NY Times: The Future is Drying Up

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry.

This fascinating and chilling article from the New York Times Sunday magazine surveys the effects that a warming climate is already having on the American West. Among the worrisome observations and predictions:

• 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear
• a "catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River" has already caused the level of Lake Mead to drop by 100 feet and threatens the 30 million people who depend on Colorado River water
• groundwater tables are dropping all over the west and those around Denver will be exhausted by 2050
• dendrochronology suggests that western drought cycles often last 60 years
• virtually all climate models show the west getting drier over the next century

The article focused on the Colorado basin, but this Seattle Times piece suggests similar issues in the Columbia River basin of the Pacific Northwest. On the other hand the snow pack in the northwern Rockies was 25% over normal this year.

Segregated Seattle

Segregated Seattle: "For most of its history Seattle was a segregated city, as committed to white supremacy as any location in America . . . This special section presents research that will surprise many Pacific Northwesterners. "

Segregated Seattle is part of The University of Washington's Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. Created and maintained in part by students and members of the community, it is both a valuable historical resource and a nice example of collaborative teaching and community outreach using digital technology. The student Research Reports are quite good--see for example Nicole Grant's "Challenging Sexism at City Light: The Electrical Trades Trainee Program" and Heather McKimmie's "Quileute Independent and Quileute Chieftain, 1908-1910." The rich site also contains short films and slideshows, Activist Oral Histories, and a page where you can browse the site by time period or topic. There is much more--take a look!

I am going to begin teaching my seminars and perhaps select upper-level courses this way. The trick will be to come up with the website and some basic templates before the course begins. I tried something like this last year, adopting the ideas in Michael Lewis' 2004 Environmental History article "Reflections: 'This Class Will Write a Book': An Experiment in Environmental History Pedagogy" to my own environmental history class. It was a mixed success--the course was small (5 students) and lacked the critical mass to develop much momentum. I am teaching Introduction to Local History in the spring and will try again.

Indian Claims Commission Decisions

Oklahoma State University has put the entire Indian Claims Commission Decisions online. The ICC was established in 1946 by Congress to investigate the claims of Indian tribes against the United States. Tribes had five years to file claims that their treaty rights had been violated. The ICC would recommend compensation if appropriate, and the whole process would wrap up in ten years.

The actual process proved much more difficult and controversial than anticipated, taking until 1978 to be completed. The government paid out a total of $800 million dollars in 285 cases.

The reports, filled with expert testimony from historians, anthropologists, and native elders are a historical treasure trove. This digization makes the 43 bulky volumes keyword searchable and far easier to use than in the past. Many northwest peoples are represented in the collections, and some fun searches include "Chief Joseph" "Chief Moses" and "Spokane Garry."

The Google-powered search software is sophisticated. A search for Kamiakin brings zero results, but does prompt the message "Did you mean kamaiakun?" since that is the spelling used in the ICC records. On the other hand the optical character recognition leaves much to be desired. For example:

Original Sentence: "Chief Joseph and his followers did, in fact, move onto the Colville Reservation and the members of his band or the descendents thereof continued to reside on the reservation until the present date."

OCR Transcription: "Chief Moses and h i s followers did, in fact, Eove cnto the Colville Reservation 2nd tke meribers of h i s band or the descendmts thereof have c ~ n t ~ u etod r eside on t h a t reservation
- until the Fres at date."

Fortunately the default display is not this OCR text but an easily-legible PDF of the original page. As with other PDFs you can print or save each document.

Estimable Blogs Post #1: Lewis and Clark Trail Watch

Lewis and Clark Trail Watch is the blog of Kathleen A. Dahl, an anthropologist at Eastern Oregon University. Dedicated to "how the Lewis and Clark Expedition has been interpreted" the focus on this blog might seem a bit narrow--and yet Dahl has come up with entertaining and interesting posts for 3 1/2 years now. Her most recent post is an excellent link to an Oregon Public Radio series on the Columbia River.

(Hey there's Jack Nisbet! I need to make a post on him soon.)

