ORAL HISTORY OF RODERICK WHEELER
Accession No. 627
Recorded: October 21, 1999
Running time: Approx. 2 hrs.
Interviewer: Martha Holliday
MH (Martha Holliday): …October 21st, we’re interviewing a gentleman from the Nez Perce Reservation. And I’m going to go ahead and have him say his name, where he was born, where he has lived throughout his childhood… you know, from childhood until now. And we’ll find out whether he’s always been here or someplace else. So, will you please state your name?
RW (Roderick Wheeler): My full name is Roderick Wheeler. I prefer to be called Rod.
I was born here in Lewiston, Idaho and I grew up the first two years of my life I spend in Lenore, Idaho which is up river approximately fifteen miles from here. After my mother passed away, I moved with my aunt and my uncle to Julietta Idaho, which is on the Potlatch River, northeast of Lewiston.
I’ve lived in this area all of my life with the exception of four years when I was in the United States Navy.
I had the pleasure as a young boy of traveling with my aunt and uncle to Celilo Falls on the lower Columbia which is where we gathered our fish that we brought back for bartering purposes and for our general diet.
We loaded up the trunk of the car full of ice and we would pack our salmon that way. And we generally had a few gunny sacks full of eels, too.
One of my jobs as a young boy was to watch the eels as they cooked to make sure that they weren’t burned to a crisp, because they were cooked over an open fire. Just made into about sandwich sized sections and then they were each put on a stick, much as you would a barbecue pit, however they were just made out of bushes that grew out behind our house. And they made excellent food at the dinner table and the sandwiches.
By cooking them over the open fire a lot of the richness, the grease that is in eel drips off of it, so that basically you are eating the meat itself and very little fat. Because an eel is similar to that like a lobster – it contains an awful lot of fat. By cooking it over an open fire, it drains it away. I can’t really say what the taste is like now because it’s been a long time since I’ve eaten eel.
MH: Is that because you don’t go to Celilo anymore or are they hard to get?
RW: Well, they’re basically… they’re not really that hard to get, but I don’t know who brings them up this way anymore. The doctor told me that’s not supposed to be a part of my diet anymore. But as far as I would imagine, anyone that fishes on the lower Columbia would have access to them.
MH: M-hmm. What years did you go down to Celilo?
RW: The early ‘50s. I went first with my mother down there when she was still alive. She was quite a strong individual. She would venture out over the falls on the cable cars out below the island. I remember first seeing her go out there because I thought I’d never see my mother again.
MH: Hmm.
RW: Because these falls were such that I didn’t even like to go near the shore for fear that I’d end up in the river. But my mother reassured me that it would be okay. Of course, my grandfather was there also.
After watching her do this a few times, seeing what she was doing – bringing in salmon with the men. I was convinced that she would be alright.
MH: Well, that’s good. Way in the beginning, when you said your name… I don’t remember did you say what your date of birth was?
RW: Pardon me?
MH: When you were born?
RW: Oh, I was born August 9th, 1947.
MH: Hmm, okay.
RW: My grandfather on my father’s side was one of the first ministers ordained at the Macbeth Mission in Lapwai – the Reverend William Wheeler.
MH: Hmm. So that’s the religion that you have is…?
RW: No, I never really practiced any religion other than what the old folks made me go to church. And I’m one of them individuals if you make me do something, I tend to be a little bit resentful towards it. I went to the Presbyterian Church most of my younger days when I was in grade school and I understand from one of my older brothers that I was baptized as a child – as a baby – at the Church of God there in Lapwai.
MH: Hmm.
RW: This is back in about 1948… I guess.
MH: Okay. You were talking about school. Where did you go to school at?
RW: I went to school at Lapwai.
MH: At Lapwai? How long did you go there?
RW: I went twelve years, I graduated.
MH: Oh you were at the…
RW: Yeah.
MH: Okay, well, that’s good. Did you ever go anything past high school? For any kind of technical training?
RW: No, I got service school training in the Navy…
MH: Hmm.
RW: … but that doesn’t relate in any way to civilian life. When I worked for the State College here in Lewiston, I took some night classes in Psychology and Economics. But these were second…. Since I worked for the college, there were certain classes that were available that they needed students to fill out the quota to justify the need for a night school. So I enrolled in them and they really didn’t catch my interest then.
MH: Hmm.
RW: I preferred studying things like History as opposed to Economics or Psychology.
MH: Right. So, you talked about, you know, when you were younger you and your mother used to go to Celilo and stuff, but was that your mother or your aunt? ‘Cause I thought you said your…
RW: That was my mother.
MH: That was your mother. So it was your father that was killed when you were young?
RW: No. My folks had separated.
MH: But you were… I thought you were saying something before that you lived with your aunt and your uncle?
RW: Yes. They…. The way our culture is, if something catastrophic of this nature happens it’s only fitting that whoever is best able to take care of that child would take him. And since my Uncle Bennie was a bachelor and since my Aunt Martha didn’t live in this country – she moved to Sumner, Washington and until recently she lived over there most of her life – so since Grandpa used to stay with my aunt and my uncle, I think he had quite a bit to say about it in that they took me and put me through school.
MH: Hmm.
RW: I can recall going to school at Lapwai and I would have my elk meat and my deer meat with me, whichever happened to be handy that I can grab and my little… they used to fix a little metal bowl and cover it with wax paper full of huckleberries.
MH: Hmm.
RW: And I’d get to school and those little white kids used to trade me their bologna for my elk and deer – dried elk and dried deer meat and homemade biscuits. Something new to them just like bologna was to me.
MH: Yeah.
RW: I’ve seen culture change just in this short time from the time I was raised as a boy up in Julietta and then growing up, going to school, we never had the difficulties in high school that you see now where racial tension is almost the rule rather than the exception. I went to school with a lot of white kids and I didn’t know what racial conditions were until I joined the Service. Because I’d never lived around Mexicans or Blacks, or even Philipinos or Chinamen. And so it was a new experience for me. And here again, we get to a change such as a diet. I didn’t know what pizza was.
MH: Hmm.
RW: I didn’t know why you had two forks at the dinner table.
MH: Hmm.
RW: Because we never ate our vegetables in a salad. We just either ate the lettuce and the tomatoes just the way they were without mixing them up. There was no such thing as carrot salad, you just ate a carrot just as quick as you picked it out of the ground. The same with radishes.
MH: Can you talk a little bit about when you were growing up because it sounds like then you had a garden and …
RW: Yeah. The… my aunt used to have a little garden. Nothing real large. But before I moved in with the old folks, two of my brothers had already been staying there and they knew the basics of gardening where I didn’t since I was more or less a city-boy in Lapwai and my mother and father weren’t into gardening.
My dad, before he and my mom went different ways… my dad was a logger. He used to work out in the mountains quite a bit and I didn’t get to see a whole lot of him. I was raised more by my big brothers. They watched out for me.
Grandpa was semi-retired with I moved up there. So the only thing that we had in the way of livestock was just a couple of work horses that Grandpa used to have, that he used to pull his hay wagon with. Up until he was about fifty-or somewhere thereabouts, he used to break horses and he had a few head of cattle. But this is before I really got to know my grandpa.
I recall grandpa visiting at Lapwai and he always made sure that we had a little drum. And he would drum and I would dance around the potbellied stove for him.
