WEIPPE'S EFFORTS

    From Orofino, I headed up the a steep grade to what the Weippe residents call "the hilltop." From a distance, the Weippe Prairie appeared to be a blue lake set surrounded by green grass, but as when I reached the historical marker it turned out to be a field of camas flowers. Weippe was preparing for the first camas festival to coincide with the flowering of this delicately colored plant, the same one that in 1805 Meriwether Lewis noticed when his group encountered three Indian boys from what came to be called the Nez Perce tribe.

Weippe was one of the smaller places I visited and one whose marginal economic base had recently been dealt a severe blow: the closing of a giant Potlatch wood processing plant some miles away. Many people in the area had lost jobs, and elementary school enrollment in neighboring Pierce dropped drastically from families moving out of the area in search of work. Nancy Webster, a local educator and historian, says Weippe today is a "sad community." Webster heard about MIRA from Mary Emery with whom she had done a local history workshop long before the Kellogg project. Another group of towns, organized by Boise consultant Jim Birdsall, had tentative acceptance of their proposal but needed participation from other small towns. Webster said, "We had conference call for Weippe and talked with the accepted MIRA group who interrogated us. Several of us in Weippe worked up a profile of our community, a very honest one, and we had to get it to the Caroline Carpenter via email. It took all this technology and people who did not normally work together. We had three sleepless nights waiting for their judgment. After we were accepted, Weippe folks volunteered in great numbers." The group available for training numbered about twenty-five, but some of those attended very little. Still, they met the required attendance and began planning for the projects.