Cold & Windy on the Camas Prairie

The sky has finally filled with rain instead of smoke up here on the prairie.  The Camas Prairie is bounded by deep river canyons and dense mountain forests.  The average elevation of the rolling fields of wheat, grass, and canola is 3500 feet.  The river valleys cut deep and are plus-and-minus 1200 feet on the waters.  The drop from the Prairie to the rivers is abrupt and precipitous.  The west edge of the Bitterroot Mountains encompass the east side of the high prairie, dark and vertical.

Camas Prairie Idaho

 Three counties share the Prairie: Nez Perce to the west, Lewis the center and Idaho County the southeast.  Lawyer Creek cuts the Prairie through the middle and is the boundary between Lewis and Idaho Counties.

The Heart of the Monster, which I spoke of in an earlier blog, the most sacred place of the Nez Perce Indians, is just south of the mouth of Lawyer Creek.  Pink and I are currently staying at the Flying B Farm, the southern yellow pin.  I am soon to finish collecting data from the two Prairie county seats and will then move down to the Canyon on the Ranch, the portion of the canyon directly to our north, the southern dip of the creek, and following the creek to the east and entrance to the canyon.  The Flying B owns most of the eastern canyon.

Portrait of “Chief Lawyer” or Hallalhotsoot, portrayed as the Nez Perce 
leader of the Walla Walla Council by artist Gustav Sohon.

I have had a few locals tell me the Canyon is named after "Crooked Lawyers", because the canyon is so crooked and so are Lawyers -- not true (Well at least about the name origin).  Cartographers can't make up their mind if the Creek is named: Lawyer, Lawyers or Lawyer's.  Every version is used, but the correct "Lawyer's" is the most seldom used.  The creek and the canyon it has gouged is named for Chief Lawyer or "Hallalhotsoot" of the Nez Perce.  Fur trappers named him Lawyer because of his eloquence and ability to argue.  With a hat like that, who could argue?

Hallalhotsoot was about nine years old, and one of three Nez Perce boys who first met William Clark in 1805, when the advance party of the Corps of Discovery Expedition stumbled out of the dense Bitterroot Mountains, starving and reduced to eating dogs. 

The next few days may have been the most dangerous days of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  The Nez Perce gave the men of the expedition a couple horses to eat and fed them Camas root.  The root of the Camas flower, the flower the Prairie is named for, makes a rich, starchy paste.  The root was a staple crop of the bands of the Colombian Plateau.  The expedition, having eaten nothing but meat for months, all became sick with nausea, and lay recovering from ingesting such a rich sweet food.  While sick and in their beds, the Nez Perce held council to decide what they should do with these new men.  Years before, a prophecy had come to the Plateau people:

Soon there will come from the rising sun,
a different kind of man from any you have yet seen,
who will bring with them a book (leaves) and will teach you everything,
and after that the world will fall to pieces.
(Silimxnotylmilakobok, theSpokan Prophet, c. 1790)
[Miller, Christopher, Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau, Rutgers University Press, 1985, p45.]

The elders argued.  Should we kill these men now?  Obviously they are the men of the prophecy; their heads are upside down, and they have eyes like fish (bald with beards and blue eyes).  Because of them the world will fall.  Should we learn from them?  Lewis had the book he wrote in, on the journal's  leaves.  A woman spoke up.  She encouraged them to be good to the men.  They were like the man who had once helped her.  After being captured by the Shoshone, she had been sold to a French fur trapper, who brought her to the Red River post and then helped her to return to her own people.  The elders agreed; they would help these new men.
(Story told by Allen Pinkham, Nez Perce story keeper.)

The Nez Perce could have just as easily killed the entire Expedition while sick from the Camas. Again, a woman saved the Expedition.  The Shoshone woman, Sacajawea, saved them on the other side of the Bitterroots, when she secured horses for the expedition from her people.

 Hallalhotsoot's father, Twisted Hair, befriended the expedition, took care of their horses over the winter, and he guided them down the Clearwater and Snake Rivers to the Columbia.  Twisted Hair and Broken Arm wintered the expedition's horses in Lawyer's Canyon, which of course did not bear Little Lawyer's name at the time.  Meriwether Lewis called Lawyer's Creek "Commearp Creek"
[Lewis, Meriwether; Clark, William (2005-07-01). The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 (Kindle Location 19110). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.]

The Cold and Windy Camas Prairie, looking north toward Lawyer's Canyon fro the Flying B Farm

Well, as I write, the sun is begining to peek out.  Maybe I'll go deer hunting.  The standard greeting in the stores and restaurants of North Central Idaho these days is "Got your Elk yet?" or the equivalent, "Got your deer yet?"  Pinky likes to sleep with this guy looking down at her.  

I have always been of the opinion that it is better to be acquainted with who you eat, rather than hire a contract killer to wrap your meat up in sanitary plastic for you.  People who eat meat and dislike hunters take a hypocritical posture; isn't it double-minded?  Oh well, maybe I'll just go shoot a bird or catch a fish.  I've always respected the morals of the vegetarian, but I don't have any Camas to eat.  I think today is a good day to eat some meat.  Even though we are on the rich Camas Prairie, few Camas flowers remain after all.  Wheat, Canola oil and grass seed for golf courses have replaced the Camas flower.  The scene Lewis described in the spring of 1806 is gone from this high prairie:

Camas Flower

"The quawmash (Camas) is now in blume and from the colour of its bloom at a short distance it resembles lakes of fine clear water, so complete in this deseption that on first sight I could have sworn it was water." [Lewis, Meriwether; The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 (Kindle Location 20756). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.] 

The spring scene on the high Camas Prairie is today Canola yellow and green wheat.  Now that the sun is appearing, the pastel tans of harvested wheat and the black burns of the fields of grass seed are brightening into golden hills, and the deep black burns show signs of spouts of green grass.  Yeah, today is a good day to hunt birds.  Here comes the sun.  I'll stay on the Prairie today, not the dark Bitterrot forest.

Spring Canola on a stormy Camas Prairie day.