by Jack Nisbet
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, multiple discoveries of precious metals—from silver in the Coeur d’Alene Mountains to lead-zinc on the lower Pend Oreille River, from gold on the upper Columbia River to copper above the Colville Valley—transformed the character of the Inland Northwest. Young men of all descriptions rushed to the region to seek their main chance.
William Morley Manning’s story began like many of them. A farmer’s son wandering far from his home in rural Ontario, the twenty-year-old Manning was first attracted to the gold strikes around Idaho’s Salmon River. He apparently liked what he found there, for in 1897 he filed a Declaration of Intent to become a US citizen. Within the next year, he returned to eastern Canada to study mining engineering at the Ontario School of Practical Science in Toronto.
He soon made his way west again. In October 1899, the Northwest Mining Association held an industrial exposition during its annual gathering in Spokane, the main supply center for the mining industries of the entire Inland Northwest. William Manning was in charge of a large display from southeastern British Columbia’s Ymir district near Nelson, touting the area’s potential in an attempt to attract investors.
January of 1900 found him traveling in northeast Washington in the company of a millionaire mine owner who was planning to develop a gold claim in the area. That year’s Washington census lists Manning as an assayer living near the town of Bossburg in Stevens County, which at that time covered the entire northeast corner of the state and encompassed several rich mining districts. By August, according to the Bossburg Journal, he was in charge of thirty employees at the new First Thought Mine, located on a hill above the Kettle River. In his spare time, he was busily locating and filing mining claims on adjoining properties, both in his own name and in partnership with one of the trustees of the First Thought.
As development of that operation continued apace, Manning visited the superintendent of the Colville Indian Agency in company with Alex Herrin, an enrolled tribal member who owned an allotment adjacent to the mine. Herrin was seeking approval from the superintendent to lease part of his allotment to the mining company for a tramway that would ferry wood and supplies to the mine. Manning had offered Herrin $150 for the right-of-way, and the superintendent saw no problem with the arrangement.
Between 1900 and 1905, Manning worked as the superintendent of three mines in the area as the fortunes of various enterprises waxed and waned. He became well-known in the nearby towns of Bossburg and Orient, whose newspaper editors considered his comings and goings worth frequent mention in their “Local Briefs” columns. In summer 1903, the Kettle River Journal shared a newsworthy item:
Billie Manning’s reputation as a “high flyer” was emphasized the other day. He flew over the head of a cayuse, and the contact between his head and a metamorphic formation assayed only a trace.
At some point during these high-flying years, Manning developed an interest in the tribes of the surrounding area. He became acquainted with Chief Joseph—the headman of the associated nontreaty Nez Perce bands who had startled the nation in 1877 with their attempt to escape placement on a reservation. Joseph’s painful journey since that time had landed his cadre on the Colville Reservation, among a mix of northern Plateau peoples who did not share the Nez Perce culture or language. The chief would have been just over sixty years old when he met Manning, who had been born the same year as the Nez Perce’s long march. The miner and the chief apparently established a rapport, for at some time before he passed away in 1904, Joseph presented Manning with a council pipe
… of serpentine rock having a solid silver inlay from end to end.… It is about 12” long, one and a half at large end by three quarters at small end and weighs about a couple of pounds. This pipe was a personal gift from Chief Joseph and is contained in a leather case which is beaded to represent the design on the pipe which is the spear and fish of plenty.
Manning also obtained at least two other artifacts belonging to Joseph. One was a foot-tall woven basket with a body of dark willow roots. A geometric design fashioned from light-colored cedar roots formed the wrap. The weaver finished the piece with buckskin strings around the top and a shoulder strap for ease of carrying.
A second item, which Manning described as a “Joseph war bonnet,” was made of eagle feathers tipped with red-dyed smaller feathers. It was bound with mane and tail horsehair dyed in greens and reds, then set into a beaver-skin headpiece. The bonnet could be tied with a pair of long strings cut from ermine fur. Joseph had several war bonnets, and Manning possibly acquired his from one of Joseph’s nephews, to whom they were bequeathed at the chief’s funeral potlatch.
