Dividing the Reservation: Alice C. Fletcher's Nez Perce Allotment Diaries and Letters, 1889-1892

By Nicole Tonkovich

Alice Cunningham Fletcher was both formidable and remarkable. A pioneering ethnologist who penetrated occupations dominated by men, she was the first woman to hold an endowed chair at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology--during a time the institution did not admit female students. She helped write the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 that reshaped American Indian policy, and became one of the first women to serve as a federal Indian agent, working with the Omahas, the Winnebagos, and finally the Nez Perces.

Charged with supervising the daunting task of resurveying, verifying, and assigning nearly 757,000 acres of the Nez Perce Reservation, Fletcher also had to preserve land for transportation routes and restrain white farmers and stockmen who were claiming prime properties. She sought to “give the best lands to the best Indians,” but was challenged by the Idaho terrain, the complex ancestries of the Nez Perces, and her own misperceptions about Native life. A commanding presence, Fletcher worked from a specialized tent that served as home and office, traveling with copies of laws, rolls of maps, and blank plats. She spent four summers on the project, completing close to 2,000 allotments.

This book is a collection of letters and diaries Fletcher wrote during this work. Her writing illuminates her relations with the key players in the allotment, as well as her internal conflicts over dividing the reservation. Taken together, these documents offer insight into how federal policy was applied, resisted, and amended in this early application of the Dawes General Allotment Act.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Washington State University Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636820484

Book preview

Introduction

ALICE C. FLETCHER IN THE FIELD

As a student of Native American cultures and a theorist of policies whereby the United States regulated its Native wards, Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838-1923) was a force to be reckoned with. A pioneering ethnologist, she was the first woman to hold an endowed chair at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at a time when that institution did not admit women students. With her colleagues who pursued Indian reform policy, she helped write the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887. Thereafter, she became one of the first women to serve as a federal Indian agent, allotting land first to the Omahas (1883-1884) and then to the Winnebagos (1887-1888). Between 1889 and 1892, as she supervised the allotment of lands in severalty to the Nez Perces, she reached a turning point in her life and decided to leave government work to undertake a career as a professional academician.¹ The letters and diaries reprinted here document the events that led her to this decision. Many of these events resulted directly from issues she confronted during the Nez Perce allotment, as she struggled to reconcile a policy she had advocated with mounting evidence of the damage it would cause to Native cultures and sovereignty.

Fletcher’s was a life of writing: she produced formal and informal reports, petitions, policy statements, encyclopedias, popular magazine articles explaining Native cultures to general readers, and complex ethnographic monographs. For more than four decades she kept a daily diary. And on almost every day of her life she wrote letters, sometimes more than a dozen. But Alice Fletcher was also an intensely private woman. According to biographer Joan Mark, in 1907, beset by a personal scandal, Fletcher methodically destroyed … everything having to do with the first forty years of her life and anything personal from the years after that.² Aware of her professional reputation, she retained much of her professional correspondence, and myriad business-related letters survive. Thus while subsequent investigators have traced Fletcher’s professional accomplishments, they have been challenged to discern the forces that motivated her and directed her energies. The letters she wrote between 1889 and 1892 are unique, for they illuminate her gradual realization of the gap between governmentality—in this case a federal policy she had helped to formulate—and the daily lives of those it sought to regulate.³ During the Nez Perce allotment, she revealed much of this dissonance in a remarkable personal correspondence with Thomas Jefferson Morgan, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in which she frankly detailed conditions she could not report in her official reports. She also wrote frequently to Frederic W. Putnam, her Harvard mentor, letters that exhibit a similar dissonance between ethnographic knowledge and the living Nez Perce culture through which she moved. Across the breadth of correspondence for this period Fletcher emerges as a thinker, friend, grim humorist, and scrupulously honest civil servant devoted to her duty, one who remained, perhaps unintentionally, blind to the chaotic and destructive effects of the policy she had helped to formulate and apply.

Fletcher, who lived to be 85 years old, did not marry. In her early adulthood, she strove to support herself, working as a lecturer, reformer, researcher, and political lobbyist in an era when those occupations were dominated by men. In the late 1870s and 1880s, capitalizing on a burgeoning public interest in American antiquities, she developed and delivered a series of eleven illustrated Lectures on Ancient America. Anxious that her presentations be accurate, she sought information from F. W. Putnam, director of the Peabody Museum. With Putnam, who became well known for mentoring women who were interested in the human sciences, she established a close lifelong friendship.

While on the lecture circuit in 1879 Fletcher became acquainted with Susette La Flesche and her half-brother Francis La Flesche, children of the progressive Omaha leader Joseph La Flesche. Members of this family enabled the first steps she took toward her subsequent political and academic careers. The La Flesche siblings were touring in the Northeast with Susette’s uncle, the Ponca chief Standing Bear, to solicit public support for their protest against the removal of the Poncas from their homelands to Indian Territory. Two years later, at age 43, Fletcher accompanied Susette and her husband, Thomas Henry Tibbles, a journalist affiliated with the Omaha Herald, to Nebraska, where she undertook a self-designed field investigation of Plains Indian cultures. In this pursuit she had no institutional support, although she sought the advice of several of the era’s leading ethnologists. She planned to live among the Native people, observe and document their lives, and interpret their cultures, a procedure that in later years became regularized as participant-observer fieldwork.

