The Trouble With Squirrles

The

TRoubLe wITh SQuIrrLEs

by Steven Branting

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be Fellow English novelist Horace Smith defined scandal as “what one half of the world takes pleasure inventing, and the other half in believing.” No community is too small to escape a scandal or two, some of which are clearly crimes, others idle rumor, and a few somewhere in-between. In the spring of 1887, Nez Perce County commissioners found themselves out-maneuvered and embarrassed by a political ploy equal to any twenty-first-century feint. The original Idaho Territory of 1863 comprised what are now Idaho, Montana and like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. — George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872F most of Wyoming, organized into five counties: Boise, Idaho, Missoula, Nez Perces (now Nez Perce) and Shoshone. The Montana and Wyoming Territories soon followed, and the shape of Idaho stabilized. By the mid-1880s, Idaho had thirteen counties, and trouble was brewing. The trail of events in this story began on January 21, 1885, when the Thirteenth Idaho Territorial Legislature passed “an act to encourage the destruction of wild animals in the different counties of the territory.” County commissioners were empowered to determine bounties for “varmints.” The bill specifically named the “cayote [sic], wild cat, fox, lynx, bear, panther, cougar and lion” as subject to the bounty system, the monies for which were to be paid out of the “Current Expense Fund” of the respective counties. In the meantime, political turmoil characterized Nez Perce County. Residents of Moscow had long insisted that travel to the county seat in Lewiston was far too difficult. The old Uniontown Grade built by ferryman John Silcott in the 1870s was tortuous and prone to washouts. They even proposed that Moscow could sponsor a second set of county offices. Lewiston dismissed the proposal out of hand, quickly pointing to the fact that Moscow was an unincorporated town. The 1880 census had counted only 76 people in the village, but the arrival of the Oregon Railroad & Navigation Company’s tracks in 1885 had set off a building boom. Subsequent events would divide the county and its commissioners—Harvey Bundy, Charles Leeper and John Naylor. Bundy and Naylor lived on the Palouse, while Leeper lived in Lewiston. Latah (originally Lath-Toh) and Kootenai Counties were first formed in part by an act of the territorial legislature in Lewiston on December 22, 1864, and attached to Nez Perce for all civil and judicial purposes. The act provided that when fifty or more inhabitants desired to complete a county’s organization, they should apply by petition to the governor, who was authorized to appoint three “discreet and well qualified citizens of the county as a board of county commissioners” with power to fill offices by appointment until an election could be held. Foiled in three attempts to formalize the county and after a spirited media campaign, Moscow residents ambitiously changed their tactics.

In early 1887, the commissioners received a petition signed by the required one-tenth of the “qualified voters” who were tax payers in the county. An analysis of census data demonstrates that no more than 150 signatures would likely have been required to place the matter before the commissioners. Although the document has long been lost to history, conclusions can be easily drawn from the events that followed. The petition sought to enact a bounty on local ground squirrels, which were not named in the original “varmint act.” On April 11, the first day of its 1887 spring term, the commission responded with a 4-cent bounty for each squirrel killed in the county. Today, that is about $1.10 based on the costs of caring for the food, clothing and shelter of an average family. The commissioners invoked section three of the bounty bill to fund the project with an ad valorem levy from the general fund of 50 cents per $100 of “taxable property,” or .5 percent. An official “Squirrel Fund” was established. To put those numbers into some perspective, ½ percent of $100,000 is $500, which would be about $14,000 today, to control the local Urocitellus columbianus. With so much money at stake, a plausible case would have to be made painting the cute little squirrels as dangerous and deadly pests deserving mass eradication. Bundy, Leeper and Naylor had no idea of what they had unleashed. Given the farming and sometime ranching economy of the county, humans came into contact with the squirrels. Columbian ground squirrels do eat many of the same foods as free-ranging cattle, but no one raised that complaint. Today, unlike the medical community of the 1880s, we now know that squirrels can be hosts for spotted fever ticks and may function as natural repositories for the St. Louis encephalitis virus after being bitten by infected mosquitos. Contrary to popular belief, squirrels rarely if ever carry rabies and have not been known to cause rabies among humans in the United States. The dog whistle that fired the public’s imagination in 1887 was “plague.” While it is true that squirrels are a common carrier for the fleas that transmit bubonic plague, no cases of the “black plague” were confirmed anywhere in the inland Pacific Northwest until 1936. Armed with an ill-informed public opinion, poison and rifles, local hunters responded with a vengeance, and political events took some strange and coincidental turns. What no one mentioned was that both sexes of Columbian ground squirrels in Idaho do not come out of hibernation until early May. The county commissioners assembled in Lewiston on Monday, July 11, 1887, for their summer term. On Tuesday, they incorporated Moscow as a result of a petition from a majority of the now six hundred residents of the town. Spearheading the Palouse group were two local well-heeled businessmen—William McConnell, described in an early history of north Idaho as a “merchant prince,” and Willis Sweet.

