Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (11 page)

Tuekakas's high and distant Wallowa Valley was among the lands that had remained free from settler intrusion. The trail in was difficult, there was no viable way to enter with wagons, and the deep snows of winter made it unsuitable for year-round habitation. But as settlers filled the arable river valleys and accessible meadows in the lowlands, newcomers began to turn their thoughts toward this inaccessible valley, reputed to be more beautiful than any in the Sierra and the Rockies and to have grazing grass as high as a saddle's stirrup.

Even before any settlers arrived, Tuekakas could see what was coming. White men's surveying teams were making their way over the mountains during the summer and piling up stones to mark out divisions on the land. He and his band dismantled the mounds, but they knew well what such incursions portended.

With his own health failing and his eyesight almost gone, Tuekakas took Joseph aside and began to instruct the young man in dealing with the whites. “Never accept any gifts,” he said, “or they will say that you have sold something.” Take no pay, sign no paper, do not even touch a white man's paper with your hand, or they will say that you have agreed to what it contains.

He reminded Joseph that it would soon fall upon him to assume leadership of the three hundred people of the Wallowa band, and it would be his duty to protect the their land. “A few years more, and white men will be all around you,” Tuekakas said. “You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. This country holds your father's body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.”

Joseph, who by now had been well schooled in the traditional ways and had drunk deeply of the teachings of Smolholla regarding the spiritual presence of the earth, heard well. As his father lay dying, he took the old man's hand and swore that he would protect the valley with his life.

On a warm August day in 1871, with a blue sky vaulting overhead, old Tuekakas died. Joseph and Ollokot buried him in the valley that he had loved so well. They placed the skin of his favorite horse on a frame above the grave so the man and his horse could ride together in the spirit world, and they placed a small bell on a painted branch nearby so the breath of the wind could sing its small and mournful note to the memory of the man who had given so much to the land and the people of the Wallowa Valley.

Then they turned their hearts toward the task of upholding the promise they had made to never give up the land that held their father's and mother's bones.

J
OSEPH WAS NOW
the head chief of the Wallowa band, a position for which he had long been prepared. He was thirty-one, strong, reserved, and watchful. He had not been a warrior, had not won praise as a hunter—he had only once traveled across to buffalo country—and he did not seek to draw attention to himself. He had the good fortune to have Ollokot, his younger brother and best friend, to serve as the leader of the young men of the tribe in matters of hunting and war.

For his part, Joseph was content to lead with the firm strength he had inherited from his father and to keep his heart to the issues of protecting the people and the land. He had a seven-year-old daughter, he loved his family, and he loved the earth on which he lived.

In all things he followed the old ways and encouraged his people to do so as well. They rose early, drank water in praise of its clear gift of life, and took their morning sweats to purify their bodies and spirits. The young boys tended the horse herds, made bridles from leather and grasses, swam the rivers, toughened their bodies. The young girls were trained in crafts and life skills by the grandmothers.

Women sang their root songs, gathered berries, tanned hides, and kept the camp. Men hunted, smoked, met in council. The strict ways of the longhouse were observed, where the first catch, the first harvest, the first gathering, was offered to the Creator before any were allowed to partake of it.

Life was lived in accord with the seasons—spring, summer, and autumn being the times of gathering and preparing and winter the time of reflection and storytelling. All actions were performed in a counterclockwise manner to reflect the transit of the sun.

From the songs to the ways of raising children to the teachings of the elders about the plants and animals, the people lived in accord with the teachings of the earth handed down from the ancestors. They were safe in their beloved Wallowa Valley and had left the ways of the white teachers and missionaries behind.

There were still doubts and concerns. When they visited their relatives in the distant villages where Christian ways were practiced, they could not help but see the wealth that their brothers and sisters had amassed by following the white ways. They were not blind to the abundant lives that came from raising crops inside of fences and animals inside of pens; neither were they immune to the barbs thrown their way when their Christian relatives showed how they could read markings in books and write sentences that others could read.

But all of this had come at a price. The Christians had given up the old ways. With their short hair and white dress, they could no longer tell who was a favorite son or grandson by the way the hair was braided. They could no longer communicate by pulling the blanket over both shoulders to indicate in council that their point of view had been expressed. They might know about spirit powers in the sky or in the Christian book, but they no longer spoke with the trees or knew the different messages in the wind or had the protective power of the
wayakin
spirit, which came only from fasting and seeking until the spirit decided to show itself to you.

