Geoffrey OGara - What You See in Clear Water: Indians, Whites, and a Battle Over Water in the American West

Geoffrey OGara
WHAT YOU SEE IN CLEAR WATER

A journalist and the author of A Long Road Home: Journeys Through Americas Present in Search of Americas Past, Geoffrey OGara lives in Lander, Wyoming.

ALSO BY GEOFFREY OGARA

A Long Road Home

FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, AUGUST 2002

Copyright 2000 by Geoffrey OGara

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
OGara, Geoffrey.
What you see in clear water : life on the Wind River Reservation / Geoffrey
OGara.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Shoshoni IndiansSocial conditions. 2. Shoshoni IndiansGovernment relations. 3. Arapaho IndiansSocial conditions. 4. Arapaho Indians Goverment relations. 5. Indians, Treatment ofWyomingWind River Indian Reservation. 6. Wind River Indian Reservation (Wyo.)Social conditions. 7. Wind River Indian Reservation (Wyo.)Environmental conditions.
I. Title.
E99.S4.O38 2000

978.763dc21 00-034913

eISBN: 978-0-307-76645-8

Author photograph Sara Hunter-Wiles
Map by Hannah Hinchman

www.vintagebooks.com

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Wyoming Law partners Andrew Baldwin and Berthenia Crocker helped me understand many of the issues discussed in the book, and while they played roles during parts of the legal battle over the Wind River, theyve been rendered largely invisible in this book. This is because one of them, Berthenia, is my life partner, and I could show little objectivity in portraying someone I admire and love so much.

What we call mans power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument.

C. S. L EWIS , The Abolition of Man

Writing about real events, one sometimes strains to accelerate the plodding tempo of everyday life and discourse to a more dramatic pace. In the case of the Wind River Valley, though, such frustrations are rare. If anything, the shorthand of hurriedly scribbled notes and the decorum of restrained storytelling may have on occasion reduced colorful speech and events to something less expressive than they were in real life.

I gathered material for this book over a period of fourteen years: first as a newspaper and magazine reporter; then as a friend of people in the valley, with no particular mission; and finally, with the more focused aim of producing this book. As a result, I reach into an enormous grab bag of material to bring forth a handful of story. Just as a historian must wrestle with the professional urge to include and footnote every last item of historical minutiae unearthed, I have struggled with what to put in and leave out of a book that might otherwise meander like a river that has spilled from canyon onto open plain.

This is a work of nonfictiona declaration that seems more necessary today than it might have been a few decades ago. For brevitys sake, I have sometimes compressed the chronology of events, but only when such modifications have no bearing on the narrative that constitutes the larger historical record. In one instance I have changed the name of a family, at their request, and some identifying characteristics in their story, to protect their privacy. The stories recounted represent my own research and experience, the accounts of others, and gleanings from historical records.

Few residents of the Wind River Valley have ever sought the spotlight; if anything, we who live here share a happy secret in our lack of notoriety, which helps to sustain the delicate natural beauty of the surrounding wildlands. If one can assign a lesson to a book like this (a hopeless task), mine would be: Every watershed in the country, even those straddled by urban sprawl, has its own particular and subtle order, its own vying cultures, its own imprinted past and imagined future, waiting to be discovered. So I would hope in the end that the people exposed in this book can find in it some worth to ease their discomfort, and then will be allowed to retreat into the community that owns them to continue with their private toils and affections.