Impressions of the Idaho Panhandle

Where the gleaming sun torches marshy lakes of emerald grasses before pine studded mountains, here is the glory of the Panhandle, this complex terrain of flooded glacial valley and constantly rising land, the majesty of the Ponderosa and white pines, Douglas firs and grand firs, tamaracks and cedars, filtering the mighty sun.

We had lunch in St. Marie's, a lumber town with a 1950's Main St. that rises to its Woodlawn cemetery where men who fell fighting the 1910 fires are honored at its dignified summit, where a robin led us among the tranquil spirits. Across the street is the John Mullan Park where the mighty trees are honored, the lifeblood of this town, the Creators of this World.

In St. Marie's

Another day we drove north, the horizons woolly with forests and blue mountain ridges with cradles of glacier, past Sandpoint where a huge moose ran through a meadow by the highway. These were some of the billboards:

Bonner's Ferry Auto: Confidence is What You Have Before You Understand the Problem

Ron Paul 2008

Ron Paul 2012

Choose Freedom, Stop Obamacare

From a rusted cab of a trailer, a doll waved out the window

North of little Naples, Idaho, close to the Ruby Ridge shootout that galvanized the Patriot movement which Idaho became, to its dismay, best known for, is the broad Kootenai River valley where Anheuser Busch grows hops. The river snakes in a slow green furrow, past a number of wildlife preserves of marshes and ponds, high grasses, red grasses, tall woolly cottonwoods and forests of larch, Ponderosa, white pine, cedar and juniper whose fragrance turns now sweeter, now more pungent, and birds call in distinct voices. I whistled to a high hidden songbird, and he whistled back so we kept up this call and response, a small interval slow trill, over the Moyie River. The falls were well hidden and beautiful, thundering down over an immense boulder into white foam and mist.

We drove on up to Canada, fields of gold spread along the glacier-sculpted plain, while ahead black green mountains stood both round and square. But we didn't want to dally in the heat, so we made a many pointed turn just before customs and headed back down to gravel roads along the west side of the valley, where Anheuser Busch has paved nice road with names like Budweiser into their fields. The Nature Conservancy had bought a stretch of marsh before the Kootenai Wildlife Refuge where I saw only a redwinged blackbird (not since childhood) and a long legged broad winged heron fly off. A deer bounded in a meadow--we had seen several throughout the day. We took a hike at a US Fish and Wildlife Station after talking with a sweet faced Scarlet Johansen look-alike volunteer, with a whispering voice like honey. I wondered if she would join the US Fish and Wildlife service in poisoning, trapping and slaughtering millions of animals. We hiked up into the western forest where many trails penetrate the Selkirk Mountain range on a well-prepared path with an elegant wooden bridge over Myrtle Creek which runs cool and clear down rocks between coniferous trees high and strong, or fallen into peat, sending up mists of cool air. Then we drove back down the Panhandle past emerald marshes with acres of lily pads before pine studded buttes and craggy mountains.

Signs on the road said:

Eyes on Road, Hands on Wheel, Mind on Driving

Pack it in. Pack it out.

In Kellogg, Idaho there are huge American flags every 10 feet along Main St.--maybe 30 of them. At the Mining Museum the curator told us how her father had died in a mining disaster. "He wasn't sposed to work that day," she began. Kellogg's Historic Center is peopled with playful mannequins, as a homemade St. George and the Dragon and soldiers.

Wallace, Idaho has a Bordello Museum. It is a well preserved and nearly ghost town that had been a red light stop till the 80's, when the FBI came after its sheriff (for gambling, drug dealing, prostitution, etc.). Till then, easy payments to the cops, donations for high school uniforms, and all round accommodation had left the oldest profession alone. In 1988 Ginger and her girls had received a warning call and left with the clothes on their backs, never to return. Shrewd Ginger had been socking away half a million a year, her girls a cool 100 grand a year, so they were not in need. The claustrophobic little rooms, the windows boarded up, with stuffy John Cheever furniture and flimsy wood paneled walls, the one bathroom for five girls who serviced 40 men a night (sometimes in the bath tub) the sad little beds with their glittering drabs and frilly bed lamps, a closet full of shag rugs to throw over their beds when the miners wouldn't take their boots off (these girls slept in those beds), the 1950's kitchen timer used to time the sessions offered on the menu --8 minutes for a quickie, etc. -- what a life for girls my age. At the time I'd been facing the loneliness of the long distance runner, while these girls had been on their backs, 2pm-6am, no leaving the brothel except to sun on the roof adjoining another brothel. They were college kids, single moms desperate for money, and professionals. And rich Ginger had only a little room with a shag coverlet, her lipsticks on a cheap mirror, a glamorous old sepia photo that looked to be from the 1940's. Neon colored wigs made of feathers.

