by Jack Nisbet
Although the context around many of William Morley Manning’s artifacts has changed dramatically, Michael Holloman, a Lakes (Sinixt) member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and past director of the museum’s Center for Plateau Cultural Studies, can describe the convoluted last century of both the collection and the people who created the objects in very clear terms. “We will move on,” Holloman says, “with the understanding that we are not going to tell the story of these pieces in the same way that Manning did. They belong to the history of the tribes that made them.”
So in the end, it is Manning himself who disappeared into the earth, even as his collections have come to constitute part of a continuing and unpredictable story. In ways that he never could have imagined, he served some of his acquaintances well.
VI
RIDING THE HIGH WIRE
Berries
Many summers ago, my friend Tom Bristol and I picked up work haying for a farmer whose place lay on the east side of the Colville Valley. After lunch on one very hot July day, we hauled bales out of a meadow that commanded a view west across the valley to the Huckleberry Mountains. An old and modest uplift, not much more than twenty miles long, the Huckleberries separate the Colville Valley from a north-south stretch of the Columbia River below the old Kettle Falls. The high point of their wavy ridge, named on maps as Stensgar Peak, didn’t quite touch six thousand feet. From our vantage in the hayfield, the forested slopes looked empty of habitation, but they were crisscrossed with logging roads and bulldozer scars. Tom came from a mining family and was curious about the scars, while I was more interested in whether those rounded hills might offer good berry picking.
“See that gash straight across?” said the farmer, pointing across the valley to a huge welt of exposed rock. “That’s the Red Marble Quarry. You go up there, you’ll see how mining worked around this whole country. And if you get to the top of the ridge above it, you’ll be into the huckleberries.” He made it sound that easy, inviting us to share the mountain’s bounty and the span of a whole industry at the drop of a hat.
After stowing our last load of bales in the loft that afternoon, Tom and I followed the main highway north to a turnoff at the mouth of Stensgar Creek. Our county map showed a braided network of dirt roads that followed the watercourse up to Huckleberry Ridge. We chose what looked to be the most heavily traveled left turn and began our ascent. Along the way, we stopped to admire the door to a root cellar set into the base of a little slope above the creek. Some old-timer had laid up fieldstone around the frame, and years of harsh weather had burnished both the door and the rocks in a way that enhanced their air of security. Whoever built the dugout had held a keen sense of both rough timber framing and the subtleties of storing food. Tom and I were recent arrivals to the area, and as we followed the dusty washboarded road up Stensgar Creek toward Stensgar Peak, we speculated on the origin of those place names.
Thomas Stensgar (sometimes spelled Stengar, Steingar, and Stranger) was born in Scotland’s Orkney Islands in 1819, during the height of the Columbia River fur trade era. Like many of his brethren, he signed on with the Hudson’s Bay Company while still a teenager, hopping aboard its Prince of Wales cargo ship when she dropped anchor at Stromness to pick up alcohol and willing apprentices bent for the New World. Stensgar spent almost his entire career around the company’s Fort Colvile trading post at Kettle Falls, never rising above the level of assistant trader in a business that by his time was winding down. Stensgar married a Plateau woman about whom little is known except that she died, supposedly of smallpox, leaving her husband with three small children. Six years after the 1846 boundary settlement stranded Fort Colvile south of the international border, Stensgar retired from the only trade he had ever known and settled on a homestead halfway up the Colville Valley along the creek that now bears his name. He was every bit of thirty-three years old.
In 1854, the widower accompanied a friend a day’s ride south to visit an old fur trade acquaintance, the well-known trapper, guide, and interpreter Antoine Plante, who had established a ranch on the Spokane River. Plante had been raised west of the Continental Divide by a French-Canadian father and Plateau mother. By the time he was a teenager, he had a job paddling cargo canoes and wrangling horses between fur trade posts on the lower Columbia. In the early 1830s, he was assigned to several of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Snake River expeditions, during which he and several of his mixed-blood cohorts drove company bosses to distraction with their “whimsical” ways. After the Snake Country ventures wound down, Plante worked throughout eastern Washington and western Montana. He married Mary Therese Sinsee, of Salish lineage, in 1834, and their daughter Julia was born two years later. The girl was four years old when her parents agreed to an amicable separation, and her father arranged for Julia to live with him on the grounds that she “would have to be provided for in better shape” than her brother, who remained with Mary Therese for a time before also coming to live with his father.
