Fancy Dancer and the Seven Drums

By John Roskelley

A nine-year-old Nez Perce Fancy Shawl pow wow dancer, Beth Louie, is killed on the reservation by a hit-and-run drunk driver while walking home from the bus stop with her younger brother. Tire marks and boot tracks on the remote gravel road suggest to a Colville tribal member Ben Moses and his grandson, Alex, who find the two children, that the driver of a pick-up truck tampered with the scene and evidence, and hid the body. Tribal law enforcement and the FBI are stymied, but evidence points to a white cattle rancher from Omak as the prime suspect. In the prejudicial environment of the 1950s, will an all-white Spokane jury convict and send the killer to jail?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Reverie
• Release date: Feb 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781955690744

John Roskelley

Author and photographer John Roskelley is a dabbler in everything outdoors. If he’s not dodging rocks on some alpine face in Canada or scratching his way up a frozen WI6 waterfall, John can be found paddling the Columbia River from source to mouth.  John admits adventuring flows in his blood. In his first half-century, John fought his way to the summit of four 8,000-meter peaks, including K2 and Everest, plus a plethora of devilishly hard unclimbed Himalayan and Karakorum faces and ridges. A graduate of Washington State University in geology, John has written three first person adventure books; a paddler’s guidebook to the entire 1,200 miles of the Columbia River; and edited, organized, and published his deceased father’s biography. His photography has been on the covers of National Geographic, books, posters, and other notable national magazines. John received the International Piolets d’Or Walter Bonatti Lifetime Achievement award in 2014 and is an honorary member of the Alpine Club of Great Britain, the Mountaineers, the Mazamas, and the American Alpine Club. John and his wife, Joyce, have been married 50 years and have three great kids.

Book preview

A Note From the Author

In the 1855 Treaty with the Yakama, signed by Washington Territory Governor Isaac Stevens, the name of the tribe and reservation was spelled Yakama. For 139 years, misspelling and misuse by non-Indians resulted in the common use of Yakima in reference to not only a river, county, and city, but the tribe, its people, and the reservation as well. This wrong was officially corrected by the Yakama people in 1994. It is my decision to use Yakama in this book for the name of the tribe, tribal members, and reservation, so historical misuse is not perpetuated.

­—John Roskelley

Contents

A Note From the Author

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Fifty-Five

Fifty-Six

Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Eight

Fifty-Nine

Sixty

Sixty-One

Sixty-Two

Sixty-Three

Sixty-Four

Sixty-Five

Sixty-Six

Sixty-Seven

Sixty-Eight

Sixty-Nine

Seventy

Seventy-One

Seventy-Two

Seventy-Three

Seventy-Four

Seventy-Five

Seventy-Six

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Preface

I grew up in eastern Washington, hunting and fishing with my dad, an outdoor writer for the local Spokane newspaper. There were few places within a day’s drive that we didn’t walk a weedy draw or fence line for pheasants and quail, cast a line for a trout or salmon, or sit quietly, overlooking an expanse of treed canyon and hoping to catch a glimpse of a deer or elk. Many of my favorite haunts were on national forest land surrounding the Colville Indian Reservation, a sparsely populated, 2,100-square-mile, rectangular block of ponderosa pine forests, high sagebrush deserts, and basalt canyons north of the Columbia River. On the occasional trip through the reservation villages, like Nespelem and Inchelium, in the late 1950s and 1960s, I realized there was a disparity between the life I had in middle-class America and that of someone living in poverty on the reservation.

On a late Friday afternoon in mid-August, 1967, a friend and I, both in our late teens, were hitchhiking from our construction job in Winthrop, Washington, back to Spokane. It was a sweltering hot, windless day in the deep gorge of the Columbia River, a few miles east of Brewster. Traffic, other than a few farm vehicles, was nonexistent. As we waited at an abandoned truck weigh station at the intersection of two state highways, we heard a car coming, then spotted it a mile off as it came over a rise through the apple orchards at the speed of a meteor. Neither of us thought it would stop, but we stuck our thumbs out anyway.

The beat-up, robin egg blue Oldsmobile skidded to a stop alongside us, raising tire-ground dust like a smoke signal from the gravel parking lot. Inside were four Native American men in their late teens or early twenties. All of them had a beer in their hands.

Wanna ride? the passenger in the front seat asked through the open window.

I leaned in and looked inside the car. The four looked harmless enough in their old blue jeans and rumpled t-shirts. Where you headed? I asked.

Omak Stampede.

Yeah? What’s going on there?

It’s a rodeo and powwow. You wanna ride or not?