The 47th Annual Conference of the Western History Association

I am recently back from the 47th Annual Conference of the Western History Association in Oklahoma City. I was on the panel "Shamans and Showmen: Decolonizing the Indians of Buffalo Bill and Edward Curtis." The panel was organized by Kevin Shupe, a dissertating grad students at George Mason University. Kevin presented a clever paper ”Selling Geronimo at the 1901 Pan-American Expositon.” Dee Garceau of Rhodes College presented "Edward Curtis Photographs, 1899-1910: Challenges of Museum Interpretation." My paper was ”Joseph’s Funeral: Edward Curtis versus the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.” Michael Holloman, the Director of the Center for Plateau Cultural Studies at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, provided introductions and commentary. (I would simply link to the conference schedule but this year it is not online--tsk tsk.)

The panel was well-received and I thought hung together very well--though Dee and I, by presenting similarly-themed papers, rather stole the show from poor Kevin, the hard-working graduate student who pulled the whole thing together. Let that be an object lesson to you, Kevin.

I love the WHA and it was great to meet so many old friends, people whose work I admire, and bright young scholars doing exciting work. And I liked the new format of the meeting, with the awards at lunch and the evening banquet less stodgy. And above all it is good to see that the obnoxious Green River Knife tradition is gone forever. God that used to make me cringe!

What I Had Hoped Would be a Brief Tour of Indian Ledger Art

History blogging is delicate proposition. I typically look for a topic which is sufficient to fill 3-5 paragraphs with perhaps that many links. But what to do when a topic grows and grows as one composes the post? Such is the case with today's post on Native American Ledger Art.

Ledger Art is a genre that comes out of the reservation and boarding school experience. American Indians took their traditions of stylized figure drawing as seen on petroglyphs and buffalo robe paintings and adapted them to the new mediums of ink, colored pencil and paper. Not a few of these early drawings were made on discarded ledger books, hence the name. The online Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture has a good entry on the form. Ledger Art is usually associated with Plains Indians, but as we will see there are some compelling northwest examples as well.

Ledger Art is well represented online--starting with the site Plains Indian Ledger Art. "This site is dedicated to presenting and and preserving Plains Indian "Ledger" art, drawings on paper, from the late 19th century for research and enjoyment."


Fourteen ledgers are currently featured, all from plains peoples. So where is the love for northwest ledger art? Well the University Oregon offers this Cayuse-Nez Percé Sketchbook with some compelling images:


Not available online is this remarkable example of Nez Perce ledger art, recovered and interpreted by Scott Thompson, an art teacher at Chase Middle School in Spokane! Nice work Scott.

And the modern Spokane native artist George Flett plays with the medium in some of his work:


In addition, the Massachusetts Historical Society offers glimpses at this Ledger Art book drawn by Making Medicine (Cheyenne). Making Medicine (1844-1931) had a long and astonishing life with experiences that ranged from fighting U.S. Cavalry to a student at and then a recruiter for Richard Henry Pratt's Carlisle School to serving as an Episcopal deacon in Oklahoma. And this particular ledger book was once owned by Francis Parkman!

There is so much more out there, which you can Google as well as I.

Plains Indian Sign Language Conference

In 1930 the United States Department of the Interior held a conference in Browning, Montana for plains Indians to display their sign language so that it could be filmed for posterity. The conference was organized by General Hugh Lenox Scott at a cost of $5000 and is an ambitious example of salvage ethnography--the attempt to record the culture of a people thought to be on the verge of extinction.

This fascination collection of film from the conference was placed on YouTube by Tommy Foley, "I have translated the direct literal meaning of the signs in this film to English. Though I have added a little more than the literal meaning in some cases when more was meant by the signer using space, position, combination of signs," writes Foley. The description also contains a link to his website, which is an intriguingly designed site but does not seem to contain any additional information. According to the short descriptions on YouTube accompanying some of the videos, General Scott filmed 300 signs, the start of a project that was to have reached 1300 signs but was never completed.

General Scott is an interesting character in himself who combined a long military career with a lifelong interest in Indians. He graduated from West Point in 1876 and eventually served in the Seventh Cavalry, where one of his tasks was to mark the graves of Custer's men at Little Big Horn! Scott organized Indian troops, watched over an imprisoned Geronimo, served as a military attache to Smithsonian expeditions, was briefly a military governor of Cuba, battled freedom fighters in the Philippines, and was Chief of Staff of the United States Army as the country entered World War One.

Scott was one of those nineteenth-century officers who took great interest in American Indians. Though I am usually skeptical when such men are referred to as "experts," in Scott's case it may have been true. Scott's papers at the Library of Congress contain many stories he collected from the Kiowa, for example. Google Books has his autobiography--but since it was published in 1928 we only get the snippet view. A year earlier and we would have the whole thing!

