Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (49 page)

For the entire day they pushed through the mud toward the railhead. The mist turned to rain, soaking everyone and making the ground a slick quagmire of ankle-deep muck. But except for a pause at midday to eat, they did not slow their pace.

Some were able to make the entire distance in two days, arriving soaked and exhausted at the Arkansas City station about midnight on the night of the twenty-second. The others straggled in the following morning. They were permitted to trade and purchase supplies in town but were told to return to the station by 10:00 a.m. to begin loading for departure.

The government had arranged for seven emigrant sleeper cars to carry the people west. These were passenger cars with few windows, lower seats that folded into beds—albeit without padding—and upper berths that hung from iron rods suspended from the ceiling. Traditionally they had been used for transporting emigrants to the frontier to seek their fortunes and were neither comfortable nor commodious. But to the Nez Perce, they were a lifeline to home.

All morning the people loaded their baggage and scanned the horizon for signs of the children who were supposed to meet them from the boarding school. None was willing to leave without them.

As departure time drew near, the situation became tense. But finally, right before the train was to pull out, the children arrived in the care of Superintendent Minthorn's assistant. Dr. Faulkner, however, refused to accept them.

Minthorn's assistant pleaded their case. Their parents, he said, had agreed to send the children to the school because it was seen as evidence of their trust and docility and commitment to the ways of civilization. Now Faulkner was betraying that trust as well as breaking a promise that the children would be allowed to return with them.

Eventually, Faulkner relented. But once again, one final issue arose. The government wanted the Nez Perce to sign a document relinquishing the title to their lands in Indian Territory. Again, the people met in hurried council. This land had been deeded to them by the Cherokee two years before and was their last vestige of wealth as a people. Now they were being forced to barter it for their freedom.

Such a demand was cruel and unjust and without legal basis. But in the end, it was simply one more injustice visited upon them by a government that had betrayed them and treated them unfairly for as long as any could remember. So, with sadness and anger, the chiefs signed the document, making the people landless and homeless but freeing them to return to the country that they had been longing for in their hearts for the past eight years.

The people climbed on, the wheels began to move, and the train moved slowly away from the Arkansas City station. As the engine gradually built up steam, observers near the tracks heard a strange, keening wail coming forth from the cars. It was the cries of the people, lifting a last lament for the parents and grandparents and young children and infants whose bodies they were leaving in this strange and alien country, far from the land the Creator had given them and far from the land they believed was their home.

The journey did not go smoothly. At McPherson, Kansas, only 120 miles from Arkansas City, the station agent insisted that the people transfer to a Union Pacific train, in direct violation of their agreement with the government. Given the supplies they had been issued, along with their blankets and teepees and personal goods, their freight weighed almost eighteen tons. Though still exhausted from their long walk of the day and night before, the people were forced to take all their baggage from the first train and reload it onto a second, while curious citizens from McPherson crowded in on them, impeding their efforts and offering no assistance.

At midnight, after three strenuous hours of unloading and reloading, they were able to depart again on what they hoped would be an uneventful journey to a station near the Lapwai. But, again, they were wrong.

At the town of Pocatello, several days down the track, the station attendant announced that the train was to be divided. Those people going to the Colville would travel north on a rail line that went north into Montana then turned west to Spokane. The others would continue on a different rail line that ran on a northwest diagonal directly to Wallula, near the site of the Whitman massacre, and disembark there to be transported to the nearby Lapwai.

But Agent Faulkner balked. He had been charged with the responsibility of transporting all the people to the rail junction at Wallula, and he was going to do so. There would be no division of the families unless he received direct confirmation to this effect.

In order to clarify his orders, he went into the telegraph office and sent for instructions. But delay was dangerous. An edgy crowd was already gathering around the train, and there was word that a U.S. marshal was on his way to arrest Joseph for his supposed part in the killings back on the Salmon.

Faulkner became nervous. It was not impossible that this supposed change of orders was nothing more than a ruse to stall the train until the marshal arrived. He did not want to be responsible for a situation that went against the army's wishes, but neither did he want to resist an order that might indeed have come from official sources.

Finally, without waiting for a return message clarifying his responsibilities, he convinced the station agent to send all the people together to Wallula junction, and the train departed hastily before any of the potential confrontations or arrests could take place.

Stopping only to pick up some troops for protection, the train moved across southern Idaho on rails that now ran where once only Indian trails and wagon roads had been. From the window Joseph could look to the north and see the distant mountains that protected his Wallowa Valley. Then the tracks turned north and headed up toward the Wallula not more than 150 miles from the homes and villages the people had left eight years before.