I looked at my friend. We weren’t headed that way, but this was the only car that had bothered to stop since we’d been dropped off several hours earlier. Spokane was 150 miles to the east; Omak was twenty-five miles to the north. He nodded and said to me, Might as well.

We squeezed into the back seat, one of them handed each of us a cold beer, and the driver took off at the speed of light, the center line weaving under the car like a rattlesnake winding its way through the brush.

The Omak Stampede wasn’t like any rodeo I’d been to as a kid. The Stampede not only had a nationally ranked rodeo and a carnival that rivaled Barnum & Bailey’s, but also the Colville Reservation’s powwow and Indian encampment—fifteen acres of tipis, a dance arbor, and an open-sided longhouse along the south bank of the Okanogan River. We arrived just as the sun, a fiery red ball barely visible through the dense fog-like dust rising above the parking lot, touched down on the foothills of the Cascades. As we walked through the carnival toward the rodeo arena, there were so many cowboys and cowgirls walking through the crowd, I could have just as well been on the movie set of Oklahoma than in Omak.

The carnival crowd was as thick as cotton candy, so we left the midway for the Indian encampment and open-sided longhouse along the river. The crowd at the longhouse was almost as thick, as hundreds were gathered around an evening contest of slahal, the stick game. We watched as two teams of Native Americans sitting opposite each other sang tribal songs and deftly passed the marked bones to their teammates. The betting among the tribal members and bystanders was intense.

Tired of the crowd and noise, we left the longhouse and entered the tipi encampment. Ambient light filtered through the trees from the rodeo grounds, but otherwise, it was dark among the fifty or more tipis and eerily quiet compared to the longhouse and carnival. Some of the owners of the tipis were outside sitting on logs, drinking and talking; several were cooking on an open fire, and many could be heard talking inside their tipis. The encampment teemed with traditional Indian life and the inhabitants were in their element.

I realized as I watched and listened to those in the camp that my knowledge of the local tribes could be put in a sentence, but my misconceptions could fill a book. My trips through the Colville Reservation with my dad had been a snapshot of Native American life, an outsider’s view that failed to understand the daily struggle they had to retain their customs and traditions. The Omak Stampede was their opportunity to live as their ancestors did, even if just for a long weekend. Yes, Indians drove trucks and lived in houses, held jobs, and went to school, but they were more comfortable riding a horse or living in a tipi, hunting deer and fishing for salmon, and learning about their spirit animals, medicines from plants, and traditional values. They went to the many powwows to gather with family and friends and pass on the traditions of their people to the younger generations.

In the past fifty-five years, since my first Stampede, the world has changed from night to day socially and economically for non-Indians, but not as dramatically for those who live on the Colville Reservation. Poverty, prejudice, addiction, and unemployment—the Four Horsemen of reservation life—still prevail. The tribal council of the twelve bands of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation works hard to revive their culture and language, educate their kids, create business opportunities for tribal members, and clean up the reservation environment. As a result, the council’s work has, in some respects, helped reverse the effects of poverty, addiction, and unemployment. But it’s up to us outside the reservation to stop one horseman we are responsible for—prejudice.

About four years ago on a calm fall day, my wife, Joyce, and I drove a remote road on the Colville Reservation that wound its way through ponderosa forests and passed close to the Columbia River. We stopped at a pull-out near a high bluff that was bursting with the yellows, oranges, and reds of fall foliage and overlooking the river. My thoughts were of a story I had wanted to write for over fifty years about the Colville tribes, reservation life in the 1950s, and the poverty and prejudice faced by minorities in central Washington as this region developed and flourished for the rest of us. I knew at that moment it was time for me to write this novel.

In August 2019, I traveled to the confluence of the San Poil and Columbia Rivers to celebrate the Colville Confederated Tribes’ release of thirty large summer Chinook salmon into Lake Roosevelt, a fish not seen above Grand Coulee Dam since it blocked the Columbia River in the spring of 1938. Two hundred people gathered there to laugh, sing, and enjoy the celebration. All who attended glowed with pride as three generations of tribal members and a few visitors passed the bagged fish, some weighing ten pounds or more, hand over hand down a conga line to the water to be set free.

Releasing the salmon was a leap of faith for the tribes in their quest to preserve a culture that so many through the years have tried to erase. Fancy Dancer and the Seven Drums is just a small step in that same direction.

John Roskelley

September 2022

One

Colville Indian Reservation, 1954

The scar had an ugliness, like the knife fight that created it. Charlie Whitehorse ran his index finger along its length—from the lobe of his left ear to an inch short of his mouth. It itched, as it always did with too many cups of coffee.

