Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (47 page)

Agent Haworth, who had accompanied the people on their journey, turned them over to the new agent, a Mr. Whiteman, who was to take responsibility for their settlement and well-being in their new country. Whiteman had been instructed to meet the people with supplies and medicines. But the instructions had come too late for him to gather the required provisions, so he had no assistance to offer them. Haworth then departed for his home in the Quapaw, and the Nez Perce were left alone in an empty land with a few days' rations, a confused and unprepared agent, and no knowledge of what to do or how they were to survive.

Fortunately, their situation was not as dire as when they had arrived at the Quapaw. Whiteman was a man more in the mold of Haworth than of Jones, and the people had arrived with tent poles, shelter, broodmares, and livestock. Nonetheless, the country was cruel and unforgiving in a way that the Quapaw had never been.

The Quapaw had been a land of gentle hills with hickory and sumac and sheltering, towering oaks. The water, when not polluted by livestock, had been good. But this new country was a place of a different order. Though in some ways it reminded the people of the great openness of the buffalo plains, even to the extent of having an occasional herd of bison roaming across its vast open grasslands, it was in all other ways a harsh and merciless land. The rolling banks of cumulus clouds that filled the summer sky quickly darkened and turned to fire-spitting thunderheads. Torrents of rain, driven by slashing, cutting winds, blew down shelters and turned streams into rushing, uncrossable floodbeds. And swarms of flies and mosquitoes tormented the flesh of humans and animals alike. On some days the air would grow still and breathless, turn the green of an animal's eye, then unleash a fury of swirling wind that snapped off trees and ripped tents from their moorings. The air was so hot and wet that it kept the weak and elderly from ever getting a full breath.

The Nez Perce had never experienced such a place before. It seemed more like the hot place spoken of by the Reverend Spalding than like the kind and gentle mother in whom they had been taught to believe. Truly, they seemed to have been forgotten by the Creator.

When Colonel Meacham visited the people less than a month after their arrival, Joseph minced no words in his assessment of their situation. “You come to see me as you would a man upon his deathbed,” he told the colonel. “The Great Spirit above has left me and my people to our fate. The white men forget us, and death comes almost every day for some of my people. He will come for all of us. A few months more and we will be in the ground. We are a doomed people.”

Meacham could not but agree. All through the camp the air was filled with the constant haunting death wail that announced the impending passing of yet another member of the band.

Yet the people persevered. Broken in body and defeated in spirit, they gave in to the demand to work the earth to save their lives. The season was too advanced to allow for the planting of crops, so Agent Whiteman provided them tools and assistance in putting up hay to feed their stock for the winter. The people who had refused to cut the hair of their mother in the home country were now reduced to doing so in order to survive.

But despite Whiteman's best efforts, progress came slowly. By the time the icy gales of winter began to blow, only a commissary shed had been constructed, and this was little more than a crude construction of rough-hewn cottonwood planks with batting boards nailed over the cracks. The people were forced to spend another winter in canvas tents, shivering against the high prairie winds and living off the meager rations that the agent was able to provide.

By the time spring came, the canvas on the tents had become so rotten that they could no longer keep out the rain, and the people were sleeping on mud and trying to keep warm under soggy, soaking blankets. Because they were unable to keep warm and dry, consumption and diseases of the lungs moved among them, filling the camp with coughs and wheezing and claiming the people one by one.

As their leader, Joseph was able to do little. He was visited frequently by well-meaning government officials—some promising to help him move to a healthier land in the north, others promising to help him if he would accept the white man's ways and make a life for himself and his people in this country. But none of their promises ever came to anything.

Slowly, the hopelessness of the situation and the deep sadness of the people were wearing down their spiritual as well as their physical resistance, and the Christian teachings of Reuben, Lawyer, and Williams began to take solid root. It was not just the power of the Christian religion; it was the simple requirements of survival. Here, no one could survive without tilling the earth. No stock could endure the winter unless the hay was cut. The old sanctions not to gouge the mother's flesh and not to cut her hair seemed impossible and, in their impossibility, became distant spiritual echoes for all but the strongest believers. Even the most devout wavered, slowly abandoning their grandfathers' faith as they slowly abandoned their grandfathers' dreams.

By spring, even Joseph was preparing to plant a field of corn, and he and Yellow Bull had become frequent visitors to the white settlement of Arkansas City across the northern border of Indian Territory into Kansas. In an attempt to survive, the Nez Perce had begun planting fields and working as teamsters, hauling goods from the railhead at Wichita to the agency. Many of them had adopted white clothing and white names along with white religion. A few crude houses were going up, though they amounted to little, since the supplies promised by the agent were slow in coming and the amount being allotted for each house was only sixty dollars, compared to the four thousand dollars that the Quakers had appropriated for the house Jones had built himself back on the Quapaw Agency. Still, it was a movement toward civilization and away from the old ways. The Nez Perce seemed to be learning the lessons of survival that the Modoc had learned at such a great human cost back in the Quapaw.

Joseph too had begun to lose his voice among the people. Chapman had committed one too many indiscretions and had been driven off. With his absence, Reuben had become the prime spokesman for the tribe. His command of English and his connection with the Presbyterian Church allowed him to move quickly to the forefront of power and influence.

Reuben's goal was to get the people back to Idaho where they could be reunited with their Nez Perce brothers and sisters at Lapwai and where they could learn to live freely in the Christian way. By this time he also had the complete allegiance of Husis Kute, who had transferred his deep spiritual convictions from the ways of Smolholla to the ways of the Christians.

