Ancient Places

by Jack Nisbet

  Masselow was officially retired but still active two years later, when President Woodrow Wilson finally signed the order creating a thin slice of reservation land along the Pend Oreille River that included the Kalispels’ traditional summer encampment. The canoe builder and leader was well into his nineties when he passed away in 1920. He had helped his people survive the fur trade, missionary, mining, and settlement eras, and he had steadfastly guided them to the return of their homeland sovereignty.

  Mattie’s Shoes

  In September of 1906, William Manning appeared before a judge in Colville to be sworn in as a naturalized US citizen. Two friends accompanied him to witness the proceeding. Age twenty-nine that year, he continued his bachelor lifestyle, maintaining a room at the Colville Hotel while traveling all around the region.

  That fall, drawing on his technical mining experience, Manning successfully ran for the joint position of Stevens County surveyor and engineer, and over the next two years he badgered the county commissioners into purchasing a new transit and other equipment so he could carry out his appointed duties. He laid out new bridges and condemned old ones. He recommended road improvements, often along tracks where large mining equipment needed to be moved. He created maps of roads and property ownership, and interacted with the public, attending local booster dinners to explain various projects on the county docket.

  Manning also found time to pursue his hobby of collecting, and at some point may have decided to share his artifacts with the public. For one week during the summer of 1908, “the display windows of the Stannus-Keller Hardware Company held an interesting and valuable display of Indian curios,” announced the Colville Examiner. “Much attention was attracted from passers-by.”

  After standing for reelection that fall, Manning mitigated a dispute between a railway company and the county commissioners over a road in the Pend Oreille Valley. He helped two college students create an eight-by-twelve-foot relief map of Stevens County for display at the fairgrounds. Then, much to the surprise of some of his Colville pals, he married a Spokane socialite and moved into her home on that city’s fashionable South Hill. By 1911 the newlywed sported a new business title to boot: an advertisement offering his services identified him as “U. S. Deputy Mineral Surveyor for Washington and Idaho” and noted that he could be reached through phone numbers in both Colville and Spokane.

  Throughout this period, Manning’s duties as county surveyor required him to spend time on the Spokane Indian Reservation, where he developed a relationship with William Three Mountains the Younger. For a third time, the ambitious mining engineer came to know one of the seminal figures of a tribe involved in serious questions of territory, removal, and cultural survival.

  The Three Mountains name predates the early missionary era among the Spokane people. Spokane elder Pauline Flett explains that the Spokane language renders it as Chah-tle-hsote (“three-bare peaks-snag”), which evokes the story of an epic journey. “Tle means ‘mountain,’ ” Flett says. “We remember hsote, ‘a forest of bare trees,’ maybe ‘a big burn,’ maybe ‘a storm of some kind.’ The original Three Mountains crossed through that bare forest three times going over the mountain. Probably to the coast, we think, because in those days when we said ‘the mountain,’ we meant the Cascade mountains, and crossing over them meant going to the coast.”

  As a teenager, around 1839, William Three Mountains the Elder lived with the family of Reverend Elkanah Walker at Tshimikain Mission. The lad left the mission after two years, but as the century wore on, many of his kin were baptized as Protestants. In time, Three Mountains assumed the leadership of a band of Upper Spokanes who spent a good part of the year at the mouth of Latah Creek (also called Hangman Creek), just downstream from Spokane Falls. William Three Mountains the Younger was born there about 1864. He grew into a tall man, “always a head above everyone else” at gatherings.

  After a bustling city began to form around the falls in the late 1870s, the elder Three Mountains led his band of Upper Spokanes to a new location on Deep Creek, south of the Spokane River. Blending traditional and modern practices, the people developed a successful agricultural colony there. Three Mountains the Elder continued to play a chief’s role in tribal matters of all descriptions until he was killed while trying to mediate a dispute in 1883. His son, still a young man at that time, remained with the Deep Creek colony. He married a tribal woman known as Mattie and continued to farm. Early white settlers in the area remembered the couple well.

  One white family who built a log cabin close to a well-used tribal trail that wound through the plains south of the Spokane River grew used to Indians dropping by their place, including a man they called Chief William or Three Mountains William. “He told father and mother to tell Indians they were friends of Chief William’s if any Indians ever bothered them,” one of the daughters later recalled. She and her siblings often wore moccasins fashioned by William’s wife, Mattie.

  In 1888, under pressure from the increasing numbers of homesteaders moving into the area, the Deep Creek colony relocated to an area called West End, north of the river on the established Spokane Reservation. Three Mountains the Younger and Mattie developed a farm near the Detillion Bridge, eight miles upstream from the mouth of the Spokane River. “There was a distinctive rock in the river there—we called it Detillion Rock,” recalls Pauline Flett, “with the old A-frame Presbyterian church nearby. William Three Mountains’s house was just a stone’s throw from Detillion Rock.” In 1900, the younger Three Mountains was elected as chief of the band his father had led. Like his father, William took active and sometimes controversial stands according to his beliefs. He maintained the respect of both the Indian and white communities, and when he was in his early forties, he accepted a call to serve as a tribal judge.