Charlie was eighteen when he discovered a Yakama elder molesting his younger sister after midnight along the riverbank near the powwow grounds. He was a head taller than Charlie, who was tall for his age, and muscled like a rodeo bull. The man had silenced her with a meaty hand over her mouth and then dragged his victim into the bushes. The older man was drunk. Cornered against the river and angry at the interruption, he waded into Charlie, swinging a hunting knife, and sliced his cheek open . . . before Charlie’s catlike reaction and brute strength broke the man’s lower back like a stick and put him in a wheelchair for life.

Charlie’s mom made a honey-and-root poultice, coated the wound, and then pinched the two sides of the cut together. With a leather awl, she sewed it up like she would a moccasin. The ridge-shaped scar was a good thing; it drew people’s attention away from his enormous head and crooked teeth. Forty-seven years later, the kids who rode his school bus called him Grizzly Bear because of all these features he shared with his brother, the bear. He liked that.

Now, the old bus driver’s chest swelled with pride. Sitting behind him in the worn and discolored canvas seats of the school bus was the future of his people. He was born a Yakama: proud of his native heritage and ancestors. As he had done for his sister, he would fight to the death for these kids. Four of his charges were Nez Perce, six were Colville, three were Moses-Columbia, and two were Sanpoil. What the white man branded as Indians, he knew as First People—his people.

As he drove his bus to the first stop, Whitehorse thought of what Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt had said before his death: Whenever the white man treats Indians as they treat each other, then we shall have no more wars.

Sixty years since Chief Joseph said those words and white people still look upon us as vermin to be trapped on lands they don’t want. Whitehorse shook his head at the thought. For ten thousand years, my people moved freely through this land—land that has sustained our way of life. Yet, in just my lifetime, the white man used their soldiers to corral us like horses on these reservations. Whitehorse looked through his bus window. The land was barren, rocky, and overgrazed; the few homes he could see were unkept and worn out. Our war with the soldiers is over, Joseph, he thought. Now, our fight is with their treaties and lies.

The rusted and faded yellow school bus, looking like a thick, overripe banana, slid to an abrupt stop on the Schoolhouse Loop Road gravel a few yards short of Columbia River Road. The cyclone of tire-ground dust trailing the vehicle caught and wrapped the bus in a dense earthy haze before an afternoon breeze, rising from the river deep in the canyon below, sent it into the sagebrush and across the dirt road so narrow that it was more like a wagon track. Whitehorse set the emergency brake, flipped the toggle switch on the dash to turn on the alternating red lights, and pulled the hand lever to extend the STOP sign on the driver’s side. Satisfied the bus was locked in place, he glanced left to the driver’s side mirror, then to the opposite side for any trailing vehicles.

There was one: a newer 1950s model, dark-colored Ford pickup. On its flatbed was a homemade wood-slat cattle rack. In the reflecting sunlight off his mirrors, Whitehorse noticed only a driver before the truck’s cab pulled close behind the bus and stopped in his blind spot.

Certain the road was now safe, he glanced in the oversized rectangular mirror above the windshield to ensure all of his fifteen students were seated, then growled, Okay.

Danny Louie, in his first year of school, and his older sister Beth, a third-grader, knew to stay planted in their assigned seats until Mr. Whitehorse uttered the one word they’d ever heard him say besides their names. As if a starting pistol had gone off, the two kids, with coats and tablets in hand, shot from their seats near the front of the bus; they were followed closely by Alex Moses, a sixth-grader who lived with his grandpa along Columbia River Road a few miles from the bus stop. The three kids knew each other and even walked together at times, but their difference in age and Alex’s pranks had strained their relationship—until this year. The summer before the school year started, Ben Moses, Alex’s grandpa, had noticed Beth dancing at the Nespelem powwow and, in an off-hand remark to Alex, said, That young Beth dances like your mother used to.

Alex didn’t know his mother. She died almost three years after he was born. But from that moment, Alex saw Beth as a tie to his mother’s spirit and no longer as a little kid to tease.

At the door, Beth grabbed Danny by the collar of his jacket and moved him behind her before Alex had a chance to pull her braids, something he had liked to do anytime she and Danny rode the late bus. This was Beth’s day for Fancy Shawl Dance lessons after school at her aunt Nettie’s house in Nespelem. The lesson had lasted longer than usual, so she and Danny had missed the first bus. Beth didn’t worry, though, as she knew they would catch this bus, which the older kids who played sports rode.

Whitehorse pulled the handle connected to the bi-fold door, opened it, and one after the other, the three kids stepped off the bus.

