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Grab a cup of something. This is a long one.
I grew up along the Blackfoot River in Eastern Idaho, not far from the town of Blackfoot. Given the name of the river and town, one might think Blackfeet Indians played a key role in the history of the area. They did not.
Shoshone or Bannock Indians left behind the “Indian writing” a couple of miles from our house, which I grew up hearing about. The river leaves the deep canyon it cut and meanders along for a few miles between the mountains on the south and Presto Bench on the north. That secluded valley was a wintering spot for the tribes and, in 1870, a homesteading spot for the Just family.
I explored the lava rocks on which someone had drawn strange symbols centuries before, many times in the summers of my youth. Along the upper edge of the cliffs, you could see redoubts, rocks piled to hide behind and imagine what native men were hiding from.
I heard only vague stories about the possible meaning of the rock writing. One was that scientists from the Smithsonian had come to document the petroglyphs in the 1920s.
That story, as it turns out, was a bit inflated. John E. Rees studied the petroglyphs along the river in 1926. He sent that study to the Smithsonian.
Rees was an attorney, a high school teacher, a state senator, a “professor,” and a fanatic about history, especially as it pertained to Indians. He wrote several papers digging deeply into indigenous languages, pulling definitions together in defensible, if tortured, ways to explain the etymology of place names in the West. Perhaps his most famous explanation was how Idaho got its name, attributing it to the Shoshone words “eh” (coming down), “dah” (sun, root, or mountain), and “how” (the equivalent of an exclamation mark).
The Rees interpretation was widely accepted for years, but research by Idaho’s most esteemed historian, Dr. Merle Wells, proved it wrong in about 1958 (see story below).
It was that same John Rees who visited “my” rocks along the Blackfoot River in 1926 and attempted an interpretation of the petroglyphs based on his conversations with a Shoshone tribal member who was an artist.
There are many rocks with rock art on them on my cousin’s property in the valley where I grew up. They may have once been close to the river. If so, the river has meandered about a half mile to the south since then. But it was one rock in particular that made the news in 1926.
The Idaho Statesman, displaying little sensitivity to ethnic slurs at the time, led off with this boxed headline: “John E. Rees, Authority on Folk Lore of the Redskins, Explains Picture Writing Found on Rock on Bank of Blackfoot River.”
Susie Trego, the wife of Blackfoot’s Idaho Republican newspaper publisher, was credited with “finding” the rock. Doubtful. It’s more likely my great aunt, Agnes Just Reid, showed it to her. Reid was a long-time columnist for Blackfoot papers and a friend of the Tregos. She lived near the rock for all of her 90 years.
Trego claimed the 875-pound rock and moved it to her mansion in Blackfoot, Sagehurst. Thanks to the efforts of my cousin, Marlene Stibal Reid, it would be returned to the Blackfoot River Valley 69 years later. Someone blew the math in the photo caption below.
I grew up along the Blackfoot River in Eastern Idaho, not far from the town of Blackfoot. Given the name of the river and town, one might think Blackfeet Indians played a key role in the history of the area. They did not.
Shoshone or Bannock Indians left behind the “Indian writing” a couple of miles from our house, which I grew up hearing about. The river leaves the deep canyon it cut and meanders along for a few miles between the mountains on the south and Presto Bench on the north. That secluded valley was a wintering spot for the tribes and, in 1870, a homesteading spot for the Just family.
I explored the lava rocks on which someone had drawn strange symbols centuries before, many times in the summers of my youth. Along the upper edge of the cliffs, you could see redoubts, rocks piled to hide behind and imagine what native men were hiding from.
I heard only vague stories about the possible meaning of the rock writing. One was that scientists from the Smithsonian had come to document the petroglyphs in the 1920s.
That story, as it turns out, was a bit inflated. John E. Rees studied the petroglyphs along the river in 1926. He sent that study to the Smithsonian.