We took a quick trip up the vertiginous mountain pass of mighty pines, folds of green and shadow around us as we climbed, through the mining towns of Yellow Dog, Black Bear and Burke, where houses made of collapsing siding crowded into the Canyon, and nice prefabs faced lush creek. The sad country had been carved up for its bounty, tainted and despoiled--still the mining goes on.

Driving north, meadows are fewer and fewer among young pine and fir forests and blue mountains roll up behind the green hills with their basalt walls. A young deer crumpled, head twisted back, by the roadside.

Monument to Miners who died in a major accident

Then we drove the far side of Lake Pend Oreille with its history of immense glaciers that carved out these states. On the lavishly watered marshes of azure and chartreuse a few Western Grebes sailed in elegant formation, eagles and osprey soared, a gorgeous nubile deer stood by the edge of the forest--these are far healthier than Yellowstone's. The mixed glories of Avistas's dams with their aerial views of massive rockface, basalt columns lining the water's procession. Then we drove up switchbacks to Thompson's pass, past knife edged fir borders, unfurling, climbing vertically, deep shade and blinding golden sun, and then we flew by Murray where Jacques was seeking the memory of Molly B Damned, a colorful character from those parts, but the only sign was for a famous Scrapdoodle Restaurant.

We drove down into the aluminum siding mining towns and the perfectly idyllic RV sites lying flat along the swift clear Coeur d'Alene River, with its immaculate pebble beaches and sleek horses grazing. The golden evening sun, more brilliant than mornings, more pervasive than midday, blinded us as always as we drove past satin waters and then onto the tedious highway.

Teal colored St. Joe River is like a watery canvas painted with mountains and sky. Lumber trucks, throwing up screens of dust, are visible for miles around. Waters stretched grassily to mountains, osprey and eagles and a flock of pelicans preened under our binocolars' gaze. And on into the emerald and azure beauty of the St. Joe, deep and satiny.

Calder, Idaho restaurant

Hungry, we stopped at Calder, a "tiny little drinking village with a fishing problem" and in the piney café with its taxidermy and bright murals and jokes, where neon suited construction workers were just finishing up lunch, we ordered fish n chips and a Reuben from the enormous cook/proprietor. The fish, beneath its fried crust, was white and fresh and the fries were a revelation. Real tasty taters. But our hearty lunch sabotaged us in the heat and we staggered drowsily on.

A memorial site to loggers told us about the bad old days, greed and adventure, homesteading tricks and cheating and frontier justice, how the local bully scared people off their land at the behest of the timber barons and ended up filled with bullets, along with his horse and his dog. The sheriff had to bury him alone, justice left to the victors. That was enough storytelling for me, I hate the timber and mining stories. The sun was blazing and it was hard to find refuge that was not downwind from the latrine. 

We drove on along the St. Joe, now rapid and shallow, between canyon walls of mighty pines and dead trees and secret forest pathways, bulky basalt rock face, where the fragrance of cedars and pines and firs filled the corridor with cold air and campsites leveled off perfectly at the water's edge.

The Cataldo Mission to the Coeur d'Alene

The Cataldo Mission

The Cataldo Mission bears in its heart the long sad struggle of the Coeur d'Alene Indians who made their bargain with Jesuits and sold themselves to suffering. They had sent a delegation to St. Louis (the center of their world, for fur, missionaries and power) to request the magic of the Black Robes. In fact, the coming of the Black Robes had been prophesied: the Jesuits would bring peace, but they would take away the old ways.

The white man's horses and his rifles had already arrived among the Indian tribes. The theft of horses was an honorable and heroic conquest. But tribes encroached on each others' land for buffalo hunts, and there ensued wars of vengeance. The Coeur d'Alene and other Flathead tribes had become vulnerable to the Crow and Blackfoot tribes of the Plains, and their once tranquil and prosperous lives were disturbed forever. Therefore, like other tribes, they wanted to the white man's magic to regain power in their world.

