The furor over the proposed reintroduction of grizzly bears to the Bitterroot Mountains here has quieted somewhat; the newspaper clippings on my desk grow crisp at the edges, but a quote shouts up at me from the middle of a coffee ring.

"We're fed up with you guys sitting somewhere back in the East and deciding what's going to happen Out here. We're sick and tired of having stuff shoved down our throats by people back somewhere who think they're better than us," an angry man yelled at a public hearing in Salmon last October, when the public was invited to comment upon the proposal.

A few miles south of Salmon, almost two hundred years ago, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark crossed the Continental Divide and met a band of Shoshones on the Lemhi River. Cameahwait, their leader, turned out to be a brother of the expedition's Shoshone interpreter, Sacajawea. He gave Lewis and Clark an earful about the political situation in the northern Rockies.

"They told me," Lewis wrote, "that to avoid their enemies ... they were obliged to remain in the interior of these mountains at least two-thirds of the year, where they suffered .... great hardships for the want of food...."

"But this,' added Cameahwait,....would not be the case if we had guns. We could then live in the country of buffalo and eat as our enemies do, and not be compelled to hide ourselves in these mountains and live on roots and berries as the bear do. We do not fear our enemies when placed on an equal footing with them."

So the native people of Idaho began, at the moment of their first contact with white men, a long state tradition of dependence upon the outside world. In the footsteps of the Lewis and Clark Expedition came beaver trappers. Cameahwait's people joined their fortunes to the fur trade, in a bargain which gave them guns, made them mobile and prosperous, and in the end destroyed them, and the beaver, and began the degradation of Idaho's rivers and streams.

White miners and ranchers eventually forced the Lemhi Shoshone from their mountain homeland and sent them into exile on the Snake River plain. They were a peaceful people, led by a succession of chiefs who remembered Cameahwait and Sacajawea and Lewis and Clark. They stood with the whites during the Nez Perce and Bannock Wars, but in the end their fate was the fate of many others: loss and exile.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, as Idaho ships wheat to Pacific Rim countries through the inland port of Lewiston, the Snake River dams that make the commerce possible have destroyed the great salmon runs. We traded a ten thousand year old economy based on Chinook and Sockeye to get Toyotas and Hondas. We are still a colony: only the trade goods have changed.

Our minerals are unearthed by giant Canadian mining companies. Our old growth pines fell long since to the saws of corporations now chewing up the forests of Siberia. Yet still we welcome them, these outsiders, and never see them for what they are: the guys sitting somewhere back East, thinking they are better than us.

Take it, we say. Take the gold and the trees. Leave us only the wages that will buy us, for a little while, things from outside. Put something back? Salmon? Wolves? Grizzlies? Admit that we have never been our own masters, but only wards of governments and big corporations? Admit to our­selves that we are geographically, economically, and culturally marginal, and always have been?

For six generations, our ancestors in Pennsylvania and Virginia, Ohio and Missouri and Nebraska, gobbled up land because their astonishing fecundity gave them no choice. In the seventh generation, a bare century after Cameahwait's hungry eyes burned into Lewis', our grandparents awoke to find the land filled from sea to sea. They left their fathers' farms to work for wages, in a decades-long shift that divested most of us of any tie to the soil. But for awhile, in the logging towns and mines and grain fields of the West, we could forget that the West was, even then, mostly urban. We saw ourselves as strong and independent, and forgot that Westerners were first in line to ask the despised Federal government to remove the Nez Perce and the Shoshones, kill the wolves, and build the dams. We forgot that the nation, and not our individual states and counties, owned the West.

Now our absentee landlord returns, to shove stuff down their throats, to remind us that the mountains are not ours, after all. Now our valleys fill with strangers far richer than we, who never worked in a sawmill or mine, who never thought of the armed forces as a viable career option for their children. They have the education that we never thought we needed. They hear the quiet that we don't hear; see the beauty that we don't notice. They love the wolf and grizzly that we hate, and for the same reasons. They embrace for its freedom the same wilderness that we fear because we cannot control it.

We will lose this battle, as we have lost all the others. And from his long sleep beneath a pile of stones on a ridge top above the Lemhi River, I imagine Cameahwait stirring in astonishment as his spirit finds, at last, something in common with the strange people who made promises they never intended to keep. As the November snows creep down the Bitterroots and blow into the crevices of his grave mound, I hear his ghost laughing at us while the world spins out from under our feet.

"Good," he says. "Now you know how we felt."

IWP member Louise Wagenknecht of Leadore is a professional journalist , 02000