Wandering with Sam
Rock Art on Lake Pend Oreille
Aug 16, 2005, 08:24

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Green Monarchs

After an afternoon of canoeing on north Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille near Denton Slough, we decided to beach the canoe and explore a quiet part of the rocky shore. The setting was quite peaceful: tall ponderosa trees, dry yellow grass and crumbling rocks protruding from the shallow water of the lake. A primitive campsite marked by a campfire, a crude tripod, and a few discarded cans of Coors Light instilled a sense of calmness.

This setting seemed to be far from traffic jams, cell phones, or terrorist bombings in the London Underground, almost as if those things didn’t even exist. The Green Monarch Mountain ridge loomed over the eastern shore of the lake, an abrupt three thousand foot ascent from the dark water. Except for the discarded cans and an occasional garter snake quickly disappearing into the rocks, the setting was perfectly serene. Then we noticed the engravings on one of the larger rocks along the lakeshore. The face of the rock was covered with about 30 petroglyphs, or rock engravings, of primarily abstract bear paw prints, but also of an antlered animal, a few angular carvings, and circles scattered about.

The bear paws dominated the panel, forming a diagonal swath of numerous abstract oval shaped paws with five short heavy lines forming the claws. The various shapes were deeply engraved into the rock, despite the fact that someone had recently covered them with a layer of plaster or some other such substance to preserve them. Or perhaps the creators of the petroglyphs added a substance to the surface of the rock before beginning their engravings. They were oriented to the east, as if they were intended to meet the rays of the rising sun every morning. The rock outcrop was crumbling and cracked in several places, so the engravings have deteriorated over the years, but despite the fractures and dried lichen, the images are still quite evident.

Bear Paws

There are actually seven different “rock art” sites on the north shore of Lake Pend Oreille including a total of 150 bear paws, 70 arcs and ovals, and a few curvilinear abstracts, all carved into argillite rock. About 40 are located at the site that I visited, while the other 200 or so images are distributed among the other nearby sites. This phenomenon of rock art (as it is referred to by archaeologists) is actually quite common all over the world where traces of the earliest peoples have remained intact. And this rock art site at Lake Pend Oreille is just one of hundreds along the Columbia River and her tributaries in the Pacific Northwest. About two-thirds of them are along the Columbia River itself, but they also occur near Lewiston, Post Falls, and Priest Lake in Idaho; Spokane, WA; and Cranbrook, British Columbia. The bear paw motif appears at the site near Cranbrook, on an inundated island near Vantage, WA, and at John Day Dam in north Central Oregon.

The two main types of rock art are petroglyphs, or stone engravings; and pictographs, or paintings on the surface of the rock. The Plateau rock art usually depicts images of humans, animals, or more abstract shapes like circles, arrows, or lines.

Dating of the rock art is quite difficult unless the content shows historical elements: Horses, rifles, or ships would suggest a date after 1700 A.D., while atlatls (spear throwers) would indicate sometime before the Birth of Christ, because bows are supposed to have replaced atlatls around then. Modern scientific methods like Carbon 14 or tree ring analysis can only be employed if the rock art can be associated with organic substances like bones or wood, but it is not effective on the rock itself. Weathering is another clue, although much more vague. However, if a comparison of photos from 1900 and 2000 revealed minimal changes in weathering, then the work could be quite old indeed.

The final method is analyzing the lichen growing on the engravings, but this does not seem to have yielded reliable results yet. (I wonder if the Carbon 14 method can be used on the lichen).

The age of the petroglyphs at Lake Pend Oreille is probably almost impossible to determine beyond a vague speculative range, because they do not contain images of a “historical” nature and scientific dating methods are not of much use in dating engravings on a geologically ancient rock. However, a late nineteenth century photograph published by Science Magazine (1893) proves that they existed at least a century ago. The two hundred year old journals of David Thompson(1) do not mention these carvings even though he used Hope Peninsula as a base for exploration and trading furs between 1809 and 1811. Indeed, he had even taken a four hour long stroll around the peninsula on September 19, 1809 without confirming their presence. But his diaries did not exhaustively mention every possible detail of his exploration of the North American interior, and the presence of indigenous rock engravings might not have been all that noteworthy considering that he spent several years immersed in the Great Plains and Columbia Plateau Indian cultures.