MH: Hmm.
RW: I remember back in the old days there a Pow Wow wasn’t called a Pow Wow. It was just a gathering where we all gathered. No money was ever worried about then. And the elderly citizens like the way you danced, maybe they would give you a silver dollar. Because back then a silver dollar was worth more than a ten dollar bill now.
MH: Right.
RW: Or else they might give you a six-pack of Pepsi-cola. Or maybe they might give you a jar of huckleberries – canned huckleberries – or any kind of fruit for that matter. But if they really liked your dancing they would reward you with a shawl.
This is how I grew up, knowing these things.
Some of the old traditions… like when you sweat. Grandpa always taught me that sweat was never built on Sundays and that sweat was used to cleanse your body inside and out.
I could always tell when Grandpa was ready to go to an Indian gathering because he was quite a stick game player. I could always tell because he would sweat two times a day. Early in the morning and in the evening. And he would do this about three or four days and then my Uncle Louie used to drive him to the bus depot and he’d catch a bus up to where he was going.
MH: Hmm.
RW: We very seldom ever drove him. Mainly because he was always pretty much a loner. Grandpa was one of those kind of individuals that didn’t like arguments…. Didn’t like fights. He got to be a hundred and three years old and I can’t recall exactly how old I was when he passed away – I was in my mid thirties. But in all that time I never saw my grandfather once lose his temper.
MH: My goodness, to live so long.
RW: Even though sometimes I would do wrong – not purposely… I wasn’t raised that way – but there were somethings I would make mistakes at and he would correct me. But he’d do it in such a manner to where I understood.
He taught me how to build a mudbath and the time to take a mudbath was generally early in the morning for him. And that was just everyday for him. The only time he sweated in the morning was when he was going to a gathering at another reservation.
Aunt Mollie always made sure that we had three meals a day. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner on time. Unless we were in school which we had to ride the bus all the way to Lapwai to school and Julietta is - back in those days… a long bus ride was twenty-five miles to school. That’s just how far we had to go.
Supper was ready at a certain time every evening. We were in bed by seven o’clock.
MH: What kind of foods did you have then?
RW: Pardon me?
MH: What kind of foods did you have then?
RW: Mostly we had the staples such as spuds, deer meat, an awful lot of dried salmon, roots. They used to can what they call cloton. To this day I don’t know what the white man name of this root is… but it was good.
MH: Hmm.
RW: But it was always in a jar and, of course, we had fresh vegetables too. And usually homemade biscuits. To me a fried bread – you know, course, for some people that’s every day – but Aunt Mollie preferred biscuits and since she was the cook, why that was what we ate.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: But she occasionally, she would make fry-bread maybe about once a week. And fry-bread to me was something you ate just as soon as it was cooked. And Aunt Mollie used to allow us to do this because she knew we were going to grab that fry bread the moment it came out of the frying pan. And that kind of burns the finger tips. But it’s hard to resist.
MH: Yeah, it does.
RW: If you wanted dessert, which, of course, I was raised on things that were good for you… in other words, we didn’t know what jello was. We had canned strawberries, canned plums, canned peaches, pear, whatever it might be. And we had a couple of apple trees. For some reason, Aunt Mollie didn’t like to go peach trees, but we had an awful lot of apricot trees. I used to climb up those trees to get at the best apricots near the top.
And of course choke-cherries. They use to grow all over the hillside where I was raised. And I can recall Uncle Louis backing the old three-quarter ton GMC pick-up up there. He’d back it up the hillside underneath these bushes so we could crawl on the rack. Instead of packing a ladder all that way we’d just get on .
MH: I know, and they use to grow so much better.
RW: We ate more off the bushes than we did at the dinner table. We never made it into jam or anything like that.
MH: And so most of the stuff you grew or gathered… or hunted?
RW: Yeah, grandpa and Uncle Bennie and my eldest brother Nathan used to be the hunters and they would travel… they’d be gone for days at a time.
I always recall Uncle Bennie taught me a valuable lesion. Of course, they didn’t need me on a hunting trip right then and there because they knew darn well I wasn’t old enough to do any good. But I used to help them unload because most of the meat was quartered up ready for butchering by the time they got back. But on the way home they used to come up over the – from the Clearwater River up over the hill into the Potlatch with a short-cut… so they cut across that hill one evening… they already had four elk… and they spotted a deer just standing in the road… so my bother Nate, dropped that too.
MH: Hmm.
RW: It was so close to home they didn’t even bother to gut it. They just threw it in the back of the pick-up. And when I wandered out there… it was a small one – they had it laying… they had tables… probably three or four tables in the back yard and this deer was laying on one of those tables. Uncle Bennie was sharpening his knife. He said, It’s high time you learned. So he handed me a knife and I didn’t know what to do. So he said, you’re meant to gut it.. That means make your incision right here and then just run right clear up through the neck.
MH: Hmm.
RW: Well, he didn’t tell me I had to hold the skin first. I just take that knife and jammed it in that belly… and boy, did I get a face full.
MH: Oh, wow.
RW: And I don’t think Uncle Bennie ever laughed so damn hard in all his life.
MH: I bet you never did that again.
RW: What the while man calls tripe we in the Nez Perce call glopis – the belly to the calf after it’s been… The ranchers who lived up there around Julietta, one in particular, used to bring a tub with a belly in it.
MH: Hmm.
RW: Now my two older brothers that lived up there with me… with us… they knew what I was in store for… neither one of them had a very strong stomach – I’ve always had a strong stomach; I’ve withstood an awful lot of foul odor in my life. Aunt Mollie would have then take it out and set it on the back porch and manage to get to work and it was my job to help her because the other two boys made it nice and convenient…
[15 seconds blank]
I don’t care for this particular food because I know what came out of that belly because – I mean I cleaned it alright and everything else and no matter who much we boiled it… rinsed it and boiled it… that odor stayed with me. That aroma. And Uncle Louie, again, being the head of the household… he put a chunk of that on my plate and I think I was at dinner a half-hour longer than everybody else. Because when something was set before you at dinnertime, you cleaned that plate. And it took me a long time. He saw that I didn’t care for it but that was his way of teaching me.
MH: About how old were you then?
RW: I was about eight years old. And Grandpa is the one that told me an awful lot about the Columbia River. See, he grew up as a child at what’s now the Steptoe River, that feeds into the Snake. That used to be his playground. There used to be an old Indian camp there. Back up away from the river itself. Back where the Steptoe… he was telling me that the older ladies would get out in there and the salmon were so thick they would tickle their ankles as they went up in there.
MH: Oh, my goodness.
RW: And the little girls were afraid to get out there. They thought they were going to get hurt by all these. The water was actually moving to them…
MH: Hmm.
RW: That’s how thick the salmon were. It was the same at Wallowa Lake. That little crick that comes off the glacier at the head of the lake. They used to go there quite a bit and he was saying that there were an awful lot of fish in there too. It resembled water moving. There was just all these fish going to their spawning beds. But his… grandpa’s parents were buried just above what is now Pasco… and when they built Ice harbor dam the pool washed out those graves.
MH: Oh, my gosh.