Where Politics, Environmental History and Airport Restrooms Meet

Sen. Craig's fall may benefit salmon.

"Craig, who was removed from leadership posts on the Senate Appropriations and Energy committees after a sex scandal, is known as one the most powerful voices in Congress on behalf of the timber and power industries. Environmentalists have fought him for years on issues from endangered salmon to public land grazing.

"Now Senate Democrats, exercising their slim majority, have waded into two contentious issues — both related to Snake River salmon."

Posted without further comment by your bemused history blogger.

John Beeson Internet Roundup

The explosion of internet sources for American history makes it possible to explore topics way beyond the obvious. Only a few years ago online historic investigations were limited to a few major archives (the Making of America, American Memory at the Library of Congress, and a few others). If you were willing to tailor your research to the topics available, you could investigate the writing of Thomas Jefferson or some other high-profile topic. And that was it.

How far have we come in the last few years? As an experiment in researching a secondary character in American history let us look for John Beeson. Beeson was an abolitionist and preacher, born in England in 1803 he migrated to America in 1832 and settled on a farm in Illinois--which he eventually turned into a station on the Underground Railroad. In 1853 Beeson, his wife, and son walked (!) to southern Oregon. There he became an outspoken proponent for the Indians during an era when Americans northwesterners did not particularly want to hear it. They ran him out of the state and he did not dare return for ten years.

Beeson was unloved in his day and has not received his due from modern historians--though he gets mentioned a lot. The internet, however, loves Beeson.

His brief, obscure, but wonderfully passionate 1857 book A Plea for the Indians is online, one of a number of historic documents hosted courtesy of the Friends of the Talent Library. A Plea for the Indians is a unique and compelling primary source in northwest history. "I would offer a few thoughts upon a subject which, as I conceive, has not heretofore received that just and impartial consideration which its importance demands," Beeson begins in a typically understated nineteenth century book introduction. Then he gets going. Beeson heaps scorn on his fellow immigrants, "many who have never been refined by either mental or moral culture" and their casual brutality "men are heard to declare their determination to shoot the first Indian they see."

Beeson's account is largely devoted to a condemnation of the Rogue River War and the treatment of Indians in the Oregon Country. "There were scores of men, assuming the prerogatives of sovereigns, who could not read, and yet made and executed law, and whose only idea of the Constitution of the country is, that is was made to keep down the 'Niggers.' Of course they understood it to have the same bearing upon Indians, and all others except 'white male American citizens,'" Beeson wailed.

Beeson is most powerful when writing about the gradual dehumanization of the settlers themselves as they grow hardened in their treatment of the Oregon natives:

The majority of the first Emigrations to Oregon were from Missouri, and among them it was customary to speak of the Indian man as a Buck; of the woman as a Squaw; until at length, in the general acceptance of these terms, they ceased to recognize the rights of Humanity in those to whom they were applied. By a very natural and easy transition, from being spoken of as brutes, they came to be thought of as game to be shot, or as vermin to be destroyed.

Other Beeson items online include four letters he wrote to the government and to newspapers to publicize the oppression of the Oregon Indians. These letters are a part of the California State University-San Marcos Native American Documents Project. The fabulous Oregon History Project has another Beeson letter to an eastern newspaper. In 1858 Beeson had fled east and delivered a sermon titled "The Natural Interests and Christian Duties Involved in Our Treatment of the Indians" according to this contemporary article from the New York Times.


Beeson has a brief Wikipedia page with a one paragraph outline of his life. Find-A-Grave.com knows where Beeson is buried and povides the photo on the right. And while Google Books surprisingly does not have a full text version of A Plea for the Indians but a search for John Beeson uncovers every reference to Beeson by scholars.

New York Times Archives--Free, Full Text and Searchable to 1851!

