Dividing the Reservation: Alice C. Fletcher's Nez Perce Allotment Diaries and Letters 1889–1892 by Nicole Tonkovich

Abstract

290 OHQ vol. 118, no. 2 detailing NWC’s challenges and disappointments . Their discussion of how John Astor’s Pacific Fur Company base at Fort Astoria fell into British hands at the conclusion of the War of 1812 is particularly revealing, for the fate of Fort Astoria was far from certain. The authors emphasize the objections some British naval officers on the HMS Racoon expressed over their participation in handing off Fort Astoria to the NWC, rather than claiming it a prize of war. “The officer and crew of the Racoon, who expected prize money would be theirs,” Keith and Jackson note, “had to be satisfied with the knowledge that they had done their duty ‘to the North West Company’” (p. 100). In addition, the authors point out, NWC partners at the newly named Fort George at Astoria had divided interests and internecine disputes that further hampered the company’s ability to fulfill its plan in the Pacific Northwest. Many readers familiar with NWC’s interior fur trade will find the sections on its maritime operations revealing, especially the voyages of the Isaac Todd and two vessels named Columbia, which attempted to tap the China trade and fell far short, and the Colonel Allen, a trading vessel meant to ferry NWC furs to the London market. The authors also cover the interior trade in the Columbia Basin after 1815, but in fleshing out NWC personalities they often repeat descriptions of events and relationships dealt with earlier in the book. The authors also admit in notes that they often had to speculate on events that went undocumented by participants. Nonetheless, they have compiled considerable materials from NWC correspondence and set it all in a broad context. For anyone curious about how NWC men, often traveling with their families, tackled difficult and frustrating challenges on the west side of the Divide in the early nineteenth century, The Fur Trade Gamble is a most informative account. In addition, the authors include two comprehensive appendices that cover all NWC personnel and business returns up to the merger with HBC, when NWC ceased to exist and began to fade from memory. WILLIAM L. LANG Portland State University DIVIDING THE RESERVATION: ALICE C. FLETCHER’S NEZ PERCE ALLOTMENT DIARIES AND LETTERS 1889–1892 by Nicole Tonkovich Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2016. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. 334 pages. $29.95 paper. An extraordinary collection of primary sources, Dividing the Reservation provides important details into how Indian agent Alice C. Fletcher carried out the General Allotment Act on the Nez Perce reservation. Under the General Allotment Act, or Dawes Act, of 1887, U.S. Indian agents surveyedandbrokeupmillionsofacresofAmerican Indian tribal lands, allotting them to individual tribal members and selling off the so-called surplus lands to non-Natives and corporations for a fraction of their value. For Indigenous communities in the United States, the Dawes Act stands as one of many devastating federal policies of the nineteenth century. Indeed, scholarship on the Dawes Act is robust, in part because the effect on each reservation community was unique. Literary scholar Nicole Tonkovich has curated this excellent collection of documentary sources — many of which appear for the first time in this book. With an accomplished career, Fletcher was both the first woman to serve as a federal Indian agent and hold an endowed chair at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology. Tonkovich focuses only on the years of Fletcher’s work with the Nez Perce and organizes this impressive assemblage of personal correspondence and field diaries chronologically. As the letters and diaries show, every summer from 1889 to 1892, Fletcher traveled from Washington, D.C., to the Nez Perce reservation to carry out the survey and allotment of the reservation. In her seemingly procedural daily records and personal correspondence, readers will see Fletcher’s “realization of the gap between governmentality — in this case the federal policy she had helped regulate — and the daily lives of those it sought to regulate” (p. 1). Throughout her work on the reservation, Fletcher, an agent of the federal government on the one hand and an intellectual fascinated 291 Reviews with cataloging Indigenous cultures on the other, compartmentalized...