What Does It Say?

By Rick Just

I grew up along the Blackfoot River in eastern Idaho, not far from the town of Blackfoot. Given the name of the river and town, one might think the Blackfeet Tribe played a key role in the history of the area. They did not.

A couple of miles from our house, Shoshone or Bannock people left behind the “Indian writing” that I grew up hearing about. The river leaves the deep canyon it cut and meanders along for a few miles between the mountains on the south and Presto Bench on the north.

That secluded valley was a wintering spot for the tribes and in 1870 was a homesteading spot for the Just family [see “Presto—Spotlight City,” IDAHO magazine, April 2024].

Many times in the summers of my youth, I explored the lava rocks on which someone had drawn strange symbols centuries earlier. Along the upper edge of the cliffs, you could see redoubts: rocks piled for native men to hide behind and for me to imagine what they were hiding from.

I heard only vague stories about the possible meaning of the rock writing. One was that scientists from the Smithsonian Institution had come to document the petroglyphs in the 1920s. That story, as it turns out, was a bit inflated. John E. Rees studied the petroglyphs along the river in 1926. He sent that study to the Smithsonian.