It was to the Wallowa people and to other bands who had not signed the treaties and had stayed away from white ways that these old powers still came. It was to them that the earth and the grandfathers still spoke.

Joseph held no ill will toward the Nez Perce who had chosen to go with the white ways, nor did he feel any animosity toward the white settlers themselves. He wished only to have his people left alone to live in the old manner as the ancestors had prescribed. He intended to lead them in this manner for as long as the Creator and the people wanted his guidance.

But shortly after his father's death, this simple wish was tested.

Even as his father lay dying, stockmen, lured by the glowing descriptions of the surveyors, had been riding over the pass, disregarding Tuekakas's stone boundary markers and probing the valley to see if it was worthy of further exploration. What they discovered was a land of abundant game, fish-filled creeks, meadows of lush grazing grass as high as a man's shoulders, snow-covered peaks, evergreen-studded hillsides, and a great lake as blue as the sky. It was a paradise for homesteading, made difficult only by its relative inaccessibility, snowy winters, and a few hundred wandering savages who didn't even occupy the land for the entire year. The stockmen's minds were quickly made up.

That winter of 1871, as Joseph and his people made their traditional journey down the mountain trails to the Imnaha Valley lowlands by the Snake River sixty miles away, these men drove their stock over the pass into the valley and began staking claims. When the Nez Perce returned in the spring, they found white men living in cabins on the creeks, at the head of the lake, and in many of the places the Nez Perce traditionally made their camps. These white men announced that the government had opened the land to settlement and these were now their homes.

Joseph politely but firmly explained that his father had never sold this land and that the government had made a treaty long ago promising it to his people forever. He bore no ill will toward white people, he said, but would not give up his land. He gently but firmly requested that they leave.

The settlers, however, insisted on staying, pointing to the treaty that Lawyer had signed in 1863 as proof of their right to be there. Joseph explained that this treaty was not valid, that his father had never signed it, and that it was the old Treaty of 1855, guaranteeing the Wallowa people their valley for all time; that was the law by which this land was governed.

The white settlers were impressed and even a bit intimidated by the chief's clarity and civility. But they had no intention of leaving their new homesteads because a small band of savages claimed it had been given to them for all times in an outdated treaty or, even more absurdly, by some spiritual promise of the Creator.

By the middle of the summer following Tuekakas's death, the situation had become critical. Both the whites and the Indians were remaining civil, but they had come to an impasse. Both groups decided to appeal to the Indian agent, a well-intentioned Presbyterian man named John Monteith.

Monteith had been appointed Indian agent over the region under President Grant's new Peace Policy. According to this policy, put in place in 1868, the control over Indian tribes would be given to various religious denominations, which would be responsible for administering treaties and bringing the Indians along the inevitable path to civilization. It seemed a far preferable course to the difficult, expensive, and inflammatory policy of having the military oversee the Indians. The churches could guide with a gentler hand, and they would save the government money. The Nez Perce had been assigned to the Presbyterians, and Monteith was their representative.

Monteith was not a bad man, at least compared to the previous Indian agents. But, like all good Christians, he saw the Indians as people trapped in a childlike stage of human development who needed, both for their own survival and for the salvation of their eternal souls, to advance toward civilized ways and Christian truth. To him, bands like Lawyer's and Timothy's were the successes. Joseph, no matter how clear thinking, well spoken, and honorable, was a man of the past. He and his people had to move forward.

Monteith tried to broker meetings between the settlers and the Wallowa Nez Perce, offering all kinds of suggestions and compromises. But there was little place for compromise when the land was at stake.

Eventually, Joseph agreed to allow the settlers to remain so long as they stayed inside the small plots of land they had chosen. There were not many of them, and if they stayed to themselves, conflict could be avoided.

But the settlers did not stay to themselves. Their animals wandered, their presence brought whiskey peddlers into the area, and conflicts inevitably ensued. Tensions rose, and the government had to step in. Again, Joseph spoke with clarity about the misunderstanding that had brought them to this impasse. The Nez Perce, he said, were not a single people under a single chief, no matter what the white men wanted to believe. They were made up of many bands, and each band had its own leader and was free to make its own decisions. When Lawyer and those other men had signed that treaty ten years ago, they were signing only for themselves and the members of their bands. The chiefs who did not sign—and Joseph's father had been among them—were no more bound by that treaty than they were by some treaty signed by the Iroquois or Lakota or some foreign government.