As he watched the kids leave, Whitehorse looked for Pete Louie, Danny and Beth’s dad, who often picked up his two kids at the intersection. On nice days, though, he knew their dad let them walk. Pete wasn’t there. He’ll catch them walking the road before dark, Whitehorse thought.

He checked his side mirrors again and then watched the kids scamper clear. They all turned and, as instructed, waved in unison. Although, Alex simply withdrew his hand out of his well-worn faded Levi’s and held it waist-high. This was Whitehorse’s signal to close the door, reverse the stopping procedure, look left and right along Columbia River Road, ease out the clutch, then turn east toward Highway 10A, where he would unload six of the remaining twelve kids.

Glancing in his driver’s side rearview mirror, Whitehorse noticed the pickup slowly turn west onto Columbia River Road in a wide arc to avoid the kids, weave back into the center of the road, and then speed up. In a billowing cloud of dust, the truck disappeared into a pastel of sagebrush green and reddish-brown basalt outcrops. The kids had already started their walk home.

Nine-year-old Beth, holding Danny’s small hand, pulled him along the deserted road, a rutted stretch more dirt than gravel and barely wider than their dad’s work truck, to put some distance between themselves and Alex. It didn’t matter. Alex, his long legs rotating like a paddle wheel in a fast-flowing creek, caught up in a few strides.

Hey, do you want me to walk with you? Alex asked.

Beth glanced sideways at Alex, wondering what he was up to. Alex seldom spoke to anyone, not even his peers, but over the past few months, she’d noticed a change in him. He talked more to her and even spoke to Danny like a big brother. Nevertheless . . .

No, thank you, Beth said, keeping the conversation short. She stopped abruptly along the side of the road, put her hand on Danny’s shoulder, looked at Alex, and added, My papa will pick us up soon. You don’t have to wait for us.

Danny looked down at his feet and remained silent. Alex was muscled and tall for a thirteen-year-old and enjoyed grabbing younger kids around the neck and rubbing his knuckles along the top of their heads until it burned. Even the older boys knew to walk away when Alex clenched his teeth and his jaw muscles flexed and quivered. Danny couldn’t walk away. Staying quiet, though, was like being hidden.

I won’t then, Alex replied, annoyed. It will be dark soon. Be careful; Old Coyote has taken kids on this road.

Alex bent over, put his books down in the dirt, and tied the frayed and knotted laces of his hand-me-down leather boots. He was disappointed, as Beth was a good listener and he wanted to tell her about training his horse. But with a coyote howl loud enough to make them both jump, he left the two kids and jogged down the road, which cut into high banks of gravel deposit and sand dunes as it descended into the V-shaped canyon carved over eons by the seasonal fury of the Columbia River. The setting sun’s filtered rays found an opening along the jagged crest of the Cascades and transformed the dark gray river water into a vein of silver. If he hurried, Alex could cover the short journey of under two miles to his grandpa’s farm in less than twenty-five minutes. But Danny and Beth’s farmhouse on Lower Coyote Creek Road was almost five miles from the bus stop. It would take them well over two hours, with so many round rocks for Danny to throw and insects to badger off the road.

The late October sun was far below the high ridges that captured and guided the river’s bends when Danny and Beth saw a dim light coming from the row of small windows in the house where Alex lived with his grandpa, high on an ancient river terrace above the road.

The building’s size and quality were unusual for a home on the Colville Reservation, where small sheds and stock shelters rivaled many an extended family’s rudimentary two-room dwelling. The Moses’ farmhouse had a corrugated, galvanized steel roof and shiplap siding over tar paper, and Beth overheard her dad tell her mom the walls held out the wind and dust. On the res, good building materials were hard to come by. Leaky shake roofs and tar paper over slat-boards were commonplace. Old newspapers balled up and stuffed in the walls worked just as well as any white man’s insulation and were free.

My papa said your house used to have running water, Beth had said to Alex as they’d walked home earlier that fall. Why doesn’t it now?

I don’t know for sure, he said, but I heard my grandpa tell a group of elders playing slahal last year at the powwow that the building had two lives. The old men seemed to understand this riddle. There were many smiles and nods.

How could a building have two lives? Beth asked. Did Coyote do this?

Alex shifted his stance and looked puzzled. Well, Coyote could be the culprit. He’s always big trouble for Indians. My grandpa told me the building used to be at the big dam, then was taken down and built again on his land, but without water. Maybe that wily trickster told Grandpa he didn’t need water in the house this time. That’s why, in its second life, the house has no water.