Rees was an attorney, a high school teacher, a state senator, a “professor,” and a fanatic about history, especially as it pertained to Indians. He wrote several papers digging deeply into indigenous languages, pulling definitions together in defensible, if tortured, ways to explain the etymology of place names in the West. Perhaps his most famous explanation was how Idaho got its name, attributing it to the Shoshone words “eh” (coming down), “dah” (sun, root, or mountain), and “how” (the equivalent of an exclamation mark).
The Rees interpretation was widely accepted for years, but research by Idaho’s most esteemed historian, Dr. Merle Wells, proved it wrong in about 1958 (see story below).
It was that same John Rees who visited “my” rocks along the Blackfoot River in 1926 and attempted an interpretation of the petroglyphs based on his conversations with a Shoshone tribal member who was an artist.
There are many rocks with rock art on them on my cousin’s property in the valley where I grew up. They may have once been close to the river. If so, the river has meandered about a half mile to the south since then. But it was one rock in particular that made the news in 1926.
The Idaho Statesman, displaying little sensitivity to ethnic slurs at the time, led off with this boxed headline: “John E. Rees, Authority on Folk Lore of the Redskins, Explains Picture Writing Found on Rock on Bank of Blackfoot River.”
Susie Trego, the wife of Blackfoot’s Idaho Republican newspaper publisher, was credited with “finding” the rock. Doubtful. It’s more likely my great aunt, Agnes Just Reid, showed it to her. Reid was a long-time columnist for Blackfoot papers and a friend of the Tregos. She lived near the rock for all of her 90 years.
Trego claimed the 875-pound rock and moved it to her mansion in Blackfoot, Sagehurst. Thanks to the efforts of my cousin, Marlene Stibal Reid, it would be returned to the Blackfoot River Valley 69 years later. Someone blew the math in the photo caption below.
But I digress. You need to know what was scratched onto the rock. It was, after all, “the story of one of the first great peace conferences ever held on the American continent,” according to the Idaho Statesman. According to “Professor” John Rees.
The title Rees often used is in quotes because he was never a college professor and did not have a degree in history, as one might assume. “Professor” was a fairly common colloquial title of respect in the early part of the Twentieth Century. He taught history and science in Salmon and was well-respected by historians at the time.
Rees also ran the Indian trading post at the Lemhi Agency near Salmon for 17 years. There he vigorously studied native languages and the symbols of petroglyphs—images carved into the surface of a rock—and pictographs—images painted on a rock with natural pigments.
The remarkable rock “borrowed” by Susie Trego told a story. John Rees retold it in excruciating detail using the photo below and describing each symbol by its corresponding number.
The title Rees often used is in quotes because he was never a college professor and did not have a degree in history, as one might assume. “Professor” was a fairly common colloquial title of respect in the early part of the Twentieth Century. He taught history and science in Salmon and was well-respected by historians at the time.
Rees also ran the Indian trading post at the Lemhi Agency near Salmon for 17 years. There he vigorously studied native languages and the symbols of petroglyphs—images carved into the surface of a rock—and pictographs—images painted on a rock with natural pigments.
The remarkable rock “borrowed” by Susie Trego told a story. John Rees retold it in excruciating detail using the photo below and describing each symbol by its corresponding number.
In the Rees interpretation, the rock was an invitation to a meeting to divide hunting rights between tribes in what is now Idaho and Wyoming. Those stumbling upon the rock were to pass along the complicated message so the chiefs could meet, according to Rees.
There are some holes in the interpretation. First, why bother spending hours scratching this on a rock in the first place when you could simply assign a runner to get the word from one tribe to another? Second, although there was some commonality in the symbols, their interpretation probably wouldn’t survive precisely for a thousand years in a game of “telephone” passed through the centuries. Third, what good was an invitation without some way of knowing what date, or year, or even season, the invitation was for?
To give you a taste of a Rees explanation of rock writing without making you slog through pages, I include a few lines from a description of the following plate depicting symbols at the Blackfoot River site. It appeared initially in the 1923-24 Biennial Report of the Idaho State Historical Society.
