Through Eyes of an Eagle

Through Eyes of an Eagle Steven Warnstaff was born Steven Simonis, his father Elvin, and his mother Evon Sevy, both attended Union High School. The Simonis family were one of the first families to live in the Baker Valley, and eventually landed in North Powder, Oregon. In 1976 he moved from California to Eastern Oregon to a town named Elgin where he worked in a lumber mill a few miles away in Alicel. One day as he visited with his grandparents he asked his grandmother Olena, what it was like to live during the latter years of 1800 and early 1900’s when the state was being settled by the pioneers. His grandmother told him she had lived out in the valley between Baker City and North Powder as a child, attended school in a one room schoolhouse, to which Steve’s father had since moved into North Powder as his home before he passed. Several stories were shared of the Nez Perce travelling from their villages in the Wallowas to hunt elk and deer in the Blues and Elkhorn mountains above Baker City. She mentioned they had always stopped to ask permission to camp the night on her family’s property, and as her father agreed, on the return trip the Nez Perce stopped and offered a deer and an elk in gratitude. This story had stayed with Steve since its inception and has brought many questions to lie unsettled as the government had stated just the opposite, the Nez Perce were not a friendly tribe and had threatened the settlers. Truth be told, Steve says it was the settlers who first broke the treaties and promises made between the two peoples in order they both could live peacefully side by side. First there were the gold miners who tore the landscape searching for their fortunes. Then ranchers and farmers came with plows that tore at the heart of Earth Mother as they turned the…