Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1889

Around the Nez Perce reservation, there were numerous land-hungry persons who waited eagerly for the reservation to be allotted. In 1889, the government sent a special agent, Alice C. Fletcher, an ethnologist who had been associated with Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, to divide the Nez Perce reservation. Fletcher, an ardent advocate of the Dawes Act, had already carried out allotments among the Omaha and Winnebago Indians. Accompanied by a photographer friend, E. Jane Gay, she spent four summers among the Nez Perces, completing her assignment in 1893. (pp. 164)