The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

by Andrew R. Graybill

  Monteath’s vindictiveness may thus explain why, when the Blackfeet Reservation was allotted beginning in 1907, Helen Clarke was not selected for the job. Certainly she was an obvious and qualified candidate, given her extensive work in Indian Territory. Moreover, if federal authorities had once believed that her mixed ancestry gave her an advantage in dealing with native peoples, how could it be anything but a help with the Piegans, who shared her blood and trusted her counsel? Leaving nothing to chance, the Blackfeet even sent a petition signed by two hundred individuals (representing almost one-tenth of the reservation population) to the commissioner of Indian affairs recommending Clarke for the post, but to no avail; Charles Roblin, a white man who had valuable allotting experience of his own, would see the Piegans through the complex transition to a new way of life.94

  Compounding Clarke’s frustration, no doubt, was her required participation in a humiliating charade: proving her native bona fides in order to secure a homestead. Though that was a standard procedure in the allotting process, her personal history was already well known to the government. Nevertheless, on an April day in 1909, an elderly and respected chief named Little Dog shuffled into agency headquarters and testified to Roblin that Clarke’s mother was a full-blood Piegan, thus entitling her daughter to 320 acres of Montana soil.95 Clarke must have appreciated the irony. After spending most of a decade badgering native peoples to accept allotments in Indian Territory, she had come to rely upon an Indian—and, if judged by Little Dog’s traditional dress, an unreconstructed one at that—to vouch for her native ancestry. Thus endorsed by the chief, Clarke became allottee number 283.

  GUESTS STAYING AT New York’s brand-new McAlpin Hotel in the summer of 1913 could be forgiven if they overlooked some of the building’s state-of-the-art amenities, which included Russian and Turkish baths as well as a striking subterranean bar decorated with polychrome terra-cotta murals depicting the city’s maritime history.96 Instead, their attention would have been drawn to the rooftop of the building, located at the intersection of Broadway and Thirty-Fourth Street, where a group of visiting Blackfeet Indians had pitched their teepees, because—in the words of their chief, Three Bear—“my people want air … [a] hot room [is] no good. [We] want plenty [of time] outdoors.” Louis Hill had brought the natives to New York to promote Glacier National Park, and before they left, the Blackfeet took in sights like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Bronx Zoo, and that quintessential feature of modern city life, the new subway system, then in its infancy.97

  Hill’s publicity stunt had the desired effect, as Helen and Horace Clarke watched scores of well-dressed easterners disembark from the Great Northern’s Oriental Limited during the hotel’s inaugural season. These visitors then spent vast sums of money at the lodge or on a variety of recreational activities, from hunting and fishing to touring the park’s backcountry on horseback with an expert guide. As the air turned chilly and the leaves began to fall, bringing the curtain down on the lodge’s spectacular debut season, the Clarkes could see clearly that Glacier National Park offered economic opportunity for them as well.

  In truth, they needed extra income. If in their twilight years both enjoyed good health, their finances were not nearly so robust. Like many mixed-blood people on the reservation, who by this time constituted nearly half its total population, the Clarkes ran a few cattle and grew hay. Such ventures, however, were becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, as the allotment process continued to carve up tribal lands and thus reduce common grazing space.98 More to the point is a recollection by one of Helen’s friends: “Neither of them had much business ability so they never made much money.”99

  Some sense of the Clarkes’ economic hardships emerges in a series of letters between Helen and J. H. Sherburne, who was the licensed Indian trader on the Blackfeet Reservation. Born in Maine in 1851, Sherburne as a young man had migrated west in search of work and wound up eventually in Indian Territory, where in 1876 he started a trading post. There he met Helen Clarke and was so inspired by her “stories of the great west, and especially Montana … [that] we turned our thoughts to the big open spaces in the land of the great mountains.”100 In the end, her encouragement of Sherburne served as a Trojan horse of sorts; according to one observer, by the early 1920s the trader had devoured huge portions of the reservation by buying up the land patents of impoverished Indians.101

  Although Helen and her brother were not as destitute as many of their neighbors, her correspondence with Sherburne indicates that they were nevertheless on intimate terms with privation. For instance, in one letter she requested a package of rat poison, as “my house is alive with mice.” In another, scribbled during a brutal cold snap, Helen asked about a shipment of goods that had not yet arrived. Noting that she had only enough heating oil to get her through the night, she wrote, “We are in a sad plight—no oil … and soon no butter … send goods so soon as you can.”102 These missives, however, were probably easier to draft than the many concluding with apologies like this one, from January 1916: “Wish we could have paid more on old note—but a little is better than nothing.”103

  In this bleak economic milieu the aging Clarke siblings formed a plan to develop a portion of their land, hoping to capitalize on the Glacier National Park tourist trade. Helen explained in October 1913, “We intend to build chalets and bungalows and induce others to do likewise which will not only benefit the public but enhance the value of our own lands.”104 It was a fine idea, but implementing it was not nearly so simple as she described. After all, as allotted Indians, the Clarkes had first to secure title to their property, which was held in trust by the federal government according to the terms of the Dawes Act. Helen’s subsequent navigation of the federal bureaucracy reveals much about the status of mixed-blood peoples at the turn of the century.