But now came the difficult moment. It had been left until now for each person to decide whether he or she wanted to go to Lapwai and live as Christians or to Colville and live in their traditional ways. The interpreter came among them asking for their decision. Only Joseph was given no choice.

Those who by now had fully embraced the Christianity taught them by Reuben had no difficulty deciding. But for others it was not so easy. Especially in the case of White Bird's people, who had been among the most belligerent and intransigent about accepting white people's ways, the decision was difficult. Lapwai was only several days' ride from their home country. But in order to live there peacefully they would have to look and act as Christians, even if they did not feel it in their hearts. The Christians in the Lapwai not only were opposed to the old ways, they feared those who practiced them, thinking that they might still have the old powers and could use them for harm. If any of White Bird's band or any of Toohoolhoolzote's people who still believed in the old ways wished to live in Lapwai, they would either have to hide their true beliefs or risk certain persecution.

Joseph's people had less difficulty. Their chief was being forced to go to Colville. Their home country in the Wallowa lay more than a hundred miles from the Lapwai across the deep canyons and treacherous waters of the Snake and Salmon—almost a different world. The Colville was on land filled with game and fish and wild berries and roots. It could easily support their traditional way of life. In addition, Chief Moses had extended a welcome to them, which was far different from the reception they would receive at the Lapwai. And by refusing to accept placement at the Lapwai, they would continue to demonstrate that they were a people in exile and could not be said to have relinquished their right to land in the Wallowa by accepting placement on the Nez Perce lands at Lapwai. Though saddened at the thought of further exile, they willingly chose the Colville Reservation as a destination, hoping that it would be but one more stop on their journey back to the land of their birth.

When the final counting was made, 118 people had chosen a reunion and reunification with their friends and families in Lapwai, and 150 had chosen to continue north by train to the sprawling Colville Reservation, where they would continue their life on land they did not consider their own.

T
HOSE FAMILIES WHO
chose the Lapwai received a warm, joyful reception. They had been carried by steamboat from Wallula to Lewiston and by wagon and on horseback from Lewiston to nearby Lapwai. The whole reservation was waiting when they arrived, and both the exiles and the waiting families stood in ceremonious formality while a prayer was offered and welcoming speeches were delivered. Then they rushed forward and greeted each other, seeking out friends and relatives. It was only at the end of this hour-long reunion that the true tragedy of the exile began to be revealed. Now, for the first time, both those who had been gone and those who had remained were able to realize the great number of their friends and family members who were not present at this celebration. As the depth of the loss began to sink in, the tears of joy turned to mournful wails from those who had sought mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and were now standing alone, realizing that time or the trail or the harsh conditions of exile had cost their loved ones their lives and that the reunion they had so long desired would not take place in this life.

For Joseph's followers there was no such discovery because there was no such reception. Joseph's people arrived by train in Spokane Falls and were immediately transported by wagon to the Colville agency headquarters fifty miles to the west.

The Colville was a large reservation of mostly high, rolling country that stretched from the Columbia River north to the Canadian border. Governor Stevens had established it in 1872 as a kind of “Indian Territory” of his own devise, where he could place a number of tribes on common ground in order to open up their homelands to white settlement. As a location for living, it had much to recommend it. There were broad expanses of open meadow and prairie with ample grass for horse and cattle raising. It was crisscrossed by streams abundant with fish, and its forested hills teemed with game of all kinds. Many of the roots and berries that were central to the diets of all the people who had lived in the area grew on its hillsides and in its meadows. Except for its cold, snowy, high-country winters, it was an ideal setting to give people an abundant way of life.

But its great extent and diverse terrain were also a source of problems. Over the centuries, many tribes had roamed freely over this land in search of food and game. A number of them, including the San Poil and Nespelem, considered their homelands to be inside the boundaries of the Colville Reservation. Sharing its great expanse for seasonal hunting and gathering was one thing; sharing it as a living place was another. When the government began assigning other tribes to the Colville as their place of permanent residence, they were denying the primacy of those tribes who considered this land their own, and frictions quickly developed. The forced imposition of outsiders put a strain on the fish and game supplies, changed settlement patterns, and placed people side by side who had differing languages, differing beliefs, differing attitudes toward white culture, and long-standing histories of interaction that had not always been hospitable and amicable. Chief Moses, who had invited Joseph to live with his people, was one of these outsiders.