A Possible Deer

Although the date of the petroglyphs at Lake Pend Oreille is unknown, they are likely associated with the Kalispel Indians, one of the many groups that have inhabited the Columbia River Plateau for more than two millennia.

This Amerindian region lies between the Cascades and the Rocky Mountains and is largely centered on the Columbia River and her tributaries. Some of the most prominent groups within the region are the Yakima, Palouse, Spokane, Colville, Nez Perce, Flathead, Kootenai, and the Kalispel. The various tribes interacted with each other at pan tribal gathering sites like The Dalles or Kettle Falls, both of which were important fisheries on the Columbia River. The Kalispel Indians, also known by the French name Pend Oreille for their “ear hangings,” once occupied an area that extended from Thompson Falls, MT to Northeastern Washington. The Upper Kalispel largely lived in Montana along the Clark Fork River, and the Lower Kalispel lived along the Pend Oreille River drainage in Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia.

The presence of the petroglyphs at Lake Pend Oreille probably correlates with the pan tribal gathering area known as Nacemci, or Indian Meadows, near the mouth of the Clark Fork. This area is presumed to have been a permanent Kalispel village of up to four hundred people and a popular site for gatherings, powwows, and horse races as late as the 1930’s. According to archaeologists, the earliest human inhabitants of the Columbia Plateau migrated into the region following large game at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10-15 thousand years ago. The river and salmon oriented culture developed about 2000 years ago, but still existed when David Thompson’s party arrived about two centuries ago. The annual life pattern of the Plateau Indians was centered on seasonal moves between various fixed sites, such as villages, ideal fishing locations, and harvest sites for roots and plants, particularly camas.

The religious beliefs of the Plateau Peoples focus on the power of nature and spirits that controlled every living and non living entity. Because nature and the spirits are quite powerful, people would quest after a guardian spirit represented by an animal, bird, fish, plant, or place, often through undergoing a period of solitude and fasting or through visiting sacred places like the wilderness, mountain tops, or burial sites.

The medicine man (shaman) played an important role in connecting with the spirits to enable healing, protection, and support for endeavors like hunting. Some of the modern pictographs in North Central Washington are associated with adolescent vision quests, in which the painting of humans, animals, and other such figures plays a role in a young person’s spiritual development.

The hydroelectric dams of the last century have made a dramatic impact on the remnants of the Plateau lifestyle as they inundated sacred islands, burial sites, important fishing sites, petroglyphs and pictographs. The dam at Albeni Falls on the Pend Oreille River has raised the water level in the lake to the point that some of the petroglyphs are threatened by deterioration by periodic inundation. Some effort has been made to preserve the sites, but the emphasis is more on salvage documentation to preserve their condition prior to the advent of hydroelectric dams and other pressures of increased population. Inundation from the dams, development, and vandalism has probably reduced the likelihood of these petroglyph sites surviving into future centuries.

1906 Photo of the Petroglyphs from the Spokesman Review

Works Cited and Further Reading:

(1) See Janet Hanson’s “Historical view of David Thompson…A follow up to the story of Margarite” posted in the History section of Ruralnorthwest.com for a summary of his career.

Boreson, Keo and Warren R. Peterson. The Petroglyphs at Lake Pend Oreille, Bonner County, Northern Idaho. Report Prepared for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle District. Archaeological and Historical Services, Eastern Washington University: Cheney, WA, 1985.

Cotes, O.J., ed. The Kalispel: People of the Pend Oreille. (Kalispel Tribe: Spokane, 1980).

Fahey, John. The Kalispel Indians. (Univ. of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1986).

Keyser, James D. Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau (University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1992).

Layman, William D. “Riverplaces as Sacred Geography: The Pictographs and Petroglyphs of the Mid-Columbia River,” in Great River of the West: Essays on the Columbia River. Ed. William L. Lang and Robert C. Carriker (University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1999), 53-75.