Over the next several years Joseph La Flesche effected her access to valuable ethnographic materials. Convinced that legal title to their land would protect his people from removal in the face of white encroachment, La Flesche enlisted Fletcher to help him and 52 other Omaha men to petition for congressional protection of Omaha lands.⁴ In August 1882, due in part to the advocacy of Fletcher and her friends among Indian reform associations, a bill was passed [making] allotment [of tribal lands] compulsory and universal for the Omaha tribe, an outcome far exceeding the legislative redress Fletcher and La Flesche had sought.⁵

The partitioning and deeding of Omaha lands proceeded under the supervision of Special Allotting Agent Alice C. Fletcher. While allotting, she continued her research, conducted field interviews, observed and documented ceremonies, and acquired items of material culture for Putnam’s collections. Shortly after she completed the Omaha allotment, Fletcher designed and mounted a special exhibit for the 1885 World’s Industrial and Centennial Cotton Exposition in New Orleans displaying what she deemed to be the progress of the Omahas toward civilization. There she gave a series of Noon Talks and wrote a promotional souvenir pamphlet summarizing her presentations, illustrated with reproductions of the sixteen large photographs she had commissioned for the exhibit.⁶ She later accepted a commission from the Secretary of the Interior to complete an unfinished report on Indian Education and Civilization. The 693-page document was published in 1888.

These activities placed Fletcher at the center of a powerful group of white policymakers concerned with Indian affairs. She formed a friendship with Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School and a promoter of assimilation by education. She became involved with several powerful reform groups: the Women’s National Indian Association, the Indian Rights Association, and the Friends of the Indian, an affiliation of secular groups and members of the Board of Indian Commissioners, whose officers administered reservation policy and distributed federal appointments in the Indian Service. These partisans, Fletcher a major voice among them, constituted a powerful advisory group to the legislators then engaged in drafting comprehensive federal allotment legislation.

On 8 February 1887, the Dawes General Allotment Act became law. Once again Fletcher was appointed as allotting agent, this time assigned to the Winnebago tribe. She pursued the work intermittently between August 1887 and December 1888. While she was finishing her work in Nebraska in October 1888, her friend E. Jane Gay joined her, and the two began to experiment with photography as a means of anthropological documentation.

Just four months after closing the Winnebago allotment, Fletcher received orders to oversee yet another allotment, this time in Idaho Territory among the Nez Perces, a tribe unfamiliar to her.

E. Jane Gay with her camera. From cover of Gay’s small scrapbook, Where We Camped. A20-6-1. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

The Nez Perces became one of the first tribes to be allotted under the Dawes Act as a result of events following the Joseph War of 1877. For eight years thereafter, Chief Joseph and his followers had been interned in Indian Territory. His eloquent pleas to return to his homeland and his widely publicized stance of pacifism secured the group’s release in 1885, when they returned to the Northwest. Some of the internees settled on the Nez Perce Reservation, joining those who had accepted the boundaries mandated by the Treaty of 1863; others continued to manifest their opposition to the so-called Thief Treaty by joining Joseph on the Colville Reservation in Washington state.⁷ Meanwhile, the Nez Perces who had remained in Idaho following the 1877 conflict had begun to manifest an interest in agrarian capitalism. This combination of factors convinced federal Indian agents that the tribe was ready to receive the putative advantages of allotment. Thus in May 1889, accompanied by Jane Gay, who served as her ad hoc personal assistant, cook, documentarian, and photographer, Fletcher departed for the Nez Perce Reservation.

Allotment had been a feature of Nez Perce-US relationships as early as the Treaties of 1855 and 1863, which had created and then diminished the reservation, dividing arable lands into 20-acre plots. The Dawes General Allotment Act, intended to apply to many different tribes, superseded those earlier arrangements. Under Fletcher’s supervision the reservation boundaries, which had already been breached by avaricious white farmers and stockmen, were to be resurveyed and verified and the land within them reassigned, leaving room for future roads and railroads.⁸ Thus when Fletcher began her work she was able to use the resurvey as a means of convincing dubious Nez Perces that she had their best interests at heart. In May 1889, when she began her work, 756,960 acres of land comprised the reservation. The allotment took much longer than Fletcher or her federal employers had thought it would (a total of about 26 months of field work over four summers). Each summer Fletcher returned to face new challenges, which I outline in the introductory essays to the sections that follow. When she departed on 13 September 1892, she had made 1,908 allotments, but she had not completed the work, for about 125 Nez Perce had not yet received allotments.⁹

THE DAWES GENERAL ALLOTMENT ACT

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Native groups living on lands desired by white expansionists had been removed to and contained within western reservations. Following the California gold rush, the overland migration, the Homestead Act, and the Civil War, demand increased for the resources in water, fertile lands, timber, and minerals within reservation boundaries. In Idaho in the early 1860s, prospectors in search of gold in the Orofino area had established illegal camps and carved out a permanent settlement at Lewiston, then within the boundaries of the Nez Perce Reservation. Subsequent settlers complained that the grazing lands and the fertile rolling hills of the Camas Prairie were locked up in the reservation. In Idaho, as elsewhere, the invisible reservation boundaries became a source of irritation to railroad companies, land speculators and developers, ranchers, miners, and homesteaders. Their incursions on Indian lands spawned violent conflicts that demanded a new solution to what had become known as the Indian problem.¹⁰ Reform groups such as the Friends of the Indian advocated a federal policy that would protect Natives while extending to them the putative benefits of white civilization. The result was the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887. Upon learning of the incipient allotment of the Nez Perce Reservation, a local newspaper editor declared, It is about time. This reservation has been a blot upon the Clearwater country long enough. It has hindered development of this region more than if it were a desert.¹¹