RW: The Corps of Engineers – I used to work for the Corps of Engineers so I know exactly what the Corps can do and what they’ve done. – they answer only to one god. They’re gonna… grandpa always told me there’s no end to what a white man will do to get his way. And that’s exactly what they did. Regardless of what… I recall … the old lady that was with grandpa – they sued the United States Government. The old lady… I can’t recall her first name… Wilson is her last name… Mrs. Charlie Wilson. I think her Indian name was Ineoweekenmai – but they took the federal government to court over that. Over them graves that were inundated by that dam. And they won that case in Federal court in Portland back in 1963 I think it was. And I don’t know how long ago those parents were buried. It must have been an awful long time ago.
MH: It had to be.
RW: But Grandpa was born in 1885, I believe. Anyway, he can recall when his mother took him to the Indian Agency to be registered. You had your choice of whether you were going to be Nez Perce. Because Grandpa had a mixture of blood. He was part Palouse, Umatilla, and Nez Perce.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: But on the books he was listed as being 4/4 Nez Perce because that’s what he chose. And my father and my mother were listed 4/4 Nez Perce. So I’m listed as 4/4 Nez Perce too, as were my brothers.
MH: So you had just two other brothers? Is that what’s in your family?
[End tape one, side one. Begin side two.]
MH: So you had just two other brothers? Is that what was in your family?
RW: No. My oldest brother in the early ‘50s was in the United States Army in Korea. Either – it’s kind of confusing to the average citizen. With two brothers named Allenwood… we shared the same mother with different fathers.
MH: Right.
RW: Okay… now there were four brothers with the last name of Wheeler – no make that five. There was three of us shared… the three youngest little brothers… we shared the same mother and father. The two older Wheeler brothers had the same father but their mother was from the Umatilla reservation. And then there was one other brother went by James – Delbert James – but he later changed his name to Woods because that was Grandpa’s last name was Woods. How he came by that last name I don’t know. Because I guess it was just something that the Indian Agency… it might had to do with his traditional name or his parent’s traditional name somewhere along the line. But for his first name… I think that came the same way – just whatever he could pronounce.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: Because everybody knew him as Johnny. It wasn’t John, or Jonathan… it was just plain old Johnny. Johnny L. Wood.
MH: Hmm.
RW: And the L. stood for Lugologon which is Nez Perce for the stag deer – the deer that runs by itself – which was basically what grandpa used to do. They call him Lugologon uet danute in that he never took a wife. He was always by himself but yet he had children and they all went by Woods.
Uncle Bennie was decorated at Normandy during WWII. But each and every one of us traveled on the Lower Columbia west. Either with another family, or with our own family. Most of the time it was Uncle Wille and aunt Mollie and then my other two brothers that grew up in the household.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: Back in them days we used to go into Toppenish first – then we’d go over the hill to what’s now Goldendale…
MH: M-hmm.
RW: Then we’d cross the ferry… there was no bridge – well, maybe one or two bridges that crossed at… I think the only dam at that time was McNary or John Day and, of course, Bonneville which was way, way down river.
But the farthest we ever went was The Dalles, Oregon. We never went any father then that. We’d just go in there to pick up supplies and we knew when we was getting ready to head home because they’d go in there and go right to the company that made the ice and then…
MH: M-hmm.
RW: …they’d give us our ice and we’d go right back out and stock up and head for home. But back in them days the roads weren’t what they are now and it was an all-day trip.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: If you left Julietta at 4 o’clock in the morning, you didn’t get to Celilo until about 6 that evening. It was a long ways. so I can imagine what it used to be like on horseback back in the old days.
MH: I know, it took a long time.
RW: Grandpa used to travel with his mother and father with the old buckboard. He was telling me that was a… you more or less lose track of what day it was, you were out for so long.
MH: Well, I don’t know… did they care about what day it was in those days though?
RW: Yeah, really they didn’t. All they knew was ….. they more or less went by… they knew it was time for the fish to be there.
MH: Right.
RW: That’s basically down there. They use to dry salmon right there.
The way we used to prepare our salmon an awful lot. When we’d get it up here we’d dry it. Or we’d get some dried salmon down there and then just stow it away. It’ll keep forever if you let it. We’d get it and throw it in the pot and boil it and soften it up a little bit and eat it that way.
MH: Hmm.
RW: But my brother and I used to go in there and grab a chunk apiece and snack on that.
MH: Well, that’s my favorite way.
RW: Yeah, that…
MH: I don’t have any right now…
RW: You get awful thirsty on it.
MH: So … this is a question that I have about when you were back on or living at your grandfather’s place and you had the gardens and the orchards and stuff. Did you have any cows and chickens at that time?
RW: We kept chickens… we didn’t have any cows.
MH: No cows?
RW: No, we had chickens and oh, some pets… one old goose and a couple of little ducks. I don’t know why these mallard ducks couldn’t fly but they was always in my back yard and it was my job to feed them.
MH: Hmm. So were the chickens for eggs and food or just some were pets?
RW: Oh, yeah.. yeah.. good old brown eggs. Yeah. Aunt Mollie told me when to gather them up. When you hear them clucking around than you know they’re… go out there and gather up your eggs.
MH: Did you ever drink much milk? Did you buy milk?
RW: No, we subsist with canned, evaporated milk… and mix that with a little bit of water.
When I lived with Grandpa at Lenore, he’d take me up there in the summertime and it was so cool up there right where he built his sweat house in the natural spring that come in… it was so cool that’s where we used to keep our butter and our – maybe our one soda pop a day. And we’d keep our eggs down there. And the thing that always surprised me the fact that no wild animals ever got into them. Course I don’t think they’d get into the butter anyhow, but you’d think the magpies would be in there after they ate the raccoons and the something… but they were always there and they just never would bother it.
MH: About when did you get electricity where you might have had a refrigerator?
RW: When I moved up there they already had electricity.
MH: Oh, they did.
RW: We had a refrigerator. But we did all our cooking over a woodstove. We didn’t have an electric range or… we didn’t have the inside plumbing… we used to have to haul our water.
MH: Hmm.
RW: As a matter of fact the water table right there where I grew up, we’d have to sink a well about ten feet and we’d have fresh water, but it was muddy. So we’d go to the next Indian family down the way, their well was about a hundred feet down so we used to go down there and take… we used to go to the local community and get the old milk containers… them big old silver or aluminum – whatever it is they’re made of.. stainless steel or whatever and that used to be our water supply.
Even in the wintertime when we weren’t sweating a lot of time we’d take a sponge bath using the water out of that. It was a way of life. I don’t think you’d find any children nowadays that’d get out in the open air and rinse off with cold water. Not the way we used to do it. I used to get out of the sweatbath, walk down to the spring, get in that… soak your head and then go stand by the fire and dry off. It’s just the way I was taught.
I recall when we’d get done with our evening sweat. After I’d get off the schoolbus, we’d bring our fresh supply of water and make sure there’s plenty of wood in the house for supper… by the time we got done sweating, supper would be ready. We’d have supper and we’d be asleep. It was just so relaxing and so… I mean… we got a full almost ten hours of sleep. We’d get up around 7 o’clock and get ready to catch the schoolbus.
MH: So when you were going to school did you play any sports or anything?
