis at New Perce Pass

But for the tribes, who throughout the nineteenth century continued to subsist primarily by their traditional ways of life, the off-reservation rights guaranteed by the treaty were vitally important, and they fiercely resisted these pressures. Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai people — in large tribal parties, in small family groups, and as individual people — continued to move across their vast but intimately familiar territories, hunting, gathering plants, fishing, grazing their horses, visiting other tribes and the places and placenames they had used from the beginning of human history.

And they also continued to use fire — if perhaps in gradually less expansive ways — as an integral part of that way of life, shaping the landscape and nurturing the plants and animals upon which they depended. Some of the evidence for this can be found in the tree rings examined in recent years by forest scientists. In study after study, they have generally found a consistent record of burning throughout the nineteenth century in western Montana.ii

In addition, the federal government’s presence in western Montana was also relatively minimal, including on the Flathead Reservation itself, where the “Jocko Agency” consisted of little more than the agent, a clerk, and a few employees. Through most of the 1860s and 1870s, the government operation did little for the Indian people it was supposed to be serving, but on the other hand, it also exercised little repressive control over them. The agent and his small crew could do little to stop tribal leaders and the warriors alongside them on their way to buffalo — or on their way to light fires.

In the decades following the Hellgate Treaty, the tribes had by no means been marginalized yet, and western Montana was still contested terrain. And it was also still a regularly burned terrain.

__________________
i William Farr, “Going to Buffalo: Indian Hunting Migrations across the Rocky Mountains. Part 2, Civilian Permits, Army Escorts,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 54 (1) (Spring 2004), 26-44.

ii See, for example, S.F. Arno, H.Y. Smith, and M.A. Krebs. Old growth ponderosa pine and western larch stand structures: Influences of pre-1900 fires and fire exclusion (USDA Forest Service Intermountain Research Station, Research Paper INT-495. Ogden, UT: USFS, 1997), S.W. Barrett, S.F. Arno, and J.P. Menakis, Fire Episodes in the Inland Northwest, 1540-1940, Based on Fire History Data (USDA Forest Service Intermountain Research Station, General Technical Report INT-370. Ogden, UT: USFS, 1997), and Stephen F. Arno, The Historical Role of Fire on the Bitterroot National Forest (USDA Forest Service Intermountain Research Station, Research Paper INT-187. Ogden, UT: USFS, December 1976).