The urban traveler cutting through Southeastern Oregon who makes a brief detour down one of the side roads–say Skull Creek road or the Three Forks road–would think he was passing through a land that had remained much the same as when the first settlers arrived. Our traveler certainly might, for a moment (if he climbed out of his car and walked more than a few yards from the road), experience many of the same feelings of solitude, awe and humility in the face of such natural grandeur as did the early settlers. But, the landscape he viewed would be markedly changed from 150 years ago in ways the modern visitor finds difficult to comprehend fully. While some of the most consequential changes have been natural and beyond the control of man, others equally far reaching have been by the hand of man. Characteristically, the impact of the modifications by humans was little understood by those who wrought them. Those changes in turn significantly affected the evolving association between man and the land and other creatures of the Owyhee
The relationship between man and the Owyhee landscape can be seen as having passed through five stages: discovery, coexistence, domination, exploitation, and understanding and remediation. The original discoverers were of course the Native Americans, who left signs of their presence in petroglyph fields at Hole in the Ground and elsewhere. Their relationship with the land was primarily one of coexistence. They hunted and fished and harvested wild berries and grains, but they left the landscape pretty much unchanged. Rather than trying to modify it to meet their needs, they accommodated themselves to their surroundings and got from it what they needed to survive. Their purpose was subsistence; in any case they mostly lacked the means or did not feel the need to make significant changes in the landscape. Not so with the European-American settlers.
While the earliest European-American settlers anywhere on the continent perforce had to adapt to their environment, their goal was to dominate it and foster development. In many places, this entailed clearing the land in order to plant it in either crops or pasture and constructing systems for watering the fields. New species of plants and animals were introduced to provide food, fodder, and power to pull farm implements. Roads and bridges were built; dwellings, outbuildings and fences were constructed.
With domination of the landscape came its exploitation, which planted the seeds of its degradation. Before the earliest European-Americans made their way to the Owyhee Canyonlands, the land was fertile and potentially rich agricultural land. Early migrants to the Owyhee Mountains in the 1860s and 1870s recorded grass growing as high their shoulders. The rivers and streams teemed with fish, and wildlife was abundant. With the passage of time, however, the tall grass disappeared with the increasing grazing of livestock and the growth of feral horse herds. Streams were dammed and diverted or poisoned from mining operations. But not all the changes resulted from the actions of man. Old time residents spoke of rising temperatures, a decline in precipitation, and the disappearance of water, indications that natural changes were occurring as well.
The settlers understood the need for responsible management of the land, stewardship, if you will. But they understood this to mean managing the land in a manner that would ensure its continued productivity. Overgrazing was addressed by the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. The Grazing Service was established to administer the Act and manage the land, and in 1946 the Grazing Service was merged with the General Land Office to form the the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM was to administer the Act and manage the land, while the cattlemen built fences and water projects. Neither the BLM nor the cattlemen were originally concerned with such matters as the protection of native species. In recent decades, however, this has changed with such actions as the creation of Wilderness Study Areas, the reintroduction of Big Horn Sheep, the protection of the Greater Sage-grouse, efforts to restore Red Band trout, and remediation of riparian areas. Though significant, these latter developments are beyond the scope of the present discussion, which is concerned with how the residents of the Canyonlands viewed and interacted with the world around them.
Daily life was most fundamentally affected by the seasons and the weather. The winters could be cold and the summers hot, though that might be relative to where one had come from. When Josephine Lytle arrived in Vale in December 1915, she found the winter mild compared to Wisconsin. People told her that she would “just die in the heat” when summer came, but she said the cool nights made it a joy and she didn’t feel the heat. Fall was beautiful–warm days and cool nights and colors–and she considered it the “most delightful season.” But the winters could be cold, and she felt sorry for the livestock because they had no shelter. When the cattle wintered out on the range, they would find sheltered spots to bed down. According to George Palmer, there was a particularly hard winter in the 1880s that killed “pretty near all the cattle…. From that hard winter, there was bone piles in those sheltered places that you couldn’t ride a horse through.” Ranchers would put up hay for winter feed, though Stacia Davis said that at Hole in the Ground it was rarely necessary to feed. The ranch was down low (1500’ below the rim) so one could be working in shirt sleeves while there was snow at the Rinehart Ranch on the mesa across the river.
