“...when they crested the last ridge and the prairie came into view they thought they were looking at a vast violet-blue lake.”

Today, we drove west and then south to see the Camas Prairie, also known as the Weippe Prairie. This expanse of flat land reaching towards the distant mountains is named for the blue flowering camas, a root plant and important historic source of food for the Nez Perce tribe, the Nimiipuu people, who lived on this land for thousands of years. Located between the Salmon and the Clearwater River drainages, the area is now mostly owned by private farms. The Nez Perce tribe of Idaho has slowly lost this ancestral land and today occupy only a small portion of the northern part of the Prairie.

In 1805, having made the terrible crossing through the Bitterroot Mountains, Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery came upon the Weippe Prairie. They were starving and weak. It is said that when they crested the last ridge and the prairie came into view they thought that they were looking at a vast violet-blue inland lake. They were greeted by the members of the Nez Perce tribe, all but one of whom had never seen white men. That one was a woman. She had been abducted and sold to a white family. She eventually returned to her people and told them that she had been treated very well while in captivity. She convinced the Nez Perce to offer friendship to the Corps. The tribe fed the explorers, helped them build canoes, mapped out the water route west and cached their horses and supplies, and kept them untouched, until they returned a year later.

I have seen the Prairie in full bloom and it is stunning. I’ve harvested the roots that grow beneath the ground. And, I’ve tasted some of the ancient recipes which were a staple of the Nez Perce. I did not know the full history of this place before coming to Idaho. I did not know how critical the friendship and expertise of the Nez Perce people was to the success of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition. And I did not know, until now, the long and bloody legacy of eradication those same Nez Perce would experience at the hands of our government. The tribes homeland stretched across 17 million acres at one time. The 1855 Treaty allotted them 7.5 million acres and in 1863 reduced that to the 750,000 acres where they live today. The tribe operates as a Sovereign Nation and collaborates with private and public entities and organizations to preserve their culture and to contribute to the prosperity of their tribe and of Idaho.

When we returned to the Prairie this time, we travelled across the wide valley dotted with farms, but the landscape was still the brown and the straw color of late winter. Farmers were just beginning to till the soil. The camas flowers remain deep in the earth. And yet, it is still breathtakingly beautiful. We saw almost no other cars and only got out at the dead end of the road that winds through the Camas National Wildlife Refuge where a flock of ducks were our only companions.

There is no physical evidence that the Nez Perce ever lived here, but there is evidence of how unforgiving the forces of nature that rule this land can be to those who continue to make this place home.