The Dawes Act represented an uneasy compromise between the demands of white entrepreneurs and the rights of Native peoples. Although its proponents argued the law would protect Native interests by giving each individual title in fee simple to a homestead-size plot of land, they had not fully accounted for the climate and geography of the arid western states. Early on, allotment law was necessarily amended, allowing larger tracts of non-arable grazing land to be assigned to allottees. The terrain of the Nez Perce Reservation—its mountains, cliffs, bluffs and buttes, winding rivers and deep canyons—presented significant challenges to the law’s abstract conception of land as a featureless space that could be divided into an infinite series of equally sized rectilinear plots tidily aligned with the Boise Meridian.

As this collection of documents makes clear, Fletcher encountered these and other challenges she and her colleagues had not considered as they theorized the general legislation. She was puzzled, for example, by some Nez Perce allottees who insisted on claiming properties of no apparent value and only belatedly realized their importance as sites of historic and ritual significance. She worked to conform Nez Perce patterns of kinship and marriage to the patrilineal, heterosexual monogamy presumed to be normal by whites; she strove to define a single tribal identity for allottees whose ancestors had lived near and intermarried with other tribal groups and with French, British, and American fur trappers, traders, and settlers. She traced these complex histories in her letters, entering them as documentary evidence in the vexing Cox, Holt, Langford, and Craig cases, to name only the most infamous examples in which early white or mixed-blood settlers claimed hereditary rights. Although committed to giving the best lands to the Nez Perces, Fletcher found many acres of prime land tenaciously occupied by white men, some who had married Nez Perce women, and/or who held lucrative federal appointments as managers of stage stations, post offices, and ferries. She met white cattlemen (one or two of them reservation agents) who grazed their herds on reservation land in informal partnerships with Nez Perce ranchers and others who simply considered the lands to be open range. She learned that her two-dimensional plats could not represent local conditions that changed with each season. Finally, Fletcher contended with the loopholes in the Dawes Act itself, which retained federal control over transportation routes. Thus she was forced to revise some of her earliest work when in 1891 the Spokane and Palouse Railway exercised eminent domain and seized prime lands she had already assigned along the Clearwater River. In a nice irony, then, as Special Agent for Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians, Alice Fletcher was challenged to effect concrete results dictated by the abstract provisions of a law she had had a large part in drafting. As the letters and diaries reprinted here demonstrate, she only gradually realized that idealized and rational solutions, reached by well-meaning people who knew next to nothing about the places and peoples they intended to manage, were flawed. The realization surely affected her later decision to embrace full-time academic work.

The Nez Perce Reservation, ca. 1890

THE NEZ PERCE RESERVATION AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The letters Alice Fletcher wrote between 1889 and 1892 as she worked among the Nez Perces add a visceral and welcome specificity to historical accounts about allotment. Fletcher’s early epistolary reports from Idaho carry an overtone of surprise—even shock—at the local geography. The prairies of Nebraska bore no resemblance to the mountains, rivers, and canyons of northwestern Idaho. The weather, even in the summertime, demonstrated extremes of hot and cold. At times forest fires produced smoke so thick the surveyor could not use his solar transit. Living here and camping in the field led Fletcher to recognize to some degree that the Nez Perce Reservation was a place with its own history, long populated by peoples who had adapted their living patterns to its terrain, climate, and resources of timber, water, fish, game, and minerals.

Nothing in Fletcher’s previous experience of allotting had prepared her for the rigors of allotting lands to people who had not been asked whether they wished to have their properties reconfigured, divided, (re)assigned, deeded, and their remaining common holdings sold. She did not arrive on a vacant land with no history. The Nez Perce Reservation contained land preemptively claimed by the government for its agency, fort, and school; lands developed by various religious organizations; and fertile tracts given by Nez Perces to early white settlers and trappers who had intermarried with Nez Perce women and whose descendants now lived in log homes surrounded with outbuildings situated on plowed and fenced fields. Some Nez Perces who lived in the Lapwai area had strategically positioned themselves as the agent’s allies; some retained ties with traditional activists who had resisted decades of white interference; and some had become adept at living as neighbors to and business partners with white developers, stockmen, and merchants from nearby Lewiston. Religious differences divided the Nez Perces, as well. Some followed traditional practices, some were Catholic, and some were Protestant, mostly Presbyterian. A feud between two women who had long served as Presbyterian missionaries had exacerbated allegiances and differences among their congregations. In 1889 Kate McBeth lived near the Fort Lapwai Agency and worked primarily with Nez Perce women, while her older sister Susan, who had earlier been expelled from the reservation for sowing discord among her charges, lived in Mt. Idaho. There she exercised a great influence over the Kamiah congregation, having trained several of their ministers. The tensions among Presbyterian congregants over privileges of church membership and administration bled into their potential support of Fletcher’s work. Such complex details emerge only gradually from Fletcher’s letters as she began to assess the situation she faced.