  In 1907 and again around 1912, the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ local agent, Captain John Webster, assessed Three Mountains the Younger’s work as a judge: “Intelligent, serious, dignified and straight-forward, with courage and integrity,” wrote Webster. “By temperament an old time Indian who recognizes … the new conditions thrust upon his people … he brings to his duties intelligent observation, keen analysis of evidence and strict impartiality.”

  In carrying out his job as county surveyor, Manning would have met the tall chief soon enough. One of the maps Manning crafted in the course of his duties plotted the lands within the Spokane Indian Reservation, including the location and title-holders for all the original allotments. Census records show that in 1905, Mattie Three Mountains was living with her husband, William, near the proposed road between Detillion Bridge and the Turk Mine, which lay inside reservation boundaries. Manning surveyed this road three years later, and in 1911, Mattie affixed her thumbprint to an agreement giving consent for a new wagon road twenty feet wide to open along the south boundary of her allotment. In return, an existing wagon road that crossed the northwestern corner of that allotment would be closed.

  At some point during these years, Manning purchased a pair of beaded moccasins from Mattie and entered them into his collection records as item number eighty-eight.

  Woman’s buckskin moccasins, bought from wife of Chief Three Mountain of the Spokanes, who were at the time, wearing them. Solid beaded design in blue, green, yellow, old rose and purple. 7½” long. Beaded on front and outside only.

  Mattie had applied the utmost care to those shoes, and the top of each one bears a red rose on a blue panel sewn over with tiny seed beads. Even Manning would have admitted that such showpieces could not qualify as Mattie’s everyday footwear.

  The collector also purchased at least two other items from the Three Mountains family. The first was an extraordinary flat-twined root storage bag, eighteen by twenty-five inches in size, woven from native Indian hemp cordage and so well used that the traditional geometric pattern worked into the outer wrap had almost completely faded away. The second was a

  bow of ironwood, back lined with deer sinew firmly attached by fish glue. Both ends so fa
shioned as to form when strung a cupid bow. 36” long. Five plain, wooden or target (Bird) arrows attached. Very old, obtained from Chief Three Mountain of Spokanes.

  Ironwood, the tribe’s familiar name for a shrub white settlers called ocean spray, creamwood, or arrowwood (Holodiscus discolor), was well-known for being tough enough to serve as stock for digging sticks or bows. Once again, Manning’s description of an item in his collection perfectly matches a detail in one of Paul Kane’s field watercolors from 1847—in this case, Kane’s portrait of a Spokane hunter he calls Tum-se-no-ho, or The Man without Blood. Tum-se-no-ho holds a beautifully fashioned, cupid-curled strung bow in his massive right hand. The short bow barely touches the ground from his waist, and a second companion bow pokes out of a quiver draped across his back. In a separate watercolor, Kane sketched details of a similar quiver trimmed with bear fur and grouse feathers. Both the bow in Tum-se-no-ho’s hand and the one in the quiver look perfectly suited to the open pine woodlands and basalt scablands where the Spokanes hunted for such game.

  While Manning appreciated traditional designs and craftwork, he was not shy about mixing in ideas from his own culture. As an active member of the Spokane Shriners club, he commissioned a Spokane woman to weave the Shriners emblem of a crescent moon and star hanging from a scimitar onto one side of a traditional flat bag. Manning did not identify the name of this craftswoman, but he did describe the bag.

  All in native hemp and wild rye with two native hemp strings at top for handles.… This bag was made for me in 1907 by an old, totally blind Indian woman, the widow of a chief of the Spokanes. She was shriveled and bent into a tiny being and was one of the few old timers left who knew the art of weaving on the outside layer of a double weave fabric without carrying the design to the inside except on the edges.

  The world of Shriners and road surveys continued to encroach on William and Mattie Three Mountains, even on their remote corner of the Spokane Reservation. In the summer of 1911, when William strenuously objected to agency attempts to erect a sawmill on the West End, agent John Webster seemed to understand his concern, reporting that “like most of the old full bloods he is adverse to the introduction of certain devices of the white man on the reservation—such as railroads, sawmills, etc.” The following year, when Webster proposed a West End community center based around athletic endeavors, Three Mountains balked again, convinced that the club atmosphere would promote more drinking, which he saw as the bane of reservation life. “He is a ‘teetotaler,’ ” wrote Webster, “has a fine ranch he takes excellent care of and during the Fall, after his crops are harvested, he looks for work among white people and can be found busily engaged in the orchards picking fruit, or close to ground digging potatoes.”

  In 1916, Three Mountains led a council meeting near Detillion Bridge calling for action on the nondelivery of government funds that had been earmarked for the tribe. Over the next two decades he remained a constant presence in gatherings of Spokane and Plateau leaders as they discussed matters of importance to their people. In photographs of these meetings, he always cuts a fine figure, usually wearing a dark shirt and distinctive neckerchief. His head always rises above the rest of the crowd.

