Appalachian Figures
A Tennessee beginning for a Pacific storykeeper
Ella Elizabeth Clark was born in Summertown, Tennessee, in 1896. She left the South as a teenager for high school in Peoria, Illinois, earned both her B.A. and M.A. at Northwestern, and in 1927 joined the English faculty at what is now Washington State University. She taught composition and literature there until her 1961 retirement as professor emerita. The university’s archival biography confirms both her Summertown birth and the arc of her academic career.
From lookout towers to legend work
During the Second World War, Clark spent several summers as a fire lookout in the Cascades. That experience drew her deep into the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest and, in time, into the oral literature of the Native nations who named those places. Her publisher’s author page likewise notes the wartime lookout work that helped orient her later research among Indigenous storytellers.
Clark did not approach this work as a trained anthropologist. She approached it as a teacher and writer who corresponded, traveled, and listened. Her papers at WSU’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections preserve the road map of that effort: drafts, field notes, photographs, and correspondence with tribal schools and elders across the U.S. and Canada. One oversize image in that collection is labeled simply “Ella Clark, two unidentified Indians,” an artifact of fieldwork that scholars have used when discussing her method.
The archives also hold a letter Clark wrote to St. Mary’s Mission School in British Columbia in April 1954. In that note, she explained her hope that sharing these stories would raise respect for Indigenous culture among non-Native readers and strengthen pride among Native readers. The letter is cited with box and folder numbers by later scholars and is part of the record researchers consult at Pullman today.
A teacher in a growing land-grant university
Clark’s faculty life played out in a rapidly expanding humanities division. An oral history with former dean Albert Thompson describes how WSU met surging enrollments by appointing experienced high school teachers as “associates,” which sets context for Clark’s early rank and pay even as she became a valued member of the department.
Books, readers, and reviewers
Clark published three major folklore anthologies and one biographical study: Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest (University of California Press, 1953), documented in WorldCat for its first edition and pagination; Indian Legends of Canada (McClelland and Stewart, 1960), issued in multiple printings with digitized copies available at the Internet Archive; Indian Legends from the Northern Rockies (University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), which the press still carries; and Sacagawea of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (with Margot Edmonds), later reissued in paperback by the University of California Press.
Her collections reached a broad readership and drew the notice of scholars. In 1954, Erna Gunther reviewed the Pacific Northwest volume in the Journal of American Folklore and Viola E. Garfield reviewed it in American Anthropologist; Dell Skeels assessed Northern Rockies in American Anthropologist in 1967. Indexes and tables of contents document these notices and their page numbers, which later scholarship has discussed. In recognition of her work as an author and educator, Clark received Washington’s Governor’s Writers Day Award in 1966.
Why an Appalachian historian should care
Clark’s path from Summertown to the Cascades is one more thread in the larger story of Appalachian out-migration in the early twentieth century. She carried a Tennessee birthright into a western classroom and then into Indigenous communities as a listener and compiler. Whether one reads her books as entry points for general audiences or as contested texts within folklore and anthropology, they show how a teacher from the South helped popularize place-based Native storytelling for postwar readers. That is a reminder that Appalachian lives and labors shaped cultural work well beyond the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
Guide to the Ella Elizabeth Clark Papers (Cage 146). Washington State University Libraries, MASC. Overview, biographical note, series descriptions, and item lists. Archives West
Photograph: “Ella Clark, two unidentified Indians” [cg146_oversize_51], listed within the Clark Papers. Archives West
A. E. Housman to Ella E. Clark, autograph letter, 23 June 1935, Cage 4443. Permission regarding A Shropshire Lad. Archives West
Siegfried Sassoon to Ella E. Clark, autograph letter, 1 June 1935, Cage 4109. Signed holograph, with envelope. Archives West
WSU Centennial Oral History Project: Interview with Albert Thompson, 2 May 1985. Program page and PDF.
Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest. University of California Press, 1953. Catalog record. WorldCat
Indian Legends of Canada. McClelland and Stewart, 1960. Digitized editions. Internet Archive
Indian Legends from the Northern Rockies. University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. Publisher page. University of Oklahoma Press
Sacagawea of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. University of California Press, later pbk. listing. University of California Press
Erna Gunther, review of Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, Journal of American Folklore 67, no. 265 (1954), p. 324. TOC evidence. JSTOR+1
Viola E. Garfield, review of Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, American Anthropologist 56, no. 5 (1954), p. 924. TOC evidence and index list. JSTOR+1
Dell Skeels, review of Indian Legends from the Northern Rockies, American Anthropologist 69, no. 5 (1967), pp. 530–531. TOC evidence. JSTOR
Archives West biographical note for Clark Papers. Summertown birth, education, WSU appointment, fire-lookout work, and publications. Archives West
University of Rostock “American Antiquities” profile on Clark. Scholarly overview and citations to Clark’s correspondence and photo [cg146_oversize_51]. IAA
Penguin Random House author page. Short vetted bio. Penguin Random House
Washington Secretary of State, Governor’s Writers Day Awards list, 1966. WA Secretary of State