At first Fletcher was reluctant to report the shocking instances she encountered of graft and corruption manifested by local businessmen, developers, and even federal appointees. Local settlers expected allotment to lend a much-needed boost to the local economy, opening grazing spaces and croplands and providing a railroad to connect the fertile grain fields of the Camas Prairie to the port at Lewiston and thence to the Pacific. They openly chafed at Fletcher’s imperturbable insistence on making advantageous allotments to people they disdained. At the Fort Lapwai Agency jealousy, chicanery, bribery, graft, and simple incompetence were facts of everyday life since federal appointments within the Indian Service were based not on qualification but on political patronage. Positions as agency farmers, blacksmiths, schoolmasters, teachers, and even laundresses were awarded to relatives, political cronies, and powerful potential allies. Nor was any man who served as Nez Perce agent during these years a model of probity and efficiency.

Fletcher was directed to work in close cooperation with the agent, but once she had taken the measure of conditions at Fort Lapwai, she correctly judged that to succeed she must distance herself, metaphorically and literally, from agency politics. She removed to Kamiah, seventy-five miles and several mountain ranges to the east, in early July 1889, declaring her independence from the Fort Lapwai Agency. Thereafter she conducted most of her business from field camps where she could personally oversee her surveyor Edson Briggs and his crew as they corrected the reservation boundaries, laid out allotments, and graded the land. She met with individual allottees on site, showed them the corners of their properties, and obtained from them the genealogical documentation she needed to write their deeds of title.

Ironically, Fletcher’s life in the field mirrored that of her clients. Like them, she lived in different places according to the seasons. From late fall to early spring, she and Gay lived in Washington, DC, making occasional side trips—Gay to visit family in New Hampshire and Chicago, Fletcher to visit her mentor Mary Thaw in Pittsburgh, to attend the meetings of various professional associations in the Northeast, and to work at cataloguing the artifacts she had donated to the Peabody Museum in Cambridge. From early spring through mid-fall, the two women returned to northwest Idaho, entraining like tourists on one or another railroad line, stopping enroute to visit friends and colleagues, pausing in Nebraska to check on the progress of Fletcher’s former allottees.¹² Once in Idaho, they were usually in transit between field camps.

Fletcher emphasized her separation from the Fort Lapwai Agency by heading much of her official correspondence In the field. Indeed she did not work in an office. Nor did she often camp in the wild, but located her headquarters, a movable land office, near springs, trails, crossroads, and settlements where clients could easily find her.¹³ Her letters and diaries, in their rich quotidiana, suggest the sheer volume of baggage she and Gay carried from location to location: clothing and bedding in various weights to accommodate temperatures ranging from below freezing to well above 100 degrees; foodstuffs, cooking utensils, and camping gear; grain for the pack animals; axes, saws, axle grease, chains, crowbars, and other tools; Fletcher’s office supplies—law books, plats, books of deeds, reels of red tape, incoming correspondence and copies of letters sent, reams of official stationery, carbon paper, tracing paper, and ink; Gay’s camera, glass plates, and chemical fixatives; and, on one trip, paint, several rolls of carpet, and 111 rolls of wallpaper destined for the First Presbyterian church at Kamiah.¹⁴

Envelope, forwarded four times, containing letter from Richard Henry Pratt to Alice C. Fletcher, 16 Sept. 1891. Author’s photograph, printed with permission of National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

A Sibley tent (visible in figures on pages 48, 116, 166, 182, 289), manufactured according to Fletcher’s specifications and emblazoned with her name and title, was both home and office. Her portable desk folded out into a bedstead. Fletcher usually remained within a half-day’s ride of a post office, remaining in regular communication with the Indian Office in Washington by telephone, telegraph, or letters—some of them forwarded multiple times. She and her surveying team usually pitched their tents near a home or farm whose owner sold them forage for their horses, eggs, milk, meat, and baked goods for exorbitant prices. When she could, Fletcher employed Native women to clean and wash her clothing, and when she performed these tasks for herself, she noted the occasion in her diaries. She trusted many of the details of her personal and business correspondence to Jane Gay.

E. Jane Gay was eight years older than Fletcher. The two had likely met in the reform circles of Washington, DC, sometime before fall 1888. She was unmarried, well-educated, full of energy, an enthusiastic markswoman, and adept at manual technologies such as taxidermy and cabinetmaking. A former teacher, Civil War-era nurse, and employee of the federal Dead Letter office, she was a Washington insider and viewed government-related enterprises with a skeptical eye.¹⁵ She made hundreds of photographs of camps, terrain, workers, and the Nez Perces with whom the allotting party interacted. Although they are not the focus of this collection, her writings and photographs provide an invaluable supplement to Fletcher’s records. for this period. Because Gay had no official appointment, but traveled with Fletcher as a companion and friend, she had little reason to censor her opinions of what she observed. Her written accounts, while not entirely factual, offer corroboration, sometimes correction, and occasionally contradiction to what Fletcher wrote as the allotting agent. Throughout the Nez Perce allotment, a period Fletcher called the worst struggle of my life, Gay remained by her side as a friend—a woman friend—who shared Fletcher’s enthusiasm for reform, her Protestant sensibilities, her intellectual interests, and a host of common friends among the intelligentsia of Washington, DC.¹⁶ In Washington, they visited each other frequently, and when Fletcher purchased her own home in 1892, Gay shared her living quarters.