An interesting phenomenon remarked on by several of the interviewees was “climate change” resulting from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which some dated variously to 1904, 1905 and 1916. According to George Palmer, whose family came to the Canyon in 1902, the earthquake was said to have moved them “400 miles to the north in climate change.”1 The climate became drier and hotter and it was necessary to build up springs and water holes to ensure sufficient water.
When we first come here, there was lots of horses in the country, and they’ll congregate in alkali places, and they’ll paw and dig until they made a little lake, and that would fill up with water. Before the climate change when it got so dry, we’d have water out of them water holes in the fall of the year when we came out of the mountains. Heck, you can’t even see those indentations any more.
Walter Perry, who arrived in 1914, described winters as getting “lighter and lighter.” Speaking in 1980, he commented, “It’s been drier and warmer in the last forty or fifty years. It’s warmed up an ungodly lot. We used to have lots of snow and lots of rain.” Another change came with the Owyhee Dam in the 1930’s. Stacia noted that before the reservoir filled there was never any fog. After the dam, they regularly experienced morning fog that usually burned off by noon.
Perhaps the most common indications of man’s interactions with the landscape are place names. They can commemorate an individual, an event or the reaction of early explorers and settlers to the shape or beauty of a natural feature. The names to be found in an area as large as the Owyhee are too numerous to be described here, but those mentioned by the former residents of the Canyonlands who were interviewed offer some insight into how the process worked and how they felt about the place. Best known of course is the origin of the name “Owyhee,” an early Anglicization of “Hawai’i.” The mountains of southwest Idaho were given this name when in 1819-20 three Hawaiian members of an expedition led by Donald McKenzie left the party to explore the mountains and disappeared. Jordan, which is found in such names as Jordan Valley and Jordan Creek commemorates Michael M. Jordan, who discovered gold along the stream that bears his name and who was killed in battle with Indians in August 1864.
Leonard Duncan’s interview is a rich source on the origins of Owyhee place names. Here is his colorful account of how China Gulch got its name,
About three miles above the highway [US 95] there, there’s a gulch comes in and it’s called China Gulch. The way it got its name, the Chinamen were coming through from Nevada during the Indian Wars, and it was a bunch of squaws and kids. I think they killed all but one. One got away and got to Silver City. My grandad said it was Indians. My grandad told my dad that he was a kid six or seven years old, and he knew something about it. The squaws killed them Chinamen. My dad says wasn’t you scared and his dad said “Christ, Pearl, don’t you think you can scare a damn Indian?”
And here is his description of the origins of Boney Canyon,
That canyon up there on Jordan Creek, about two and a half miles up the canyon–Bony Canyon–named in 1910 when we lost the horses up there–stallion and all the mares, and we couldn’t find them that winter. Jess Roberts, hired man, found them, and came in and said “Well, Pearl, I found your stud bunch. They’re up there in Bony Canyon,” and it’s been Bony Canyon ever since.
Duncan claimed that Bogus Creek got its name when his uncle and a friend named Cantor were riding toward the creek, and Cantor promised the party that once they got over the next rise there would be a lake with a nice cool drink. But when he got there, “the bottom was white as could be” without a drop in it. ‘Cantor rose up in his stirrups and said, ‘By God, boys, she’s bogus!’”
Deadman waterhole was named after a fellow who was just passing through and died there after saddling his horse and lying down for a nap. No one knew who he was. Ranches might be named for a geographic feature, such as the Hole in the Ground ranch or The Difficulty, the name deriving from the difficulty of getting water to it. The Whitehorse got its name because “some fella had a claim on it and a man came along and traded a white horse for his squatter’s rights on the claim.” And a place might have more than a single name if the situation called for it. Duncan told the following story about Ratchett creek,
I run the buckaroo outfit on Grassy Mountain in 1949. There was a BLMer there, some kid, and we had an argument about names. He asked what the name of a creek was, and I said I guessed it was Ratchett. He said I was giving him a line. I said “That’s the name you fellas gave it.” I said, “You’re so goddamn smart, why don’t you look at the goddamn map you’re carrying and find out yourself.” I said “We used to call it Lone Tree when the ladies was around and Mouse Turd when they wasn’t, so I guess that’s why you named it Ratchett.”
