Qu-lash-qud watched the women bake bread over an open fire. They maneuvered sticks to hang salmon from the roof. The fish dangled there, above a smoldering fire, for days at a time. In a week or so, heat from the stoked fire dried the salmon to the bone. The women sent Qu-lash-qud off to the river. He tied the fish to a bale of hay and left them to soak overnight. By dawn, the salmon were so soft you could eat them without teeth.
When he wasn’t soaking salmon, Qu-lash-qud often stood behind his father, Kluck-et-sah, on a galloping horse. They’d ride together up and down the winding trails around Puget Sound, disappearing into clusters of dense trees. His father also taught him to fish. They’d climb into a shovel-nose canoe and drift for miles, scooping up the salmon.
At Thanksgiving, they shared feasts. “All the creeks were just full of fish,” Qu-lash-qud told a filmmaker, Carol Burns, years later. “Every year they come up to spawn, and on Thanksgiving we all lived up on the prairies and we’d come down and camp on a creek and build a fire and catch the biggest dog salmon and bake them Indian style with the stick and we’d have our Thanksgiving dinner.”
father, Willie Frank Sr.
With his mother gone, Qu-lash-qud looked to his Aunt Sally as a female mentor. He called her Grandmother. One day, Qu-lash-qud and his friend drummed and played where the elders gathered to pray. The boys started to feel sick. “We don’t feel good,” they complained to Grandmother. “Don’t know what’s wrong with us.” “You’re down there making fun . . . where we pray down there,” Grandmother scolded. “We got these sticks that are powerful. You guys are down there and you’re making fun . . . that’s why you don’t feel good.”
Qu-lash-qud was just a kid the first time he spied a white man. A group of whites “menacingly approached” the longhouse and ransacked the place while the boy watched through a crack in a rain barrel. The memory of the armed horsemen never left his mind. “Gramps would sometimes have fears and he’d relate back to raids against Indians when he was a little boy,” Hank Adams recalls. “White marauders would come in with guns and be threatening Indians, or beating Indians. He’d talk about hiding under barrels and hiding under different things. This would be in the 1880s and 1890s.”
Throughout his life, Qu-lash-qud told chilling stories of disease ravaging the Indian people. “Let me tell you about this one—what I heard. A ship come here on Puget Sound and the ship was throwing brand new blankets, suit of clothes, underwear and the Indians on the shore got in their canoes and went and got all that stuff. And brought them ashore. And come to find out all those clothes and blankets were smallpox. The ship had smallpox. And so all the Indians got smallpox, from the mouth of the river to La Grande. They all died off. Smallpox killed them all. See when I come to, there was just a few Indians. I’d say just about 300 living on the reservation.”
The staggering losses drove many to drink, writes Norman Clark in The Dry Years: Prohibition and Social Change in Washington: “In their sorrow . . . the Indians finally reached for the bottle of rum which the fur traders had been offering them. In the white man’s liquor they found a source of ecstasy and release from their grief.” “Pretty soon American come over in wagon trains and they had bad whiskey,” said Qu-lash-qud. “Indians now fight and kill each other after they had bad whiskey American brought over.”
The free education promised in the Treaty of Medicine Creek, in fact, carried a price. American Indian boarding schools opened to throngs of supporters who hailed them as a means of survival, and legions of critics who denounced them as cultural genocide. Richard Pratt, founder of the first off-reservation boarding school, at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, unapologetically avowed, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. . . . In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Pratt set out to kill the Indian by teaching Indians to be white. Uprooted from homes and taken from their reservations, Indian children bore the brunt of a profound culture clash. They were silenced from speaking their Native tongue and urged to worship an unknown god.
Along with schoolwork, teachers handed out new names. Most came from American politicians and did not reflect Indian history or heritage. “At Fort Peck, we had a Grover Cleveland. We had the Thomas Jeffersons. We had George Washingtons and we had John Adams. And these are all new names,” recalls Hank Adams. In fact, Adams himself is an Assiniboine-Sioux from Montana, the great grandson of Digs the Ground, an Indian renamed John Adams in boarding school.