In 1889 and 1890, Gay, a skillful and witty writer, shared letters about the pair’s adventures with Richard Henry Pratt, which he featured in the Red Man, a newspaper he circulated to sponsors and supporters of his Carlisle Indian School. Aware of the public appetite for entertaining tales of western adventure and for factual popular accounts of work in the emergent human sciences, both Gay and Fletcher planned to write books addressed to a general readership based on their experiences in Idaho. Their mutual friend Frank Hamilton Cushing had, for example, published My Adventures in Zuñi, a well-received illustrated account of his fieldwork among the Zuni in Century Magazine. Fletcher negotiated a similar series about Omaha culture with Century, completing initial drafts of several long articles as she worked on allotment between 1890 and 1892. She may have hoped to collect them later as a popular book patterned after her Camping with the Sioux, which she had drafted in 1887.¹⁷ Gay, too, planned to publish a book based on her letters, encouraged by Isabel Barrows, co-editor of the Christian Register. In addition to the accounts she wrote for the Red Man, she likely intended to include similar letters about allotment that had appeared in the Register and in Lend a Hand, as well as selected letters she had sent to friends from Idaho.

For reasons that remain obscure, neither book was published. Fletcher’s Century accounts became part of her scholarly ethnography, The Omaha Tribe. Gay collected a selection of her public and private letters, and, with the assistance of her niece, Emma Jane Gay, an accomplished graphic artist, compiled a two-volume handwritten scrapbook documenting the allotment years, illustrated with Gay’s photographs. Unpublished in its full form, Choup-nit-ki: With the Nez Perces is now the property of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and has been scanned and made publicly available by the Harvard Open Collections Program.¹⁸

THE GENDERED DIMENSIONS OF ALLOTMENT WORK

Neither Fletcher nor Gay was directly involved in the agitation for women’s rights that characterized their era. Yet each was aware of working in a man’s world. In Fletcher’s letters assumptions about gender inflect the conception and administration of allotment policy, as well as pursuits of scientific ethnographic inquiry. In arguing for a policy that would secure Indian lands to their owners, white reformers, many of them women, presumed the superiority of white, Protestant, heteronormative, and patriarchal family structures. They argued that owning property would bring manhood to Indian men, overlooking the fact that the Dawes Act gave women their own allotments.¹⁹ Women reformers constituted a powerful, if ad hoc, Washington lobby. Fletcher’s letters illustrate how she cannily used her connections among societies and associations, as well as her social bonds with wives of administrators (Caroline Morgan), legislators (Electa Dawes), and publishers (Isabel Barrows) to secure her aims, often writing to these friends in the unspoken assurance they would share her news with their husbands. Significantly, Fletcher’s appointment as an Indian agent was based both on her intellectual qualifications, her experience, and on the assumption that her putative feminine moral superiority would make her an honest employee.

Perhaps no woman friend exercised greater influence on Alice Fletcher than did her philanthropist friend and mentor, Mary Copley Thaw. In 1890, as Fletcher began her second summer on the reservation, Thaw, who had followed the details of her friend’s career since her Omaha field work, offered to give her lifelong financial support so Fletcher could pursue ethnographic research.²⁰ Thaw’s bequest ultimately funded an endowed chair for Fletcher at Harvard University, which she held for the balance of her life. Learning of this gift, Fletcher considered resigning her federal appointment immediately. Yet she was an idealist, and she had reason to believe she could quickly complete the allotment. After some deliberation she decided to retain her federal appointment, writing F. W. Putnam, [M]y honor is involved in getting this done. I dare not resign until it is completed.²¹ Two very long summers followed, during which she was repeatedly thwarted in her efforts to conclude her work, and some of those complications stemmed directly from the dominance Mary Thaw and her Presbyterian connections wielded over Fletcher’s allotment work.

Fletcher went into the field with a reputation as a straight dealer, letting it be known even before she arrived at Fort Lapwai that things would be done on the square. Her principles produced a comical frustration in those who tried unsuccessfully to sway her. Gay wrote of a delegation of cattlemen who visited Fletcher to secure their ‘rights’ on the Reservation, then retreated in disgust, evidently non-plussed, and muttering, Why in thunder did the Government send a woman to do this work? We could have got a holt on a man. ²² Fletcher held a federal appointment, and therefore could not be tempted by elective office. Her generous salary made bribery impractical. A woman of a certain age, she seemed immune to threats of sexual assault and physical violence. By her own admission, she enjoyed negotiating with, cajoling, and commanding others, men and women alike. Reporting the work of her first field season to the Board of Indian Commissioners, she declared, I have always had to coerce a few, and I rather enjoy it. One of her hearers retorted, Most women do.²³ In the field, as in the academy, she succeeded because she commanded a variety of skills that her contemporaries were more likely to attribute to a man. She oversaw a large budget, supervised payrolls, purchased supplies, and ensured the condition of federal properties in horses, wagons, and surveying gear. She hired and negotiated the conditions of work and reimbursement of a surveyor, a translator, and dozens of axemen, chainmen, and messengers. She took evidence and reached legally binding decisions in disputes over land. In short, although visibly a woman, she embodied federal power.