Two

Colville Indian Reservation, 1954

The first stars faintly dotted the eastern sky behind Danny and Beth as they moseyed downhill past Alex’s home, headed to where the road flattened out on an ancient gravel bar above the river. The walk home was taking far longer than it should have.

A short time after Alex left them at the bus stop, six-year-old Danny, a tad smaller than the family’s forty-pound heeler mix, left the road and descended a sandbank above the Nespelem River, now a late-season trickle, chasing a red-winged grasshopper the size of his little finger. Neither Danny nor the grasshopper were ready to give up. The chase ended when the wary insect landed in a clump of knee-high bunchgrass and Danny cupped the little critter in his two small hands.

Danny opened a tiny hole near his thumbs to examine his prize. As he tilted his head, the sun caught the beaded headband made by his mother, Ann, to keep his shoulder-length black hair in place. He’s hiding his red wings, he yelled to Beth. Now he looks like a brown rock. Come see!

No, we don’t have time, Beth said, feet firmly planted on the side of the road. Just bring it here.

With the grasshopper captive in his balled-up hands, Danny made his way among the high sagebrush and bunchgrass to the bank below the road. He scrambled in the loose gravel at the lip and tucked the little insect in his right hand. He then reached for Beth with the other. As he did so, he slipped on the loose gravel and almost opened his right hand and lost his prize. Digging in with the outer sole of his older brother’s loose-fitting hand-me-down Red Ball Jets, Danny lurched for the level section of road and into Beth’s grasp.

Once on his feet, Danny and Beth joined heads and peeked into his hand. The grasshopper stared back, preening one of its antennae.

Ready? Danny said.

Yes, let him go!

With great care, Danny opened his hands. The light buckskin-colored grasshopper turned to face Danny, sensed its vulnerability, and then jumped. Its coral red wings, like that of the Indian Paintbrush flower, were brilliant in the last rays of the sun as it sought the safety of the vegetation below the road again.

Oh, so beautiful! Beth said as she watched the grasshopper fly into the brush. I’ll ask Mama to color my long tassels grasshopper red when she makes my new Fancy shawl.

Beth, like so many young Indian girls on the reservation, competed in the Fancy Shawl Dance at the many regional powwows her parents attended each year. These were special days for Beth, spending time with friends and family, feeling the spiritual world around her in dance and drumbeat, and practicing the old ways she so much enjoyed. For many years, it was the only time Beth played with her numerous cousins, some of whom lived in Idaho on the Nez Perce Reservation near Lapwai.

Why do my cousins live so far away, Mama? Beth asked her mother one morning when their Lapwai family left for home after a powwow.

Ann knew the history of why the Nez Perce lived on two reservations. The tribe’s history was passed down from generation to generation in songs and stories at every powwow. But it was no easy task to explain to an eight-year-old. Many years ago, Ann began, our band of Nez Perce was led by a great warrior, Chief Joseph. After many battles with the white soldiers, our people lost to the soldiers and were held captive for years.

Were they in a jail? Beth asked.

No, my love, Ann replied, but many died from disease, starvation, and ill will outside the military camps in Kansas and Oklahoma. After a while, though, those who were still alive were allowed to return to the Lapwai Reservation, but only if they signed a treaty with the whites. Chief Joseph would not sign this treaty because it took away our traditional homelands in the Wallowa Mountains. So, Joseph and those who followed him, like your grandparents, were forced to live here on this reservation. Those who signed the treaty were allowed to return to Lapwai.

This past summer, Beth had taken second place at the Omak Stampede in the Fancy Shawl Dance for young girls. That was the spark she needed to work harder. Beth knew that with weekly instruction and practice at her aunt Nettie Herman’s house in Nespelem, she might win first place at the next powwow.

Beth loved the Fancy Shawl Dance, with its quick and acrobatic twirls and footwork. She was good at the Jingle Dance as well, but its presentation was not as energetic as she liked. Besides, the shawl was special to her, as it seemed to become part of her as she danced.

Today’s lesson was spiritual, like she’d had a vision. Never had she experienced such a separation of her spirit from the energy within the room. Beth, who was small for her age, had twirled time and again, lightly toe-stepping and rocking her upper body to the single beat of Nettie’s drum. Straight and tall, she bent her head back, reversed her spin, gripped her shawl, and raised her arms. Poised and balanced in a fast twirl, she closed her eyes. Beth felt the air flow under the two-foot-long tassels and fill the shawl like a kite, lifting her as if she had the wings of a soaring eagle. The drumbeat faded away, the tiny room opened, and she no longer sensed her soft moccasins touch the floor. It was magic.

