Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1860

One adventurer, Elias D. Pierce, who had been in the California gold rush and had been trading intermittently with the Nez Perces since 1852, had settled at the bustling new town of Walla Walla and, in 1858 and 1859, had visited Indian villages along the Clearwater and panned a little gold. At the time, he considered it too dangerous to pursue his quest, but early in 1860 he and a companion, Seth Ferrell, returned to the village of a friendly, pro-Lawyer headman near the mouth of the Clearwater’s North Fork, where Lewis and Clark had built their canoes in 1805. On February 20, a little higher up on the Clearwater, they found enough gold to induce them to go back to Walla Walla for equipment and supplies. Cain, who was based there, learned of their plans and warned them to stay off the Nez Perce reservation. Ferrell dropped out, but Pierce brushed off the warning and with three other men returned to the Clearwater, where they were accosted by Lawyer and a number of his headmen, who questioned them about their intentions and then, seeing that they were not settlers after their lands, agreed to let them prospect. Some of Cain’s authorities appeared, however, and once more Pierce returned to Walla Walla, this time to raise a party too large for the agent to stop.

After telling Cain falsely that he would prospect outside the reservation’s eastern boundary and would get there by a northern route that did not cross the reservation, Pierce started off again in August with ten men. Stealing onto the reservation, he ferried the Snake River at Timothy’s village at Alpowa and made his way to the upper North Fork of the Clearwater, guided through the mountainous country, according to one story, by Timothy's 19-year-old daughter, Jane, who was married to the interpreter at Fort Walla Walla. On September 30, one of his men, W.F. Bassett, made a rich strike on Canal Gulch, a headwater of Oro Fino Creek, on the northern part of the reservation.

The news was carried back to Walla Walla, and in December, before winter snows closed in the mountains, a group of 40 prospectors reached Canal Gulch and began a settlement, which they named Pierce. . . . (pp. 97-99)