Inside the Chapel

Along came Father DeSmet, a Belgian who had secreted himself to the New World, against his father's will. He had been a young sibling among 23 siblings but with his own dreams, who smuggled himself to St. Louis to become a Jesuit priest. Heeding the call of the Flathead delegation, he and other young, often well-born and highly educated Jesuits, rode west with a wagon train through heat, hunger, thirst and danger on what would become the Oregon trail. The Indians welcomed and submitted to them. Under Jesuit supervision they built a log cabin and learned European methods of planting and sowing, but the St. Joe River flooded them out, so on higher ground they built a neo-classical temple to the new religion, supervised by Father Cataldo whose skills happened to be architecture and painting. And in the process of being asked to sacrifice their freedom, they learned to reject the heroism of old for submission to the white man's ways. 

In fact, they hadn't expected the Jesuits to stay past two years; the Jesuits had expected to stay forever and build an empire of Christians. As the West opened, the priests became intermediaries as the US began to force the Indians even from the land where they'd built their church on a hill, their Bitterroot Land. Suffering, humiliation and degradation were the new masters of these once proud people whom the French trappers had once named "Heart of Awl" for their stubborn shrewdness. In a fascinating exhibit at the Cataldo Mission, Indian children with eyes of bewildered suffering face the camera, shorn of their braids and their language. Finally, even the Jesuits lost their place in the new order of immigrants.

The Cataldo Mission has the rough hewn charm of the frontier. It is filled with voices and memories, recounting how even the children hauled rocks to build it, how the young Jesuits were taught table manners, how grandmothers kept the old tongue alive, telling the children Indian stories and speaking to their horses in forgotten Indian. In a masterful video at the end of the exhibit, the Coeur d'Alene Indians themselves speak of the transformation wrought by Christianity. Now many are obese--one woman sits in her bedroom filled with stuffed animals. With wry, bitter humor they tell stories of hardship, of being uprooted without time to collect their belongings, of exile in a useless land. Their path is now the path of suffering. They find solace in the ceremonies of old, in dancing and especially the sweat lodge.

The Jesuit Mission

Both Indians and priests compromised their visions, both came away empty handed in the crowded way west.

A few days later we drove along the DeSmet road, on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation, past a huge tribal high school in search of the current Jesuit Mission Church. As a fascinating epilogue to this tale of the Coeur d'Alene, a sign told us it was closed, there would be no more masses due to disrespectful behavior of ATV's (all terrain vehicles, a noisy joy ride). The Father would be departing for Florence, Italy. A carload of teenagers blasted by us, there on the Rez. An ominous white Christ stood before the Mission, his eyes cold and beautiful. The Jesus that sees all, that deracinated the heroic Indians, and gave them instead a heart encircled with thorns.

Where the Coeur d'Alene and other tribes used to rendez-vous, each year, for Native games and festivities, on Lake Coeur d'Alene - before the Jesuits came

We went into a supermarket on the Rez. At one end sat laughing customers at their video games. At the other end, seated at a table, an obese young Indian, a Protestant minister, read the Bible aloud. Among his students was a Mormon store employee. They argued their interpretations--that of the Bible and the Book of Mormon. The minister's beautiful brown-eyed baby screamed in the arms of his obese, white wife.

Then we hiked among the great trees, in the beautiful still evening.

Indian Tales: the Bitterroot Valley and the Lolo Trail

Largest peak of the Bitterroot Mountains

We drove up through Montana on US 93 through the Bitterroot Valley, alongside the eponymous mountain range, the mountainous spine of the Continental Divide. Many Indians have called this valley home and their equilibrium with the valley preserved great abundance for thousands of years. Here grew the sustaining bitterroot and camas roots that tribes dug in the spring. But the valley was also a refuge from smallpox epidemics and war with rifle-armed Plains tribes.

In 1855 tribal leaders of the Flathead Nation and US officials signed the Hellgate Treaty (a Jesuit observer noted "not a tenth of what was said was understood by either side"), which designated the valley south of Lolo, Montana as a conditional reservation.