Because allotment was a relatively new policy Fletcher had a good deal of latitude in approaching her work. Some Washington administrators apparently felt the task entailed little more than matching the names on census rolls with available plots of land, according to the nicely photographed plats furnished by the Department, for the most part drawn from imagination.²⁴ In the late summer of 1892, under great pressure to conclude her work, Fletcher herself employed this expedient. For the most part, however, she involved herself with every aspect of the allotment work. She supervised the initial surveys aligning the reservation boundaries with the base meridian and laying out the plots available for claim. Because earlier surveys had been inaccurate, because white squatters had gradually made incursions into reservation lands, and because many Nez Perces already owned farms on which they had built fences, homes, and outbuildings, she felt she needed to be in the field to adjudicate disputes when multiple parties wished to claim the same lands. She personally supervised the grading of lands to be sure each allottee received property on which s/he might have at least a fair chance of raising crops or grazing cattle.²⁵ She and her crew also advised potential allottees about details that would affect the land’s future value: shallow or alkaline soil, for example, or proximity to roads and railroads as yet unbuilt.

Many of those who worked for Fletcher were young Nez Perce men who had been educated at government boarding schools. She appreciated their ability to speak, read, and write English and their understanding of basic principles of individual competitive capitalism. At the same time she thought of them as immature and docile, in need of her tutelage. On one occasion, concerned that her survey crew were spending too much of their food allowance for frivolities such as jelly, she gave each man a notebook in which to record his personal expenditures for food (an intervention entirely unrelated to the terms of their employment or her official appointment). Thus she was several times surprised when her employees went on strike for higher wages, and retaliated with a disciplinarian’s resolve, refusing to re-hire the troublemakers.²⁶ Despite such episodes, Fletcher enjoyed generally cordial relations with her Native employees, several of whom also served as ad hoc translators and go-betweens, making it possible for her to allot lands to their extended families and to interview them as ethnographic informants.

Consistent with her self-conception as a mother to the Indians, as she made allotments Fletcher documented family structures.²⁷ She compiled careful genealogical documentation to ensure the heritability of the properties upon the death of the original allottee. In the process of extracting such information Fletcher also conducted ethnographic interviews. She was especially interested in the stories told by those whose ancestors had figured in white settler colonial histories, such as Jonathan (Old Billy) Williams (Kew-kew’-lu-yah), who spoke with her about the embassy of four Native men to St. Louis following the Lewis and Clark expedition.²⁸

Despite Fletcher’s reputation for fairness, she did not approach allotment impartially. She preferred to work with clients who were already inclined to accept the law, who understood its implications, or who were at least amenable to her direction. To the Board of Indian Commissioners in 1889 she reported, It has always been my aim to find out the vantage point on the reservation, the point most likely to be opened to settlement, and on and around that point I place my best Indians. I give the best land to the best Indians that I can find. I always help the progressive Indians first.²⁹ Such help included giving them fertile lands, locating them near water and transportation routes, and grouping families on adjoining properties. As the allotment dragged on, however, she became increasingly impatient and imperious with those she perceived as impeding her progress. She was not above slandering them, ignoring them, or, as a final expedient, unilaterally assigning them to plots of ground they had not chosen.

Although Fletcher herself was not a religious enthusiast, she understood the powerful effects of church interests in colonizing endeavors, evidence of which she saw before her. Although Nez Perces practiced several different religions, because the reservation had been placed under Presbyterian supervision by the Grant Peace Policy, that denomination demanded the bulk of Fletcher’s attention. The Fort Lapwai Agency stood on lands first settled by missionary Henry Spalding, who had come to the Northwest with his wife and the Whitmans in 1836. The leaders of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, responsible for staffing the Lapwai Agency, were both her indirect supervisors and her colleagues on the Board of Indian Commissioners. Moreover, Mary Thaw had given and continued to give large sums of money to Presbyterian causes. Therefore, when F. F. Ellinwood, Secretary to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, and others with similar positions of power wrote her friendly (and sometimes imperious) letters inquiring about the status of church properties under allotment, Fletcher moved decisively to protect their interests.

Shortly after she arrived in Idaho in 1889, Fletcher befriended Susan L. and Kate C. McBeth, bringing them into a network of exchanges that benefitted the missionary sisters, their congregants, and herself. To Mary Thaw and the Board of Foreign Missions, Fletcher praised the successes of the McBeths among their Nez Perce congregants. As a result, gifts such as a silver communion service and Thaw money flowed toward the reservation, funding extensive repairs to Presbyterian churches at Kamiah and helping to build a church at Meadow Creek. Eventually Mary Thaw purchased land on the reservation and built a small cottage for Kate McBeth. In turn, the Native leaders trained by the McBeths supported Fletcher’s allotment initiatives, served as willing ethnographic informants, allowed her to camp on their property, and helped her by packing her camp gear and guiding her party over icy mountain trails. Moreover, Susan McBeth, who had been working with her ministerial students to compile a Nez Perce grammar and syllabary, shared this ethnographic treasure with Fletcher, who immediately offered it to F. W. Putnam. Kate McBeth helped Fletcher to interview Jonathan Williams and then to document a map of aboriginal Nez Perce territories and settlements he drew for her; she subsequently arranged for several of her Nez Perce congregants to verify and supplement his information. Fletcher’s work, then, melded church, state, and academic agendas, partnerships apparent in the documents reproduced here.