Beaver Charlie Hole, according to Bill Ross, was named for an old trapper, who was said to have had two wives–one white and one Indian. At Beaver Charlie Hole there was an old cabin built of rock to about four feet and then juniper logs and a dirt roof.
Other names were more prosaic, such as Cow Creek or Cow Lakes, or fairly straightforward descriptions, such as Crooked Creek and Three Forks, where the main stem Owyhee River is joined by the North and Middle Forks. Such names need no explanation.
Mountains might be named for what grew on them, such as Mahogany mountain, which was topped with mountain mahogany. And names could change. According to George Palmer, Cedar Mountain, a prominent peak on the Lower Owyhee was originally named Juniper Mountain.
The landscape of the Owyhee Canyonlands is defined by sage brush. The Canyonlands are at the center of the largest contiguous shrub-sage brush habitat in the Interior Columbia Basin.2 Since long before man arrived, the various species of sage have blanketed the landscape from valley to mountain top, with few exceptions.3 Those exceptions are primarily wet meadows (sage prefers aridity) and rock scarps. One could stand almost anywhere and see sagebrush in any direction. The sight was surely disappointing for some. Ethel Raburn described what could happen,
In 1918 or 1919, somewhere along in there, they started this Antelope Reservoir project. They brought a lot of people in from the East. A fella named Harley Hooker did most of the advertising of it. He’d sell them 80 acres, sight unseen, and they come out from the East, and there’d be nothing but 80 acres of sagebrush.
The prospect must have been daunting for the easterner unfamiliar with the “Sagebrush Sea,” but that didn’t stop them from remaking the landscape. As Opel McConnell commented, “There was lots of sagebrush and dry land, and where people lived, there were trees, lawns, shrubbery and flowers.”
The ubiquity of the sagebrush made utilization of the naturally occurring grasses difficult. When Walter Perry homesteaded on Mahogany Mountain, he said he could have mowed the bunch grass there at a half ton to the acre had it not been been for the sagebrush and rocks. But to convert sagebrush steppe into land that could be cultivated required a significant input of labor. Mostly the sagebrush had to be grubbed by hand. George Palmer described the challenge facing the aspiring rancher,
The Owyhee River places was irrigated with water wheels, and they was all sagebrush, big high sagebrush, and we grubbed that off with grubbing hoes. The grubbing hoe has got a kind of an axe deal on one side of the handle, and a blade like a hoe on the other side. We’d chop greasewood and sagebrush out with that, and we’d pile it with a pitchfork and burn it at night. My mother and I cleaned up that whole ranch – 60 acres–in two or three summers.
Ranchers who could afford it hired Indians to do the grubbing. Kirt Skinner described how his father would
hire Indians to cut it off, grub it out and burn it and make wood out of it. There were two or three winters here when we had men, women and children–there’d be over 100 people here, you know. They all had their own camps and teepees on the place. It was contract work. They’d take so many acres, each family. They cleared at least 1500 acres.
An Indian family would have a contract and would work together grubbing their own piece. The pay varied. Kirt Skinner estimated that when they first began clearing on his family’s place, the crews were paid $3-3.50 an acre. As they continued, the amount would gradually rise, and in places where the brush was especially thick the crews would want more. Since aside from willows along the creeks, sagebrush was the only wood, Kirt’s father had the Indians trim the branches and stack the wood for $3-6.00 a cord. The piles weren’t full cords–4’ x 8’ x whatever the length of the pieces of wood. When it was only a matter of gathering wood for fires rather than clearing ground for cultivation, a pair of horses might be attached to a railroad rail to break down the sage. With that method, said Josephine Scott, the wood was easily gathered.