This announcement from the New York Times--Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times--is being celebrated largely as the demise of Times Select, which was the NYTs scheme to charge extra for such "premium" content as Thomas Friedman's inane name-dropping. More significant to we bold historians however is that the Times has also opened up their online archives:

The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

What a boon this is to historians of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries--including historians of the distant northwest A search for Spokane, sorted oldest to newest, reveals the first use of the word in the Times in an 1858 story about the defeat of Colonel Steptoe: "The Indian Victory in Washington Territory." In a somewhat garbled report, the Times announces "The defeat of Colonel STEPTOE by the Indians is confirmed. The original statement was that he had been waylaid by a combined hand of Pelouses and Snakes, amounting to 1,500 warriors, and so routed." The Spokanes appear a little farther down:

A little nineteenth-century humor there. From the same search comes an 1877 editorial on the outbreak of the Nez Perce War ("It is quite likely that the first reports from the scene of the disturbances are exaggerated," the Times soothes) an 1883 article CHINAMEN SLAUGHTERED; THIRTY-THREE OF THEM KILLED BY A RAILROAD COLLISION, and this article about the Coeur d'Alene mines, "A New Eldorado."

For most of the older articles you only get the title and perhaps a few sentences in plain text followed by a link to a PDF of the original article. The Times server is robust, search results pop right up and the PDFs render smoothly. The Times archives are a major new digital resource for historians.

::: Great Seattle Fire :::

"The spring of 1889 in Seattle had been beautiful. There had been little rain, and temperatures were consistently in the 70s. Unfortunately, the unusually good weather proved to be disastrous, as the dry conditions conspired with a handful of other elements to allow for the worst fire in city history." Great Seattle Fire
is an impressive set of digitized archival resources at the University of Washington Libraries. There are 162 photographs of the city after the 1889 fire, tagged and searchable by keyword.

YouTube 1776 Roundup

I am drifting again from NW history, but I do so love the movie 1776, I just had to share these video mashups that people have created and posted to YouTube:



See also: Conquer the World-1776. | 1776 Lover Boy. | 1776 - A Christmas Story. | 1776-This Ain't a Scene, It's a Revolution. | The Rocky Horror 1776 Picture Show.

Why Couldn't this have Broken on Talk Like a Pirate Day?

This has nothing to do with either the Northwest nor digital history--but it is too good not to share. Some folks in Virginia are up in arms over a gigantic new statue of Christopher Newport at Christopher Newport University. It seems that the statue has one arm too many!

Newport was the captain of the Susan Constant, the largest of the three ships that carried settlers to the death trap new colony at Jamestown in 1607. Like a lot of the early English explorers he was half-pirate on his mother's side, engaging in a long career as a privateer raiding Spanish galleons in the Caribbean. He was influential in establishing the Virginia colony, not only in its initial settlement but in several vital resupply efforts. His fourth voyage to Virginia went amiss when his flagship, the Sea Venture, began to leak and had to be run aground on Bermuda to prevent her from sinking. The loss of supplies led to the famous "starving time" at Jamestown. (The event also marks the initial colonization of Bermuda and served as the inspiration of Shakespeare's play The Tempest.) Newport eventually died on the Indonesian island of Java in 1617.

It was during his privateer days that Newport lost his right arm in a fight with the Spanish in 1590. And yet the huge statue of Newport (presumably in 1607) shows him hale and hearty, with his right arm resting on his manly unsheathed sword. "We don't show our heroes maimed" was the explanation of sculptor Jon Hair (who from his website really does appear to be a bit of an ass). Local historians, not to mention disability advocates, are not amused. But at that point what could Hair say? "Ooops, I failed to do basic historic research on my topic before investing hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on my commission?" If Hair of anyone else in the project had so much as bothered to visit the Wikipedia page for Christopher Newport they would have been greeted with a illustration of the hook-armed explorer on a Virginia beach.

What is to be done? Probably nothing. The outstretched right arm is integral to the sculpture, it isn't likely they will lop it off for historical accuracy. My prediction is that they will put up a little disclaimer plaque in a discreet location: "Actually, this statue is completely wrong. Sorry."

Update: I started a thread about this over at the general interest website Metafilter where the users added some interesting twists to the story. This Washington Post editorial decries "a sanitized monument not only to the spirit of discovery and exploration but also to the liberties too easily taken with the past and the dead." Hair defends himself in this article in the Charlotte Observer, claiming "I have endeavored to be accurate in every historic piece I have sculpted." Another Metafilter member reminded us that statues of one-armed naval heroes are not uncommon, especially this guy.

Lewis and Clark Showdown--Cancelled!

Alas, the Simpson's version of the Lewis and Clark expedition was pulled from YouTube after a cowardly complaint from Twentieth Century Fox. Something about copyright violation. Wankers. The Wikipedia episode description only hints at the greatness!