With the Nez Perces: Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889-1892

In 1889 the U.S. government sent the anthropologist Alice Fletcher to Idaho to allot the Nez Perce Reservation. She was accompanied by E. Jane Gay, who served as cook, housekeeper, photographer, and general factotum. In this collection of her letters, Gay describes in sprightly fashion their encounters with feuding agents, hostile white squatters, and a Nez Perce tribe divided over and puzzled by this latest government program.

Frederick E. Hoxie is director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, Newberry Library. Joan T. Mark is the author of A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians, also a Bison Book.