Antoine soon remarried a Flathead woman and began building a horse herd in the Colville Valley. In 1849, the entire family journeyed to California during the height of the gold fever there. Julia was thirteen that year, old enough to help her father pan for gold by pouring water over the earth that he shoveled into a rocker. She also sewed buckskin clothing with her stepmother to sell to the miners for handsome prices. After a successful adventure, the Plantes returned to eastern Washington and located on the Spokane River near a popular crossing point. They raised cattle and horses, cultivated wheat, and planted vegetable gardens and apple trees. Their ranch became a landmark and a refuge for travelers, who feasted on fresh milk and butter from the family’s milk cows. Because of his knowledge of the country, Plante was in demand as a guide and interpreter for exploring parties moving through the area. The teenaged Julia, who had learned English, French, and Salish from her parents, sometimes assisted her father.
She was, by her recollection, eighteen years old the summer that a family friend arrived for a visit with Thomas Stensgar in tow. The friend took Julia aside and suggested that the young widower would be a good match for her and that she might marry him. Upon consideration, Julia agreed, and later that year she and Thomas, who was almost twice her age, journeyed to the mission church at Kettle Falls to say their vows. They lived on his sizeable farm overlooking the Colville Valley, where their first daughter, Maggie, was born the next year.
Several other retired fur company employees and their mixed-blood families had also settled in the Colville Valley. Between 1840 and 1880, as the region made a slow transition from British to US control, the birth, death, marriage, and baptismal records of many such blended families were recorded at two Jesuit missions in the Colville country. One of them was consecrated as Saint Francis Regis Mission to the Cree, with “Cree” referring to the mix of European with Plains, Eastern Woodland, and Plateau blood that typified the era. Between 1855 and 1867, Thomas and Julia Stensgar baptized six children at these missions. During the ensuing years they remained engaged in both the emerging white society and traditional tribal culture. They lived on a homestead claim, raised their children in a comfortable farmhouse, and sent them to the district school nearby. Thomas became part of Washington Territory’s emerging new order. Stevens County records show that in 1860 he served as an official for the recently formed election board, and from that position, while the Civil War raged back east, he stepped into the role of county commissioner. The couple also maintained a lattice of relationships with many tribal and mixed-blood families in the area. Prominent tribal leaders such as Spokane Garry came to the farm to discuss problems and seek advice. While two of their sons remained in the Colville Valley and farmed land near their parents, another pair married Plateau women and moved to the Colville Reservation. Their daughter Maggie married a mixed-blood son of the Fort Colvile factor and traveled east to the Flathead country; their daughter Nancy married a white man and lived on the Colville Reservation. Many Stensgar descendants
are enrolled tribal members on the Colville, Salish-Kootenai, Coeur d’Alene, and Spokane Reservations today.
When Thomas Stensgar passed away in 1891, Julia chose to remain on the family homestead, where she was regarded as “a venerable lady” by the community. During the next twenty-six years, she watched the small town of Addy grow up near her farm and a railroad run through the valley. She watched mining prospectors plant claims all over Stensgar Mountain. She also would have watched the continuous blending of cultures as more and more white settlers came to live among tribal and mixed-blood families. And during the summer, when huckleberries ripened on the hills behind her farm, she might well have been called upon to translate between neighbors who spoke very different languages.
Accounts from several homesteaders who lived in the Colville Valley in the early 1900s testify to the way their families’ berry-picking routines mirrored the evolving practices of local Indians. One woman, who grew up on a favorably located and hospitable farm, remembered tribal families stopping by in horse-drawn hacks or buggies each July for a drink of well water on their way to pick berries. Sometimes a lady who didn’t speak much English would buy butter from the family’s creamery. The young farm girl would listen in on conversations in the Salish language as the pickers parked their wagons along the edge of a meadow and unhitched their horses in preparation for the next phase of the trip. Following much the same procedure as the girl’s own family, they would secure a pair of grain sacks to their saddles, then slip square five-gallon tin cans into the sacks so that their berries would not be crushed during the jolting journey to come.
