Debbie Lee
NEH Funds Cultural History of Iconic Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness
By Gail Siegel, College of Liberal Arts
Imagine an English professor researching her subject and you might picture her in a hushed library full of musty volumes. But for writer Debbie Lee, research means flying into the rugged Bitterroot Mountains with bush pilot Dick Walker and a rare opportunity to watch spring chinook salmon spawn in the wild.
Lee, a professor of literature and creative writing at Washington State University, received a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities' "We the People" project to write a cultural history of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana.
Lower Selway River
"[The] project focuses on an iconic American wilderness with an unanalyzed and largely unknown cultural history but with a wealth of resources for writing such a history," said Lee.
Co-PI's Debbie Lee and Dennis Baird at the Moose Creek Ranger Station, where they collected historical documents and photos.
Over the next three years, Lee will work on completing her book Wild Lives: A Cultural History of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and in the process collect oral histories, primary documents and photographs that will reside with the University of Idaho Libraries' Wilderness Archive. The collection will be made widely available to researchers, scholars, wilderness practitioners, and the public through a web-based exhibit.
The NEH grant is a collaborative effort between Lee and University of Idaho librarian Dennis Baird. Baird, who founded the Wilderness Archive, will do the majority of document collection, while Lee will conduct oral history interviews and write the book.
"I see this as a real opportunity for WSU and UI to join forces to showcase the great beauty and power of this part of the American West," Lee said.
Ben Bunting and Jim Trout look at a land deed from 1893 in the University of Idaho Wilderness Archive. The deed comes from the first homestead in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, filed by the Shissler brothers, who were outlaws. Their homestead later became the area's first ranger station.
The grant also funds work by digital archive specialist Deborah Green and Lee's two Ph.D. graduate students, Ben Bunting and Jim Trout.
"Deborah, Ben, and Jim were instrumental in helping to conceptualize the project," Lee said. Both Bunting and Trout are writing dissertations that deal with ecological interpretations of literature and culture.
Lee will build her cultural history of the Selway-Bitterroot by incorporating multiple perspectives from varied sources including archaeological resources, traditions of American Indians, oral histories, historic and contemporary photographs, secondary historical sources, secondary ecologic theory and ecocriticism sources, and firsthand accounts by explorers, missionaries, writers, scientists, homesteaders, outfitters, advocates, and wilderness workers.
"Part of my process involves fleshing out the lives of individuals whose destinies intertwine with one another as well as with the larger narrative of place," said Lee.
Some of the characters in the Selway-Bitterroot story include the outlaw Shissler brothers, whose cabin became the area's first ranger station; Charlie Gallagher, an African-American fire crew cook; Mary Ellen Dodds Rees, a lone female homesteader; trapper-turned-fire-chief Bud Moore; and Walker himself, a former U.S. Forest Service wilderness ranger and photographer who has been documenting the Selway-Bitterroot for decades.
Co-PI Dennis Baird and pilot Dick Walker on the airfield at Moose Creek Ranger Station.
Lee's long-term goal is to increase understanding of the relationship between wilderness and human history in America.
"My aim is to demonstrate that the Selway-Bitterroot, and by extension all wilderness areas, are living histories," Lee said.
George Case, ranger in the Selway-Bitterroot Primitive Area in the 1920s and '30s. Case was 1/4 Cherokee and the longest-serving ranger in the Selway-Bitterroot. His 16-mm movies, photos, and documents make up some of the primary research material of Lee's project.
The 1.3-million-acre Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years, yet according to Lee it remains an intact ecosystem that upholds the idea of wilderness as defined by Congress in the Wilderness Act of 1964.
The Wilderness Act states, in part, "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
"The Selway-Bitterroot's cultural history is unique because it provides a lens into how and why individuals shaped a landscape such that today it retains its wild character," said Lee.
The NEH "We the People" program is designed to encourage and enhance the teaching, study, and understanding of American history, culture, and democratic principles in order to help Americans appreciate their heritage and understand their rights and responsibilities as citizens.
Lee received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. She is the author of several books, including Romantic Liars: Obscure Women Who Became Impostors and Challenged an Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Literature, Science, and Exploration: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
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