Auntie, Beth said when she finally stopped and caught her breath. I felt strange, like I had left the room. Was I taken by the Great Spirit?

You have the gift of dance, child, like your mother, her dad’s younger sister replied as she stood and walked toward her small but well-organized kitchen. The Great Spirit comes to those who believe.

Nettie, fleshy in the arms and face, and barely five-foot-two if she stood on her toes, reached into a doorless cupboard and withdrew a jar packed with smudge sticks she had made the year before from store-bought tobacco and local plants found in the wild. Her fingers moved from one to another until she found a lavender stick and plucked it from the bunched assortment of juniper, sweetgrass, sage, and tobacco sticks.

Nettie used each plant’s spirit locked in its bitter- or sweet-smelling fragrance for purposes passed to her from her mother and grandmother. If she had wanted to remove negative energy—so prevalent on the reservation—she would have burned the tangy sage; if she had preferred to invite positive energy into her world, she would have lit the common sweetgrass; or if she had intended to unite with an ancestor in the spirit world, she would have put a match to the sacred and powerful tobacco smudge stick.

Today, though, was a special day. Beth’s day. Nettie placed the lavender smudge stick, known as a potent plant spirit that provides spiritual blessing, in a teacup-sized clay bowl and lit the top. The flame died and left a smoldering, lazy line of smoke, its fragrance filling the small room with its sweet aroma, purifying Beth, Danny, herself, and the room where Beth had danced.

Beth had been dancing at powwows since she was born. Her mother, Ann, would wrap Beth in a blanket, lean over and place the soft sling-like bundle on her back, and then tie it securely around her chest with the loose ends before standing erect. Ann, shoulders back and chin high, with a shawl neatly draped over one arm and her great grandmother’s eagle feather fan in the other hand, would walk up to the clockwise-circulating dancers, wait for an opening in the crowd, and then, as graceful as an Indian princess, step into the arbor and crowd of dancers. Beth, even at such a tender age, felt the rhythmic toe-stepping of her mother as Ann settled into the gentle, refined Traditional Dance to the beat of the drum and haunting, high-pitched, guttural syllables of the singers.

Men, women, even the youngest children, like Beth, practiced their movements and prepared their outfits to participate in both non-competitive and competitive dances at each powwow. Both Ann and Nettie had competed in the athletic and entertaining Fancy Shawl and Jingle Dress Dances in their youth and later as strong young women. The modern regalia of multi-colored cotton fabrics and yarn, brilliant glass beads, and shiny metals and mirrors for these dances was in stark contrast to the Traditional Dance outfits of age-old tawny or cream-colored deerskin and elk hide dresses and moccasins, bordered with delicate porcupine quills, the iridescent hue of mussel shell pearl, and the strength of eagle feathers. But as the two women aged and their bodies matured, they sought the formal intimacy and leisure of the Traditional Dance, where movements are careful and artistic, and their dresses of animal skins, shells, claws, and feathers, passed from generation to generation, represent and honor the natural world. By the age of five, Beth had learned the precise movements and timing of the Traditional, Jingle Dress, and Fancy Shawl Dances from her mother, aunt, and grandmother, all of whom had won many dances at powwows in their day.

Nettie recognized Beth’s gift of balance and rhythm at an early age, as she participated in the region’s powwows. This would be her year to dance her way into the heart of her tribe, the Nez Perce, and honor her ancestors by learning the ancient ways.

But now daylight had ended and the walk home was still far. Beth pulled Danny by the arm and picked up her pace. We must hurry, Danny. Papa will be worried for us.

Three

Colville Indian Reservation, 1954

We might not have enough time now to go fishing, Jack said, looking over at his son, Jake. We’re going to be late dropping off this horse.

It had taken over an hour that morning on the ranch to load a spooked two-year-old quarter horse gelding into the homemade wooden rack on the pickup bed, despite covering its eyes with a bandana and placing a rope behind its hindquarters to guide it in. Now that the horse was finally loaded, Jack drove State Highway 10A from Omak through the Colville Indian Reservation to Grand Coulee. He then turned southwest on Highway 2A to Coulee City, where he backtracked east on State Highway 2 to Wilbur, a pittance of a railroad town with just over a thousand residents. Six miles south of Wilbur, Jack drove underneath a log-framed gateway into the Bar W Ranch, owned by Art Wilkerson, a fussy but frequent buyer of Jack’s stock animals. He backed the truck tight against a dirt unloading ramp, dropped the cattle rack gate, led the horse into the empty corral, and removed its halter.

