She is a fifth generation Idahoan, someone who grew up in a family that embraced certain Western values: "Keep the government out and the guns close by. Remember that the land is your land to use as you want. Tromp into the woods, camp in the wilderness . . . . Let no strangers in," These are values Gwartney rejects entirely as a late-middle-aged white and left-leaning woman. The tension between her childhood in small-town Idaho and her adult awareness of impact of the white settlers and US Government on the land runs as a thread through the book.
She evokes her childhood. Her father impregnated her sixteen-year-old mother when he was fifteen. They married and apparently the two sets of grandparents loathed each other. Her father managed to move the family out of Salmon (pop. 3,000) to Boise, "so he could become the family's first executive for a corporation; he was the first man in our clan to toss off terms like pension and stock options."
But Gwartney weaves into the memoir the history of Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, "the first Caucasian woman (so say the history books) to cross the Rocky Mountains, the first white woman to give birth to a white baby on the frontier (same history books). A missionary killed by the people she aimed to convert—her death, some say, changing the course of the settling of the West."
In 1836, Narcissa and her husband Marcus set up a mission along the Oregon Trail about eight miles from current day Walla Walla, Washington, in the Columbia River basin. They had come to bring Christianity to the Cayuse Indians and to provide a rest stop for settlers continuing west. Marcus named the mission Waiilatpu, "home of the ryegrass people," to honor the Native people whose traditional grounds he and Narcissa settled on. Gwartne writes, "Tall grasses and bullrushes--tule sedge that the Cayuse used primarily to cover their long houses—were imperative to the tribe's way of life, a fact that Marcus, in what strikes me as one of his first acts of colonial indifference, ignored." He burned the grass, churned the soil, planted a garden, established an orchard, and sowed acre after acre of wheat to provide for the mission.
To discourage the Cayuse from taking the melons from the garden the Whitman's coated the melons with a drug that made the Indians sick. Worse, Marcus presented himself as a doctor, but he could do nothing to save the Indian children who died from the measles that came with the settlers. After nine years, the Whitman's had not converted a single Indian, and in 1847 a small band of Cayuse attacked the mission, killing Narcissa, Marcus, two girls, and a dozen men and boys.
Aside from relating key events in her life (almost dying on a Salmon River rafting trip; her father's recover after being crushed by a horse) and the inherent interest in Narcissa's history, I Am a Stranger Here Myself is wonderfully well written. Here, taken at random, is an example:
"In her journals and letters home, Narcissa, without a waver, asserts that she and Marcus were doing exactly what was necessary to teach the Cayuse a different way of being. The Cayuse had little interest in such instruction, but Narcissa went on instructing, and she went on insisting, for one thing, on a new notion of boundaries. Narcissa, like my great-grandmother Hazel would some sixty-some years later, stashed a rifle on the porch to warn Native people away front door and vegetable patch, and in the permanent house that Marcus finally did build to replace their first sod dwelling, she made sure an 'Indian room' was tacked on toward the back, the one space the Cayuse (though only those dressed in western clothing and recently bathed) were allowed to enter, to keep their muddy feet and sticky hands, their stinking bodies, from her parlor."
I Am a Stranger Here Myself is a moving and powerful corrective to the heroic story of the dauntless pioneers who Won the West. Gwartney, her Idaho family, Narcissa and Marcus a human beings, strangers in a strange land, as are we all.
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