Steakhouse in Lolo, Montana

But mining, trapping and agriculture attracted settlers, and the Indian reservation was shrunk to a tenth of the original land. Chief Victor of the Selis people rebuffed efforts of US officials to get them to abandon the choice lands of their ancestors. After Chief Victor died, settlers successfully lobbied President Grant to declare the Flathead Reservation "better adapted to the wants of the Flathead tribe." In 1872, Congress sent future President Garfield to arrange for the removal of the Selis. Claw of Small Grizzly, or Chief Chariot, said the Bitterroot was where the bones of his ancestors were buried and he would not leave, but his "x" mark was forged onto the Garfield agreement. More whites moved illegally onto the Selis land and pressures intensified with the coming of the railroad. In November 1889, faced with the worsening conditions for his people, he finally agreed to leave. The Selis therefore planted no crops, but Congress delayed funding for the move pushing many people to the brink of starvation. Finally Troops from Fort Missoula roughly pushed the tribe on the sad march north to the Reservation.

Where the Nez Perce passed over Traveler's Rest

Nez Perce Chiefs

Big Hole, Montana was a battlefied for the Nez Perce,  where they lost almost a hundred women and children to a surprise attack by the US troops. But we were too late for visiting hours and saw the pretty Indian girl already cycling home. So we continued to drive up 93, past curious deer standing at the edge of the National Forest on a flat Montana highway, toward the "traveler's rest" that Lewis and Clark found in Lolo, Montana. We found a cheap motel and dined at a capacious pine lodge covered with the taxidermy trade, magnificent moose, elk, deer, mountain sheep and goats, the bounty of that great land majestically fixed in time. The Church in Lolo advertised "The Coming Apocalypse End-Time Series."

The Nez Perce Escape

Just across the road was the "Traveler's Rest" where Lewis and Clark (1805) rested before their cold and miserable way west, aided at critical moments by the Nez Perce who saved their lives.  Seventy-one years later, the Nez Perce tribe, heading east, would be halted nearby.  They had tried to negotiate with the US Army, after broken promises and the theft of their land, but a few younger warriors had killed some settlers in reprisal for Nez Perce killings, and now some 800 Nez Perce were on the run toward Montana, led by Chief Joseph.  It is said that they still carried Thomas Jefferson's letters of friendship. The US Army wanted them held at the border by local volunteers so they could attack from the rear.  But instead the Nez Perce bands passed above them on an Indian trail just north of Traveler's Rest, filing over a ridge above the heads of the US citizen army, with their 2,000 horses, papooses, old gray hairs and young boys, their warriors taunting the troops below.

Construction of US 12

We drove through their wild land of memories and heartbreak, along Highway 12 (built by Italian POW's and Japanese internees) that travels west through Idaho, south of the Lolo trail, now route 500 which requires a more rugged vehicle than our own. The Lochsa River, designated wild and scenic, sparkles alongside a million acres of protected wilderness on its southern bank, National Park land on the northern bank. The Nez Perce had, over four months, traveled 1,600 miles through the rugged wilderness of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, fighting and holding off an army of thousands with better equipment--some 14 battles in all. Until the last battle, notes the Encyclopedia of Native Americans, the Nez Percé "consistently outsmarted, outflanked, and outfought the larger white forces."But those fleetfooted Indians would ultimately be worn down by grief, loss, exhaustion, allies turning on them in fear of the white man. We followed their journey of valor and despair, and the smaller dramas of Lewis and Clark who had been nursed to health, fed and aided by these same tribes 70 years earlier. It is still a pristine wilderness of endless discovery, the warm pinesap fragrance, the singing waters, clear and laughing, glorious mountain vistas, an unfolding corridor of endless deep pine folding out before the river bed.

The Lochsa/Clearwater

From the fresh currents of the river valley we entered the  Nez Perce reservation, where the temperature reached nearly 100, heat trapped in an arid canyon between scrubby rock mountains, unrelieved by the broad Clearwater River. It seemed as if, for these brave people, the US army reserved a special hell. Chief Joseph himself would never be allowed back to his own lands. A hundred years before, the Nez Perce had been indomitable, peaceable with all, gifted horse breeders and proud stewards of the land. In 1877, on their way east, just 40 miles south of Canada, the US would hound them down. Their chief tactician, Olikut, whose methods are still taught in important military colleges, was shot in the head by a Crow scout riding with the thousands of US soldiers. Broken by grief, the loss of their great warriors and revered families, most of them would surrender and be herded back to cramped reservations on barren lands.