Sagebrush was used for fueling fireplaces and wood-fired cookstoves and for building. It burned fast. Even though Joe Beach said that when they used sage, “the top of the heater was red hot one minute, stone cold the next,” he claimed that sage was better cooking wood than pine or fir, “lasting longer and burning hotter.” Besides fuel, sagebrush was used for constructing out buildings. The place that Jim Page’s father bought had a sagebrush roof with straw on on top. The walls were made from woven willow branches.
For ranchers, aside from water, the most important element of the landscape was the range. They depended on the grass to feed their animals. Early settlers described the region as being covered with tall grass and of course with sage brush.4 When Leonard Duncan’s family first moved to the Owyhee, it was all open range without fences, and there was plenty of ryegrass up and down the river at Rome. But man’s activities changed this both intentionally and unintentionally. That is, man cleared the sage brush to make pasture and fields for crops, a process described earlier, while grazing livestock degraded the grass and the riparian areas. George Palmer remembered “The range was so good out there when we went there that we never even fed our milk cows hay.” Walter Perry’s comment that “There ain’t no grass like there used to be” was echoed by others.
Gradually the bunch grass disappeared. The interviewees offered several explanations of how this happened. As we have seen, George Palmer attributed it to a drop in the water table resulting from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, an explanation repeated by others. Declining precipitation and overgrazing were the more likely culprits. Settlers’ accounts from around 1900 tell of increasingly drier conditions in the Owyhee Mountains, with snowfalls declining from each year to once every five years. Annual precipitation was declining, and tall grass had all but disappeared. Over time the area was changing from a high precipitation tall grass area to a low precipitation desert plant community.5 As often happens with natural change, the impacts were accelerated by man. Ethel Raburn described how this could work,
When they first brought sheep into this country, there was sheep and cattle wars galore. They’d let them crawl into your fields, even. You know, sheep will go through barbed wire fences like lightning. It was real cattle wars. It was mostly Stansfield’s sheep that came in here. He was from up around Enterprise, I think. One fella was shot. They finally put this law in that they had to stay a mile from your fences. It had a lot to do with the starting of the Grazing Act. Most of the people that had sheep right in this area around here are cattlemen now….
It got to where there was nothing for the cattle to eat. There was a few dry years and they ate the good bunch grass out. What came back was cheat [grass]. That’s really what ruined the range in the first place. My dad said when he first came to this country, the brush wasn’t very thick. Grass just everywhere, and it was that way until the sheep came in. The BLM has sure been a good boost in getting the ranges back where they used to be.
Ethel’s comments about the BLM are striking, given the criticism directed at the agency now.
Not all plant life was a boon to raising cattle, however. James Page recalled losing cows to larkspur and having sheep possibly go loco on greasewood.
Dad ran cattle, maybe 25-30 head. I remember we lost seven head to larkspur after the lake filled. He’d moved out to the homestead after the lake filled and left them on the river. I wanted to go down and get them, but he said no hurry about it. After a week, I said we should go get them, and he said I could if I wanted to. I went down there, and seven of them were dead. It was spring time, and the ground was soft and they ate that larkspur. The roots are what gets them. It’s a poison and they bloat up and die in just a little bit. Doesn’t take much. That was across the river from the cemetery. Sheep would go loco on greasewood or something. I’m not too sure it was the greasewood. They run around in circles with their head off sideways. I think it was a tick in their ear. Didn’t happen very often.
The iconic feature of the landscape was the Owyhee River and the canyon it had carved. It formed an obstacle to East-West travel but wasn’t navigable for North-South communication. Josephine Scott, whose family came from South Carolina in 1918 and settled at Rome, remembered that before there was a bridge they used a boat to cross the river in the spring when the water was high. When the river was down, it was possible to cross with a team and wagon. As a boy Chesley Blake learned to swim in the river; all the kids did, he said. They would wait for the water to go down and warm up, and they would swim across the river and back or dive off the bridge. But in the spring, the river could get high. Scott remembered rising “ten or twelve feet overnight.” Chesley Blake offered a more detailed description,
In the Spring when it got high, it would roll. In some places it would be out of its banks. The island out there across from the house, you couldn’t even see except a little bunch of brush sticking up on it. It was about a mile wide in some places when it was high. Three quarters to a mile wide.
