Jane Gay, novice photographer, left a remarkable legacy of the months she and Alice C. Fletcher, Special Agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, spent in Idaho on the Nez Perce Reservation. In addition to taking more than 400 photographs, Gay wrote twenty-seven lengthy letters that tell of their experiences among the Nez Perce during the process of allotting the Tribe. The letters vividly describe the extremes of their experiences -- with both people and the Idaho landscape and climate. What Jane Gay observed among the Nez Perce was often in contrast to the stereotypical images of nineteenth-century whites. Her letters and photographs provide a unique view of the Nez Perce at a crucial period in their history -- the implementation of general allotment, a policy now understood as devastating to Native Americans.

Jane Gay, born in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1830, was well educated, taught school, and worked as a clerk for the Post Office. In 1883, she retired and traveled in Europe. Gay lived as an economically independent woman most of her life. After a chance reacquaintance in 1888 with anthropologist Alice Fletcher, a nationally prominent Indian rights' reformer, Jane Gay traveled to Idaho as companion, cook, and housekeeper for Fletcher, who had been appointed to allot the Nez Perce Tribe.

Allotment was supposedly the solution to the "Indian question," the hotly debated nineteenth-century issue among whites of what to do about Native Americans' lands and rights. Many believed its solution had been found in the General Allotment Act of 1887, often called the Dawes bill after its sponsor, Senator Henry Dawes. The bill was the product of much debate and effort by humanitarian "Indian reformers" who by the 1880s sought to bring Native Americans into the mainstream of American life instead of segregating them on tribally held reservations.

Allotment or severalty -- owning property by individual right -- would grant every member of an Indian tribe a plot of land (an allotment) and United States citizenship. All tribal "surplus" land left after each individual (man, woman, and child) had chosen land (been allotted) could be bought by the government from a tribe and sold to settlers, who were seeking new opportunities to start farms. The theory was that the Indians could see by their white neighbors' example how to move from their tribal existence -- its language and traditions -- into the dominant Christian, Euroamerican civilization. Allotment was intended to force Indians to convert from their mutually supportive tribal ways into economically independent (by white standards), white-educated, property-owning citizens with equal rights.

Breaking down tribal culture and language and assimilating white ways were thought to provide Native Americans with the means to survive the sweeping effects of white encroachment. This assault on tribes was already devastating enough; the "surplus" land sale provision of the Dawes bill was disastrous. It is estimated that allotment cost Native American tribes in the United States all but approximately 2% of their original territory; it was not an estimate but a fact for the Nez Perce.

Before 1855, the Nez Perce had traditionally lived on territory (in present-day Idaho, Washington, and Oregon) now estimated to be in excess of ten million acres. After the Treaty of 1855, the size of that territory was reduced to about seven million acres. When the Treaty of 1863 was negotiated (because gold was discovered on Nez Perce land), the Nez Perce retained 785,000 acres -- losing over six million acres. Allotment further reduced tribal lands by another 575,000 acres and the Nez Perce ended the allotment process owning less than 200,000 acres.

The delayed effects of allotment were equally devastating. By a quarter of a century after allotment, much of the remaining land had passed out of Nez Perce ownership because of leasing to settlers, the lack of credit (the land was held in trust and the Nez Perce had no legal control over it), debt, and complex problems with inheritance.

The results of the policy of allotment were the separation of Native Americans from their vast traditional tribal land holdings, a weakening of tribalism, and the loss of many Native languages and traditional ways.

"Her Majesty," Special Agent Alice C. Fletcher, was the Allotting Agent for the Nez Perce. Called the "mother of allotment," she played an important role in shaping, lobbying for, and implementing the Dawes allotment bill. Fletcher believed that only by owning property individually and attaining the rights of citizenship could individual Indians survive and remain secure in the face of white encroachment. She advocated breaking down tribal influences that held individuals back from assimilating white culture.

As an anthropologist, she lived among and studied the Omaha Indians in the early 1880s, and was afterward appointed Special Agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to allot the Omahas. In 1887, after the passage of the Dawes bill, she was sent to allot the Winnebagos and, in 1889, the Nez Perce, arriving twelve years after the Nez Perce War of 1877 and attempted flight of the Nez Perce into Canada under the leadership of White Bird, Looking Glass, Ollokot, and Joseph.

Alice Fletcher's otherwise remarkable accomplishments as a pioneering anthropologist and unique nineteenth-century woman are overshadowed, in retrospect, by her participation in the allotment process that proved so destructive to Native Americans. To her credit, she acted in good faith and believed that allotment was a "great change" that would benefit Native Americans; she was also scrupulously honest in her personal dealings with them, as is clear from the episodes of Fletcher's contact with the Nez Perce in the letters of Jane Gay.

When Fletcher's allotment fieldwork was completed in 1892, Fletcher and Gay returned to Washington, D.C. Fletcher resumed her anthropological work; Jane Gay assembled the letters she had written from Idaho and illustrated them with her own photographs. She called these hand-written letters "Choup-nit-ki, With the Nez Perces," now in The Schlesinger Library. The letters, with selected photographs, are published as With the Nez Perces: Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889-92, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie and Joan T. Mark, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 1981.

Jane Gay continued to travel and by 1908 made her home in England. She died there in 1919 at the age of 89 in "Kamiah," a home named after her Idaho "paradise," the Nez Perce village of Kamiah on the Clearwater River.