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Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is now available.

Some of Jack Nisbet's "Boundary" columns are available here, with more on the way.

BOUNDARIES April 2012

Sketching the New World: The Art of Alfred Dowing

The early 1880s marked a key period of transition in Northwest history, especially in the Interior. As white settlers began to move up the Columbia and the territory stuttered toward official statehood, tribal people were supposed to relocate to lands roughly laid out by treaties signed (or not signed) in the 1850s, even though the boundaries of several reservations seemed to change from day to day.

The Moses or Columbia Reservation was created in April 1879, and originally described as stretching from the crest of the Cascades east to the Okanogan River, and from the mouth of the Methow north to the Canadian border. With those boundaries in mind, the U.S. Army established Camp Chelan at the mouth of Foster Creek, just below the present site of Chief Joseph Dam, at the modern town of Bridgeport. In March 1880, when the edge of the reservation was abruptly extended south to the shore of Lake Chelan, the army responded by moving their outpost to the outlet of the lake, where the town of Chelan stands today.

“View of Lakes in Grande Coulé”

by Alfred Downing, courtesy of Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma

In order to provide access to their new post, the military needed to connect Camp Chelan via overland routes that would run south to the head of navigation at White Bluffs on the Columbia River (at the present-day Hanford Reach), east to Fort Colville, and west over the Cascades to the Skagit drainage. At that time survey engineering was a regular part of West Point training, and the army assigned several different officers to handle these tasks. As luck would have it, an enlisted man named Alfred Downing, described as a “topographical assistant,” spent much of his time between 1880-84 traveling with the various parties. Downing also served as a part-time “sketch artist,” and during those years created a record of the human and natural landscape that seems to perfectly fit the era—faintly colored, fragile sketches that depicted people on the move in a vast but increasingly settled landscape.

Downing was born in England in 1848, and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 24. An adventurous soul, he soon found work with the Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian headed by Lieutenant George M. Wheeler of the U. S. Army. Under Wheeler, Downing carried out field assignments in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and California, then in western Oregon and Washington. During this time he met a lieutenant engineer his age named Thomas W. Symons, who would later become his boss as they surveyed their way around the Columbia Basin. The two made a long circle from White Bluffs to Camp Chelan and back in summer, 1880, then explored from the Snake River to the International Boundary in 1881. In 1882 Downing joined the Pierce Expedition that traveled from Fort Colville to Puget Sound via Lake Chelan. In ’83 he toured north-central Washington in anticipation of the visit by General William Tecumseh Sherman, and in ’84 Downing wandered the Colville Reservation with the local Indian agent to select mill sites for the Moses tribe.

“I Signal an Indian from Opposite Shore”

by Alfred Downing, courtesy of Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma

During all this time, Downing made sketches of the land around him, and each one relates a direct experience in the North Columbia country. Usually he worked with a simple pen or pencil, sometimes on blue-lined paper torn from issued journals. He occasionally found time to add colored ink or wash portions of his art with watercolors.

One small cartoon shows a bedraggled Downing wandering the Columbia shore below Rock Island Rapids, where he had dumped his boat and drifted downstream from his party. Carrying a red flag as a signal, he tries to communicate with a tribal member who has pulled over to help. The canoe is a classic Plateau dugout, slender and seaworthy; the vast expanse of lonely river north of Vantage stretches to a line of fine riparian on the opposite shore. Downing himself, stepping around what looks like a stubby willow, extends his watch as an offering in exchange for some much-needed food. Speech balloons show the combination of Salish or Chinook jargon and English that the two men use to come to an agreement.

In his “View of Lakes in Grande Coulé,” Downing stands on a hillock above the current U.S. Highway 17, just a mile or so below the Dry Falls Visitor Center. His view down into lower Grand Coulee, at Blue Lake as it rounds the bend to Lenore Lake, has hardly changed at all in the last 130 years. The entablature of the basalt rim to his right is expertly rendered, showing the awesome carving power of the Ice Age Floods. A single color of blue washes life across Blue Lake. A few rafts of ducks ride on the water, and gulls sail with the breezes above. Scattered around the artist, a few clumps of sagebrush demonstrate the open beauty of the shrub-steppe.

“Mouth of Spokane River”

by Alfred Downing, courtesy of Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma

In Downing’s “Mouth of Spokane River,” a man fishes calmly from the stern of a boat securely tied to shore. It’s a craft that seems to be descended from the Columbia River bateaux of the fur trade era, plank-sided and about 25 feet long. He casts his line toward two tepees set up across the way, a clear indication of continued tribal presence in the area. For modern eyes used to seeing this area drowned beneath the backup of Grand Coulee Dam, massive boulders along the shore and in the water make for striking scenery. Downing used a light wash of blue to follow the course of the Spokane and, as in many of his sketches, he locates a well-known place on the edge the picture by marking a flag that flies above Fort Spokane on the bench above the river. That marker drains the high water of today back down to the original confluence of the two rivers to show the undulating landscape, the flood features, and the scattered ponderosa pines that formed the basis of the Spokane world for untold generations.

Alfred Downing was no museum artist, and he never seemed to quite get beyond the first stage or two of finishing his field sketches. But he had an eye for detail, and a knack for capturing a moment on the fly. His work describes a real place, both familiar and very different from what we see with our own eyes, and that’s makes it so valuable to us today.

Reprints of Jack Nisbet's "Boundary" columns are available here.

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