ALICE FLETCHER’S CORRESPONDENCE, 1889-1892

The extent to which Alice Fletcher understood the deleterious effects of the Dawes Act upon Native sovereignty and culture remains unclear. Surely she saw its flaws and inconsistencies, responded by trying to make local modifications, and persisted in what she understood to be her duty. The diaries, reports, and personal letters she produced during her work show how she apprehended the immediate problems facing her, the solutions she imagined, and, to a degree, her reaction to them, although her skill as a rhetorician masked her own opinions in many cases. Like all letter-writers, Fletcher matched the content of her letters to the relations she had with her correspondent, whether personal or professional, and to their mutual expectations. The documents below demonstrate the extent of her skills as a diplomat, negotiator, and power broker skilled at manipulating the resources she controlled to effect the outcomes she judged to be best for her clients and herself.

By all accounts, Alice Fletcher was a gregarious woman, and throughout her life maintained contact with many close friends. In her professional life she formed networks with scholars, colleagues, informants, and publishers. As a federal agent she produced meticulous written documentation. In her field diaries, the lists of those to whom she sent letters suggest the breadth of her influence, although only a portion of these letters is now available. Thus this collection is necessarily incomplete. Almost none of the letters Fletcher wrote Francis La Flesche during these years have survived, nor have I been able to locate her correspondence with Mary Thaw. In selecting the letters reproduced here, I have tried to represent accurately the range of people with whom she corresponded between 1889 and 1892. These include federal agents and legislators, their wives, her mentors, church officials, members of various reform groups, Nez Perce allottees, agency officials, local Idaho ranchers and businessmen, legislators, and local friends and opponents. Fletcher also composed public letters intended to be read to gatherings of reformers and scholars or to be published in newspapers or magazines. Rather than reproduce such sources, now easily available electronically, I have listed them as part of the bibliography.

A number of Fletcher’s letters to the Indian Office and to F. W. Putnam from this period were published by Caroline D. Carley in 2001.³⁰ In selection, context, arrangement, and transcription, the documents in this collection duplicate very few of those she reprinted, but supplement them. Together, this volume and Carley’s collection present nearly every letter Fletcher wrote during the Nez Perce allotment. Here my selections duplicate Carley’s when the letter is centrally important to understanding Fletcher’s policy interventions, ethnological investigations, or interpersonal relations. With those letters I have interwoven many reports and letters that have not been transcribed or published: a number of long personal letters Fletcher wrote to Richard Henry Pratt, to her well-connected women friends, and to Thomas Jefferson Morgan. These personal documents contain information she deemed inappropriate to discuss in her official reports, but that nevertheless illuminate in fuller detail the conditions impacting allotment. Copies of many of these letters were preserved in Fletcher’s letterbooks, but were badly damaged by the letterpress duplication process, a technology that involved wetting a copy medium. They are very difficult to read, but I have digitally photographed and enhanced them to produce the transcriptions here.

The majority of Fletcher’s official correspondence is filed numerically by year in Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in Washington, DC. Other letters are held in regional branches in College Park and Silver Spring, Maryland, and Seattle, Washington. In Fletcher’s collected papers now held by the National Anthropological Archives, two letterbooks and numerous paper files contain duplicate or draft copies of much of her official correspondence, as well as carbons of letters not held in RG75. Many of these documents are damaged and partially illegible. Within these major collections, some letters have been lost, misfiled, stolen, or destroyed; others have been moved or reclassified into thematic groupings within RG75 known as Special Cases. Four such groups are important to this collection: SC147 (Nez Perce Reservation), SC143 (Missions), SC37 (Langford Claim), and SC191 (Leases, Nez Perce).

Sample damaged page from Fletcher’s Letterbook 2:139. MS 4558, Series 3, Box 5B. Author’s photograph, printed with permission of National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

A number of Fletcher’s personal letters are held in other collections, as well. A large group of her letters to F. W. Putnam are filed in the archives of Harvard University and the Peabody Museum. During the years she worked with the Nez Perces, Fletcher often wrote at length to Putnam of her Omaha research. Because space here is limited, I have omitted much of the Omaha-related content, so indicating with ellipses.

FLETCHER’S FIELD DIARIES

Throughout her adult life, Fletcher carried a small pocket diary (approximately 3 x 2.5), in which she wrote daily—brief penciled notations of the details that she needed to remember later for her reports.³¹ She begins each day’s entry by noting the weather. In Idaho, where the weather sometimes changed hourly, field conditions determined the day’s work. She recorded her movements, her daily activities, conversations she did not document in formal reports, her financial transactions, her health, and her mood.³² She carefully noted when she sent and received correspondence, sometimes reminding herself in coded language when she had sent two versions of the same letter—one official and one personal—to Thomas Jefferson Morgan, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Field diary for 1889; at right: sample diary pages for 29 and 30 June 1889. MS 4558, Series 9, Box 11. Author’s photographs, printed with permission of National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

The diaries make fascinating, if difficult, reading. Non-narrative, they lack the sense-making plot structures of retrospective accounts, for the cumulative meaning of individual events has not yet emerged. These immediate, abbreviated records provide a chronological and sometimes corrective foundation for other accounts of allotment, including Gay’s heavily emplotted Choup-nit-ki, which has often been erroneously used as if it were a primary source. They show how a complex policy was effected over a long period in an inexorable accumulation of daily events. They offer a visceral sense of the tedium of allotting, in its daily details of heat, dirt, and frustration, cool days, clean linen, and tiny victories. They expose strata of deep chronologies, such as the developments in the Cox case, which plagued Fletcher from the moment she arrived in 1889, through the four summers of her work, and which was unresolved when she left in 1892.