RW: In high school my brother and I we all had our favorite sports. We played basketball primarily. I played baseball. My brother played… the last two years he played baseball. He played football his last two years… I never did. I think schooling and sports went hand and hand as far as we were concerned. If you didn’t get good grades in school you couldn’t play the sports that you liked. If you failed the last quarter let’s say, your junior year, that meant you couldn’t play football. Because that carried over to the next school year. And if you failed the first quarter then you couldn’t play basketball. So we made sure that we got satisfactory grades.
And my older brother… the oldest of all us brothers… he graduated and then the two that grew up with me at Julietta, the two of them graduated. And I figured that if they could do it I can do it and I made sure I graduated from high school.
MH: Well, that’s good. You had a pretty busy day and stuff, but did you do anything else for recreation. Did you do any of the social dances or…
RW: Not too much. Most of our time was taken up, oh, of course, we were a couple of kids… but we liked making the ole fishing pole and going down there… and just for the sport of it we used to catch suckers for the cats. Aunt Mollie loved cats. We’d just drag them up there and the cats would get them. But actually suckers was the staple diet for the older folks in our family. I didn’t care much for the taste of them myself…and they were too boney. But they used to eat them quite a bit.. So we’d come up with a gunny sack and they’d make good use of it. We wasted very little in our household.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: I recall the first time I ever ate moss – off of a tree? Have you ever seen that?
MH: Well, my mother used to make us go get it. We would go with her and we’d have to gather it.
RW: Yeah, the first time I saw that I couldn’t believe we were going to eat that. I tried my first spoolful and said, that’s pretty good. After that I got to expecting that. Things that you don’t expect. I would never have thought of eating that if I had of grown up in a city. And, of course, Lapwai was a city to me. A population of 200 if that. But we had a movie theater. Didn’t have a roof over it… used to watch the old Flash Gordon and Lone Ranger. But it was hard.
We had ways of entertaining ourselves. Oh, just little games that you don’t see kids playing nowadays… just simple things.
MH: Would you say like a lot of your time was spent outdoors then?
RW: Oh, yeah, yeah… that’s where we preferred it. In the wintertime we’d get out there… and you’re over here and I’m over there and we’d have a good old time.
Oh, there were a lot of times when we were inside we’d just sit there by the window and see what would go by. Lot of time you’d see a raccoon and skunks – we didn’t want to see – a lot of rabbits. The place was just alive with rabbits. The older boys since they had twenty-two rifles they used to go our and shoot rabbits and Aunt Mollie would make them into stew. Good old rabbit stew.
I recall one morning my brother was sitting. He sat facing out the window and I sat at the end – I had to lean over to look out of the window. He was watching for a long time he was watching and finally he said… boy, that’s a big tom cat out there. So I went to get the pistol because Aunt Mollie didn’t like the old wild tom cats they used to get up there… she didn’t want them to get into her little domesticated cats. I looked out that window and I said, I don’t think I’d better shoot him, I’d just make him mad. It was a young mountain lion. Nowadays I’ll bet you’d never see one up there now.
In between our house and Julietta you could count the houses on the fingers of one hand. Nowadays they’re just a few feet apart. The population has moved up there so bad and the wild life, of course, suffers for it too. Occasionally you’ll see a raccoon or maybe a deer, but the place used to be alive with beavers. They changed the channel of the Potlatch River like you wouldn’t believe. They’re so industrious. And of course the weather had a lot to do with it too… the spring run-off up there… to this day it’s still terrible. You never know if it’s going to cross that highway and into our front yard up at the old place.
My niece lives up there on that very same property where I grew up. The old house I grew up in is still standing. My sister-in-law lives there by herself.
MH: What kind of house was it?
RW: Just an old wooden frame house. I don’t even know what the foundation is made of – whether it’s just rocks that they put together… that’s what it looks like.
MH: But it’s still there.
RW: Yeah, it’s still there.
MH: It’s lasting pretty good.
RW: I don’t recall there being any other house there. I moved up there in 1953 and that house was there then. It’s been remodeled once when the old lady got to be so old and so blind… she was injured as a youngster. She used to be pretty good with her horses and she got thrown by a horse and broke her hip and injured her back and then, of course, arthritis set in so she couldn’t never straighten up or walk properly… so eventually that caught up with her. While I was in the Navy, they had her put in a nursing home and then they rented the property out to a retired carpenter and he landscaped it and remodeled the house. He didn’t change it so much that I forgot it. The old house is still there. Same frame, just the inside is a little bit different.
Back then families were much stronger than what they are now. I remember…
[Last fifteen minutes of tape are blank. End tape one, side two. Begin tape two.]
RW: Her birthday was the day where a lot of the old folks would help her celebrate her birthday and that’s how they’d bring their families and when I say families, I mean families. There was all kinds of kids and they brought the whipman too. I don’t know if all reservations are like the Nez Perce, but we don’t like to see the whipman. Cause at the end of the day when you got ready for the last meal before everybody started heading home… all the children were rounded up and given their swat for the day because they figured at one time of another during the day we were all doing something wrong. And when you gather a bunch of eight, nine years olds together.. there’s bound to be fights and arguments, teasing the girls and things like this. But I don’t guess I was any different from any other boy growing up. But like I say, it was…
School, when I started in the first grade… fortunately my mother and father spoke more English than Nez Perce in the home so it wasn’t that bad for me, but there’s still… I still use Nez Perce words in place of English words.
MH: Yeah.
RW: And my brother… some of my brothers when they went to school, literally couldn’t speak English.
MH: So at the time when they were going to school, did they have much problems with it? You know, because you always hear stories of some of the really older people getting punished and everything for it.
RW: Yeah, they had quite a bit of tolerance for it. I think they could sense the change… they were more or less recognize the fact that they are not going to be change things.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: You just try to understand it the best they could… much as right now…. I don’t understand my own kids… the way they dress, their type of music – things like this. I tolerate it but I don’t necessarily like it.
My two grandsons and my granddaughter and my two daughters I’m trying to get them their Indian names before anything happens to me. Because I‘m the only one that can give them their names since my grandfather’s gone and all my brothers are gone.
And I intend to have the boys dress just the way their grandfather did… or my grandfather… he’d be their great grandfather.
Back in them days grandpa never wore bells. There were no frills to his outfit, no fluffs, no bright beads or anything like this. Just the breech cloth and your bustle and a simple arm band and your roach and leggings. You always had to have leggings, but no bells. Later on… well, at one time bells were introduced as a way of fighting off spirits. Evil spirits. But if you’re an elder… a man like grandpa was when he used to dance… it’s just like you see anyone else wears the traditional buckskin outfit, there no bells on that either. But you’re respected enough to where the evil spirits aren’t going to bother you. And that’s the way it was with grandpa.
These are just some of the things as I know them. I can only relate what I’ve seen and how it explains why we’re doing what we’re doing. We dance because we like to dance. We didn’t dance to win contests; we didn’t drum to win contests. We drummed because if you didn’t dance you drummed.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: Some of my brothers danced and drummed.
MH: Did you drum or dance?
