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, won a 2010 PNBA Award.

Watching the Great Change: George Gibbs in the North Columbia Country
April 2010

The decade of the 1850s saw the beginning of Washington State as we know it today, but it was always not a pretty sight. As the new United States government slowly pushed the British Hudson's Bay Company regime out of the Northwest, local residents experienced pestilence in the form of smallpox and measles, crippling greed as gold fever spread north, political squabbles under ambitious new governor Isaac Stevens, outright war over tribal treaties and removal, and finally the tracing of an international boundary line that tore the entire region in half. Somehow a New Yorker named George Gibbs not only witnessed the entire process, but also used his wide range of personal interests to preserve some aspects of cultures that were slated for destruction. His work across the gamut of human and natural history marks Gibbs as the Northwest's first cultural anthropologist.

It happened almost by accident. Born on Long Island to a privileged family in 1815, the young Gibbs longed for a military career, but failed to receive his expected appointment to West Point. After a couple of years of wandering, he entered Harvard University and graduated from their law school at age 23, but a job in a prestigious New York City firm only convinced him that he wasn't cut out to be a lawyer. In his late 20s and early 30s, he served as a committee member and librarian for the New York Historical Society, and in 1846 brought out an unlikely but much-praised volume of pure history titled "Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and Adams."

After this writing success he decided to follow his dreams, and joined the U. S. Army's Mounted Rifle Regiment on their way to the Oregon Territory. He published an account of that journey, stayed on in Portland, and by 1851 he served a term as a prosecuting attorney and become an expert at the Chinook jargon trade language that at that time spanned the whole region. But he still couldn't settle down, and the fall of that year found Gibbs traveling with another army expedition from San Francisco north into the Klamath country. His journal account of that experience demonstrates his remarkable abilities with language; his feel for tribal culture; and his chilling view of what most people of his time saw as the fate of all American Indians: if they couldn't act like white people, to farm the land and lust for gold, they were bound to go extinct.

A sentiment of pity may lead us to commiserate the destiny of the ancient proprietor; but we cannot lament those occurrences which promise to convert an obscure province into a powerful State; or waste many tears upon the race which, grasping such vast possessions, was too indolent to nurture the agricultural wealth of the land, and had too little enterprise even to find the mineral that littered at its feet.

Returning to Portland, Gibbs worked briefly as a customs collector but lost the job. Pushing 40 years old, he managed to latch on with Captain John B. McClellan's railroad survey crew as their "ethnologist and geologist," joining a crew that journeyed up the Columbia River. He had, against all odds, discovered his true calling. The Smithsonian Institute had provided the survey with drying paper for plants, copper kettles, Indian rubber bags, specimen kits, alcohol, and arsenic for preserving skins; along with fellow naturalists George Suckley and James Cooper, Gibbs brought in specimens of all kinds. On time and in tune with his cohorts, Gibbs wrote the geological report, collaborated with Suckley on the highly informative mammal section, and completed the seminal "Tribes of Washington Territory" as his contributions to the hefty 12-volume final report of McClellan's railroad survey.

At the American's Fort Colville in October of 1853, Gibbs had his first meeting with Isaac Stevens, the 25-year-old newly appointed governor of the territory. Stevens was impressed with the copious tribal material that Gibbs had gathered along his summer route, and hired him as an assistant. Gibbs served as a translator, transcriber, and sometimes artist as Stevens traveled from one corner of Washington to the other, parlaying with all the tribes who had to be mollified in order for the new government to take over. This led to another paper called "Tribes of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon" that Gibbs wrote for the Department of the Interior in 1855, and perhaps began to change his views on the subject.

Gibbs may have clashed with Governor Stevens over publishing certain materials independent of the railroad survey, but he continued to attend numerous tribal councils as an interpreter. In time he became openly critical of the governor's methods of coercing tribes to sign blanket treaties; in fact, it wasn't long before these treaties led to such general unrest between tribal groups and white settlers that Stevens declared martial law. It was a radical attempt to gain control of a difficult situation, and George Gibbs was one of several former aides to the governor who encouraged a suit to get martial law lifted. In 1855, some of these upstarts published letters in newspapers as far away as the New York Times complaining about Stevens's arrogant and domineering methods, and predicted that the martial law order might well lead to bloodshed.

Since the majority of white settlers took Stevens's side in the argument, it is not surprising that Gibbs's political status deteriorated. By 1857, he had signed on with the International Boundary Survey as interpreter and geologist and headed back to Fort Colville. Apparently the wild country around the 49th parallel suited George Gibbs's free spirit just fine. In a letter penned on January 31, 1859, chief American surveyor Joseph Harris tried to figure out just who he had working for him‹a linguist, historian, tribal sympathizer, or rock hound.

Mr. Gibbs is the Geologist and Ethnologist. His duties lead him of course to ramble about here a good deal so that he is not generally with the field partiesŠHe has been in these parts some years and has devoted a good deal of attention to Indian languages having pretty full dictionaries of two or three... His geological studies are [more] his hobbyŠbut he is tolerably well booked on it too.

In a letter written a year and a half later from Sinyakwateen Depot on the Pend Oreille River, Harris expanded on his interpreter's odd qualities.

He would deem his outfit incomplete if he started out for a walk without hammer and bag to collect Geological specimens and terraces moraines craters & glaciers all have to give up their secrets. He can always find room to stow away any flowers or plants that he may come across and his note book always has a place for the time of flowering of shrubs and treesŠ

If the Indian is along Gibbs bones up all the names and localities that he can lay hold of and puts them down to be transferred at the first opportunity to the mapŠAny traveler that he may see if he appears intelligent is invited to contribute to his store of geographical knowledge if he is a hunter‹to the habits and ranges of animals

if an old resident, he is asked for numbers boundaries and characteristics of Indians; in regard to the length and severity of the winters, the amount of rain & snow, the time and height of higher water in the rivers, the thickness of the ice, the kind of timber, the distance to which salmon ascend the river, and the time the amount of furs collected from that district &c &c &c &c

No matter how eccentric Mr. Harris thought this man might be, it was Gibbs's insistence on learning the separate languages, and understanding all the variations in the landscape around him, that led to a deeper vision of what was around him. It was due to Gibbs that the finished Boundary Survey maps bristled with tribal names, and he was one of the first to describe Plateau pit houses and rock cairns. When his landmark "Account of Indian Mythology in Oregon and Washington Territories" was published in 1865, it marked the beginning of serious study of the individual tribes in the Plateau region. Far from going extinct, as he had predicted when he was in California, Gibbs's work helped to ensure that the cultures of those "ancient proprietors" would endure into the centuries beyond.

Illustration by Emily Nisbet

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