Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce

       
Dedication

       
Introduction: Searching for Joseph

Part 1
A Time of Hope

  
1.
“We Thought They Might Be Descended from Dogs”

  
2.
A Harvest for the Lord

  
3.
A Child of Two Worlds

  
4.
A Tide of Laws and Men

  
5.
“We Will Not Give Up the Land”

  
6.
“I Am a Man; You Will Not Tell Me What to Do”

Part 2
A Time of War

  
7.
“There Have Been Killings”

  
8.
“We Are Living Here Peacefully and Want No Trouble”

  
9.
“The Most Terrible Mountains I Ever Beheld”

10.
“In a Dream Last Night I Saw Myself Killed”

11.
“Pursue Them to the Death”

12.
Alone in a Strange Country

13.
“Our People Are Hungry and Weak”

14.
“I Think We Will All Be Caught and Killed”

15.
“Soldiers Are Coming”

16.
“Colonel Miles Wants to Meet with Chief Joseph”

17.
“It Is Cold and We Have No Blankets”

Part 3
A Time of Betrayal and Exile

18.
“You Will Be Returned to Your Homeland”

19.
“You Must Move Again”

20.
“When Will These White Chiefs Begin to Tell the Truth?”

21.
“Is It Possible That the Noble Red Man Is Not a Myth?”

22.
“A Good Country to Get Rid of Indians In”

23.
“I Have Heard Talk and Talk but Nothing Is Done”

24.
“I Know What Is Good for You Now, Mr. Indian”

25.
“We Won't Be Responsible for Their Lives 24 Hours After Their Arrival”

26.
“I Would Be Happy with Very Little”

       
Epilogue: “The Noblest Indian of Them All”

       
A Note on Sources

       
About the Author

       
Also by Kent Nerburn

       
Credits

       
Copyright

       
About the Publisher

O
N NOVEMBER 20, 1903,
a tired, stoop-shouldered man with chestnut brown skin stood on the sidelines of a football game at the University of Washington in Seattle. He understood little of what was going on, but he followed the action with keen interest, enjoying the efforts of the young men and nodding approvingly whenever the ball carrier emerged unscathed from the pile of bodies after a tackle. His presence at the game so fascinated the other spectators that they seemed almost as interested in him as they did in the game itself.

This man, so seemingly engrossed in a game about which he understood little, was a sixty-three-year-old Nez Perce Indian named Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, or Thunder Rising in the Mountains. But to the American public he was known as Chief Joseph, “the Red Napoleon,” the man who was reputed to have masterminded one of the most cunning military retreats in American history and to have outfoxed and outmaneuvered the best that the American army had to offer. He was America's greatest living Indian celebrity.

Joseph had come to Seattle at the request of Sam Hill, son-in-law of the railroad magnate James J. Hill, to give a speech in the Seattle Theater. It was but one speech of many he had given around the country over the previous decade in an effort to gain the return of his small band of Nez Perce to their homeland in the high Wallowa Valley in the mountains of eastern Oregon.

As at all his speeches, Joseph's Seattle appearance was a great civic event—a chance to see the man Buffalo Bill Cody called “the greatest Indian America ever produced” and whom photographer Edward Curtis praised as “one of the greatest men who ever lived.” The auditorium was packed and the press and local dignitaries were in full attendance.

Most had heard of his previous speeches, in which he had recounted how his people had been forced to leave their land as part of a treaty his band had never signed; of the great exodus they had undertaken across the mountains of Idaho and Montana in search of freedom; of the sad exile they had endured in Kansas and Oklahoma; and of their continued exile on land not their own in the northeastern part of Washington on the Canadian border.

They had heard of his eloquent pleas for just treatment by the government, asking only that his people be treated as free men and women—free to travel, free to trade, free to talk and act and worship in accordance with their own conscience; his almost prayerful petition that the spirit of brotherhood might wash away the bloodstains that soaked the earth, that all people might live as one, smiled upon by the Creator, common children of a common land, living together beneath a common sky.

They sat in rapt anticipation, waiting for the legendary Indian leader to emerge and galvanize them with his rhetoric.

But the person who took the stage seemed anything but a noble orator. He was a worn and weary man, bent and bowlegged, dressed in full headdress and traditional chieftain regalia. He seemed more tragic than noble, more anachronistic than imposing.