RW: There’s a story behind that. When I was six years old… as a youngster long as I can remember when grandpa used to drum for me and I’d dance there was one outfit that was set aside that grandpa wanted me to have. And he had given it to Aunt Mollie after my mother passed away for safekeeping for the day that I was to use it. Well, when that time came.. that used to be the old Washington’s Birthday Celebration at Lapwai. Well that’s the time I was supposed to receive my name and be welcomed into the circle of the dancers. Well, I wasn’t aunt Mollie’s favorite boy, my brother was. So she gave the outfit to him and he was… it was a surprise to him because he didn’t ever know how to dance. Someone who is only six years old, to have your feelings hurt, like she hurt me. I told her in Nez Perce, that I’d never dance again not after what she had done. And to this day I don’t dance, except when they honor veterans.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: I don’t relate that story. I tell my children that the reason they don’t see me with an outfit. Because an outfit is something that you keep forever. Hand it down to your son or your nephew or whoever it might be in your family. But whoever you pick to receive that outfit, you make sure that the other children understand this is the reason that they’re getting that outfit. I got that outfit because grandpa wanted me to have it because I was a dancer and it turned out I didn’t get to use it.
MH: Doesn’t your brother dance?
RW: Yeah, he danced once and then he never did dance again.
MH: He never danced again.
RW: I don’t know whatever happened to that old outfit.
MH: That’s too bad because at this point it would be really old.
RW: Yeah. Grandpa had his own outfit that he gave to me for safekeeping and I had it for a long time and then when grandpa passed away, well, that’s something that I was never required to do was at a dressing. And since my brother – one of my older brothers and I were the only two surviving, it was our job to dress him. And I had never done this before. I knew how to dress someone traditionally …
MH: M-hmm.
RW: Because I learned this as a child, but for me to dress a person who is no longer with us in body… I feel awkward and it was two girls I grew up with that helped us do it. But he had on an old traditional outfit with traditional leggings. And one of my brother’s boys lost his breechcloth. He borrowed it when he wasn’t supposed to and he lost it and we had to have a new one made up. But it was all eagle’s feathers.
He gave me – and I only wore it a couple of times because he allowed me to wear it – it was a vest beaded in the old way that they used to with little tiny seed beads. The front was light blue with roses on it – real pretty - and in the back done all in beadwork on buckskin was a man roping a calf…. And it said on there. And this was all done in beads… it said Round-up, 1934, I think, or ’38 I think it was.
MH: Hmm.
RW: Because that’s where grandpa got it. Someone had given it to him and he made it a part of his outfit. But he never wore it with his regular clothing. In his later years he never used his war dance costume, but it was always part of that.
And he was pretty well known in stick game circles, but also as an honored elder. You could always tell my grandfather when ever you say him because he work the old reservation hat. Not the kind that you see nowadays that they make movies of us nowadays, but I mean the old ones… use to get them at Hamleys in Pendleton.
MH: He played stick games. Did any of your, any of you or your bothers play stick games too?
RW: One of my brothers did. In fact two of them.. the two eldest Wheeler brothers, they were the gamblers. It wasn’t only stick games… it was in a card game or whylukes. And grandpa used to play that too.
In fact, I recall when my son was about two years old, my younger daughter was just a year older and my eldest daughter was two years.. no let’s see, two, three, until she was five. And when children are that age and they’re quiet, you know they’re up to something. So I hadn’t really paid much attention but then I didn’t hear anything coming from the back where they usually played. They’d either be fighting or laughing or doing something. I went back there and there they were – in Grandpa’s room. He used to go back there and take a nap in the afternoon. But he wasn’t napping… he was showing them how to play whylukes. They weren’t aware that I was watching them. I watched them for about five minutes. Grandpa got the biggest kick out of that… he laughed. There was no money involved. He just wanted to teach them the game.
But I remember when grandpa used to stay with us. He taught me how to play draw poker and 21 and whylukes. Stick game is a game, I guess you have to have the knack for it and I never did. I just… no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get the hang of it. Seemed like everybody could read me. That’s what grandpa used to tell me… look them right in the eye and their eyes will tell you. And I couldn’t do that. Rather than lose the game for everybody involved, I’ll just stay out of it. Let grandpa do the gambling.
Mother was… used to like to do that too… she used to gamble quite a bit. But dad never did, that I can recall. Even though my father never raised me, he was there when I graduated from high school.
MH: So did he live in the area?
RW: Yeah, he lived right there in Lapwai. But he was always there for our basketball games. He was there watched every baseball game I played. Like I say, he watched me graduate.
MH: Hmm.
RW: I was kind of proud of that, that my father could see that. You know, later he passed away.
MH: So… a lot of the tribe… a lot of the Indians from different tribes used to like go down to the valley and pick hops and fruits and stuff, or go to the coast or something, and pick berries and stuff… did you family ever do any of that kind of work?
RW: No, we never really traveled for it.. My dad and my brother used to work the green pea harvest. And then while they were busy during that, then my mom and another lady and I used to pick cherries. And if we weren’t picking cherries we were picking raspberries or strawberries.
MH: Was that all in this area?
RW: Yeah, it was all in this area. Yeah, on top of this hill here – that’s why they call it the Lewiston Orchards. Because that’s all it was orchards. Peach trees, apricots, plums, apples. Apples were everywhere.
MH: Yeah.
RW: That’s why I’m so fond of fruit because I was raised on that.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: You’d think a person after picking so many apples – I wasn’t much help as small as I was – but one of my jobs was to watch out with one of the little babies that went along with us – make sure he didn’t crawl away or try to get up a ladder where he couldn’t walk. But you’d think I wouldn’t like apple pie as much as I do. I mean, I just.. I don’t know, it is a way of life as far as I’m concerned.
MH: Well, it was a good food for you. Unless it makes you sick or something, you still like it.
RW: Well, yeah. I remember the first time I ate a green apple, it made me sick. After that then I knew enough not to eat them.
MH: Not to eat green apples. Okay if we could move along a little bit… do you have… or actually could you talk a little bit about your family’s health. You know, what kinds of diseases did people die from or did they just get older and die or…?
RW: Well, from what I can understand of what my oldest brother used to tell me was that our mother was diabetic. And my older brother died of diabetes. He was also an alcoholic. Any time you mix alcohol and a medicine that you have to take on a regimen…
MH: Right.
RW: … he got his mixed up one time and that’s what killed him.
MH: Hmm.
RW: …but most of the time… but anyway… this was when the Indian Health Service wasn’t quite what it is today. We used to go to the old horse doctor… that we used to call him… up at Kendrick, Idaho.. just a few miles from where we lived. Aunt Mollie and Uncle Louie saw to it that we got our inoculations even before school. We had our whooping cough and what they call rubella.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: But that still didn’t stop us from getting measles. I had just about… well, I never had chicken pox, but I did have the measles and the mumps. I know, I think just about every child did. It wasn’t life threatening.
The only thing that was really life threatening was pneumonia. It was one of those things that even as a child… I caught pneumonia and I almost died. We didn’t even have a doctor.
This is where we get into spiritual healing. The old man who lived next door was an Indian doctor. So he told my mom to cook me. He was going to cook it out of me. And I sweat and I sweat. I was only like about three or four years old maybe and I had some real bad dreams and I just… mom told me later on that they didn’t know whether I was going to live or not. I could hardly take fresh water… they’d boil water for me… give me a little bit of fresh water, whatever I could take.
I don’t recall ever hearing of any other child having it that severe. Most of our problems came with dental work. We didn’t know what toothbrush was… we always had our way of cleaning teeth were apples… things like that were very good for you. And they have a way of cleaning your teeth that way. It wasn’t until we were introduced to candy and sweet things like that… pop. That’s the reason I don’t have my teeth today… I’ve got to get a whole new set of teeth as good as mine.
