The Medicine Tree

Deep in the Rocky Mountain wilderness, hidden under stone bluffs beside the East Fork of the Bitterroot River, concealed in an area almost impassable to a horseman, stood a tall ponderosa pine.  It was an ancient pine, having taken root around the time that King James took the throne from Queen Elizabeth and workers in the Vatican completed St. Peter’s Basilica.  Its scaly bark had withstood the chills of the Little Ice Age, and its seeds had fed innumerable fed squirrels as its cones clattered onto rocks below.  Its trunk had survived fires nearly beyond counting; its needles had endured winter freezes that no human recorded.  The tree’s lifespan overlapped not only with the life of King James, but also with mine.  It lived into the 1990s.

Embedded deep in the trunk of this tree, about five feet above the ground, was the skull of an unusually large bighorn sheep.  Two-thirds of one of the ram’s horns, and most of the skull, was buried in the wood.  It had been that way for as long as anyone could remember.  Alexander Ross, leading a group of fur trappers, recorded the tree’s existence in 1824.  “Out of a large pine five feet from root projects a ram's head,” he wrote, “the horns of which are transfixed to the middle. The natives cannot tell when this took place . . .”   Warren Ferris, another trapper, found the tree in 1834.  “The date of its existence has been lost in the lapse of ages, and even tradition is silent as to the origin of its remarkable situation,” wrote Ferris.  “The oldest of Indians can give no other account of it, than that it was there precisely as at present, before their father’s great grandfathers were born.”

Because humans are explainers, legends emerged about the tree.  Ross recorded an Indian story that when the first hunter reached the area, he shot an arrow at a bighorn sheep, wounding him.  Enraged, the bighorn charged the hunter, who lept behind the tree.  The animal buried his horn in the tree when he missed the hunter.  Another story tells that Coyote, passing along the Bitterroot after a long journey, was confronted by an irascible ram who battled all passers-by.  The ram threatened Coyote.  Affecting awe for the ram’s physique, Coyote cooed that the ram must be very powerful.  “I am very powerful,” said the ram.  “And I fight with my horns.  With my sharp horns.”  Coyote appraised the ram’s horns.  “Prove your power,” he said.  “Prove your power first by striking this tree.  Then you may do with me as you wish.”  When the ram embedded his horns in the tree, Coyote slit his throat.

Because humans are creators of symbols, the tree has taken various meanings.  Some Indians placed hair inside the exposed horn to bring good luck.  Others left offerings at the tree so that their wishes would be granted.  Still others told that, because Coyote had vanquished the pugnacious ram at this tree, the tree had given humans mastery over the beasts.  In the days of the fur trappers, as Ferris recorded, local Indians seldom passed the tree without leaving an offering of beads, shells, feathers, or some other ornament.  Flathead Indians performed ceremonial dances around the tree into the twentieth century.  Today, people of various races drive a half-hour north from Hamilton, Montana along Highway 93 to visit the tree’s decaying trunk.  They go for reasons of their own.

Sometimes, the inspiration provided by the tree has unfortunate artistic consequences.

But the ram’s head no longer sticks out of the Medicine Tree.  In the 1890s, a white pioneer sawed off the horn.  Later, a lumberjack tried to remove the portion of the horn that was still buried in the tree.  The lumberjack failed to extract the horn, but did manage to break off a tip that still protruded from the tree’s bark.  In modern times, the Salish branch of the Flathead tribe had to remove a sign identifying the tree and explaining its significance because of vandalism.  At one point before it died, someone dumped salt atop its roots in an attempt to kill it.  Even in 1834, Ferris’s party could not pass the ram’s horn without trying to dislodge it.  The horn, Ferris wrote, was “entombed in the body of [the] pine tree, so perfectly solid and firmly, that a heavy blow of an axe did not start it from its place.”

This cries out for explanation.