Taking a drink from a glass of water and leaning heavily against a table, he began to speak, his words translated instantly by the interpreter who accompanied him. “I have a kind feeling in my heart for all of you,” he said. “I am getting old and for some years past have made several efforts to be returned to my old home in Wallowa Valley, but without success.

“The government at Washington has always given me many flattering promises,” he continued, “but up to the present time has utterly failed to fulfill any of its promises.” He told of how he was not surprised because his life had been filled with broken promises, and of his dream to be buried by the side of his father and children.

“I hope you will all help me to return to the home of my childhood where my relatives and family are resting,” he concluded. “Please assist me. I am thankful for your kind attention. That is all.” Then he sat down.

The audience was respectful, even touched. But they were also stunned. This was not the speaker they had been led to expect, the man who had been favorably compared to the great orators of the Roman senate. The local paper even mocked his presentation, recreating his Indian language as “Um-mum-mum-halo-tum-tum-um-mum” and describing his appearance as “looking like a turkey cock on dress parade.” They characterized his speech as “grunts” and implied that any meaning in the words had likely been invented by the translator.

The chief accepted all this with equanimity. He was used to both the adulation and vilification of the white public and government. But none of that was important to him. All he cared about was the fragile hope that he and his people someday would be allowed to return to their beloved Wallowa, the land that the Creator had given them and the earth that held their ancestors' bones.

He remained several more days in Seattle, signing autographs, posing for photographs, and visiting the University of Washington. Then he quietly returned to his home on the Colville Reservation, 350 miles from the city where he had just spoken and 200 miles from the Wallowa, where he hoped to spend his final days.

He lived on for less than a year, passing away quietly on September 21, 1904.

The agency doctor, who attended him in his illness, declared simply that the chief had succumbed to a “grief which ended in death.”

He was never allowed to return to his homeland.

Joseph's story, and the story of the Nez Perce, has become part of the standard lore of the American Indian. Its outline has been presented to students by caring teachers and professors for years: Joseph, the Nez Perce chief, led 800 men, women, and children on a 1500-mile retreat after having been illegally forced from their homeland in Oregon by a U.S. government that was hungry for land and unwilling to meet its treaty obligations.

In the course of this journey they outmaneuvered five U.S. armies, assisted white travelers they met along the way, and managed to elude the best and brightest that the U.S. military had to offer. Finally, only forty miles from the Canadian border and freedom, the tired Nez Perce, slowed by their wounded and weary, were surrounded by the U.S. forces. They could have escaped by leaving the women and children and injured and elderly behind, but this Joseph was unwilling to do. Wrapping his blanket around his shoulders against the frigid winds of an approaching high plains Montana winter, he walked across the snow-swept battlefield and handed his rifle to the commanding officers of the U.S. military, speaking that now-famous sentence: “From where the sun now stands, I shall fight no more forever.”

A fine story, full of pathos and nobility and all the poignancy of the American Indian struggle. A fine story, but false. Or, to be more accurate, only half true.

The real story, the true story, is every bit as poignant and every bit as dramatic. But it is obscured by the myth because the myth is so powerful and so perfectly suited to our American need to find nobility rather than tragedy in our past. It is also a myth of our own devise, and therein lies a story.

I first encountered the story of Chief Joseph fifteen years ago when I was working on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in the woods of northern Minnesota. I had been hired to lead a group of students in collecting the memories of the tribal elders.

My students were good, caring people who wanted to do right by their parents and grandparents. But they had no context from which to work. Many were poor readers and few knew anything about their own tribal history, much less the history of other tribes in America. In order to understand what their grandparents and great-grandparents had experienced, they needed to learn something about the lives of the native peoples who have lived on this land.

I knew I could not give them standard textbooks, nor did I want to. Instead, I wanted them to learn from the voices of native peoples without the intervening interpretive lens of non-native authors or a non-Indian teacher. So I decided to put together a small book containing the words of Indian leaders and thinkers. I was confident that, with careful research and proper framing, I could create something that would educate the students and prepare them for the undertaking before them.

I set about my task with cautious determination. I read through old documents and parsed arcane anthologies. I looked at old treaties and old diaries. I found voices, common and obscure, and collected them together into a document that seemed to represent the best of Indian expressions about what it meant to be a native person on this American continent.

