STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
	Peace medals of all shapes and sizes were distributed between 1789 and 1896.

He was buried in a canoe, facing east, and wrapped in tule mats. At his feet, wound in printed cotton and leaves of tobacco, all tucked inside a leather pouch, was a medal of silver, emblazoned with an image of Thomas Jefferson.

The medal, so carefully wrapped and so obviously significant, is believed to be one of the original peace medals given out by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as the Corps of Discovery explored the West.

One of only a handful known to exist in the Northwest nearly 200 years later, it was unearthed in 1964 by archaeologists exhuming Indian graves near present-day Lyons Ferry State Park in Franklin County. The graves were destined to be drowned by the floodwaters of Lower Monumental Dam.

The identity of the man, and how he got the medal, remains shrouded in mystery — appropriate, perhaps, considering that much about the history of the medals since the time they were bestowed is murky.

To many Indians, they are sacred objects. Brought on the journey by Lewis and Clark to curry favor in a vast land, utterly new and strange to the explorers, the medals are reminders of a time when tribes were understood as sovereign nations to be reckoned with.

"It means to us today a time when our ancestors were living a good life," said Armand Minthorn, a spiritual leader and member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation's board of trustees. "They were living in harmony with the land that we live on. They were free. They were practicing their religion. They were utilizing their sacred foods."

In packing the medals on their journey, Lewis and Clark were taking a tip from the British, Spanish and French, who already had established the practice of giving medals to Indians. The medals — given on behalf of presidents of the United States and emblazoned with the message "Peace and Friendship" — are also testimony to the promises to the tribes that were broken.

"They were told these medals came from a great man, and they were convinced these things had great meaning. But they were nothing less than tokens of lies," said Jeff Van Pelt, head of cultural-resource protection programs for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Their tribal ancestors received at least six medals, according to the explorers' journals.

That first contact, Van Pelt said, "was the beginning of the end."
 

	STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
	Roberta Conner, director of the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Indian reservation, goes over the route taken by Lewis and Clark as the team came down the Snake River to the Columbia, coming in contact with many tribes in the area.

A long history of medals

Peace medals of all size and description were struck and issued between 1789 and 1896, with the faces of presidents from George Washington through Benjamin Harrison.

Only about 89 peace medals were distributed by Lewis and Clark during their epic two-year journey, including an estimated 32 Jefferson medals. Two hundred years later, it is difficult to know how many authentic medals exist.

Those that do are prized by collectors. One large peace medal sold in 2001 for $115,000 in an auction, an amount thought to be a record price.

Others are in public collections, and some are privately — even secretly — held. The medal found in the burial canoe was transferred to the Nez Perce tribe in 1971, and today hangs at the Nez Perce National Historical Park in Spalding, Idaho, run by the National Park Service.

Other known Northwest medals include a Jefferson peace medal at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland.

Some members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation suspect the medal held by Portland's historic society was found by railroad engineers on an island in the Columbia River near Wallula, a probable burial site.

The Umatilla have not filed a formal claim for the medal — the tribe's priority is repatriation of human remains. But interest in the medal abides.

Ron Pond, 63, a Walla Walla tribal member working on a doctoral dissertation on peace medals at Washington State University, believes the medal was originally given by the explorers to Chief Yellepit, one of the tribe's ancestors.

He is also researching another possible peace medal reclaimed by Walla Walla tribal elder Lillian Hoptowit from a non-Indian artifact dealer.

The explorers first came in contact with Hoptowit's ancestors in October 1805 and again on their return trip eastward in early 1806.

To Hoptowit, that first contact with the explorers is nothing to celebrate. "I hear so much about it, I get tired of it," Hoptowit said of the bicentennial. "I won't participate with it, I didn't welcome them. I wish they had stopped Lewis and Clark from coming through. It sure changed the ways of the people's lives."

Knowledge of the complete history of Hoptowit's medal, which she traces to her grandfather Charging Wolf and Walla Walla Chief Jim Kanine, is still unfolding.

The medal looks similar to a so-called George Washington presidential medal, minted in the early 20th century, but is of very different size.

Hoptowit says she is uncertain who the medal was originally given to, and of its ownership over time. After her grandfather's death, she knows of at least two other tribal members who had it. Then it disappeared for years.

Hoptowit said she traded with a non-Indian artifact collector to get what she believes is her grandfather's medal back. Today, she keeps it in a bank safe-deposit box.

Small and silver-bright, its letters worn nearly smooth by time, the medal is hung from a necklace of trade beads and wampum and is small enough to fit into Hoptowit's weathered palm.

Back when Hoptowit's grandfather kept the medal in a velvet case, her ancestors still traveled mainly by horse, and it was nothing for hunting parties to encounter a grizzly, Hoptowit said. When Charging Wolf packed salmon from the river they were so large the fish draped over both sides of his horse's back.

By the time Lewis and Clark were passing out medals to his ancestors, the Indians knew change was coming: the circulation of Euro-American trade goods, and prophecy by the elders told them as much.

But the explorers were still quite an oddity; they were the first whites their ancestors had seen. While Lewis and Clark are lionized in non-Indian history, Indians remember the explorers differently in recounting their own oral history.

"They were very pitiful people," Minthorn said. "There were many times that their expedition almost didn't happen. They were starving. They were lost. So when they came here, along with the Nez Perce in Idaho, we basically saved their lives."

The tribe's ancestors called the explorers "the upside down people," Van Pelt said. "They were bald-headed men with hair on their chins. We have hair on our head, but not our chins. They also said they were very dirty and stinky, and they didn't think too much of them."

And despite the medals' promise, the young nation's true mission of Westward expansion was soon made clear.

"It might have been peace and friendship for a while," Hoptowit said. "Then all the cheating and lying began."

In the treaty it signed in 1855, Hoptowit's tribe ceded 6 million acres of its homeland to the federal government, and reserved 500,000 acres to itself. But the reservation was cut in half when the government surveyed the Umatilla Reservation in 1871.

Non-Indians reduced it again to 158,000 acres after Congress allotted lands to individual Indians with the surplus declared open for settlement.

Disease brought by non-Indians killed 90 percent of some Indian villages in the West. Indian children were taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools. Missionaries forced Christianity on the Indians. And the government tried to remake the Umatilla's ancestors, with their proud and thriving horse culture and one of the greatest salmon fisheries the world has ever known, into farmers.

"President Jefferson, and those that came after, all they wanted was to have room for the settlers," Minthorn said. "The Indians were in the way."

Roberta Conner, director of the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute at the Umatilla Indian reservation near Pendleton, Ore., says the Umatilla Indians are among the lucky ones: Some tribes have no lands at all. Some no longer live anywhere near their original homelands, and other tribes are not federally recognized — barring them from federal funds, or reservation lands of their own.

As the history of Indian and government relations is retold in the upcoming bicentennial, the medals, with their engraved promised of "Peace and Friendship" can help keep the discussion honest, tribal members say.

"We can't change history," Pond said. "But we can find the truth about things, and reveal it."