The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (29 page)

In this bleak economic milieu the aging Clarke siblings formed a plan to develop a portion of their land, hoping to capitalize on the Glacier National Park tourist trade. Helen explained in October 1913, “We intend to build chalets and bungalows and induce others to do likewise which will not only benefit the public but enhance the value of our own lands.”
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It was a fine idea, but implementing it was not nearly so simple as she described. After all, as allotted Indians, the Clarkes had first to secure title to their property, which was held in trust by the federal government according to the terms of the Dawes Act. Helen’s subsequent navigation of the federal bureaucracy reveals much about the status of mixed-blood peoples at the turn of the century.

While in many cases the government was eager to grant outright ownership to such individuals, thus obviating the need to support them, the unique circumstances of Helen’s career helped facilitate her application. From the moment her inquiry arrived in Washington, officials in the Indian Service fast-tracked the paperwork; one of the commissioner’s assistants noted that, though the schedule of Blackfeet allotments had not yet been approved by the president, the Clarkes’ case “will be taken up specially, and this Office will make a recommendation to the Department [of the Interior] that the allotments be approved.”
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In other crucial respects, however, her petition was treated like that of any Indian seeking to gain title to allotted land, highlighting the racist assumptions of the day concerning those of native ancestry. To begin with, she needed an endorsement from the reservation’s Indian agent. More disheartening was a questionnaire designed to gauge her personal competency, which asked among other things her degree of Indian blood and whether or not she used intoxicants. For a woman who had traveled widely, been the first of her sex to win elected office in Montana, and served the government for nearly a decade as an allotting agent, Helen must have been incredulous as she wrote tersely in another letter, “[W]e know we are capable of handling our own affairs.”
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Though the Clarkes’ applications were approved in the spring of 1914, their desire for financial security did not materialize after they took ownership of the land. The siblings managed to find willing renters, but their timing could hardly have been worse: the sharp economic downturn following World War I caused many of their tenants to default on their payments. As one Sherburne associate explained to Helen, “It is most awful hard to collect a Dollar from any body on any thing [at] these present times.” That realization did not stop the trader from trying to collect on Helen’s debt, which by the end of the decade had ballooned to nearly $1,500.
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F IT DID NOT
bring her riches, Clarke’s proximity to Glacier Park brought her visitors instead. In time, the house she shared with her brother became renowned as something of a rustic literary salon, where guests sat for hours with her in order to learn more about the Piegans, who thanks to Louis Hill had became famous nationwide as “the Glacier Indians.” However well meaning, her white visitors tended to exoticize their hostess, emphasizing—intentionally or otherwise—her racial difference. Of course, that seems to have been what drew many to her in the first place. Take, for instance, a letter from the prominent Montana suffragist Mary O’Neill, who in 1910 wrote ostensibly to invite Clarke to a statewide gathering of women’s organizations. “How are you, Woman with the Shadow eyes?” she began, before arriving at the true purpose of her letter: “One thing I want to see [is] if you and I can collaborate on a book of the Mystic lore of the Indians—and no one could know it better than you.”
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And if these were the sentiments of a suffragette, one can only imagine the extent of the racial caricatures drawn by people who were not so well meaning.

Even her closest friends tended to fetishize Clarke’s hybridity. One of them, Helen Fitzgerald Sanders, daughter-in-law of Clarke’s most loyal patron, spent extensive time with the Clarke siblings while researching her novel
The White Quiver.
Published in 1913, the book, according to its author, “is a story of the Piegan Indians before they felt the influence of the white man.” In this way Sanders’s volume resembled the contemporary pictures of the photographer Edward S. Curtis or the paintings of the Taos Society of Artists (whose most senior member, Joseph Henry Sharp, visited Clarke at Glacier), with their romantic and noble visions of an uncorrupted native past. Helen and Horace had been Sanders’s portal to that world, which the author acknowledged in her dedication: “To Helen P. Clarke, ‘Pi-o-to-po-wa-ka,’ in whose noble character mingles the best of the white race and the red.”
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What Clarke made of such patronizing oblations, however generous and heartfelt, is hard to assess. She was hardly a stranger to this kind of purple language, but it is easy to imagine that she experienced less internal conflict when visited by a second group of guests: needy Piegans. In later years “Aunt Helen,” as she was known, became a trusted source of emotional and financial support for Indians on the reservation, especially the elderly, who had experienced the most trouble in conforming to the assimilated ideal set forth in the Dawes Act. According to one friend, it was this generosity, more than any absence of business acumen, that explained the poverty of Clarke’s later years.
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Helen P. Clarke. Clarke struggled to walk in both white and native worlds, dismissed by some as a “half-breed” but fetishized by others for her in-between-ness. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

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1923 a Catholic priest named Father Halligan was called to the Clarkes’ home. The old woman, now seventy-five, was failing, and since she had always been a devout member of the church, someone—likely Horace—knew she would take great comfort in having a clergyman nearby. It was pneumonia, “the old man’s friend,” that had pushed her to the brink of death, an ironic fate, given that it was her lungs that had animated her most defining feature, the sonorous voice that had once thrilled audiences and, more recently, heralded bleak tidings for the Poncas and the Otoe-Missourias.