For untold years, the ram’s head remained imbedded in the ponderosa pine beside the stone bluff along the East Fork where a horseman could scarcely pass.  Indians venerated the tree, left gifts beside it, performed rituals before it.  The tree’s location was well-known to large numbers of Indians, but still the skull remained undisturbed.  It remained lodged in the tree where it had been imbedded for longer than anyone could recall; longer than the Flatheads’ oral tradition could trace.  But the ram’s head could not survive the arrival of white settlers.  Upon discovering the ram’s skull marvelously stuck in the trunk of an ancient pine, the cultural descendants of Europeans tried to unstick it.  As soon as 1834 they were whacking it with heavy blows from axes, pounding on it with lumberjack equipment, cutting it apart with saws.  Surely this points to a cultural difference.

There are some myths I’m sick of hearing.  Some people hallow Native Americans as a race that lived in harmony with Earth and with each other, whose decisions were marked by a sagacious appreciation for future generations, who maintained a peaceful and indefinitely sustainable lifestyle.  A morally superior people.  That’s untrue.  There were wide cultural variations between tribes, just as among the European nations from which whites came, but Native Americans built giant cities like Cahokia and Tenochtitlan, fought bitterly amongst each other, tortured their captives in horrible ways, and assisted in overexploiting beaver and buffalo populations as soon as the white man’s markets gave them an incentive to do so.  Other written treatments of Native Americans – principally older sources, like the fur trappers’ journals – present Indians as unfeeling brutes with a weak mental capacities.  From Warren Ferris: the plains were “roamed and infested by hordes of savages, among whom theft and robbery are accounted any thing but crime, and whose scruples on the score of murder are scarcely a sufficient shield against the knife or the tomahawk.  Strength and courage alone command their respect.”  From Osborne Russell: “The Caw or Kanzas Indians are the most filthy indolent and degraded sett of human beings I ever saw.”  From Francis Parkman: “without [the] powerful stimulus [of war] [the Dakota Sioux] would be like the unwarlike tribes from beyond the mountains, who are scattered among the caves and rocks like beasts, living on roots and reptiles.  The latter have little of humanity except the form . . .”  That’s also untrue.  The truth about the Indians lies in the unremarkable middle: they were neither morally superior nor intellectually inferior.  They were basically the same as the European descendants who wrote about them, only placed in a different environment and exposed to different developmental forces.  In other words, boringly similar to you and me.

But the story of the Medicine Tree demands something more.  Despite the biological similarities between Indians and whites, cultural differences obviously existed.  Why did the skull remain intact for untold generations, jutting mysteriously from the bark of a ponderosa pine, then get hacked from its place when whites began pouring into the Rockies?  Maybe it was because most early white passers-by were visitors who identified with communities centered elsewhere, and for whom the Rockies were merely a place to extract wealth.  They were extractors, not conservers.  The Indians who visited the Medicine Tree, in contrast, lived in the region and may have cared more about the long-term charm of their surroundings.  Or maybe the white descendants of Europeans saw the natural world as raw and imperfect, to be improved or mined by humankind as humans saw fit, to a degree that the Indians did not.  While Native Americans did engineer the world around them to suit their own needs –digging irrigation ditches, deliberately setting fires to encourage new growth – it remains true that their societies were not as technologically advanced as those of western Europe.  Maybe the opinion that the works of humankind constituted improvements on nature was not as deeply ingrained in Indian cultures as it was in cultures tracing their lineage to Europe.  Or maybe it was as simple as this: Indians believed that nature had power over them, and whites believed that they had power over nature.

Who knows.  As the bodies swirl and juices mix in the American melting pot, maybe it matters less.  Or maybe, as we grapple with our tangled history and blurring ethnic identities, it matters more.  At any rate, there isn’t much left of the medicine tree.  After disease, a big storm, and the construction of a road near its root system, all that remains is a tall white stump.  But they say that deep inside the stump, buried from view, locked in place by the knotted wood that grew around it, there remains one abnormally large sheep horn.  It’s been there for centuries.