“I wrote this story about my version of why the Agai Dika people walk and run up Lemhi Pass each year, but I did not know what to title it. So I asked my friend, Leo Ariwite, an Agai Dika, about a title, and he furnished me with one.” – Orlan Svingen
“Where the land meets the sky, that’s where my heart is.”
Lemhi Pass sits atop the border of Montana and Idaho. The largest city to the west is Salmon, Idaho, and to the east it is Dillon, Montana. The passageway is best known to non-Indians as the pass Lewis and Clark crossed on their journey west.
Less well known is that Lemhi Pass connected the Agai Dikas or the salmon eaters (later referred to by the government as the “mixed-band of Shoshone, Bannock and Sheepeater” people) to their aboriginal homelands in southwestern Montana. The mixed-band had numerous camps in the Three Forks watershed that served as seasonal sites for their annual buffalo hunts to the east. They hunted buffalo east of Lemhi Pass in Montana, and they fished for salmon west of it in Idaho.
Because Lewis and Clark took this route west, Lemhi Pass has developed an almost singular westward orientation and historical meaning for most non-Indians, but for the Agai Dikas, the mixed band, the eastern orientation of the pass symbolized their route to buffalo hunts in southwestern Montana and beyond, northeast of Yellowstone.
Fort Lemhi, the 1855-1858 Mormon outpost just south of Salmon, Idaho, prompted settlers and federal officials to refer to the Shoshone, Bannock, and Sheepeaters people living in the fort’s vicinity as the “Lemhis.” When President Grant established an Executive Order reservation for them on February 12, 1875, he named it the Lemhi Valley Indian Reservation.
With the loss of their reservation in 1905 and their removal to the Fort Hall Reservation 220 miles to the south beginning in 1907, Lemhi Pass came to symbolize something quite different for these people.
Federal officials and the military confronted “Lemhis” who opposed removal to the Fort Hall Indian Reservation. Stories abound among Agai Dikas at Fort Hall about their ancestors being forced from their homes, even at gun point by some accounts. A principal removal route to Fort Hall for those 500 or so “Lemhis” was east up Lemhi Pass, down into Montana, and then south to Fort Hall.
Since then, Agai Dikas have returned each summer to the Tendoy School site at the base of Lemhi Pass to walk or run the 12 miles up Lemhi Pass. They do this to honor the memory of their ancestors who crossed the pass for hundreds of years to reach their buffalo campsites in Montana, but who later climbed Lemhi Pass for the last time in 1907 when they were removed to the south. A young boy might run up Lemhi Pass now just to make his grandfather proud of him.
Today they gather at Tendoy School early on a Saturday morning for prayers led by an Elder who blesses the runners and smudges them with sage. All participants, American Indians and non-Indians alike, collect that year’s specially-designed walk/run t-shirt, and the run begins. Water stations abound along the dirt road, painted salmon-shaped mile markers count the miles, and tribal police patrol the runners’ route on four-wheelers.
Non-Indians are welcome, and they walk away from the experience enriched by the beauty of the setting, and the loving sight of grandmothers using walkers being attended to by grandchildren. You might pass an elder using two walking sticks, causing one to wonder if he made it to the top. He did.
The run up Lemhi Pass (elevation 7,373 feet) gives historical depth, meaning, and texture to their forebearers: Cameahwait, Sacajawea, Snag, and Tendoy and to their people who lived on both sides of Lemhi Pass.
osvingen.com 