EDITORIAL INTERVENTIONS

Here I include diary entries only for the periods when Fletcher was present on the Nez Perce Reservation. I have summarized the events of the intervening months in the introductory comments to each of the four sections of this book. Lack of space has forced me to amend the layout of the diaries. Rather than list short entries as they appear on the page, I have interpreted blank vertical spaces as beginnings of new groups of thought, and split them as paragraphs, ending each with a period.

In both letters and diaries I have not corrected Fletcher’s spelling, nor do I mark her errors with [sic]. Fletcher was a careless speller, usually hurrying to capture her thoughts, but rarely proofreading. I believe this detail tells us a good deal about the degree to which she was distracted as she wrote.

In both the letters and the diaries, I use these shorthand indications:

•[Illegible word(s)]

•[uncertain transcriptions?]

•^interlineations^

•strikethroughs

I have silently corrected irregularities of punctuation and capitalization.

Within the transcribed letters I have adopted these conventions:

•Where relevant I have summarized CIA policy directives related to individual queries in a bracketed paragraph following the letter containing the question.

•I have omitted illegible, repetitious, or formulaic phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, indicating the omissions with ellipses.

•In most cases, rather than reproduce salutation and closing sentiments, I have indicated the names of letter writers and recipients with abbreviations in the general header, adding the location of the letter writer, the date of the letter, and the archival location of the document. When a salutation in Fletcher’s private correspondence indicates a personal relationship, I reproduce that salutation. I do not reproduce letter closings, usually variants of Alice C. Fletcher, Spl. Ind. Agent.

A great part of the value of these letters and diaries lies in their documentation of Fletcher’s interpersonal relations, not only with well-known scholars, philanthropists, and federal officials, but also with the people of northwest Idaho, many of whom had significant effects on her work. In an Appendix I have provided a biographical listing, identifying many of those with whom Fletcher worked and corresponded. Others with whom she interacted only briefly are identified in endnotes. In a separate list as part of the appendix, I have included the names of the men who were her field workers, arranged by the dates of their employment. The list is not comprehensive, but should add a welcome context for interested readers and researchers.

A list of abbreviations used in the notes and editorial comments can be found in the preliminary pages of this work.

Complete citations for all sources in the notes can be found in the bibliography.

NOTES

1. The major biographies of Fletcher are Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land and Welch, Alice Cunningham Fletcher. Neither gives detailed attention to Nez Perce allotment.

2. Mark, Stranger, 311. Among the letters she destroyed were most of her voluminous correspondence with her adoptive son Francis La Flesche.

3. I use the term governmentality here in the Foucauldian sense to refer both to acts of governing and to the technologies and strategies by which members of social groups are made governable.

4. Mark, Stranger, 70.

5. Scherer and DeMallie, Life Among the Indians by Fletcher, Introduction, 38.

6. Mark, Stranger, 114.

7. A small group of Nez Perce women and elders was released in 1883. On the internment, see Pearson, The Nez Perces.

8. CIA to ACF, 4 May 1889 (CLD 92:184:2-9). As Fletcher worked on the reservation, she discovered the extent to which the reservation [had become] a dumping ground for all outside errors of prior surveys (ACF to CIA, 30 July 1892, NAB 28931).

9. ACF to CIA, 13 Sept. 1892, NAB 34158.

10. Prucha, American Indian Policy, 11.

11. Reservation Matters, Grangeville Free Press, 13 Jan. 1888.

12. Fletcher frequently traveled on the Northern Pacific Railroad. Henry Dawes, for whom the allotment act had been named, had supported the NPRR’s efforts to set aside the Yellowstone area as a national park and tourist destination. In later years the NPRR profited handsomely when Indian lands, newly available after allotments were complete, were sold to immigrant homesteaders, who moved via railroad to their new properties (Northern Pacific Railroad).

13. RBIC, 1888, 110.

14. ACFD, 31 Mar. 1890.

15. In 1868, using the pseudonym Truman Trumbull, Gay published a long mock-epic poem titled The New Yankee Doodle, Being an Account of the Little Difficulty in the Family of Uncle Sam.

16. ACF to FWP, 11 Nov. 1891, PMC, Box 11.

17. Camping with the Sioux remained unpublished until 2001, when the National Anthropological Archives website posted Francis La Flesche’s typescript of Fletcher’s manuscript, illustrated with drawings and with photographs from BAE collections. In 2013, Scherer and DeMallie published an edition of Fletcher’s Life among the Indians, comprising both Camping with the Sioux and "The Omahas