Meanwhile, the commissioners seemed to be having second thoughts about the squirrel fund. On Wednesday, July 13, they requested a legal interpretation from Alfred Quackenbush, the county’s district attorney, regarding the powers of the board to enact and maintain the fund. However, there were bills to be paid. On Friday, July 15, “upwards of $5,000 worth of scalps were presented” for validation and payment. The county clerk noted $4,789.76 in the margin of the second page of entries. Adjusted for inflation, that amounts to $133,000. The largest bill—$1,915 ($53,000)—came from McConnell, McGuire & Company, which submitted nearly 48,000 scalps. Yes, William McConnell’s company. Following closely in the list of payees were the firms of Durnham and Kaufmann and the M. J. Shields & Company, also Moscow businesses. The total bills from just those three Moscow groups amounted to $3,445.92 ($96,000). On close examination, one finds that commissioners Harvey Bundy and John Naylor submitted bills for payment. The first list of more than fifty individuals and companies contains few names identified with Lewiston. So that answers the question as to who signed the petition. On October 15, the commission authorized a final payment of $60.20 ($1,700) for an additional 1,500 scalps. More than 121,000 squirrels paid the price in Moscow’s plan to drain the county coffers and weaken Lewiston’s hold on the county seat. By the time the commissioners reconvened in January 1888, the tensions between Lewiston and Moscow were the subject of debate in Washington, D.C. Fred Dubois owed Sweet some favors. Following Dubois’s election as territorial delegate to Congress, Sweet was appointed as U. S. attorney for Idaho, although he was not admitted to the bar until the following year, when he was appointed judge of the first judicial district of Idaho and later an associate justice of the Idaho Supreme Court — a curiously fast career track indeed. Dubois teamed up with Senator John Mitchell of Oregon to successfully steer a very unique bill through Congress. President Grover Cleveland signed the legislation on May 14, 1888, to create Latah County — the only time Congress has ever created a county. McConnell and Sweet had finally gotten their way. Both would be elected to Congress, and McConnell would become Idaho’s third governor. Sweet successfully arranged for the placement of the University of Idaho in Moscow in return for his opposition to the longtime and popular secessionist movement in North Idaho. During the 1870s and 1880s, Nez Perce County had been the focus of several attempts to create a new territory combining northern Idaho and eastern Washington. The initiative was finally defeated by an 1887 presidential pocket veto and a congressional rejection in February 1888, a move that would pave the way for statehood. Two dusty, hardscrabble Idaho towns would now take very different paths. As actor Donald Crisp says at the end of the film National Velvet: “How can there be so many currents in such a little puddle?”

Above: Moscow, Idaho Territory, street scene, 1884. The McConnell store is seen on the right. University of Idaho Library Special Collections, 5-001-13c

Next: Nez Perce County Commissioners, 1887. Left to right: Harvey Bundy, Charles Leeper, John Naylor. Branting Archives

Below, left to right: Fred Dubois, circa 1890. Library of Congress, William McConnell, circa 1883. University of Idaho Library Special Collections, PG 3-0148b, Willis Sweet, circa 1893. Library of Congress