They made sure my teeth were good when I joined the Navy but when I got out I had to spend an extra two weeks to have my dental work done After spending four years… eighteen months of it I spent in Viet Nam. I didn’t want to spend an extra two weeks in the Navy… I wanted to get out and go home and see my family.
My brother served with me. Not with me… but he was in the Army and I was in the Navy. But he was in Viet Nam too about the same time. But they would never let me see him. That’s just the laws of the military. They were too afraid that since we were at war, they were afraid both of us might get killed.
MH: If you’re in the same place?
RW: Yeah, if we’re in the same spot. But I was very close to my brother. I was especially close to my oldest brother. I guess he raised me for a long time when I got out of the hospital as a newborn. He took care of me… changed my diaper and bathed me and was with me when I took my first steps. He watched out for me until the time he joined the Army. By then I was already about three years old when we moved from Lenore into Lapwai. Dad found a bigger place for us to stay in. Because I grew up at Lenore… not grew up, but I mean, when I first got out of the hospital and went to live with my folks. It was a little two room shack that had five of us brothers and my uncle Bennie and my mom and dad all lived in this place. I guess you’d… I don’t recall very much about that. I know I used to sleep with mom and dad but the rest of the brothers wanted to sleep around the living room. Naturally Uncle Ben, being a respected elder… got the next bunk and everybody else slept on the floor or wherever they could.
But the boys didn’t lack for entertainment because we were right beside the river. You could fish and of course the hills and the mountain were up there just right close. You could go up there and shoot deer.
One of them used to work for a local rancher repairing fence and hauling hay. Hauling hay was something that I recall doing when I was about ten or eleven years old after my Uncle Louie passed away. I used to get out there and help them haul hay. It wasn’t until I was about fifteen or sixteen years old I found out you could get paid for that sort of things. I mean, I was making ten dollars a day.
But since we had the two work horses to care for…
MH: Hmm.
RW: One field took care of them year around. So he used to ranch that one field that we had. And then later on grandpa took the horses up to Lenore. They were getting pretty old.
So Indian dress property was left to my aunt from her father so she just rented it out to a local rancher and I used to wander around out there pulling the trailer along behind the tractor. It was easier for me to load. After a while I learned the knack of how to kick a bail up on the bed of that thing.
Eventually I learned who all the ranchers were that needed helpers for their hay. As a matter of fact.. I even ended up driving truck for one of them for a time. But that was one of the few jobs that was available to us.
Back in the days there were no such thing of child labor laws or minimum wage or nothing. You were just grateful for whatever was paid to you. A lot of times a farmer would give you a meal to go along with your pay. Some didn’t, some did, didn’t make any difference. It was just the way at that time.
‘Course in between hauling hay and fishing and swimming in the river… well, kind of filled up our summer.
MH: When you were at Celilo did you swim in the river?
RW: No, we didn’t. For one thing, we were awful small and our Aunt didn’t want us venturing out in that river. Especially it was free flowing at that time.
MH: Oh, yes, it was swift.
RW: Grandpa used to tell me that he remembers the Snake and the Columbia Rivers when there was no dams or bridges on them.
MH: That must have been something to see then…
RW: Oh, yeah. I can’t imagine. When I was growing up… that was the biggest river I’d ever seen in my life is the Columbia. Course, it’s one of the largest in the world to this day… in the amount of water it displaces. And it basically now it’s a great big lake.
MH: I know it’s a series of lakes.
RW: It wasn’t so much that way when we used to venture down there. Like I say there was only… Ice Harbor wasn’t even a dam and there was Lower Monumental..
MH: The Grand Coulee was already there.
RW: Oh, yeah. I remember seeing that when I was with my mother back… oh, I think it was in the early fifties. There used to be an old gentleman that used to live with my grandparents. My grandmother and there was an old gentleman that lived with them… Apparently he was originally from the Colville Reservation.. I don’t even remember his name. I just knew him by Pete Bones. But they put him in a nursing home up there. Some of his family had him moved up there. So I went up there to visit him and that’s when I say Grand Coulee when I was just six. To this day I can still recall seeing that. I couldn’t believe that. Now, I can, that it’s human made.
I recall when they first laid the first bucket of concrete for the Goreshack Dam. That’s the second highest dam in the world on a straight axis. Built the way it is. The only other dam that’s higher than it is Egypt… it’s called the High Aswan Dam.
It’s really something. It’s mind boggling. I stood at the top of Goreshack and looked down at the bottom and I almost got dizzy it’s so doggone high. It’s seven hundred feet.
[End tape two, side one. Begin side two.]
MH: Would you say that your family’s health was really pretty good then?
RW: Yeah, for the most part we were healthy. Of course we did suffer from colds certain times of the year… we’d catch cold.
MH: But you don’t recall anybody like dying from cancer or… well, the one diabetes…
RW: No.
MH: ….or any kind of like… ? Do you have any arthritis or lupus or…?
RW: Arthritis… well of course like I said, it set in early on my Aunt.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: But Uncle Louie was always healthy and so was grandpa. Grandpa never ever really had any ailments that he mentioned to me. Of course, later on when he got older, his legs would bothering him occasionally. But other than that he was in real good health. As a matter of fact, just before he died, the doctor over here at Quilaqua Hospital called my brother and I in and my brother had to interpret for him. He wanted to put a pacemaker in him.
MH: Hmm.
RW: That was when he was a hundred and one years old, a hundred and two – somewhere there about.
MH: Hmm.
RW: And they wanted my brother to explain to him what they were doing and he said in so many words… tell that doctor – this doctor was like about one third of his age… he was a youngster yet - he said, if they’re going to fix my heart… tell them to fix my eyes so I can see.. and tell them to fix my legs so I can walk like I used to. If they can’t do that then just let me be. I’ve lived a long life. I’m happy. Whatever happens, happens. Might be tomorrow, tomorrow’s another day. That’s just the way that he looked at life.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: Like I say, he was a hundred and three years old. But up until the time he was about ninety years old… his vision .. he used to wear glasses that were a little bit thicker than normal – he never ever needed a hearing aide. He could basically scratch his own back which is something even I can’t do now. And he was in really good shape. He used to walk with a… later on he got to where he used to walk with a cane. But he was never ever to the point where he needed a wheelchair or anything like that. He was always a healthy old man as far as I knew.
Used to .. in fact a lot of our elders – especially some of the ladies out here at Lapwai are still operating cars at seventy-five years old. Now you’d think that would be a traffic hazard but maybe it was- maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know. I see some kids do the same things that they do.
But we – even when I was in high school back in the sixties, cancer was almost unheard of on the reservation. We didn’t know what cancer was. And I basically didn’t have an understanding of diabetes then either. I didn’t know what caused it or how a person would react to it. What the symptoms of diabetes were.
Now it’s something that’s of a real concern here on the reservation. A person has to really be careful of their diet nowadays. Which, our diet… we didn’t really have to worry about it. So what if we cooked our… we cooked with lard instead of Crisco nowadays. I remember our fry bread was made with lard.