Together these two men formed a formidable spiritual presence: the impressive, pious, “civilized” Nez Perce from the successful, nonbelligerent branch of the Nez Perce in Idaho, and the once-adamant follower of Smolholla and the ways of the Dreamers who had served as spiritual leader of the exiles and now was beginning to walk in the light of Christian truth.

Reuben began appearing at Presbyterian meetings in Arkansas City and took to pleading the Nez Perce cause before any who would listen. His message was always the same, focusing on the injustices the Nez Perce had suffered and the progress they were making on their march upward from savage ignorance toward civilization. In one of his most eloquent pleas in Colonel Meacham's
Council Fire
journal, he told the Nez Perce story with a poignancy and bitterness that both buttressed and stood in stark counterpoint to the stately, measured, recounting that Joseph had made the previous year in the
North American Review.

“White man has wronged the red nations in every respect,” he wrote. “He has moved on to his camping places without his consent; he has swindled him out of his home by cheatings and sharp practices; he has abused him and he regarded him as beasts of the mountains and did treat him accordingly…. White man stands up and says, I know what is good for you now, Mr. Indian, get up now, move your foot off that last piece of ground, for I want it and am going to have it…. Indian packs up his bundle and away he goes, he turns to take a last look of his old home and cast a last glance upon the graves of his fathers; he utters no cry, he sheds no tears, he heaves no groans.”

Reuben continued in this vein, recounting with undisguised rancor how whites pursued Indians wherever they went, taking whatever they wanted and, when challenged, cried to Uncle Sam for assistance. He then turned to the current Nez Perce situation and pointed out how he himself had come among them of his own free will and sought nothing more than common human justice for the tribe, which, by right, would include returning them to their homeland in Idaho.

He concluded by excoriating the white government for disrespecting the Indians' rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and calling upon the government to “treat Indians like people.” For such, he said, “would be a glorious thing.”

Such eloquence naturally drew the confused and frightened Nez Perce to him and raised the possibility, however faint, that his voice and his path would be the one to possibly lead them out of this shapeless exile and back to the land of their ancestors.

When he started a school in the back section of the drafty plank commissary building, his influence increased even further. Even many who were not sure of these new ways came to believe that the way of the future belonged to the whites and that the children should be taught white ways and language so that they might not suffer the same fate as their parents and grandparents.

Soon, thirty-eight people were attending Reuben's classes, including a few adults. Archie Lawyer, whose kind and caring manner had won the favor of many of the exiles, opened them further to the Christian faith with his preaching and ministering.

Joseph put up no resistance. He had fallen sick, and his young daughter, born on the eve of the outbreak of violence back in the Camas Prairie, was now among the dead. If following the Christian way would get his people food and medicine and give their spirits hope, he would not speak against their new belief. He even enlisted Reuben's aid in composing a letter to General Howard, begging him to use his influence to get the government to fulfill the promise that had been made at the Bear's Paw. “I want you to know now I am going to be a Christian man,” he said.

But Howard offered no assistance. He wrote back a response expressing pleasure at Joseph's apparent decision to become “a real Christian” but said that he had never promised to return the people to Idaho, and he counseled the chief to accept his situation and “make a garden of the land.”

It was left to Reuben to carry the people's cause forward. Joseph could speak to visitors and make the case for his people, and he always did so. But it was Reuben and his zealously public Christianity that was having the greater effect.

Unlike the Quapaw, which had been mostly isolated from white contact, this new location, called the Oakland agency, was in direct and frequent contact with the outside world. Missionaries and government inspectors often passed through the country, and though for long periods the agents themselves were absent, the people were visited regularly by physicians, philanthropists, and others who felt concern for the Indians.

As the most vocal and civilized of the Nez Perce, Reuben quickly made his presence felt. He cut a figure of imposing gravity and piety and was able to speak to the visitors in English. He was quick to point out that he was in Indian Territory of his own accord and had accomplished much as a teacher and practitioner of the Christian ways, always without government support. In all manners he comported himself as a dignified man well conversant with the ways of white society and was a constant visitor to the churches across the border in the white town of Arkansas City.

He showed an interest in white learning and culture, and he had a white man's concern with financial affairs, insisting constantly on proper compensation for his work and keeping a strict accounting of moneys owed him. He also was adamant in his opposition to alcohol, even testifying before government officials against liquor peddlers on the reservation. To white observers, he was everything that a converted Indian should be. He embodied what the red man could become if he accepted the gifts of civilization and abandoned his savage and backward ways.

So when Reuben entreated the Presbyterian leaders in Arkansas City to visit the reservation to help establish a church, they were ecstatic. They quickly made arrangements for the visit, and on October 20, 1880, a small entourage, including a minister and a church elder, set out on the nine-hour wagon journey south from Arkansas City to the Nez Perce encampment.

Reuben's Nez Perce followers greeted the visitors with a piety that took the white men aback. As soon as the group had been ushered into the crude commissary building and the Arkansas City pastor and the accompanying church elder had been seated in the building's only two chairs, a procession of Indians filed in and took their places around the sides of the room. In orderly and dignified fashion the children entered, followed by the women, then the men, until 125 Nez Perce were seated quietly in a ring around the visiting white officials. The children sang a Presbyterian hymn in their own language, then joined together in reciting the Lord's Prayer. When they were asked questions about their faith, their answers, translated by Reuben, were spoken with clarity and certainty.

The visitors sat in stunned silence. Before their eyes they were seeing the very fulfillment of the biblical prophesy that things hidden from the wise and prudent would be revealed to the hearts of the innocent.

In the course of the next three hours, fifty-nine Nez Perce made a profession of faith and asked for baptism. More would have done so, but the hour was late and the Arkansas City pastor needed to be present the following morning at the laying of a cornerstone for an residential school on the Ponca reservation fourteen miles away.