Once they got up into the mountains, white and tribal pickers alike sometimes “threshed” the huckleberries—cutting individual bushes, holding them upside down over a big blanket, and whacking the fruit off with a stick. Everyone thought that such aggressive thinning would help future harvests by encouraging vigorous regrowth. Thick berry patches were essential, because many women aimed to put up one hundred pressure-canned quarts of huckleberries to see their families through the winter. None of them, whether they were returning to a reservation or a homestead, were coming down before they picked those twenty-five gallons and more.
The Dolomite Question
As Tom and I ascended the ridge that commemorates the Stensgars’ tenure in the Colville Valley, we did indeed get into berries. The heat had parched some of their leaves toward yellow, so the bushes were easy to distinguish among the other shrubs whose names I had been trying to learn: serviceberry, snowberry, ninebark, ocean spray, buckbrush, and Utah honeysuckle. To enter any promising berry patch, we had to stumble through all of these tangled species, because much of the land on both sides of Huckleberry Ridge consisted of ragged logging jobs growing back in helter-skelter style. Tree limbs and cut tops made it difficult to set our feet when we did find a spot, but we tasted two different kinds of huckleberries, the first, shiny black, and a larger one, stormy blue. Both were so delicious that much time passed before we covered the bottoms of our pails. Each dribble of purple stain, each sharp plink on tin, seemed to settle the riot of the surrounding landscape into a more sensible order. Familiar flowers from my battered field guide, including white scorched penstemon, fireweed, pearly everlasting, scarlet gilia, and sickletop lousewort, fell into sharp focus. Unexpected new ones, such as tiger lilies and a single delicate rein orchid, seemed all the more exotic.
Together we had not filled our first quart before the sun started to sink. With a limited amount of daylight left, the urge to explore overrode our gathering instincts, and we got back into the pickup and rattled up beside the imposing outcrop of Stensgar Peak, then down the far side, following a dirt track that was much the worse for wear. One particularly wicked stretch of road consisted of bare bedded rock that was tilted literally on edge, as if we were driving across the top of a mammoth’s laminated molar. Our route improved dramatically as it descended from the ridge to wind through an extensive grove of cedar and grand fir. We were just getting used to the shady dampness when the road broke into a new clear-cut that provided a sudden view straight down on a startling moonscape of exposed stone: the Red Marble Quarry. It took several minutes to absorb how its flat benches had been carved in stair-step fashion up the steep brow of an isolated hill. As the quarry expanded, heavy equipment had run over the hilltop and down the other side, peeling back the earth to create an unruly ziggurat that spilled off in every direction.
Upon reaching the upper terrace of the quarry, we stepped onto neatly bladed gravel. Scores of cottonwood saplings, their dark leaves shining green with balsam, were growing straight out of the crushed rock. Skeins of yellow sweet clover had also managed to push through, and now, toasted by the hot sun, their haunting fragrance drifted over the empty expanse. Where drilled and blasted bedrock walls met the flattened benches, lines of scarlet paintbrush bloomed like marching redcoats.
The angles of these bedded uplifts reached sixty degrees, and more, with some layers of dark reddish-brown argillite standing on their heads at the full ninety: these were the same strata that we had bumped across higher on the ridge. Several of the visible uplifts had been warped by additional pressure, so that their laminations waved like parallel swells in a confused sea. While the exposed stone at the ziggurat’s core glowed a luminous dove gray, the edges seemed to have been part of a mad geological experiment. The palette of earthy hues that whirled through these rocks wavered past the basic dove color to eggshell; to ocher and honey; to sage and a greasy gray-green jade; to an oily black tar that poured out in small candied crystals. Overriding all these colors, we saw reds that spiderwebbed in fractal patterns across sheer walls and tabled benches. Their shades ranged from dusty rose to blood red to maroon, all distinct and quite attractive. We tossed a few shapely reddish stones into the back of the pickup, thinking we might find some use for them later.