The government was flummoxed. It had opened the land to settlement, and under the terms of the Homestead Act of 1862, settlers were claiming 160-acre parcels but were required to make improvements to validate their claims. Stopping these settlers meant stopping their improvements and putting their claims in jeopardy. But allowing the settlement and the improvements meant permitting white intrusion on land that may not even have been included in the 1863 treaty. The agents pushed for compromise and eventually convinced both Joseph and the settlers to accept a division of the valley with protections for each group.

But somehow, in the transcribing, the designated areas got mixed up, and the Nez Perce were given the land on which the settlers had built their homes, and the settlers were given the Nez Perce grazing land. Once again, trouble brewed.

Some of the settlers, weary of the strife, packed up and left. Tensions were growing between the Modoc tribe and the whites a few days' journey south near the Oregon-California border, and they wanted no part of any Indian war. They abandoned their claims, as Joseph had initially requested, and went back to the valleys.

This action, however, only enraged many white settlers who lived outside the Wallowa. The idea that Indians could intimidate white people and drive them out of their lands was simply unacceptable. Indians needed to be taught a lesson, and they needed to be kept in their place. Driven by principle and fueled by alcohol, these settlers were ready to show the arrogant Nez Perce the power and wisdom of white justice.

By this time more than homesteads were at stake. Road-building companies had secured contracts to create access to the valley. Land speculators were busy. Ditch diggers were crisscrossing the land with irrigation canals. The loss of the valley would mean the loss of business to white concerns. They began speaking out in the newspapers and government offices until the clamor reached the Oregon statehouse in Salem, then all the way to the Department of the Interior. Through silver-tongued oratory, adamance, and guile, they said, this Chief Joseph was resisting the rightful course of progress, and the local Indian agents were falling for it.

For three years, confusion reigned and tensions escalated. Joseph was convinced that he had been given the right to his land as a reservation, and the few whites were to be contained and constrained into small areas. But the edict from the government inverting the areas of ownership had turned that into chaos. The white settlers saw the Indians leave every winter, then come back like wanderers in the spring, making it seem that Indians mistook roaming for owning, and they set their own stock free to graze in traditional Nez Perce grazing areas. The rabid anti-Indian whites, of whom there were many throughout the West, saw capitulation to any Indian wishes as weakness. The politicians in Washington, wishing to keep the support of the people in the West so they could gain their votes on important issues, listened to whichever voices spoke the loudest. And white settlers all through the Northwest, influenced by rumor and inflammatory newspaper articles, began to fear that a great Indian uprising was in the offing. Add in the disastrous effects of alcohol on the behavior of both Indians and settlers, and conflict was inevitable.

The man who found himself front and center in dealing with this potential conflict was General Oliver Otis Howard. In 1874 he received appointment as the head of the army's Department of the Columbia, which stretched south to north from California to the Canadian border and west to east from the ocean to the crest of the Bitterroots. It also included Alaska and contained within its boundaries all of the lands of the Plateau tribes, including the lands of the Nez Perce.

Like most men in a position of authority in the Northwest, Howard was a Presbyterian, and in his case this was no insignificant fact. He had been a highly decorated officer during the Civil War and had even lost his right arm in battle. But he was, at heart, a man of peace who at this point in his life preferred teaching Sunday school in Portland to soldiering. He had served as head of the Freedman's Bureau and had been a champion for the freed slaves after the Civil War, and he had been able to broker peace with the Apaches in the Southwest prior to his posting to the headquarters of the Department of the Columbia at Fort Vancouver, directly across the Columbia River from Portland and 360 miles west of the Nez Perce reservation at Lapwai.

There were many who felt that the general's overtly Christian manner compromised his military decisions. But he himself was confident that though he preferred peace to a sword, he had the mettle to make the hard military decisions when such decisions were necessary. His success during the bloody Civil War had proved this.

As a part of the continuum of Presbyterian presence in the area, stretching from Spalding to Monteith to Howard himself, Howard understood his task as to be the military arm of the Christian peace process to which his denomination had committed itself. The rabble of the miners and politicians and warmongers of various stripes was less important to him than doing the bidding of his God in bringing the savages of the area to a proper relationship with the Lord and civilization.

When word came to him that the troublesome Chief Joseph wanted to meet with him to discuss the situation in the Wallowa, he immediately agreed. The Wallowa was an insignificant issue in his overall command, but he wanted to take the measure of this increasingly notorious chief and ascertain exactly how much potential for problems he represented.