  While in many cases the government was eager to grant outright ownership to such individuals, thus obviating the need to support them, the unique circumstances of Helen’s career helped facilitate her application. From the moment her inquiry arrived in Washington, officials in the Indian Service fast-tracked the paperwork; one of the commissioner’s assistants noted that, though the schedule of Blackfeet allotments had not yet been approved by the president, the Clarkes’ case “will be taken up specially, and this Office will make a recommendation to the Department [of the Interior] that the allotments be approved.”105

  In other crucial respects, however, her petition was treated like that of any Indian seeking to gain title to allotted land, highlighting the racist assumptions of the day concerning those of native ancestry. To begin with, she needed an endorsement from the reservation’s Indian agent. More disheartening was a questionnaire designed to gauge her personal competency, which asked among other things her degree of Indian blood and whether or not she used intoxicants. For a woman who had traveled widely, been the first of her sex to win elected office in Montana, and served the government for nearly a decade as an allotting agent, Helen must have been incredulous as she wrote tersely in another letter, “[W]e know we are capable of handling our own affairs.”106

  Though the Clarkes’ applications were approved in the spring of 1914, their desire for financial security did not materialize after they took ownership of the land. The siblings managed to find willing renters, but their timing could hardly have been worse: the sharp economic downturn following World War I caused many of their tenants to default on their payments. As one Sherburne associate explained to Helen, “It is most awful hard to collect a Dollar from any body on any thing [at] these present times.” That realization did not stop the trader from trying to collect on Helen’s debt, which by the end of the decade had ballooned to nearly $1,500.107

  IF IT DID NOT bring her riches, Clarke’s proximity to Glacier Park brought her visitors instead. In time, the house she shared with her brother became renowned as something of a rustic literary salon, where guests sat for hours with her in order to learn more about the Piegans, who thanks to Louis Hill had became famous natio
nwide as “the Glacier Indians.” However well meaning, her white visitors tended to exoticize their hostess, emphasizing—intentionally or otherwise—her racial difference. Of course, that seems to have been what drew many to her in the first place. Take, for instance, a letter from the prominent Montana suffragist Mary O’Neill, who in 1910 wrote ostensibly to invite Clarke to a statewide gathering of women’s organizations. “How are you, Woman with the Shadow eyes?” she began, before arriving at the true purpose of her letter: “One thing I want to see [is] if you and I can collaborate on a book of the Mystic lore of the Indians—and no one could know it better than you.”108 And if these were the sentiments of a suffragette, one can only imagine the extent of the racial caricatures drawn by people who were not so well meaning.

  Even her closest friends tended to fetishize Clarke’s hybridity. One of them, Helen Fitzgerald Sanders, daughter-in-law of Clarke’s most loyal patron, spent extensive time with the Clarke siblings while researching her novel The White Quiver. Published in 1913, the book, according to its author, “is a story of the Piegan Indians before they felt the influence of the white man.” In this way Sanders’s volume resembled the contemporary pictures of the photographer Edward S. Curtis or the paintings of the Taos Society of Artists (whose most senior member, Joseph Henry Sharp, visited Clarke at Glacier), with their romantic and noble visions of an uncorrupted native past. Helen and Horace had been Sanders’s portal to that world, which the author acknowledged in her dedication: “To Helen P. Clarke, ‘Pi-o-to-po-wa-ka,’ in whose noble character mingles the best of the white race and the red.”109

  What Clarke made of such patronizing oblations, however generous and heartfelt, is hard to assess. She was hardly a stranger to this kind of purple language, but it is easy to imagine that she experienced less internal conflict when visited by a second group of guests: needy Piegans. In later years “Aunt Helen,” as she was known, became a trusted source of emotional and financial support for Indians on the reservation, especially the elderly, who had experienced the most trouble in conforming to the assimilated ideal set forth in the Dawes Act. According to one friend, it was this generosity, more than any absence of business acumen, that explained the poverty of Clarke’s later years.110

  Helen P. Clarke. Clarke struggled to walk in both white and native worlds, dismissed by some as a “half-breed” but fetishized by others for her in-between-ness. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

  ON 4 MARCH 1923 a Catholic priest named Father Halligan was called to the Clarkes’ home. The old woman, now seventy-five, was failing, and since she had always been a devout member of the church, someone—likely Horace—knew she would take great comfort in having a clergyman nearby. It was pneumonia, “the old man’s friend,” that had pushed her to the brink of death, an ironic fate, given that it was her lungs that had animated her most defining feature, the sonorous voice that had once thrilled audiences and, more recently, heralded bleak tidings for the Poncas and the Otoe-Missourias.