We used to dig the bone marrow out of elk or dear when I would get them – I would get a sharp stick for Uncle Louie there and he’d dig out that marrow and that was a delicacy to him. He really enjoyed that.
MH: Oh, but then you were eating a lot of healthy food beside just the fry bread thought…
RW: Oh yeah…
MH: …like the deer and elk and…
RW: …any one of your roots can be traced to being good for you. Such as what we call collas… I don’t know exactly what the white man’s name for it is… but it’s good for your heart. Almost like eating a potato.
A potato was tremendously good. That was part of our diet – was spuds. Boiled spuds, baked spuds, whatever might be… fried spuds. They was on the dinner table just about every day. Good red meat… red meat was always there.
MH: But was the red meat deer and elk or was it beef?
RW: Mostly deer meat.
MH: Yeah, cause that has a lot less fat then cow.
RW: Yeah. I prefer deer meat to elk meat. I like deer meat. There again nothing ever goes to waste. I eat the heart right out of a deer. Liver is something I got to have it smothered in onions but it’s good for you.
I don’t know if mushrooms are good for you but we used to get the old elephant ear mushrooms… the great big….
MH: Hmm.
RW: Boy, to me that’s a meal. Just as good as steak almost.
MH: Do you think your children are as healthy, because, I’m sure their diet must be different.
RW: Well it’s different in that they’re not so much into the same things. Maybe the things they do eat nowadays… you take any of your breakfast cereals - basically is good for them. But it has to meet certain standards. And they prefer it. My boys prefer oatmeal. Which is plain old good old mush…
MH: M-hmm.
RW: Which is really a good source of fiber for them. It has a certain amount of vitamin in it. And it’s good for them.
MH: So they’re healthy?
RW: Yeah, they’re healthy as… they’re on a par with just about anybody else’s kids.
MH: Okay that’s good. So actually you’re pretty lucky with your family having fairly good health.
RW: My older daughter a lot of times the boys will follow her bad habit. She’s still into McDonalds and that sort of thing which I don’t like. If my boys want to eat at one of the local restaurants I like to take them to Arby’s and get a beef sandwich or something as opposed going and getting an old preservative loaded hamburger at McDonalds.
But like I say… I didn’t know what pizza was until was eighteen, nineteen years old. Never ate spaghetti. I didn’t know what spaghetti was. Macaroni was just macaroni. Never made it into a goulash… you just ate macaroni. And that’s it for navy beans, lima beans, everything was just eaten just like it was… just boiled that way.
MH: Not putting a lot of other stuff in it.
RW: Yeah. And any bean is a good source of protein. You take like what we call is tic cluck which is a garbanzo bean. That’s awful rich in Vitamin A, I think it is. Similar to a potato. And besides being tasty, it’s good for you.
MH: Oh, that’s good. One question have you ever heard of the Hanford Nuclear Plant?
RW: Oh, yeah, as a matter of fact, my wife and my older grandson made a tour of that place. She works for the Indian Health Service there at the clinic there up in Lapwai. She was their head custodian.
MH: M-mm.
RW: Part of her job is to tour Hanford.
MH: Hmm. Have you ever received any information on it? Like from the Hanford Health Information Network?
RW: I don’t know if it came from Hanford or not, but the office out there in Lapwai has that information. I think it’s a…
MH: Environmental Restoration?
RW: Yeah, they’ve got that information. I don’t study it too much. Probably not as much as I should. Some of the things I can’t help but wonder about. Just how far down does nuclear waste go? How far does it seep into the ground… into ground water?
MH: Well, a lot more than you thought.
RW: Well, I imagine a lot more than they admit too.
MH: That’s true.
RW: There’s an awful lot that our own government is guilty of that they won’t admit to. Not only relating to nuclear waste but … I see this because I’m a veteran counselor. Some of our boys got returned from the Persian Gulf were subject to Uranium. Even though it’s in small amounts it doesn’t make any difference what amount. Small amounts can react according to the individual. You can get a terrible reaction from that. An individual can take a large amount. But any way you look at it, it’s not good for you.
Because some of our own artillery fired a small amount of plutonium in their projectiles. And when we salvaged a lot of them tanks they were subjected to this plutonium.
And Congress right now still won’t admit as to what – what a soldier complains about they’re not too sure of yet. Or at least they say they’re not too sure. In other words here’s this poor individual that’s suffering… he’s got skin rash, his eyes water constantly, gets headaches. His lungs aren’t the same… shortness of breath. This is all related to the Persian Gulf.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: Yet, they’re sitting back there trying to determine how much of a disability this soldier is going to be allowed. Well, why couldn’t they just come right out and say, Let’s give them fifty percent right off the bat so he’ll at least get somewhat of what he’s allowed.
And here again, you get back to Hanford, how many of our workers down there. In the long term think about all the people that used to live along that river. And based on the foods that we eat… a lot of it is derived from the land. Let’s face it… it’s mother earth that provides us with a good diet. But that diet might be diminishing now based on fact that the soil is no longer able to grow this because it’s all contaminated. And if it does grow who’s to say that this stuff that they give away as waste, or put in the ground as waste could be contained in that particular vegetable or whatever it is you are eating. Same with the salmon. They’ve got to take in a certain amount of that.
MH: Well, there was direct releases into the river.
RW: Yeah. And Indians have been known to eat sturgeon. What sturgeon do it’s the bottom feeder. That’s where it stays most of its life is on the bottom of the river. And that’s the first place it’s going to show up.
MH: So when people were fishing at Celilo did they get the bottom fish there – sturgeon besides the salmon and the eels?
RW: No, I don’t recall even seeing the sturgeon.
MH: Hmm. So are they like one of the tributaries like you say… the – where else did you say? You did the Shake and the…
RW: … the Steptoe?
MH: Oh, yeah.
RW: Grandpa used to see them, small ones. Nothing like the giants that they have on the Snake itself but he didn’t say anything about eating them.
MH: Where did they usually get sturgeon if they ate it? Okay, somebody was just asking if I’d eaten sturgeon and I said, No and they said you should try it, it’s really good.
RW: Usually down by the Snake. The closer you get to the Columbia the more they are, I guess. I don’t know…. I’ve never really – although I worked for the Corps of Engineers at one time I never did see that many sturgeon. I saw a sportsfisherman catch one, one day and that’s about the extent of it.
MH: Hmm.
RW: I’ve never eaten sturgeon. The only thing I know about a sturgeon is they are only three prehistoric fish left on this earth and the sturgeon is one of them; the sturgeon, the shark and the ceolacanth. My kids always ask me, Dad how did you know that? Well, some things I have a knack for in memory and a name like ceolacanth is something you don’t forget easily and you knew what a shark will do. And the sturgeon just happen to be native to this country.
There was a gentleman right here at the confluence where the Clearwater meets the Snake. I was working on the sprinkling system there one day and the gentleman come up there and he said… I didn’t know you had the alligators up here. And I thought he was only kidding me.
MH: Hmm.
RW: I says, yeah, yeah, yeah, I said, you’re just pulling my leg. He says no, there’s an alligator down here. Why not? Right away I got to thinking well, maybe somebody had a pet alligator and it escaped so I went and I looked at it and there was a sturgeon in there…
MH: Oh, a sturgeon.