Joseph and Moses had crafted this arrangement quietly through a series of messages exchanged by courier. Moses was an old friend, eleven years Joseph's senior. His people, the Columbias, had once lived farther to the east near the Columbia River. He had spent time at Spalding's mission as a child and, much like Joseph, had striven to achieve a kind of distant accommodation with the whites, accepting those aspects of white culture that benefited his people but keeping a distance in matters of belief and manners of living. He had once been a very powerful chief among all the peoples in the Plateau and Columbia Basin, but his middle course had alienated many who strongly supported or strongly opposed accommodation with white culture, and his relocation to the Colville and lands previously occupied by the Nespelem people had increased tensions between his people and some of the other Colville tribes.

Nonetheless, he had managed to gain the favor of the white governmental leaders by convincing them that he was a voice of moderation and in this way had made himself the spokesman for all the peoples on the Colville, whether or not they approved of him. To the white observers and officials, this made him the
de facto
chief, and he was happy to look upon himself in that fashion.

But, as well as an astute politician, he was a hard-drinking, self-promoting individual who had his detractors among the white locals as well as among the tribes that did not consider him their actual leader. When Joseph arrived, supposedly as the guest of Moses, these underlying animosities and doubts rose to the surface. Joseph and his people became the objects of much of this resentment.

The Colville agent who took charge of the Nez Perce upon their arrival was not happy to have such a problem dropped onto his lap. He had no sympathy for Joseph and no respect for what he considered the weak-willed decision of those back East to send this group of renegades to his territory. He did not want them near the corrupting influence of what he considered to be a “whiskey Indian” like Moses, so he kept them in squalid conditions just off the reservation near agency headquarters, withholding their supplies and rations rather than sending them to be with Moses.

White shop owners and settlers, fearing that the proximity of the celebrated marauder, Joseph, would decrease the desirability of the area for settlers, derided the chief as a “large, fat-faced, scheming, cruel-looking cuss” and lobbied against his presence. The other tribes who shared the Colville were no more sympathetic, calling the people of both Joseph and Moses “horse thieves and murderers.” The San Poil, on whose land the Nez Perce were initially placed, grew so angry at this imposition that troops had to be called in to keep the situation from escalating into violence. It was not a welcome calculated to make Joseph's people feel at home.

The new arrivals did their best but soon realized that that the situation, even if only temporary, was untenable. Joseph quickly began lobbying to be moved fifty miles west to the Nespelem Valley, where his friend, Chief Moses, resided with his people.

After a few tense months, the move was arranged. Unfortunately, since the Nespelem Valley was also the aboriginal land of the Nespelem tribe, they were no more interested in having Joseph settle on their lands than they had been to have Moses and his people settle among them. Joseph and his followers merely made a difficult situation even more difficult because the country was not well suited to farming, and the addition of more people with more stock simply put more stress on the grazing lands that all of them were trying to share. Though the Nespelems did not respond with the same fury as the San Poils, neither did they offer a warm welcome to the newcomers.

Joseph and his people did what they could to make Nespelem their home. There was no real agency presence there, just a subagent who had massive amounts of territory to administer. So the Nez Perce were left to their own devices, forced to forge an uneasy peace with resentful tribes and to establish such life as they could under the circumstances.

Once again, they had arrived too late to plant any crops, even had they wished to do so. So they were dependent on government rations and such trade as they could engage in with other tribes and the white settlers in the area. But here on the Colville, freed from the oversight of churches and agents committed to their Christianizing and civilizing, they were able to return to their old beliefs. As a result, they were able to live, at long last, in accord with the laws of the Creator, leaving the earth ungouged and the fields unshorn. But in so doing, they deprived themselves of the sustenance that came with a sustained practice of agriculture. They could hunt and fish and gather roots and berries, but without the freedom to travel across to buffalo country or to fish and hunt the places that their tribe had known best, they could not find the sustenance they needed. They tried to build up their horse herds, but this was not a quick solution. Slowly they descended further into poverty.

When the winter of 1886 arrived, bringing with it snows up to four feet deep and some of the coldest temperatures on record, the precarious reality of their situation truly revealed itself. The weak and elderly among them began to perish in alarming numbers. The following year, their situation was made even worse by a policy decision at the highest levels of the United States government. Grant's Peace Policy had been adjudged a failure, and since 1882 the agents in charge of reservations had been appointed directly by the government rather than through religious denominations. With this change it was hoped that agents would be selected for their business skills rather than because they espoused a particular belief. The result had been a notable change in business practices but no change in policy—the red race was still to be brought to the feet of civilization by being brought to its knees as Indians.