  As he and a small group kept a bedside vigil throughout the night, Father Halligan noticed that, toward the end, Helen “was reviewing her whole life.” Because of her weakened condition the priest could make out very little of what she said, but he clearly heard these words, which he shared at her eulogy a few days later. “Children,” she had whispered, “should have nothing but the greatest admiration[,] the greatest respect, [and] the greatest love and reverence for their teachers.” Halligan explained to the mourners who gathered at her grave site (a short walk from the house Helen and Horace had shared for more than two decades) that these “golden words of wisdom” harked back to the “best and happiest years of her life,” when she had taught the young children of the territory.111

  Headstone at the grave of Helen P. Clarke, 2007. If the dates are incorrect (she was born in 1848), it is certain that Helen P. Clarke was “a pioneer.” As the first woman to hold elective office in Montana and one of the very few to serve as an allotting agent, she was an exceptional woman and will be inducted into the Gallery of Outstanding Montanans in 2015. There she will join her nephew John, who was so honored in 2003. Photograph by the author.

  Perhaps the priest was right, that at the hour of her death Clarke thought only of her students at Fort Benton and Helena (and maybe even San Francisco). Yet there is another possible interpretation of her last words, one in which she is still the teacher but her students are the native peoples to whom she devoted so many years. To be sure, such an equation would leave Clarke open to unsettling charges of condescension and self-aggrandizement. Nevertheless, at least according to one acquaintance, this alternative reading may be closer to the truth: “Whatever her own opinions, she could only serve her people by counseling them to submit, make the best of the situation and so educate themselves that they might meet the whites on their own ground and possibly, finally, to obtain justice.”112

  IN THE SUMMER of 1915 James Willard Schultz, a white man who had married a Piegan woman and lived with the tribe for years, sat with a group of elders around a campfire just outside the boundaries of Glacier National Park. The men feasted on roasted elk ribs and shared a pipe, reminiscing about the old days. After a time the conversation turned serious, with one of the men railing against “the most recent wrong put upon us by the whites.” The headman was referring not to the creation of the park, or even to the efforts of federal authorities to exclude the Blackfeet from its premises, but rather to the white outsiders’ renaming of the features of the landscape. The group concluded that “the whites’ names should at once be wiped out and our names restored to the maps of the region.”

  Ten years elapsed before Schultz and two respected Piegan elders, Curly Bear and Takes-Gun First, had the chance to realize their plan, but they took to it with tremendous enthusiasm. Over the course of a week in June 1925, the men methodically renamed the sites one by one. In this way, Florence Falls became Pai-ota Oh’tôkwi, or “Flying Woman Falls,” named for a sacred holy woman, and the Sherburne Lakes were rechristened Kai’yoîks Otsitait’ska O’mûksîkîmîks, or “Fighting Bears’ Lakes,” in honor of a tussle between two grizzlies.

  Toward the end of their work the group paused to consider Helen Lake, a cerulean glacier-fed pool located in the north-central portion of the park, not far from the spot where George Bird Grinnell had experienced his epiphany forty years earlier. Although they changed the name of the lake, they did not change the person to whom it referred, calling it Pai’ota-pamakan O’mûksîkîmî, or “Came Running Back Lake,” both variations of Helen’s Indian moniker. In explaining its significance, Schultz wrote that “Miss Clark was a woman of high education, and was a teacher in various Montana schools.” He and his friends were particularly proud to claim her as a Piegan.113

  Today, because of Helen Lake’s remote location and the poor campsite nearby, it receives fewer visitors than many other parts of Glacier National Park. Those who do stop at its shores, however, are well rewarded. Enclosed on three sides by soaring mountain walls, backpackers can revel in a sense of total isolation, broken only by the bleat of a mountain goat or the sight of a grizzly seeking refreshment from the impossibly blue waters. If they think of it at all, hikers who reach this lovely spot might wonder about its supposed namesake, the daughter of a white engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey who mapped the area in the early twentieth century.114 The Piegans, to whom the land originally belonged, maintain that it honors someone else, a complex woman of many talents who, for a time, managed to walk between two increasingly divided worlds.

  5

  The Man Who Talks Not

  Nearly seven decades after Helen Clarke’s death, the Montana Historical Society (MHS) mounted a lavish retrospective in 1993 featuring the work of her nephew John L. Clarke, a woodcut artist with a remarkable biography. Descended from one of the state’s oldest pioneer families, Clarke had overcome the inability to hear or speak and established a career as an internationally acclaimed sculptor, known especially for his extraord
inary renderings of western wildlife. As one admirer recalled, “When John L. Clarke finished carving a bear, you could just smell it.”1

  Highlighting the Helena exhibition was the unveiling of a splendid bas-relief frieze. Carved from a one-ton block of cottonwood, Blackfeet Encampment captures the essence of the tribe’s lifeways in the period before Montana’s absorption by the United States. Accompanied by their dogs, a group of Indians on horseback arrives at a small stand of teepees, whose residents emerge from their lodges to greet the newcomers. A herd of ponies grazing in the distance speaks to the prosperity of the camp, while a kettle suspended over an open fire holds the promise of nourishment for the weary travelers. It is a moving scene, conveying the unmistakable impression that all is right with the world.

  John L. Clarke and Blackfeet Encampment, ca. 1950s. Clarke carved his masterpiece on-site at the Montana Historical Society, using both traditional and contemporary tools. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.