These were the words of Chief Joseph:  

"Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolshute is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say, "Yes" or "No." He Who Led The Young Men In Battle, Olikut my brother is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are -- perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."

On the Trail of Lewis and Clark and Sacajewea

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Leadore, Idaho

We left Idaho Falls on the Sacajewea Byway/Nez Perce Trail, a valley corridor between mountain ridges-- basalt columns tufted with sage on one side, mountain ranges on the other. Cattle now graze on this sage prairie where 10,000 years ago men hunted bison in forests and mountain sheep on the rocky volcanic plateau where caves bore into the patterned rock.

Almost out of gas, we made it down to Leadore by the skin of our teeth. A sign said $1.49 a liter which Jacques quickly calculated would be $6 a gallon and fumed. But the sign referred to Coca Cola. Black leather jacketed bikers browsed the souvenir shop with witty sayings about rednecks. In the back hung animal skins. The lady said "Fill it up and come tell me how much it is" but as soon as Jacques walked out the door she picked up a pair of binoculars and watched him closely. The Lemhi County Sheriff sat parked in his pickup by the road. A little girl with red hair and glasses wore a t-shirt that said, I heart Hollywood.

From the Lemhi Pass

We drove up a gravel road past a farm or two with many eager dogs and puppies, past an antlered moose below, sitting with its young placidly under a tree in full view, to the campsite where Lewis and Clark had pitched their tents after visiting the Lemhi pass, now a grassy crease between tawny hills. The terrain was sage studded and rolling, with pine forests alongside high desert.

Lewis' campsite

Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery was following the Missouri River to its headwaters. The team had been commissioned in 1803 by President Thomas Jefferson to find "the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce." They had departed from Wood River, IL in 1804 and would spend 105 days in Idaho where they encountered some of their greatest challenges. 

The Lemhi Pass is 7,373 feet above sea level, an ancient passageway in the Bitterroot Mountains the Shoshone had traveled for thousands of years. There Lewis and Clark entered what is today Idaho, but was at the time the Oregon Territory, contested by English, Spanish and even Russian sovereignties. And all the while it was home for Indian tribes.

Moose and young

It was cold and raining gently when we stood at the high Lemhi Pass with its view of dry and endless blue mountains to the west, and circular green patches on the eastern mountains, the Continental Divide where waters flow down to two different oceans. The name Lemhi comes from a king in the Book of Mormon.

Sacajewea, a Shosone who had been kidnapped from her homeland at the age of 14 and later sold to her trapper husband, led Lewis and Clark to her people, where they would seek horses in order to continue their journey. There she found her own brother--he was their Chief.

Striding the Missouri

Little is actually known of Sacajewea, nor did Lewis or Clark write much of her. But since the turn of the 20th c. she has been an icon for feminists. A memorial grove was established near a tributary of the Mighty Missouri, in 1932. "Though the pathfinders die, the paths remain open" weorw Laura Tolman Scott, a Daughter of the American Revolution who campaigned for this sacred grove for many years.  This was on "the road (that) took us to the most distant fountain of the waters of the mighty Missouri in surch of which we have spent so many toilsome days and wristless nights," wrote Meriwether Lewis on Aug 12, 1805.

We drove back down among cattle and their young crossing the road, graceful hulks, the calves stepping delicately, staring at us implacably. A deer bounded away in the high desert. The terrain was alpine, young and burned forest land, along the cool Lemhi River, past interpretive sites that questioned which way Lewis & Clark had turned next. One described how Lewis had painted makeup on a few Shoshone women, a custom for pleasing them. We came to a hot spring, two neat pools maintained by the BLM where I floated in healing waters for a little while in the high desert.

And so, with horses and help from Sacajewea's people, Lewis and Clark started north, through the Bitterroot Valley, up to Lolo, Montana. Seventy years later the Nez Perce--still bearing, it is said, letters of friendship from Thomas Jefferson, would take this route, in flight from a US Army determined to force them onto a small reservation where they had once roamed free, a proud and successful people. So we followed, learning the stories of land that has not changed much since their day.