But in 1887 the Allotment Act, sponsored by Senator Henry Dawes, took the efforts at civilizing in a new direction. According to this act, the reservations would be divided into plots of land that would be distributed to individual Indians and families, who then would be able to work these plots for their own benefit. In theory, this would foster self-reliance, individual initiative, and a loyalty to home and family rather than to people and tribe. In reality, it opened up the possibility of a settler land grab on the reservations by allowing surplus land that remained after everyone had received an allotment to be sold to white settlers. It also resulted in Indians being duped out of their allotments by unscrupulous settlers and land agents who could manufacture trades of Indian lands for promises, services, or needed goods.

Some of the tribes—those who were inclined to accept the idea of individual ownership and white practices of animal husbandry and agriculture—prospered under allotment. Others, who either did not understand or did not wish to change their lifestyle, did not. In the case of Joseph's Nez Perce, the allotment policy created particular hardship. The people did not want allotments on the Colville because to accept Colville land meant they were giving up their claim to land in the Wallowa. Acceptance of allotments on the Lapwai would mean the same. Though some, like Yellow Bull, did relent and accept an allotment, others refused, effectively rendering themselves landless.

Joseph himself was offered an allotment on the Lapwai in 1889 but refused it. Passions had cooled enough for him to return safely to Idaho, but he knew that accepting land in the Lapwai would be interpreted by the government as relinquishing his right to land in the Wallowa, and this he would never be willing to do.

Instead, he redoubled his efforts to reclaim the Wallowa and to force the government to adhere to the conditions of the agreements it had made with him and his people over the years. With the help of white lawyers in Spokane, he began articulating the legal case for his claim to his homeland. He pointed to 1855, when his father had signed the initial treaty giving the government the land on which the Lapwai existed and nothing else. He pointed out that even the conditions of that treaty had never been fulfilled and that his father later had refused to sign the Treaty of 1863, in which the Wallowa was illegally given to the government by men who did not own it. He pointed out that Grant had put the Wallowa in trust for his people in 1873 and had abrogated this decision in 1875 with no legal authority to do so. He cited the fact that the Cherokee had given the Nez Perce land in Oklahoma and that the Nez Perce had never received fair compensation for it beyond the $18,000 that the government had appropriated for their transportation back to the Northwest. Since that land had been purchased originally for $300,000 from the Cherokee for the Nez Perce and later had been sold off to settlers for almost that much, he demanded an accounting of those moneys. He also pointed out that if the Nez Perce in exile were seen as part of the Nez Perce who stayed in Idaho, the more than $1.5 million that the Nez Perce had received for their lands should be distributed in some proportion or made available to the Nez Perce who had been incarcerated in Indian Territory.

Point by point, decision by decision, governmental action by governmental action, Joseph constructed an argument that allowed for no honest escape by the U.S. government. No matter what the government claimed, Joseph had legal grounds for refuting any argument that led to any conclusion other than that the United States owed the Nez Perce compensation for the various lands they once had inhabited.

His first hope, as always, was not compensation but the return of the Wallowa Valley. But if that were not to be, he wanted fair compensation so his people, like all other tribes, would have the annuities to allow them to become self-sufficient without turning to agriculture or continuing to rely on the whims and mercies of government handouts.

At the heart of his contention was the conviction that the Nez Perce were a people and should be compensated as a people, not as individuals with no collective identity or responsibility for each other. This was the one condition that the government, no matter what its sentiment toward Indian claims, could not accept. America was the land of free individuals, not a nation of subordinate groups that could negotiate for the collective good of their people. Joseph's claim to negotiate as the leader of a sovereign and separate people represented an antiquated, discounted point of view, and his claims, no matter how legally compelling, had to be disregarded.

But Joseph would not relent. He wanted to see the ancestral lands returned to his people as a whole; he was not interested in the distribution of individual plots to individual families. And if he could not get satisfaction through legal means, he would try to use his personal reputation to gain public support. Drawing upon the goodwill and reputation he had with the American public, he began traveling to Washington, D.C., in an effort to present his case to sympathetic authorities. His first visit there with Chapman and Yellow Bull in 1879 had been a great success. There was no reason to think that subsequent visits would be any different.