As he and a small group kept a bedside vigil throughout the night, Father Halligan noticed that, toward the end, Helen “was reviewing her whole life.” Because of her weakened condition the priest could make out very little of what she said, but he clearly heard these words, which he shared at her eulogy a few days later. “Children,” she had whispered, “should have nothing but the greatest admiration[,] the greatest respect, [and] the greatest love and reverence for their teachers.” Halligan explained to the mourners who gathered at her grave site (a short walk from the house Helen and Horace had shared for more than two decades) that these “golden words of wisdom” harked back to the “best and happiest years of her life,” when she had taught the young children of the territory.
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Headstone at the grave of Helen P. Clarke, 2007. If the dates are incorrect (she was born in 1848), it is certain that Helen P. Clarke was “a pioneer.” As the first woman to hold elective office in Montana and one of the very few to serve as an allotting agent, she was an exceptional woman and will be inducted into the Gallery of Outstanding Montanans in 2015. There she will join her nephew John, who was so honored in 2003. Photograph by the author.

Perhaps the priest was right, that at the hour of her death Clarke thought only of her students at Fort Benton and Helena (and maybe even San Francisco). Yet there is another possible interpretation of her last words, one in which she is still the teacher but her students are the native peoples to whom she devoted so many years. To be sure, such an equation would leave Clarke open to unsettling charges of condescension and self-aggrandizement. Nevertheless, at least according to one acquaintance, this alternative reading may be closer to the truth: “Whatever her own opinions, she could only serve her people by counseling them to submit, make the best of the situation and so educate themselves that they might meet the whites on their own ground and possibly, finally, to obtain justice.”
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N THE SUMMER
of 1915 James Willard Schultz, a white man who had married a Piegan woman and lived with the tribe for years, sat with a group of elders around a campfire just outside the boundaries of Glacier National Park. The men feasted on roasted elk ribs and shared a pipe, reminiscing about the old days. After a time the conversation turned serious, with one of the men railing against “the most recent wrong put upon us by the whites.” The headman was referring not to the creation of the park, or even to the efforts of federal authorities to exclude the Blackfeet from its premises, but rather to the white outsiders’ renaming of the features of the landscape. The group concluded that “the whites’ names should at once be wiped out and our names restored to the maps of the region.”

Ten years elapsed before Schultz and two respected Piegan elders, Curly Bear and Takes-Gun First, had the chance to realize their plan, but they took to it with tremendous enthusiasm. Over the course of a week in June 1925, the men methodically renamed the sites one by one. In this way, Florence Falls became Pai-ota Oh’tôkwi, or “Flying Woman Falls,” named for a sacred holy woman, and the Sherburne Lakes were rechristened Kai’yoîks Otsitait’ska O’mûksîkîmîks, or “Fighting Bears’ Lakes,” in honor of a tussle between two grizzlies.

Toward the end of their work the group paused to consider Helen Lake, a cerulean glacier-fed pool located in the north-central portion of the park, not far from the spot where George Bird Grinnell had experienced his epiphany forty years earlier. Although they changed the name of the lake, they did not change the person to whom it referred, calling it Pai’ota-pamakan O’mûksîkîmî, or “Came Running Back Lake,” both variations of Helen’s Indian moniker. In explaining its significance, Schultz wrote that “Miss Clark was a woman of high education, and was a teacher in various Montana schools.” He and his friends were particularly proud to claim her as a Piegan.
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Today, because of Helen Lake’s remote location and the poor campsite nearby, it receives fewer visitors than many other parts of Glacier National Park. Those who do stop at its shores, however, are well rewarded. Enclosed on three sides by soaring mountain walls, backpackers can revel in a sense of total isolation, broken only by the bleat of a mountain goat or the sight of a grizzly seeking refreshment from the impossibly blue waters. If they think of it at all, hikers who reach this lovely spot might wonder about its supposed namesake, the daughter of a white engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey who mapped the area in the early twentieth century.
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The Piegans, to whom the land originally belonged, maintain that it honors someone else, a complex woman of many talents who, for a time, managed to walk between two increasingly divided worlds.

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