  William Three Mountains the Younger died at his home near Detillion Bridge in January of 1937. He was survived by his widow, Mattie, and one son. Mattie lived in the house until the backup of Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1941, forced her to move higher up on the hillside. Today, although the old bridge is drowned beneath fifty feet of water, the top part of Detillion Rock still rises above Lake Roosevelt, and a campground on the reservation side recalls the Three Mountains name.

  Stones and Bones

  In 1916, as William Three Mountains argued his tribe’s case against the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Spokane Historical Society mounted a display of local Indian artifacts in a glass-faced cabinet on the third floor of Spokane’s City Hall. A newspaper article about the display noted that “W. M. Manning, who has loaned to the historical society the largest single exhibit, said much can be gathered in the way of historical material from the Indians if an effort is made before it is too late. He spent several years in collecting his exhibit.” That original display moved several times over the next few years, always under the care of the organization that became the Eastern Washington Historical Society.

  In 1925, the historical society’s secretary, William S. Lewis, asked Manning to place a value on the collection, in the hopes that his organization might acquire it for their proposed museum. Manning quickly replied with a figure of $1,500 for the entire lot, minus Joseph’s pipe, which he had reclaimed the previous year. In the course of assessing his artifacts, however, Manning noted that several items had gone missing over the years, including some stone implements, two woven women’s hats, and the very old ironwood bow he had purchased from William Three Mountains. “This loss of course is that of your institution to whom I intrusted the property,” he wrote.

  Even so, Manning was willing to make a deal. He told Lewis he would like to keep his artifacts together in Spokane under the title of the “Manning Collection.” Secretary Lewis, a lawyer with a deep interest in both the historical society and local culture, immediately informed his board president that they should agree to Manning’s offer.

  The loss of valuable articles from this collection demonstrates the need for greater care in the handling and preservation of such collections, and for the purpose of cataloguing, and proper control thereof I recommend that all historical and Indian collections of the Society be placed under the direct charge and control of the Secretary.

  The deal did not come to fruition, and Manning shifted ground. Following a contentious divorce, he accepted a post as a consulting mining engineer across the Rocky Mountains in Helena, Montana. After he remarried and settled into a downtown Helena apartment, there is no indication that he ever dabbled in the world of American Indian artifacts again.

  In the fall of 1930, Manning again contacted the board of the Eastern Washington Historical Society, asking if they would be interested in purchasing his collection for $6,500. Negotiations skittered along until the outbreak of World War II, when Manning became an advisor for the mining division of the War Production Board, assessing claims all across Montana, Idaho, and Washington. It was an important job that kept him on the move until 1944, when he was felled by a stroke while inspecting a corundum mine. Manning’s widow took over the dispersal of his artifacts and reluctantly, in 1954, sold the entire collection to the Eastern Washington Historical Society for $750.

  With that purchase, the society began updating the catalog made three decades before. Archivists found that while Manning had accumulated scattered items from a variety of tribal traditions, most of the artifacts had been crafted by Plateau people, with Spokane and Kalispel the most numerous, followed by Colville. They also found significant objects made by Coeur d’Alene, Yakama, and Thompson (Nlaka’pamux) tribal members.

  Museum curators also discovered, to their dismay, that the collector had picked up, rather than purchased, some of the items, including a handful of grave goods from the Spokane Reservation. The robbing of ancestral graves by white collectors has long been a source of tremendous bitterness among tribal members, but Manning appeared unaware of his trespasses. In his notes he coolly described finding a grave “while tracing some boundary lines … about 500 ft. up a steep, coarse slide rock side hill,” as well as collecting “Kalispel Indian bones plowed up in the Pend Oreille Valley.” Tribal members were acutely aware of such behavior, and they still talk about a human skull that was included in Manning’s original City Hall display in 1916.

  It’s been just over a century since William Morley Manning compiled his collections, and he left behind no writing to indicate exactly what he thought about them. All that can be said, based on his “before it is too late” statement that appeared with his original Spokane display, is that Manning, no matter how much he respected the work and culture of the tribes, felt that American India
ns would surely soon be extinct. In the eyes of many tribal members, such collectors thought that by holding an artifact in their hand—whether it was a stone pestle thousands of years old, or a pair of freshly beaded moccasins, or a human arm bone turned up by happenstance—they could somehow “own” pieces of that vanishing history.

  But time has proved that Manning and many others were wrong. All the Plateau tribes have survived, and their cultures remain alive. Today the Spokane, Kalispel, Coeur d’Alene, and Confederated Colville tribes play an integral role in the Eastern Washington Historical Society, and they independently own those materials created by their ancestors. Over the last few decades, all human remains collected by Manning, as well as objects of ceremonial or spiritual importance, have been curated and repatriated according to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

  Today, just as the mining engineer desired, the Manning Collection forms a core part of the Plateau collection at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture. It is impossible to tell what the collector, certainly a man of his time, would make of the way things turned out. He may or may not have learned to leave the contents alone if he happened to stumble across a grave during the course of his work. He may or may not have been surprised to learn that the three families with whom he had the closest contact, and who supplied him with treasured relics of a culture that he regarded as inevitably on the wane, remain relevant forces in their communities today.