Wilkerson, a burly stump of a man in his fifties, walked up with a noticeable limp from an old rodeo accident and handed Jack cash for the horse. I’d almost given up on you. With an oversized hand, he removed a recently rolled cigarette dangling from his lips and added, Have you got time to wash the dust down?

You bet.

After two shots each of homemade corn whiskey and as many words between the men, Jack hollered for Jake, who was pursuing a black-and-white rabbit near the corral, to get back in the pickup. We’ll be on our way. Let me know if you want that mare.

Jack drove the same route back to Grand Coulee, and then to Nespelem, where he stopped and parked off to one side of Daugherty & Sons General Mercantile.

Stay put, Jake. I’ll be right back.

You know what Mom said, Dad. No drinking!

You let me worry about Mom, his dad replied. We’re going to stop and do a little fishing before driving home, and she’ll never know. Then, so Jake understood his meaning, he added, Will she? And it wasn’t really a question.

Jack approached the clerk and asked him for a bottle of Dewar’s. The clerk, an older fella with salt-and-pepper-colored short hair, an easy smile on a blank face, and an Irish accent, turned, grabbed a bottle from the shelf, and put it on the counter. That’ll be three dollars even. No tax on the booze.

Yeah, I know.

Jack left Daugherty’s, cut across the highway to Schoolhouse Loop Road, and drove south to the intersection with Columbia River Road. As he approached the turnoff, Jack pulled up behind a school bus unloading three kids. He wasn’t a patient man and the bus driver was slow to move on.

Goddamn bus, Jack muttered. Jake heard his dad curse, something he did when he drank, and then watched him grab the bottle from between his legs again, unscrew the top, and take a quick gulp. As the bus cleared the intersection, Jack made a wide turn around the three kids and sped down the deeply rutted gravel road for his favorite fishing hole along the Columbia River, a half mile upriver from what was once known as Granite Rapids.

Growing up, Jack had fished for Chinook, sockeye, and coho salmon, steelhead, bass, and trout with his dad, Glen, from almost every sand and gravel bar they could reach by truck from Granite Rapids to the San Poil River, which was about thirty miles to the east. The completion of Grand Coulee’s lower dam in 1937, though, put an abrupt stop to all the salmon and steelhead fishing upriver from the dam, despite the fact it would be another five years before the high dam was completed. Jack guessed that some bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., had decided building a fish ladder to allow the migrating fish to reach above the 550-foot-tall structure would cost too much.

Young Jack had declared, They should have done something to get the fish around or over that dam.

Hell, you sound like that damned Teddy Roosevelt, son. Man was meant to tame rivers and horses and use them to make a better life. There’s plenty of fish in the river. No use spending that kind of money so those damn Indians can kill them upstream.

For the first time in his young life, Jack had disagreed openly with his dad. But, Dad, it doesn’t seem right to stop all those fish from going upriver. I mean, there won’t be any fish for us, either.

Jack’s argument fell on deaf ears. For the next few years after the salmon were stopped from going upriver, he and his dad fished for the anadromous fish in the deep holes along the many rapids below the dam, including Granite Rapids. Their trips ended when Jack’s dad died four years later from a Grand Coulee Dam-sized clot of cholesterol that clogged his left main coronary artery. While cleaning a horse stall in the barn, stabbing chest pain dropped him to his knees. His eyes rolled to the back of his head, and then he plunged face-first into a fresh pile of horse manure. To those who knew him, it wasn’t unexpected. The elder Johnson smoked two packs of filterless Lucky Strikes every day and never said no to a drink.

Now it was Jake’s turn to carry on the family’s fishing tradition and learn from his dad where to find the elusive fish. In the last year, the free-flowing Columbia below Grand Coulee Dam was now mostly under the rising reservoir, known as Rufus Woods Lake, flooding more land every day behind the unfinished Chief Joseph Dam. Jack had not caught a salmon or steelhead from the river in almost two years, and neither had anyone he’d talked to. He knew who had condemned the fish to extinction above the latest dam: politicians, bought and paid for by extraction industries, like logging and mining, and men like his dad, who made decisions for power, money, and self-interest.

At a pull-out a half a mile above what was once Granite Rapids, Jack stopped the truck, more in the gravel road than out, and took another drink from the bottle. Jake stepped from the truck, reached back, and grabbed the two rods from behind the seat.

Coming, Dad?

Jack could hold his liquor, always could, but with the two shots at the Bar W and damn near an entire bottle of Dewar’s since Nespelem, his chin fell to his chest and his eyes couldn’t fix on Jake. Okay, let’s catch us a fish.