There are some holes in the interpretation. First, why bother spending hours scratching this on a rock in the first place when you could simply assign a runner to get the word from one tribe to another? Second, although there was some commonality in the symbols, their interpretation probably wouldn’t survive precisely for a thousand years in a game of “telephone” passed through the centuries. Third, what good was an invitation without some way of knowing what date, or year, or even season, the invitation was for?
To give you a taste of a Rees explanation of rock writing without making you slog through pages, I include a few lines from a description of the following plate depicting symbols at the Blackfoot River site. It appeared initially in the 1923-24 Biennial Report of the Idaho State Historical Society.
“Fig. 1, represents the 'rising sun,' so denoted by the rays shooting from it. To an Indian every object in nature is endowed with a spirit, the source of which is the sun. His own spirit coming from a spirit eventually will return to it. This orb, then, is the sun, father of the Indians. The sun-father made two brothers, the wolf and the coyote, who lived in a cave near a spring that came from solid rock. The coyote went to live with a fair young girl and from their union came the Shoshonis and Bannacks. This is the 'coyote cult, and is represented in Fig. 2.”
The air of authority in the writing of John Rees and the certainty he exhibits is what originally cast doubt on his work for me. Archaeologists today are hesitant to assign meaning to such symbols.
I wouldn’t argue that the first figure might be the sun and the second a coyote. As the figures become more abstract and less representational, my confidence in the Rees interpretations wanes.
Even so, I have a favorite. I’ve always been drawn to the coyote because of its simple, nearly Picasso-esque lines. One line, the tiny one emanating from the creature’s mouth, has always fascinated me. It’s clearly (yes, I’m making the same leap as Rees often does) barking or howling.
A “sound line” such as that is common in cartoons today. The technical term for it is emanata. I was surprised and delighted to see it in ancient artwork.
I’m grateful to John Rees for recording the rock art from my home valley for posterity, even though he was complicit in moving the “gathering stone” from its original site. But, I do have one more complaint that I must pass on. Rees went over the rock art with some kind of whitewash for the purpose of making the art stand out in photographs. Another method often used is to go over the lines with chalk. This was a common practice in his day, so I can’t much fault Rees for it, but I must point out that archeologists today vehemently discourage that. It can degrade the petroglyphs and pictographs. It also captures only what the photographer saw, and not what might actually be there on closer examination.
And with that, I’ll quit picking on Mr. Rees, who, despite his over-eager interpretation, is guilty mostly of trying to understand the world around him. We’re all guilty of that.
The air of authority in the writing of John Rees and the certainty he exhibits is what originally cast doubt on his work for me. Archaeologists today are hesitant to assign meaning to such symbols.
I wouldn’t argue that the first figure might be the sun and the second a coyote. As the figures become more abstract and less representational, my confidence in the Rees interpretations wanes.
Even so, I have a favorite. I’ve always been drawn to the coyote because of its simple, nearly Picasso-esque lines. One line, the tiny one emanating from the creature’s mouth, has always fascinated me. It’s clearly (yes, I’m making the same leap as Rees often does) barking or howling.
A “sound line” such as that is common in cartoons today. The technical term for it is emanata. I was surprised and delighted to see it in ancient artwork.
I’m grateful to John Rees for recording the rock art from my home valley for posterity, even though he was complicit in moving the “gathering stone” from its original site. But, I do have one more complaint that I must pass on. Rees went over the rock art with some kind of whitewash for the purpose of making the art stand out in photographs. Another method often used is to go over the lines with chalk. This was a common practice in his day, so I can’t much fault Rees for it, but I must point out that archeologists today vehemently discourage that. It can degrade the petroglyphs and pictographs. It also captures only what the photographer saw, and not what might actually be there on closer examination.
And with that, I’ll quit picking on Mr. Rees, who, despite his over-eager interpretation, is guilty mostly of trying to understand the world around him. We’re all guilty of that.
One of the photos John Rees took of the Blackfoot River rock art. Not that the art has been “chalked.” What story do you think it tells?
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