For most of her life, Mary Jo Estep had kept a secret. Born in either Idaho or Nevada in 1909 or 1910, she had been adopted at a very young age and raised by her step-parents, Evan and Rita Estep. The family lived in Montana and New Mexico before settling in Toppenish, Washington, in 1924.
In 1934, Estep graduated from the Washington State Normal School (now Central Washington University) in Ellensburg with a degree in music education. While a student, she had excelled at her studies. On several occasions, the student newspaper noted when she was performing piano recitals on campus.
Following graduation, Estep began teaching music in Yakima schools, which she did for the next 40 years, until her retirement in 1974. Over the years, she and her longtime partner, Ruth Sweeney, lived a quiet life that, in addition to work, included tending a large garden.
Estep’s secret, however, came out in 1975, when Oregon writer Dayton O. Hyde, who had written a book, “The Last Free Man,” sent her a letter and asked to visit. His book told the story of a small band of Native Americans, led by a man called Shoshone Mike Daggett, who had fled Idaho’s Fort Hall Indian Reservation in order to return to living off the land in their homeland in Northern Nevada.
Tragically, most were later massacred in an incident that became known as the Battle of Kelley Creek.
After his book had been published, Hyde received a letter from a woman who said she had attended the Washington State Normal School in the 1930s with a young Native American woman named Mary Jo Estep, who had confided that her birth family had been killed by white men in northern Nevada. The woman said Estep was then adopted by the superintendent at Fort Hall. She had lost track of Estep over the years but thought Hyde might be interested in finding her.
Hyde later recounted in his autobiography that he began searching for Estep, calling long-distance operators in the state of Washington, asking for any information on a woman by that name (this was in the pre-Internet days).
“Finally, the Yakima, Washington, operator said that she had a Mary Jo Estep in Yakima,” he said. “I sent Mary Jo a copy of my book, then waited in agony for her to agree to see me. Her adopted parents had kept most of the information about Shoshone Mike from her, and I wasn’t sure what her reaction would be.
“She had been born to wild, free-living Indians, survived the murder of her band, and been raised by white parents as a white girl. I was to learn that during her lifetime, Mary Jo had toured as a concert pianist and taught music in the Washington public school system.”
Hyde said he was as fearful of meeting Estep as she was of meeting him. But after Estep agreed to a visit, Hyde traveled to her home in Yakima.
“It was the beginning of a long friendship that lasted until Mary Jo moved into a rest home,” he wrote.
At one point, Estep visited Hyde in Oregon and showed him the child’s undershirt she was given when she was captured; her own clothing was taken from her and burned.
“In the collar, written in indelible ink, was the name she had been given [at birth], Mary Josephine Mike,” he recalled. “She remembered only a little of her capture.”
According to Hyde, after Estep learned her story, she became a popular inspirational speaker for Native American student groups.
In the book, “Shoshone Mike,” author Frank Bergon recounted the story of Shoshone Mike (Estep’s grandfather) and his band of about a dozen members of the Bannock tribe (despite his nickname, Mike was a member of the Bannock tribe, not the Shoshone tribe). The tribe had their traditional hunting and gathering land taken from them by the U.S. government.
After initially attempting to live on the Fort Hall Reservation in southeastern Idaho, where they were given moldy food and little shelter, the band wandered away from the reservation and, starting in 1890, began to live off the land in the mountains between southern Idaho and northern Nevada.
For the next two decades, the band struggled to survive, which was particularly difficult during the lean winter months. In May 1910, the group had managed to round up wild mustangs to replace several that had died during the previous winter.
One of Mike’s sons, Jack, was shot and killed while driving the horses to camp. In response, Mike’s other sons rode out and, in Bergon’s words, “paid death with death.” They encountered a party of four white men and a woman camped in a draw, who had Jack’s horses. The parties exchanged shots and one of the white men, Frankie Dopp, was killed.
The episode exacerbated the already tense relations between white settlers and Native Americans in northern Nevada. Believing that he and his band would not receive a fair hearing on the matter, Mike led the party deep into the mountain ranges between Nevada and Idaho, away from settlers. For the next several months, the group traveled hundreds of miles through the Nevada-Idaho borderlands and into northern California.
Then, in January 1911, four stockmen were found murdered in a remote canyon about 135 miles north of Reno. Humboldt County (Nevada) Sheriff Graham Lamb formed a posse and set out to find and capture the responsible party. The newspapers of the time reported breathlessly on the posse’s hunt to quell what was described as an “Indian uprising.”
On February 26, they caught up with Mike’s band, which numbered 12, including women and children, in a dry wash north of Golconda, known as Kelley Creek. Gunfire was exchanged and when it was all over, one member of the posse was dead, along with four Indian men (including Mike and his three sons), two women (including Estep’s birth mother, Wenegah), and two children.
The only survivors were Estep and three older children. All, except for 18-month-old Estep, would die of tuberculosis during the following year. Shortly after being removed from a cradleboard on her dead mother’s back and taken to Fort Hall, the former Mary Josephine Mike was adopted by Fort Superintendent Estep and his wife, and became Mary Joe Estep.
Historians now believe what happened was that Mike’s band—desperate, cold, and starving—had captured and killed cattle in the High Rock Canyon area, north of Gerlach, to survive. The four stockmen had gone to investigate the missing cattle and were most likely killed during a hostile encounter with the band.
Newspaper accounts following the shootout with Mike and his band describe them as savage renegades who had allegedly kept trophies of their kills (which was not true). Stories also claimed the posse fired more than 500 rounds at the camp and the Indians fired back with some 150 rounds and 300 arrows during a battle that lasted more than three hours. The evidence, however, did not support the presence of such firepower, particularly from Mike’s band.
Sadly, Estep would again find herself in the headlines at the end of her life. In 1992, at the age of 82, she was receiving care for a broken hip in a Yakima nursing home and was accidently given three doses of prescription medicine intended for another patient.
While the error was discovered within a half-hour, and was easily reversible, the home took no corrective action because Estep had signed an advance directive barring heroic measures from keeping her alive. She died a few hours later. Her death triggered a series of investigations and, eventually, a change in Washington state law to require health professionals to rectify any life-threatening situation that was caused by health providers.
In an Associated Press article published at the time of Estep’s death, one of her friends, Louis Jarnecke, noted, “You look at what happened to her, and you could say that she [like her family] died at the hands of the white man, too.”
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