RW: … a small one, about three feet. But he thought it was an alligator. And it’s very rare that you’ll see a sturgeon near the surface. Usually the sturgeon are down deep where it’s cool. I guess it all depends on where you travel. I don’t know.
I haven’t traveled that much. I’ve seen the Yellowstone. We took two of our kids there to see that. I’m just not that well traveled a person. Like I said… the last time I saw Celilo Falls was in 1956, I think it was.
[Remainder of the tape is blank. End tape two, side two. Begin tape three.]
RW: There was never any animosity – outright animosity. Say, when we traveled and they knew my Uncle Louie quite well because we used to stop along the way and they were used to seeing him every year and they were on a first name basis with him. And occasionally we’d go in to downtown The Dalles and he had his favorite restaurant where he ate and they remembered him.
As I said back in them days we didn’t really know what racial tension was. We never saw that much of it. I’m not saying that they treated us as equals but yet there was more or less peaceful coexistence. We had something that they liked too. They liked fresh Chinook. They had something we liked.. hotcakes. It was something different to us.
MH: Hmm.
RW: But I don’t recall ever seeing any hard feelings. I never heard of it.
MH: Like was there free access to all the restaurants and stores and there was never any…
RW: No, not that I can remember. We traveled down there to The Dalles. It was a chance for the older ladies to go and see a bigger city. Rather than, like Lewiston here back in them days I think there was only about 10,000 maybe not even that many people then, to me that was a big city.
MH: You mean so at that time The Dalles was bigger than Lewiston?
RW: Yeah.
MH: Oh, so Lewiston has grown, huh?
RW: Yeah, well, The Dalles was bigger because it was as major trade route. But Lewiston has grown quite a bit and actually with that you get… around here nowadays you get… you’ll find that what kids learn they can only learn from their parents. It’s that way all around this country. You can feel when you’re not wanted in a certain place.
MH: Hmm.
RW: Like, I have a… ever since I quit drinking I don’t see that much of [inaudible] in the supermarkets and the shopping center. When I used to work at the State College I got to meet quite a few people that I normally would never have met. I used to work for the Director of the Vocational School there. And he and I got to be real good friends. And some of the department heads, you know, I’ve always been that kind of person, I prefer to work with people not for them… or have them work for me. I prefer that they work with me. If I happen to refer to "my secretary" once or twice… I just mean someone that works with me…
MH: M-hmm.
RW: .. that handles things much better than what I do, because she’s probably got more education than I do. I got my education from the School of Hard Knocks.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: But I like people. I like meeting different people and I like working with different people.
I knew that to… I guess you’d call it kind of an honor, I don’t know – at the time I didn’t think too much of it – but some of the gentlemen I used to work with wanted to see if they could get me into the Elk’s Lodge here locally. And the Elk’s Lodge is a fraternity that is strictly white. They didn’t realize that there was already an Indian that was a member of the Elk’s Lodge.
MH: Hmm.
RW: Ed Mattson is enrolled Flathead and real light complected. He used to play professional baseball for the team here and in California. They didn’t know that.
MH: Hmm.
RW: He was already a member. But I think a lot of these guys want to do it just more or less so they could just be on the band wagon so to speak saying that they got an Indian as a member of the Elk’s Lodge in Lewiston, Idaho. Which I don’t go in for that sort of a thing.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: In other words, they just want you and me as an example maybe, I don’t know. I never pursued it.
Working for the Corps of Engineers I worked at Clarkson to begin with and it was a temporary appointment. I ended up working in Lower Granite Dam in the wintertime. And I got to see quite a few fish in the springtime…
MH: Hmm.
RW: … I was still working there. And that’s the first time in my life I can recall seeing a Shad which is native to our Columbia River system.
MH: Is that a type of fish?
RW: Yeah. It’s kind of like a… kind of like a carp. And it’s really a pretty fish. They say it’s edible. Like I say I’d never seen one before and never ate one so I wouldn’t know.
MH: Hmm.
RW: I just happened to catch one out of fish handling it slowly one day… and he came over the fish separator. I picked him up and put him in one of the tank.
Some of the fellows that used to work with it one of them hollers out, Come here, Come here, look at this… there’s a snake in the tank. That wasn’t a snake, that was a little tiny eel that worked its way up here. Usually they don’t get this far up anymore.
MH: Hmm. Well, I don’t really have anymore questions but I was just wondering as you’ve been talking is there any other thing that you might want to add?
RW: No really I don’t.
MH: Okay.. then I have… well, we’ve covered a fair amount of ground tonight.
RW: M-hmm.
MH: Just one other thing, you know, because this tape will be contributed to the Archives at Gonzaga and, you know, it will be there for future generations to look at. From us it will be at least one or two generations. And so I’m wondering do you have any kind of a message you’d like to leave them… you know, about your belief in life and such.
RW: The only thing that I can say… the way I feel is that if we don’t start somewhere for future generations. It’s not going to get any better. It’ll get worse before it gets better. If we don’t stop now, or at least start. Make people in particular our own children aware of our environment is changing.
Some of the things that have happened over the years… the use of fertilizers, pesticides, things of this nature. Sure they might make a better wheat crop… I happen to own some ground here on the reservation, but the amount of fertilizer that has to be put into that - there used to be a good artesian well up there near that property but it isn’t good any more because there’s so much seepage into the ground water.
But I think that the kids will realize that there’s more to life than sport and there’s more to life than being a - say a social worker or whatever… we need social workers… there’s a place in life for everybody, but even a social worker or a lawyer or a… you average laborer has the opportunity to make a change of some sort, no matter how small they think it is. Whether it be recycling your pop cans, or your cardboard or your paper rather than burning it.
I remember when I was a kid there used to be a sawmill just up the road there from where I grew up and there’s nothing I like better than getting out early in the morning and smelling that sawmill. That freshly cut wood. Nowadays it isn’t there anymore. A lot of things aren’t there. You can’t hardly go up on the hill near where I grew up and smell the clover like it used to be.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: Our children are going to be taking care of us one of these days when we get old. Who knows what’s going to happen to them or my grandchildren. Future generations. Unless we take a good long look and try to make some kind of contribution no matter how small. I think we can all help.
Even the job that I have now… even though it’s not necessarily related to the environment – I like to think I’m helping - helping our people by making them aware of the dangers that can be had by warfare.
MH: M-hmm.
RW: I’ve seen war. Even though I was only a Navy clerk. I’ve still seen some of the damage that can be done to the human body. No modern miracle can bring that kind of thing back, whether it’s in your mind or in different parts of your body.
I do know that President Clinton didn’t go to war, but yet he doesn’t hesitate to send our boys out to war. Six or seven times he sent them to different countries now, knowing that some of our boys were going to end up making the supreme sacrifice.
Two of the first people killed in Viet Nam was Nez Perce. I can’t recall his first name. He was a Talbooth. And the other one that was still over there used to be playing third base on my baseball team, he graduated from high school same time I did. He’s one of the first ones too.
But if we could wipe this sort of thing from our way of life, so to speak, or at least make it a cleaner place for our children and grandchildren. I think we’d all be much better because they’re going to be looking out for us.
MH: Yeah, that’s true.
Okay. Thank you very much on behalf of the Hanford Health Information Network and we really appreciate your contribution to the Archives. And thank you very much for your time.
RW: My pleasure.
[End of interview.]