N-łḱwḱw-mín: Remembering the Fur Trade in the Columbia River Plateau Stacy Jo Nation-Knapper A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN HISTORY YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO September 2015 © Stacy Jo Nation-Knapper, 2015 ABSTRACT This dissertation answers the question of how and why the history of the fur trade in the Columbia River Plateau is understood in the ways in which it is. It examines the construction of memory and commemorations of the fur trade era by different communities for their distinct purposes. The project methodologies include analyses of archival materials and publications created by fur traders and historians who were interested in their lives, and examination of historical monographs and their indexes and sources lists. Fur trade commemorations and public history events were scrutinized, as were newspapers for interviews with the historical actors driving public acts of memory and biographies of these individuals were examined. Artistic representations of the past in films, songs, comic books, advertisements, and greeting cards created are included in the analysis. People’s understandings of the past are made in daily encounters of its representation, however seemingly trivial they may be. Indigenous Plateau peoples have created histories of the fur trade, and those histories have been largely ignored by settler historians and boosters, resulting in a historiography that has mostly omitted Indigenous voices that were present and speaking to those settlers creating fur trade histories. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Plateau Indigenous peoples brought their histories into the same public forums where fur trade histories were heard in the region for non-Indigenous people to encounter. Examining the stories people told about the fur trade and why, this dissertation demonstrates that the history of the Columbia River Plateau fur trade has been and continues to be a tool used to further the social, political, and economic desires of its creators, who construct fur trade histories largely in their own image. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………...ii Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………………………...iii List of Figures ……...…………………………………………………………………………….iv Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter One: In the Thick of It ………………………………………………………………….40 Chapter Two: Building an Empire ………………………………………………………………97 Chapter Three: In the Service of Colonialism …………………………………………………156 Chapter Four: Layered Stories of Trade, Resources, and Sovereignty ………………………...215 Conclusion: Nƚḱwḱwmin ………………………………………………………………………..262 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………...273 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: “No. 5. Traite et distribution de liqueur”……….……………………………………80 Figure 1.2: “No. 6. Canots et traineaux indiens”………………………………………………...82 Figure 1.3: “Crossing the Bitter Root Mountains Nov. 1855”…………………………………..91 Figure 1.4: “Military Post & City of Walla-Walla, W.T. in 1862”…………………………...…92 Figure 1.5: “Old Fort Walla Walla”….…………………………………………………………..93 Figure 1.6: “Fort Okinakane”……………………………………………………………………94 Figure 1.7: “Fort Nez Perce, 1841”……………………………………………………………...95 Figure 1.8: “Map of the Spokane Indian Reservation Showing Indian Allotments, 1910”….....103 Figure 1.9: “Indians who were given a taste of melons grown by the Astor party at Fort Spokane came back for more!”………………………………………....117 Figure 1.10: “Famous Landmark on Farm Recently Bought”………….……………………....144 Figure 1.11: Christmas card, 1933………………………….…………………………………..161 Figure 1.12: “Christmas Eve at Spokane House == December 1810”…………………………162 Figure 1.13: “The Story of Spokane House”…………………………………………………...166 Figure 1.14: “Ladies of Hope put on David Thompson skit”………....………….…………….167 Figure 1.15: David Thompson Memorial Fort, 1922…………….……………………………..169 Figure 1.16: “Archaeologist Finds Flintlocks”…………………………………………………172 Figure 1.17: “Spokane House (1810-1826)”…………………………………………………...181 Figure 1.18: Smith Funeral Home advertisement……….……………………………………...185 Figure 1.19: “Modern Spokane House”…………………….…………………………………..186 Figure 1.20: “Spokane House Banners Will Fly Again”……………………………………….196 Figure 1.21: “Spokane House: Social Center of an Empire”….………………………………..203 Figure 1.22: “Ross Cox of the Astor Company”……………………………………………….205 Figure 1.23: “Spokane House”…………………………………………………………………206 Figure 1.24: “The United States has Arrived in the Northwest”……………………………….207 Figure 1.25: “Finan McDonald is Such a Man!”……………………………………………….208 Figure 1.26: “Many Budding Romances Lead to Marriage Between the Handsome Maidens and the Traders”………………………………………………………………...209 iv INTRODUCTION: Whose History? In the Spokane dialect of the Salish language, there are more than twenty ways to talk about remembering the past, all of which contain a version of the root word, nƚḱwḱwmin.1 These many varied forms of nƚḱwḱwmin reflect who is doing the remembering, as well as when and how something is remembered. Nƚḱwḱwmin reflects the complexities of recalling the past and seems an apropos title for a dissertation about the complexities of the history of the Columbia River Plateau fur trade. In his recent book, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, Thomas King examines varied and complex North American histories from a critical Indigenous perspective, observing that dominant histories of the continent often overlook its original inhabitants and their experiences with colonialism in the more than four hundred years since Europeans’ arrival. Most of us think that history is the past. It’s not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That’s all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Benign. Which, of course, it isn’t. History may well be a series of stories we tell about the past, but the stories are not just any stories. They’re not chosen by chance.2 The history of the fur trade in the Columbia River Plateau, a region located in what is now northeastern Washington state and southeastern British Columbia3, is similar to other North American histories: a “series of stories we tell about the past” that have not been chosen by chance. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot warned, however, this is not to say “we are prisoners of our 1 Tachini Pete, Seliš Translation: English to Salish Dictionary (Arlee, MT: Nḱwusm, 2006), 349; conversation with Ann McRae, Spokane Tribal Language Elder, July 2012. 2 Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2013), 2-3. 3 Definitions of where the Columbia River Plateau is located vary and are defined by geologic formations, as well as human and animal use, and watersheds. For a clearer visualization of the definition employed here, see David H. Chance, People of the Falls (Kettle Falls, WA: Kettle Falls Historical Center, 1986). 1 pasts and…that history is whatever we make of it,” but that histories are created.4 Crafting history necessitates making selections, omissions, and emphasizing events and details more than others, or omitting some details altogether. It is telling stories that have been remembered and personalized by the creator to serve a purpose. The history of the Columbia River Plateau fur trade, an economic enterprise with profound social, cultural, and political consequences, has been shaped by the social, cultural, political, and economic interests of its writers. The interests of all people captivated by this history influenced how they thought of historic fur trade events, and those with access to resources of historical dissemination had a voice in incorporating their interpretations into the region’s history. Early 20th-century Indigenous people did so through oral history, but such influence was largely limited to non-Indigenous upper and upper-middle class people. The history of the Columbia River Plateau fur trade was created predominantly by non- Indigenous settlers interested in promoting their region for further settlement and economic development, using settler fur trade histories as a tool to do so. Indigenous histories of the fur trade in the region were rarely included in published accounts unless they conformed to the interests of non-Indigenous authors. Nonetheless, Indigenous histories of the Plateau fur trade exist and act as powerful reminders that history is not neutral or benign and it has very real consequences for its subjects and their descendants. Because this dissertation discusses the ways in which the fur trade era was remembered by different groups of people in different times and contexts, it is helpful to portray the status of these memories today in published works by professional historians and in the oral traditions of the region’s Indigenous peoples. While interpretation of the following events and circumstances varies, their existence is rarely challenged. Of course, as Thomas King suggests in the opening 4 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), Kindle edition, 158. 2 paragraph, historical interpretation is a largely subjective endeavor and the interpretations of events discussed here as contextual framework also informed how Columbia River Plateau fur trade histories were created. The narrative that follows reflects a series of events that have, with few exceptions, achieved the status of fact in most published works