Chapter VI 

 THE SMOHALLA RELIGION OF THE COLUMBIA REGION 



SMOHALLA 



1 have only one heart. Although you say. Go to another country, my heart is not 

 that way. I ilo not want money for my land. I am here, anil here is where I am 

 going to be. I will not part with lands, and if yon come again I will say the same 

 thing. I will not part with my lands. — Umatilla < hief. 



We have never made any trade. The earth is part of my hody, and I never gave 

 up the earth. So long as the earth keeps me I want to be let alone. — Toohulhuhote. 



Their only troubles arise from the attempts of white men to encroach upon the 

 reservations. I verily believe that were the snow-crowned summits of Mount 

 Rainier set apart as an Indian reservation, white men would immediately commence 

 jumping them. — Superintendent Boss. 



About the time that the Paiute were preparing for the millennial 

 dawn, we begin to hear of a "dreamer prophet" <m the Columbia, called 

 Smohalla, who was becoming a thorn in the flesh of the Indian agents 



in that quarter, and was reported to 1 rganizing among the Indians a 



new religion which taught the destruction of the whites and resistance 

 to the government, and made moral virtues of all the crimes in the 

 catalog. <>ue agent, in disregard of grammar if not of veracity, 

 gravely reported that "the main object is to allow a plurality of 

 wives, immunity from punishment for lawbreaking, and allowance 

 of all the vices — especially drinking and gambling — are chief virtues 

 in the believers of this religion." [Comr., 8.) 



This was bad enough, but worse was behind it. It appeared that 

 Smohalla and his followers, numbering perhaps about 2,000 Indians of 

 various tribes along the Columbia in eastern Washington and Oregon, 

 had never made treaties giving up any of their lauds, and consequently 

 claimed the right to take salmon in the streams and dig kamas in the 

 prairies of their ancestral country undisturbed and unmolested, and 

 stoutly objected to going on any of the neighboring reservations at 

 Yakima, Umatilla, or Warmspring. There is no doubt that justice 

 and common sense were on the side of the Indians, for by the reports 

 of the agents themselves it is shown that the dwellers on the reserva- 

 tions were generally neglected, poor, and miserable, and subjected to 

 constant encroachments by the whites in spite of treaties and treaty 

 lines, while tit the same time that agents and superintendents were 

 invoking the aid of the military to compel Smohalla's followers to go 

 on a reservation these same men were moving heaven and earth to 

 force tite Indians already on a reservation to give up their treaty rights 

 and remove to another and less valuable location— to begin lite anew 



Tils 



