Russell Means and Pocatello

A recent email:

Pocatello High School

Russell Means, in the early 1970s, sued my father, and other named administrators of School District 25 in an attempt to force Pocatello High School (est. 1892) to abandon its logo and sports name, "Indians." The tribes of the local Fort Hall Reservation declined to join Means in the effort, labeling him an unwelcomed opportunist. Local media said the Shoshone and Bannock considered "Indians" an honor to their history, as was the name of the town and its first high school.

 

"Pocatello," as best as history has determined, was bestowed in respect by an admiring U.S. Army officer, perhaps from an obscure European legend, on a Shoshone chief who led a long resistance to depredations of the land by the rush of white settlers who responded in the 1840s, first to the call of "Oregon" country and then the gold fever of California. The main trails diverged at Fort Hall in what is now eastern Idaho.

 

Pocatello had various tribal names, as was the custom, reflecting his achievements as he grew through life. Tanaioza was one. None resemble the white man's moniker.

 

Fort Hall was built in 1832 by Nathaniel Wyeth, who a year before had established a Columbia River fur-trading post at what is now Portland, Oregon.

 

Unrecorded years earlier, French, then British, then Canadian, and following Lewis and Clark, American, fur-trappers traded with tribes of the Pacific Northwest to mutual benefit. The trappers got furs, food, brides; the natives received iron goods and other forged metals, plus manufactured beads and other glass works. (Horses came from the Spanish.) Compared with what followed, the peoples lived in relative harmony.

 

As late as 1840, the Shoshone -- most widespread of Western native Americans (the linguistic group extends into the Mojave) -- and the smaller warrior tribe of Bannocks hunted bison throughout the Snake River Plain. These groups long occupied the SRP and were present when the last of the volcano fields in the region erupted, roughly 2,000 years ago. The Shoshone have a legend of a snake curling around the mountain and squeezing it until fire shot forth.

 

Oregon- and then California-bound wagon trains cut swaths, said by white historians to be upward of 40 miles wide, across ancestral lands. These itinerants consumed all sustenance in their path. Virtually every plant and animal resource was consumed, the same provender that the hunter-gatherers required -- from the Camas root and wild grasses and stalks to the bison, antelope, deer and elk.

 

This, American history knows, sparked the US-Indian wars that burned through the region for the next four decades.

 

US armed interest in southern Idaho grew -- white man's politics being what they are -- not only to protect the wagon trains, but eventually, in the 1860s, to preserve hold during the Civil War. And to a certain extent to thwart the Indian policies of Brigham Young's church in Great Salt Lake City, which was waging its own battle against Washington authorities.

 

One result was what historians consider to be the worst atrocity committed by the US Army against natives in the West, the so-called battle of Bear River in 1863, a few miles north of the Utah border, in which an estimated 250-400, mostly women and children, were slaughtered in a dawn sweep through their campground.

 

Pocatello had taken his warriors out the day before.

 

The chief went on to destroy wagon trains in ensuing years, until the white surge was no longer resistible.

 

The land and its bounty once belonged to his people, from eastern Oregon to the Wind River range of Wyoming (they hunted eastward and battled with Blackfoot, Crow, Sioux and other plains tribes as bison herds dwindled). The influx of Oregon and California settlers forced these Shoshone and Bannock, probably never numbering more than 10,000, into starvation and then an unwinnable defensive war. During the period, an estimated 242,000 white people transited Fort Hall.

 

Sometime in the late 1860s or  early '70s, Pocatello gave up the battle and retired into obscurity, and perhaps reservation life. The details remain unknown, even to his own tribe.

 

In the 1880s, the Union Pacific company, setting up subsidiaries, built rail links from the transcontinental line -- itself a Civil War-era coast-to-coast knitting project -- to the newly opened Butte, Montana, copper mining operations (which for several decades made Butte the biggest city in the Northern Rockies) and to Oregon.

 

With the approval of Washington, The UP carved out a major rail center from land granted by treaty to the Shoshone-Bannock. The Fort Hall Reservation was reduced by more than half to create the city in which I was born. UP chose the city's name, by which a small sliver of history was respected.

 

Pocatello has always meant "Indians." By the time Russell Means showed up, the local tribes had accepted their fate. They bade Means move on, take his movement elsewhere.

 

One beneficial result was that the Pocatello High School mascot was shorn of its encephalitic, cartoonish Indian head, knicknamed Oske-Ow-Ow (meaningless), an embarrassment that my contemporaries and me mocked (1961-63). Today, something more akin to a warrior brave infuses the representation.

 

Recently (ca. 2010), the city fathers commissioned a statue of a noble Indian chief to represent Pocatello.

 

During my stay in the city this past summer, no one I spoke to knew of the statue's existence.

 

Today, it would be foolish for a white person to explore, hunt or fish on the remaining reservation -- or seek the site of historic Fort Hall -- without Shoshone/Bannock permission and an Indian guide.

 

-- Thomas Strah