The students were fascinated, but I were transfixed. In these native voices, I discovered a clarity and dignity that far surpassed anything I had ever encountered. It was as if I were hearing the most measured, well thought, and heartfelt oratory of which a human being is capable. It brought to mind the comment of the famous western sculptor, Frederick Remington: “There is a dignity about the social intercourse of old Indians which reminds me of a stroll through a winter forest.”

And the oratory that touched me most deeply was the story told by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce in a long, heartrending speech given to an assemblage of dignitaries in Washington, D.C., in 1878.

In his words I caught a glimpse of the true tragic dimensions of the Native American experience since the arrival of the European on these shores and of a quality of heart and dignity of spirit that we, as a nation, are poorer for having lost. Here was a man who embodied all that I believed about compassionate leadership, the kind of person I could gladly hold up as a model of worthy manhood to my students or my son.

Over the next fifteen years I continued to work on Indian issues. I published several books, continued to work among Indian people, speak on Indian subjects, and learn. It was more than an interest; it was almost a calling. In my corner of northern Minnesota, where nature dominates culture and the presence of the first people is strong, I grew, day by day, to believe that it is in the native people of this continent that some fundamental truth is vested. And all of this served only to deepen my respect and admiration for the man whose words I had transcribed for my students those fifteen years before.

So when the opportunity arose to do a book on Chief Joseph, I was excited. But I was also apprehensive. My time among native people had shown me that there is little they hold in greater disdain than non-natives dabbling in Indian issues for fun and profit. I did not wish to be the next person in this unsavory tradition. Still, I believed that Joseph was a man whose life and character should be better known and whose story was important—even central—to an understanding of who we as a nation are and who we might yet be. I wanted that story to be told—honestly, accessibly, and with compassionate sympathy. So I accepted the challenge.

The task was daunting. I could not claim to see through a native person's eyes, but neither did I wish to write a bloodless, analytical history. I wanted the story to have a heartbeat, and I wanted it to be written in such a way that native people who read it would say, “Yes, this
wasichu,
this
Soyapo,
this
jamokaman,
understood. This white man has done a good job.”

So I armed myself with every book I could find, every monograph that could be extracted from every library I could access, every newspaper account I could dredge up from every publisher's morgue, and every personal testimony, both native and white, that existed in every archive, and interred myself beneath the material, hoping to read my way to the surface with some kind of understanding.

But, try as I might, something was wrong. Though the story was becoming clear, it was not coming to life. I was missing something essential. I needed to find a way to bring the reader closer to the heartbeat of the man and his experience. I needed to go to Nez Perce country, meet the people, feel the pulse and lifeblood that lay beneath all my research.

And so it was that I found myself several thousand miles from my home, wandering through some of the most beautiful, intimidating, and awe-inspiring country I had ever confronted, in search of a man I did not know how to find. My hope was to hear the story of Joseph from the Nez Perce themselves and to feel the presence of the earth they held so dear. For I knew that no Indian can be understood apart from the land of his or her birth and that to understand Joseph I needed to understand the heart and spirit of the land from which he had come.

This land the Nez Perce called their own—the land where Joseph was born and raised—is known as the Columbia Plateau. Now, as when the Nez Perce first encountered Lewis and Clark, this great broad continental shoulder between the Cascades and the first outcroppings of the mountains that will become the Rockies is almost unknown to the general population.

It is “fly-over” country, a blank spot on the map, a transition zone meant to be shot through or over or across by the fastest, most expeditious means possible. A few names might strike a momentary shiver into the hearts of people familiar with the West: Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Hells Canyon, River of No Return, even northern Idaho itself. But to anyone other than smoke jumpers and the smattering of residents who call the isolated cities and towns home, this essentially roadless wilderness area is a dark and woolly terra incognita where small-engine planes disappear in small poofs against inaccessible mountainsides, and forest fires sweep across expanses as vast as the state of Rhode Island.

Wandering through this landscape, I did not find those characterizations to be far wrong. It was a land of hillsides so vertical that a person must climb them on all fours, of the deepest gorge on the North American continent, where a person standing on the top looks down more than a mile to a tiny silver ribbon of water that, in fact, is a cataract roiling over boulders the size of houses. It was a land of sudden precipices, of high mountain meadows and cobalt blue lakes, of bald, dun-brown hills that roll like rumpled carpet until they disappear into a hazy, purple horizon.