In his tabulation of these artifacts, written two decades after their acquisition, Manning related nothing about how he first met Joseph, or what price he paid for any of the pieces, or what he might have done to deserve the council pipe gift. Yet such exchanges would not have been considered unusual at the time. Chief Joseph was a well-known figure, respected by many in the white community. Plenty of collectors recognized the cultural value and craftsmanship inherent in tribal artifacts, and it was understood that many tribal people made and sold them as a source of income. Perhaps of greater significance was the fact that a clear majority of anthropologists, government officials, and white settlers of that era believed that Native American people faced inevitable extinction, so to the collectors, it only made sense to purchase such curios before their source disappeared. After Joseph’s death, headdresses and articles of clothing that were reputed to have belonged to the famous Nez Perce chief went on display in towns throughout the Inland Northwest.
In time, Manning purchased a variety of other pieces from people on the Colville Reservation. Some, such as a pair of “men’s buckskin gloves with gauntlet,” heavily beaded with a floral pattern and fringed along the gauntlet’s outside edge, represent typical fine bead- and hidework of the time, and may well have been made with a purchaser like Manning in mind. Others, such as a selection of well-used fishing gear collected around Kettle Falls, serve as historic confirmation of timeless knowledge.
The most spectacular of these is a double-headed fish spear originally hafted on a sixteen-foot cedar shaft. The working end consists of two slender hardwood tines almost three feet long, joined at one end to form a crotch and held apart at the other end by a wooden spreader. Nooses of closely woven native hemp cord are secured midway down each tine, just above the spreader. The twin lines, both about two feet long, flutter off the tines and are attached to sharp iron spearpoints. The bases of these barbs are carefully cupped so that they nestle onto the blunt tine ends like ball-and-socket joints. Pine pitch was used to glue the spearpoints firmly in place. When this spear was cast and struck a large Chinook salmon, the points would work loose so that the full power of the fish played out on the stout hemp lines rather than snapping the cedar shaft.
Except for the iron spearpoints, this was exactly the rigging described by fur agent David Thompson when he visited Kettle Falls in 1811, and again by naturalist David Douglas in 1826: “The spear is pointed with bone and laced tight to a pointed piece of wood a foot long,” wrote Douglas, “and at pleasure locks on the staff and comes out of the socket when the fish is struck; it is fastened to the staff by a cord.” Canadian artist Paul Kane depicted the same style of spear with double-tined points in a painting he executed at the falls in 1847.
According to Manning, the Colville fisherman with whom he bargained was well aware of his spear’s value as both an artifact and a tool. “The Indian from whom I got this spear would not sell me the 16 ft. pole at any price but permitted me to cut off the pole just above the spear crotch attachment. These fish spears are not to be found any more in this section of the country.”
Manning purchased more fishing tackle of the same general sort, including a double-headed iron point set into a deer horn with the same kind of ball-and-socket insert, as well as
a single point fish spear made from one deer bone, having a so
cket in one end for spear pole and to which is attached a native hemp cord about 15 feet long, the lower 30 inches being a four strand weave. Cord attached to bone spearhead by being wrapped with fine native hemp cord and stuck into place by pine pitch. Very old and rare.
The Indian hemp cord that makes up the four-strand weave on the lower part of this fishing rig is so even and finely made that it looks as if it came off a spinning machine. This implement, along with others collected by Manning, illustrates the precontact engineering of a culture that had subsisted with the Columbia River salmon at Kettle Falls for upwards of nine thousand years—a fair glimpse of the geologic scale of time that had attracted him to the region in the first place.
A Saddle in the Mud
In the fall of 1905, the Kettle River Journal announced that Manning’s employers at the Easter Sunday mine were “hibernating” operations because of legal entanglements. Before many weeks had passed, the Easter Sunday’s former superintendent had signed on as the deputy surveyor for Stevens County and was at work with a team laying out a new wagon road. His tribal contacts expanded to the Kalispel people (also called the Pend Oreilles), a small nontreaty group living east of the Columbia in the Pend Oreille Valley. The traditional Kalispel range followed the Pend Oreille River north, where it looped across the international boundary to empty into the Columbia, as well as east along the Clark Fork and Flathead Rivers all the way to Flathead Lake.