Jack fumbled for the door handle, found it, and pushed the door open. Leaning heavily on the door, he steadied himself first and then staggered around the truck’s front end, using the hood as a crutch. Jake knew he might tumble and grabbed his dad’s arm to help him down the gravel bank to the river. There, with the water lapping the rocky shoreline, Jake sat his dad on a bleached and worn-to-a-frazzle log that had washed up on the river rock.

Even though Jake was just eight years old, he knew how to cast and set a hook in a hungry fish’s mouth. While Jack moved lures and leader material around in the tackle box on his lap, as if he’d find a fish in there, Jake hooked a fifteen-inch rainbow trout, played the fish until it no longer fought the hook and line, and then reeled it into shore. Before his dad finished the bottle, the young fisherman had caught two more.

As he sat swaying on the bleached driftwood log like he was in a stiff breeze, Jack took one last full-throated swig from the bottle of Dewar’s White Label Scotch Whisky. He then stood, fought for balance, reached behind his head like the New York Yankees’ famed hurler Whitey Ford, and pitched the empty glass container over a hundred feet before it splashed into the Columbia River. Jack looked at his son. Reel in your line, Jake. It’ll be dark soon and Mom is expecting us back by nine.

Jake moaned in protest, as he’d only had a chance to fish for a little over an hour. He watched his dad stumble toward the truck near the road, rod and tackle box in his hands, and thought better of complaining. Jack The Hammer Johnson was not someone you spoke back to, whether you were his son or not, but especially when he’d been drinking.

Four

Colville Indian Reservation, 1954

Eight-year-old Jake hooked his lure to the cork of his rod, tightened the line with his reel, and hiked sharply uphill, skirting sagebrush taller than him, to his dad’s dark green 1951 F-4, a flathead V8-powered truck parked on Columbia River Road. Despite three years of ranch work carrying wood posts and rails, bales of hay, and an occasional heifer or quarter horse, the one-ton Ford had few scratches and dings along the sides. Jake was glad his dad had taken off the truck box and put the stock rack in its place. An errant ranch hand had put a six-inch U-shaped dent on the tailgate of the box trying to pry a foot-thick gate post from the hardpan of a corral using another post on the tailgate as a lever. His dad got angry every time he saw the damage. That spring day five months back still made Jake’s stomach queasy as he recalled the incident . . .

It was late May in the Okanogan Valley, and the temperature on the rain shadow-side of the Cascade Mountains had climbed into the nineties. His dad had finished planting the alfalfa in the cool of the morning and he and Jake’s older brother, Billy, had just started shoeing several horses. Jake’s mom, Sarah, a petite, dark-haired woman wearing one of her light lupine-colored cotton work dresses, as she always did for chores, asked him to help her chase down a stewing chicken.

I’d like that white hen near the gate, Jake, she said. You take that side and I’ll take this side and we’ll catch her in the corner of the fence.

As the two chicken hunters were just about to corral one of the wary birds, Miguel and Javier, his dad’s two Mexican hired hands, drove through the main gate to the farmhouse in the Ford and parked beside the barn where his dad and Billy were hot-shoeing two young mares and an older gelding. The two hired men had been working for Jack for the past three months and, up to this point, had proven themselves to be experienced ranch hands and hard workers. But, even as young as Jake was, he knew something was amiss for the two young men to show up early—and so did his dad.

As Jack continued to nail a shoe to the mare’s right hind leg hoof, he and Miguel spoke as if words cost money. Miguel pointed to the truck, but Jake couldn’t hear what the two men said. The talking stopped and, one after the other, Jack removed the two remaining hoof nails from his mouth, placed the curved nails into the holes of the horseshoe, and then drove them into the top of the hoof wall. With a quick twist of his nippers, he bent and removed the nail tips, clinched the ends, and finished up with a rasp. Jack let go of the horse’s foot as he stood up, and then tossed the nippers and rasp into the wood tool caddy near his feet. Without another word, Jack, followed by Miguel, walked around to the rear of the truck.

As if the animals and men knew a storm was coming, all noise had stopped in the barnyard. Jake started to walk toward the truck to see what was going on, but his mom reached out as he moved past her, grabbed him by the right arm, pulled him back into the yard, and put her hand over his eyes.

As he tried to twist free from his mom’s grip, he heard feet shuffling and dragging on gravel near the pickup, followed up by something hitting the metal on the truck. By the time Jake removed his mother’s hand, Miguel was sitting in the dirt below the damaged tailgate in a daze, bracing himself with his arms. Blood gushed from his nose and three of