The river underwent a big change in 1932 when a dam was constructed across it near Adrian. Blocking the river put an end to the anadromous fish runs, forced the removal of families from ranches inundated by the reservoir, and even brought minor changes in the climate. These are described elsewhere.
Besides the main river, there were springs, streams, and lakes–though many of the latter were small and amounted to little more than large ponds. Leonard Duncan described Cow Creek Lake before irrigation dams were built on them, "it didn’t make any difference how full the lakes was, you could walk all over them if you was five feet and a half high without getting drowned.” Crater Lake formed when water flowed onto the lava. Batch Lake in the Southeast corner of the flow came from seepage through the lava.
Bogus Lake was fed by a spring that formed the headwaters of Bogus Creek, a stream that ran about eight miles from the source to the river. According to Charlie Anawalt, who bought the Bogus Creek ranch in 1937, flooding could be a problem with the creek when there was a cloudburst on the upper end of the creek. He claimed, “You could swim a horse in it when it flooded….but I never saw it flood.” On the other hand, the creek also went dry every so often and might remain that way for four or five years.
After the Owyhee River and its various branches, the most important stream was Jordan Creek. It was described by Lt. Colonel C.S. Drews of the 1st Oregon Cavalry, who led an expedition through the area in 1864 not long after Michael M. Jordan was killed there.
Jordan Creek through nearly the whole length of the valley, was in pools, and of course its water was correspondingly poor. Some of these pools are deep and four or five miles long, and are somewhat abundant with fish. The line of the creek is heavily fringed with willows….6
For cattle and wildlife alike in such an arid landscape, springs and seeps are important sources of water even if they don’t feed a stream. George Palmer described how ranchers would build up water holes and springs so they would have water for their stock. But as noted earlier, following the 1906 earthquake, many of these sources dried up. Paul Black, cited in the SubBasin Report, said water had to be hauled in for livestock to areas that previously had enough. Stream flows continued to decrease in the 1920s. Meadows in several places ceased producing enough hay for winter feeding of horses, and settlers were forced to move. Large trout populations disappeared. Black recalled catching gunny sacks full of trout in Battle Creek. Trout now are found only in short sections of streams that have sufficient water through the winter.7 But streams were important not only for the water and habitat they provided man and animals. In the absence of refrigeration, they also provided a means of cooling and preserving food as described in the next chapter.
Among the springs dotting the Owyhee Canyonlands are many warm or hot springs, the best known being near Three Forks where the old Winnemucca-Silver City wagon road crossed the river. Bill Ross described it as a “natural bath tub” twelve feet across and 4 ½ feet deep. It has since filled, raising the bottom. The rock work for the roadbed still remains. There were hot springs also near Watson and spread throughout the Canyonlands, attesting to the volcanic origins of the region.
Next to the river canyon, perhaps the most stunning landscape feature was Jordan Craters, a dark lava flow extending Northeast to Southeast covering twenty-six square miles.. One of the most recent flows in the continental US, it has been dated to about 3200 BP. George Palmer, however, disagreed with the geologists who said that it had not been active for thousands of years.
since we moved out there in 1902 up until 1909 or ‘12, I saw the ashes blow out of that old volcano and heard it roar, and it’d just shake the country. Well, it’d shake the dishes out of the cupboard right there alongside of Cow Creek. We saw that. Went through it. That’s straight. Would you rather take my word for it or the geologist’s when I was there and saw it?
The flow buried existing drainages and dammed gulches to form Cow Lakes along the eastern edge of the flow.