The Red Marble Quarry illuminates a complex geologic story that began with sediments laid down in a primordial sea. The original layers contained abundant calcium from deceased marine life, and magnesium from chemical processes. Over time, the sediments were altered by heat and pressure, bent by the forces of subduction, and overlain with argillite and quartzite.
The first prospectors to explore the ridge above the Stensgar farm in the 1880s hoped to discover the same glamorous gold, silver, lead, or copper veins that fueled rampant mining fever on both sides of the international boundary and, for that matter, on the other side of the Colville Valley. But this range became known as the Huckleberry Mountains because it provided more dependable food than mineral wealth. Geologists mapped out a definite arc of altered sedimentary rock they called “Stensgar dolomite,” part of a scatter of dolomite rocks around the valley. This concept so befuddled me after I arrived in northeast Washington that I finally appealed to an experienced prospector to help me understand its basic meaning. My question, posed in a tavern at a late hour, prompted him to immediately order another round.
“Dolomite,” the grizzled miner repeated, sadly shaking his head. “Limestone. Marble. Dolomite. Magnesite. You just can’t put them in a box and say this is that, and that is this. There will always be questions.”
The man didn’t mind reviewing the problem. He explained that dolomite emanates from the basic elements of calcium and magnesium. “Calcite is a mineral with the chemical formula CaCO3, or calcium carbonate, right? You guys must know that. Any rock in a natural setting that contains a high percentage of calcite is called ‘limestone.’ If enough heat and pressure are applied over time, this limestone can be altered into marble. See?
“Now magnesite,” he said, “is a mineral with the chemical formula MgCO3, magnesium carbonate. For reasons I’ve never understood, they call a rock with a high percentage of magnesium carbonate ‘magnesite’ too.” He went on to explain that geologists have struggled to picture the kinds of conditions that could actually create the mineral magnesite, with the latest theory crediting some kind of hydrothermal replacement at the edge of the hyp
ogene—chemical reactions taking place in superheated water trapped within magma deep inside the earth.
“OK,” he continued. “If calcium and magnesium occur in about equal proportions in this kind of rock, they call it ‘dolomite.’ But academics argue about that too: they call it ‘The Dolomite Question.’ It’s the goddamnedest thing. Dolomite takes all kinds of forms, and now they’re thinking it can probably be created in a bunch of different ways. But they still call it just dolomite.
“We could drive all around this county and look at a hundred different dolomite outcrops, and every one of them would show a slightly different color or texture. But that’s not what’s important, is it? What matters for me is whether you can crush rock out of one place that’s consistent, and whether you can find somebody who wants to buy the product. There are paper coatings. Medicals. Fertilizers. Chemical additives. Hell, there’s a guy right here in town who’s grinding up every color of dolomite he can find to make stucco chips and selling them to the goddamned Canadians. Stucco chips!”
At that point, the miner slumped back in his chair. “This Dolomite Question,” he muttered, “it’s a hell of a mess.”
When a 1902 Washington Geological Survey report tried to categorize the rock formations in the Huckleberry Range, the authors concluded that “The composition of these marbles varies from an almost pure calcium carbonate to an almost pure magnesium carbonate with all grades in between.” The predominant color along the entire Stensgar dolomite belt was gray, and the report conceded that it was hard to tell exactly which carbonate was coming out of the various quarries on the mountain slopes. No wonder independent miners of that time touted such a wide range of qualities for the resource.
Cement manufacturers burned what looked like limestone for use as quicklime, a key ingredient in mortar for laying bricks, but their product did not quite measure up to industry standards. Slate makers were attracted to the layers of argillite, a kind of cooked mudstone, that cropped up around the edges of the dolomite. It split well along the colorful laminations but was not as stable as flagstone from Pennsylvania or Vermont. Marble cutters focused on the green and red colors swirled into the basic gray by trace minerals. They cut and dressed slabs for use as headstones and decorative facade work, and sold them to cemeteries and building contractors. Even though the Huckleberry blocks did not hold up as well as the more fully metamorphosed marbles from quarries back East, hopeful entrepreneurs kept pushing their products for more than a decade without any real success. It seemed as though every aspect of the Stensgar dolomite came up a little bit short.