One of Manning’s first purchases in the Pend Oreille country was a beautiful twelve-foot sturgeon-nosed canoe reminiscent of boats admired by David Thompson a century before. “This canoe was made for me in 1905 by totally blind Chief Massalow of the Boundary [Kalispel] tribe, Pend d’Oreille River, Washington,” wrote Manning in a brief note. “Ends bound with birch bark and sealed with pine pitch.” The craft was made from a single sheet of western white pine bark, turned inside out on a delicately wrought frame of maple and birch, expertly lashed and sewn together with chokecherry bark cordage, and floored with split cedar slats. Manning also procured a four-foot cedar paddle made expressly for the craft by Chief Masselow.
How much William Manning might have learned about the struggle of the Kalispel people to maintain their traditional lands in the Pend Oreille Valley is not known, but for the second time his collecting habit drew him into contact with a key figure during a crucial period of a tribe’s transitional history. Masselow had been born near the present Kalispel Reservation, across the Pend Oreille River from Cusick, Washington, in 1826. His father, Victor, represented the tribe in Washington Territory’s initial 1853 treaty negotiations, and from that time on consistently argued for a Kalispel reservation on the Pend Oreille River. As Washington’s official territorial and then statehood status took hold, Victor discouraged the encroachment of white settlers into his homeland. He also resisted sending Kalispel children to the agency school, because he thought it was important that they should speak the Kalispel language instead of English. Although many of Victor’s people had converted to Catholicism when the Jesuit missionaries arrived in the 1840s, the Office of Indian Affairs agent who oversaw several tribes in eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana, described the Kalispels as “the wildest of all Indians attached to this agency” in 1884.
Three years later, Victor and Masselow, who had assumed the chieftainship from his father, attended a crucial negotiation between the Northwest Indian Commission and the Kalispel tribe in Sandpoint, Idaho. There the presiding commissioner promised that if the Kalispel people would leave their valley home and resettle on their choice of the Spokane, Colville, Coeur d’Alene, or Flathead Reservations, the US government would supply them with land, a sawmill, a grist mill, and farm implements. Victor replied that he would like the commissioners to come and see his home. “The old people that are blind and crawling about. What will become of them? Must I take them and pack them on my back to the Flathead reservation?”
His son Masselow rose and stated, “The little quarter of money you offer will not make us happy. We will not be happy till we die. I am a chief, and these are my people.” The Kalispels then retired to council together, and over the next three days “obstinately demanded a reservation within the boundary of the lands claimed by them.” The commissioners eventually convinced some of the Kalispel leaders to agree to a treaty ceding their lands, but Masselow refused to sign. Although several Kalispel families did move to the Flathead Reservation in accordance with the terms of the agreement, Congress never ratified the treaty, and many of the Kalispels remained in the Pend Oreille Valley.
After that valley was opened to white settlers in 1890, Masselow continued to resist offers to sell Indian land on the east side of the Pend Oreille River. Reports of ongoing conflicts led to the summoning of a military captain from Fort Spokane to investigate the situation. Chief Masselow met directly with the officer and demanded action, “complaining that his people in the Calispel valley are being abused by white settlers, taking their lands from them and threatening their lives.”
Not all of the newcomers acted with such disrespect, and the Kalispels’ relationship with the white community was complex. When one settler’s cabin burned, Masselow provided the white family with blankets, cooking utensils, and new moccasins for their little girl. Some tribal members seized economic opportunities provided by the changing times. During the early 1900s, a steamboat company advertised cruise trips along the Pend Oreille from Newport to Box Canyon, with one stop at the Kalispel tribe’s summer encampment. On these tourist visits, Kalispel women traded briskly in trinkets and beadwork.