Man of course is not the sole occupant of a particular landscape, and like the physical features of a place, wildlife can influence the manner in which he adapts to a place. One of the ways in which men interacted with animals in a newly settled area is through trapping and hunting. Walter Perry trapped bobcats, coyotes and muskrats during the winter and shipped the pelts to different fur companies once they’d been dried. He used steel traps and ran eighteen to twenty miles of trap lines. Trapping was done by children as well as adults for both winter recreation and income. When Bill Ross’ wife Phyllis asked for a fur coat, Bill told her “All right. Trap it.” And she did, trapping enough for a full-length beaver coat. She so enjoyed the trapping that she did it for another few winters getting enough pelts for coats for her mother-in-law and her sister.
Beaver were among the animals with whom the settlers shared the landscape. It was not always a matter of man exploiting the beaver. Despite the dangers of man’s presence, beaver took advantage of the changes farmers made to the landscape, such as the Beach family’s orchard. Joe related how once their trees began to bear fruit, a beaver would come in every night or two and take out a tree. It was “quite a thing,” he said to wait three of four years to have a fruit tree grow and then have it cut down. Joe’s dad asked the sheriff what he ought to do, and he replied, “Well, a man’s a damn fool to stay there and let beaver cut trees down without doing something about it.” So Joe’s dad arose before daylight, waited for the beaver, shot them and pushed the carcasses into the river, ending the problem.
Beavers were not the only creatures that sought to enjoy the fruits of man’s labors. Skunks and raccoons raided raided chicken houses, and together with chicken hawks, they made it difficult for Opal McConnell’s mother to keep chicks. Porcupines didn’t bother the chickens much, but they did eat holes in the buildings.
Not all the animals were indigenous. Best known of those that had been brought in by man and gotten loose were the mustangs.8 Ray Nelson’s family, like others–the Davises for example–ran mustangs. Nelson’s in-laws got their saddle horses that way–”good horses, but hard to catch.” He also described domestic sheep that had gone wild and lived in the rimrock where the coyotes couldn’t get to them. “People shot them for meat now and then.” When Wes Halford who had a dugout at Otter’s Delight a few miles down from Three Forks and made moonshine died, his hogs and goats ran wild.
Coyotes too were a problem for the McConnells, especially when they were herding sheep. They would always carry a gun and bring the sheep in at night to keep them safe–especially lambs. Opal’s mother was a dead shot and killed skunks as well as coyotes. All the women could shoot, and according to Opal had to be self sufficient to survive–”just like the pioneers.” The Beachs too had problems with coyotes that killed “calves, sheep and chickens.”
Rattlesnakes were perhaps the creature held in lowest regard by Owyhee settlers, though Joe Beach claimed they didn’t upset anyone. When they saw one, they just killed it. According to Joe, dogs could take care of the snakes. They wouldn’t approach a coiled snake but wait until it straightened out and then grab it and break it in two. Once when James Page was herding sheep on the Owyhee, he had two packhorses bitten by rattlesnakes. He described the result:
Their heads swelled up till they looked like a big block in their neck instead of a head. Their nostrils were wide open like they’d been running, and they stayed swelled for about a week, and then they got all right.
His mother’s dog was bitten two or three times by rattlesnakes. The dog would lie in a small reservoir he had until he recovered. But, whenever he encountered a rattlesnake, he would try to kill it.
Aside from the smaller animals and the snakes, there were larger predators as well, including the coyotes described earlier, bobcats and the occasional cougar on the lower river. Aside from the threat coyotes posed to farm animals, these animals normally were of little concern to man. Periodically, however, that changed with an outbreak of hydrophobia.
Leonard Duncan described serious outbreaks in 1914 and 1922.9 He describes how in the earlier instance one morning they found a coyote just off the porch. His dad grabbed a rifle and shot it.
We knew it was hydrophobic, because us kids lost our dogs, we lost hogs, and a damned good milk cow in the spring. The coyote bit all of them…. A cow that’s got it, you can tell when you hear her bawl. Horses run and bite and kick…. we went to school down there [Owyhee], and it was my job to take the milk cow back to Jordan Valley. I went to the Sheep Ranch–eight miles. I had a .22 that I packed all the time. I went out to get my horse the next morning, and laying right up against the manger was a coyote in the same stall as the horse. I shot him and I just knew I’d lose my horse from the hydrophobia. My horse was fine. I guess that coyote just came in there to lay down and die. Ross lived there then, and he lost lots of dogs, cattle and horses.
