Washed away

FORT HALL - Cowboys on horseback moseyed their beeves leisurely down the dirt road. A clear spring creek nearby held promise of trophy trout. A herd of bison cavorted in the tall grass. A hawk wafted on the warm September day's breeze.

Fort Hall in 2010 had many parallels to scenes of days past Saturday as more than 100 eager sightseers and amateur historians visited The Bottoms and the site of the original Fort Hall settlement.

While the Fort Hall Replica in Upper Ross Park is instructive about the early settlement, it doesn't have the feel of the original site, nestled near the confluence of the Portneuf and Snake Rivers. It is a peaceful and beautiful spot.

"Why here?" asked one of the tour members.

Bannock County Historical Society President Bob Myers explained that the ready availability of water and grass and animals made the site ideal for settlement. Of course, that was old news to the land's original occupants.

"That's what upset the natives," Myers said. "They wintered here."

Constructed in 1834 by Nathaniel Wyeth, the fort was the only American outpost in the entire Oregon Country. Wyeth's attempt to make his fortune was frustratingly short. Within four years, the British-led Hudson Bay Company had bought him out, doing its level best to keep a lock on the country and the riches to be extracted there.

Fort Hall, according to historian Merrill D. Beal, was the most significant site in the West, a stop along the Oregon and California trails that would be visited by more than a quarter million emigrants. Many of them would be discouraged by the British from continuing their westward journey.

In 1863, floodwaters washed the fort away. It was reconstructed nearby the next year, but was abandoned the following year.

Today, 145 years later, there is no sign the fort ever existed, save for a plaque erected at the spot in 1961. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in that year.

Saturday's trip was a rare opportunity for non-Shoshone-Bannock tribal members to visit the area. Prior to walking around the grassy site, the visitors were treated to a historical overview of the native people who now call Fort Hall Reservation home.

Rosemary Devinney, manager/coordinator of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Museum, gave an engaging account of the history and lifestyles of the various tribes that once roamed the region freely before their nomadic existence was curtailed by encroaching white settlements.

"The two tribes that were brought here, the Shoshone and Bannock, the Shoshone was the larger group," Devinney said. "The Bannock were a smaller tribe of Northern Paiute. The two tribes were brought here after the Treaty of 1868. A lot of our people intermarried, so most of us here are both tribes."

In the exhibit section, noted artist and Shoshone-Bannock member Rusty Houtz reminisced about his growing up in Fort Hall. He accompanied the tour group on the bus, regaling the visitors with more stories of his youth and of those tribal members who live now only in memory.

He points to a display of a salmon and information about how tribes once moved seasonally to fish. The 87-year-old Houtz, who has sketches of Native Americans salmon fishing at the museum, noted the practice had already faded by the time he was born.

"We never ate salmon unless we bought it at the store. You had to go clear to the Middle Fork, was 123 miles, to get a salmon," he said. "You had (to take) a team of horses and a buggy. You couldn't take off for a month to go catch a fish, when you could catch a big trout here in the Snake River."

Houtz said his family ate a lot of the native fauna when he was young.

"We ate everything back in them days. You tell people now what you ate as a kid, they look at you and say, 'By god, you ate that?' " he said to an appreciative audience. "But if you get thinking, if it wasn't for the squirrel, the rock chuck, the porcupine, the chubs, the suckers and the carp and the rattlesnakes, what would them pioneers have ate? Because you couldn't run down to the grocery store and say, 'Oh, we're gonna have a steak tonight.'"