During those years, Masselow regularly traveled to see agent John Webster at the Colville Indian Agency to plead for a school and a church to serve his people. Webster reciprocated around 1905 by visiting the elderly chief, whom he described as “old blind Masselow.” At about this same time, Masselow was constructing the canoe purchased by William Manning, which must have been a challenging task for an eighty-year-old man whose eyesight was failing badly. Kalispel elder Francis Cullooyah suggests there might not be a contradiction. With Masselow as the overseer, the work could have been carried out by four designated understudies, so well-known that Cullooyah remembers all of their names. These young men had been assigned to absorb the wisdom of their elder for future generations, and it showed up in the well-chosen materials and finely wrought details incorporated into the pine bark canoe.
The next summer, in 1906, Manning attended a Fourth of July celebration at Cusick, across the river from the main Kalispel encampment. At that event he bought “buckskin moccasins & other clothing articles,” plus one man’s entire outfit. Later purchases included more than a dozen beautiful flat-twined bags, with both precontact and modern designs, constructed of traditional materials such as Indian hemp, wild ryegrass, corn husks, and rawhide. Manning also bought gloves, leggings, tobacco pouches, belts, parfleches, and cedar weaving needles. When Francis Cullooyah thumbs through Manning’s list, practically every object reminds him of some scene from his own youth—leggings he saw at a dance; an old woman dipping thumb and forefinger into her tobacco pouch; a belt completely backed with an uncountable number of perfectly stitched blue seed beads.
Everyday items that Manning bought reveal clues about how Kalispel families lived during Masselow’s time and long before. The catalog describes a “large spoon made from horn of mountain sheep; used in dealing out portions of food in families.” A pair of men’s snowshoes with an open weave measured twenty-seven inches long and fifteen wide. A practical lariat had been braided from intertwined strands of black and white horsehair. One well-worn packsaddle was constructed of “deer horns for saddle crotches which are fastened to old pieces of wood by rawhide strings.” Horsehide coverings on the wood frame included pockets “in which to stuff grass for the protection of the back of the horse.”
“I remember a guy brought in a saddle exactly like that for us to look at when I was a boy,” says Cullooyah, who was born during World War II. “It had been buried in the mud for who
knows how long before he stepped on it while climbing up the bank from a creek. The whole thing cleaned up pretty good, and we talked about what he should do with it, but in those days everyone was short of money and he ended up selling it.” Cullooyah shakes his head. “No telling where it is now.”
Other Kalispel pieces from Manning’s collection, such as a deer-hoof “spirit rattle used by medicine men,” touch the kind of proprietary knowledge that is considered unacceptable for outsiders to possess a century later. Cullooyah passes over these quickly, without comment, as if to emphasize the line between artifacts purchased in good faith and cultural trespass. All that can be said is that nothing on Manning’s list indicates he had any sense that it might have been wrong to broach matters of spiritual sensitivity and that his descriptions often attest to the full cooperation of the makers themselves.
Manning purchased several ancient stone instruments from Pend Oreille Valley farmers who had plowed them up in their fields. These he categorized with his geologist’s eye, providing a casual tour of the area’s complex outcrops and ancient tool quarries.
Stone ax, granite
Monzonite stone pestle, perfect shape and condition. Found underground while excavating a basement in side hill on Pend Oreille River Porphyry pestel, very old. From Pend Oreille River bank mound on old campground.
Gabbro pestle
Quartz monzonite pestel, very hard
Serpentine round stone for kneading buckskin as it is being tanned
In the years that followed Manning’s Kalispel acquisitions, Masselow remained a familiar figure to both locals and visitors. When photographer Edward Curtis visited the Kalispel people around 1912, he took a dramatically posed portrait of Masselow wrapped in a blanket. The blind headman’s name appeared regularly in the Newport and Spokane newspapers. One article described how a Jesuit priest traveled to the Pend Oreille Valley on Christmas Eve the year of Curtis’s photograph. The priest was rowed across the river from Cusick to meet Masselow and John Bigsmoke, the elderly chief’s appointed successor. During a midnight mass performed in honor of the season, Masselow, over eighty-five years old at the time, addressed the congregation in the Kalispel language.