But it wasn’t just the livestock and pets that were bitten. Opal McConnell’s father was jumped by a bobcat while hunting for one of his horses. The animal tore one of the legs off his overalls and bit both his arms. He managed to kill it with rocks and then headed for Vale to be treated. During a later outbreak in 1922, Frank Davis worked on a cow that had hydrophobia and had to go for treatment as well. Jim Page said he’d seen just about everything with it except people, noting that at the time “the cure wasn’t too promising.” (Still isn’t.)
The possibility of a child’s being bitten by a rabid coyote would have been terrifying for any parent. Page described how during his first year of school his cousin was running and jumping over a nearly dead coyote in front of the school house. He ran to tell the teacher, whose son had joined in the fun. She sent one of Page’s cousins to summon his uncle to come shoot the animal. Later on another coyote was spied trotting toward the uncle’s place. Page’s brother jumped on his horse and raced to warn the uncle, but before he got the coyote, it had bitten a cow and a pig, both of which “went mad.” “It was common,” said Page. “You didn’t leave the house in the ‘20’s unless you had your gun.” Even so, he found “they’re hard to kill. You shoot them and they just keep on going. Dogs are usually easier killed.”
It is curious that the interviewees rarely mention birds, aside from sage hens, which they found not to be very good eating (see chap. 3) and the “chicken hawks” that stole their chicks. Lack of mention may be a function of the themes of the interviews, or it may reflect a focus on the practical aspects of everyday life. While they may have enjoyed listening to song birds and the sight of a soaring eagle, these were just part of the landscape. Since they neither provided nor stole food from the settlers, they were not worth remarking.
Fish are mentioned a bit more often, no doubt because they could be a source of either sport or food. Even so, the interviewees refer to only a few of the twenty-five native species. In 1878, Federal Indian Agent Levi Gheen was quoted in the Virginia City newspaper the Territorial Enterprise, “The country abounds in deer, grouse, prairie chickens and other wild game, while the creeks and river literally swarm with excellent fish.”10 But even from the limited information on fish found in the interviews one can get a feel for the impact man had on wildlife.
Before construction in 1932 of the Owyhee Dam at the lower end of the Owyhee Canyon, salmon runs extended into northern Nevada, with the Duck Valley Indian Reservation enjoying three annual runs of about ten days each in normal years. The annual catch by tribal fishermen has been estimated at 200 fish per day, yielding a potential annual catch of 90,000 pounds or about 6000 fish. How many salmon might have been caught further downstream by the settlers is not clear. Leonard Duncan described Indians netting salmon as they jumped to get over the water falls above Arock. Some would fall back, and the Indians would catch them. Duncan claimed that the only salmon he ever caught was while hauling manure. He was standing in the back of a wagon as they crossed a stream and spied a fish in the water. Letting fly with his pitchfork, he speared the fish through the “rim of the nose.” He jumped down to retrieve the salmon and got a bath as the fish attempted to shake loose. They ate salmon that night. After 1933 salmon were eliminated from the Owyhee river system, which may have resulted in significant nutrient losses to both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.11
Another plentiful species was the Pacific lamprey, an important ceremonial food for some Indian tribes. Like the salmon, the Pacific lamprey is anadromous, being born and spending early years in fresh water, migrating to the ocean for 1-2 years and then returning to spawn. But the dam ended anadromous access to the Owyhee river system; salmon and lamprey both became extinct there. While they were in the river, however, the lamprey must have been plentiful. Walter Perry offered an interesting account that suggests both their numbers and the impact that man’s activities had on them even before the dam:
When we irrigated in the Spring, the eels used to come up the river and I’ve seen them so thick in the field after they come up the flume that you couldn’t hardly get out into the field because of them old dead eels. The water wheel picked up them things because they had to go through the wheel when they came through the river. They couldn’t get through the dam. The buckets picked up a lot of them…. I remember one time it picked up a big salmon. About 30 inches long. It put it into the ditch up there.
It is not clear whether Walter is referring to a small dam to divert water into the water wheel or to lampreys caught when the Owyhee dam blocked the river and unable to migrate to the ocean. Unable to fulfill their natural cycle, they would have died out within a few years and like the salmon, would have become extinct beyond the dam.
Another prized fish was trout. Leonard Duncan used to take a team and buggy down to Buck Scott’s dam in Crooked Creek and catch “all the rainbow trout you wanted…. Buck, he used to catch them and put them in the wagon with cut hay to keep them damp, and take them to the valley and trade them for groceries.”12
Besides native fish, two invasive species, carp and catfish were already present. James Page talked of fish fries his family had with the neighbors.
Them bullhead catfish just come into the country, and they’d bite as fast as you could throw a line in. You didn’t have to rebait it very often. You had a willow pole, and you’d just flip them on the bank and they’d turn loose theirself. We used to catch a hundred or two of them and clean and fry them. Might be midnight before it was all over.
But Owyhee residents were cautious about eating locally caught fish. Ethel Raburn, for example, reported that her family didn’t fish in Jordan Creek. “The minerals they used up there at the mine killed all the good fish in Jordan Creek. About the only thing they had left was suckers, and they’re not a very good fish. Once in a great while you’d see a white fish, but there used to be, they tell me, years and years ago, a lot of fish.” Jordan Creek is still contaminated by mercury and children under six and women of child-bearing age are advised against eating any fish taken there.13
When humans first entered the region now referred to as the Owyhee Canyonlands, survival meant that they had to adapt to the landscape. They neither had the tools nor the knowledge to undertake anything more than minimal modifications of the environment. Besides, pursuing a nomadic lifestyle and practicing a hunting and gathering economy, they had little reason to make any permanent changes. Such was not the case with the European-Americans who began arriving in increasing numbers in the 19th century. Although the earliest settlers had to adapt to some extent, they brought with them the tools–iron tools–required to modify the landscape to make it habitable. They had weapons to kill animals either for food or to defend their crops and lives. With grub hoes–and often the help of Indians–they could strip the land of its natural flora and make it cultivable. They had the hammers and saws to build ever nicer dwellings and wagons and domesticated horses to haul goods. Starting slowly, at an ever-quickening pace they began to make modifications to the landscape on top of those that Nature itself was making.
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1 That is, the local climate now became as warm and dry as though it were 400 miles to the south.
2 Owyhee SubBasin Plan, ch. 1, p. 6.
3 Great Basin Riparian Ecosystems, 27.
4 Owyhee SubBasin Plan, 1.27-8.
5 Owyhee SubBasin Plan, 1.27-8.
6 Lt. Colonel C.S. Drews. Official Report of the Owyhee Reconnoissance, p. 22.
7 Owyhee Subbasin Plan, ch. 1, p. 27.
8 Lovers of feral horses will bridle at my referring to mustangs as introduced, pointing out that their DNA is the same as the prehistoric horses that occupied North America and died out perhaps 7500 yrs ago. Those horses may have been native to the environment that existed then, but that environment evolved over several millennia and they were not native to the ecology the Spaniards introduced them into 500 years ago. That fact and their treatment as feral animals “with benefits” is having a serious impact on the desert ecology.
9 Vivid descriptions of encounters with rabid coyotes during thew 1915 epidemic are found in Mildretta Adams Owyhee Cattlemen, 1878-1978: 100 Years in the Saddle, 129-30.
10 Cited in the Owyhee Subbasin Plan, Ch. 1, p. 47.
11 Owyhee SubBasin Plan, Appendix 1, p. 200.
12 Duncan is probably referring to Great Basin red band trout, which though related to rainbow trout, evolved to adapt to the high desert ecology. They are now considered a species of concern.
13 The same is true for the Owyhee River up to Three Forks. Oregon Health Authority Fish and Shellfish Consumption, Advisories and Guidelines. https://public.health.oregon.gov/HealthyEnvironments/Recreation/FishConsumption/Pages/fishadvisories.aspx