Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (50 page)

But in the intervening years, America had changed. When he had first traveled to Washington, the Indian question was still strong in people's minds. America was still coming out of the Civil War and struggling with the questions of how to deal with the people and spaces of the sparsely settled West. But in the few years since that first visit, the vision and focus of the country had shifted. Railroads now crisscrossed the continent, knitting East and West into a single nation. The telegraph now reached all corners of the country, making communication almost instantaneous. Cities had grown into teeming immigrant centers, and small wooden boardwalk frontier towns had turned into solid stone and brick communities, with banks and churches and newspapers and men and women as interested in the affairs of Europe as in the struggles of declining Indian tribes.

Men like Joseph, fighting to keep alive a vision of the past, were slowly becoming vestigial. They elicited curiosity, even a romantic nostalgia, but they did not fire public indignation with their stories of mistreatment and injustice. The closest most Americans came to an interest in Indians was attending one of Buffalo Bill Cody's traveling Wild West shows. Even the dreaded Sitting Bull, the scourge of the plains and the man whose ghostly presence had shaped both the escape route and the final battle of the Nez Perce people at the Bear's Paw, had been reduced to performing with Buffalo Bill, sitting onstage in front of a teepee while white barkers expounded on the spiritual nature of the Indian.

So now, when Joseph visited Washington, D.C., he competed for public attention with issues like the Standard Oil trust and construction of a canal across the isthmus of Panama. He was received politely, even given a presidential audience, then dismissed with the same kinds of vague promises that politicians made to all suitors and favor seekers. The business of America had become business, and anyone who represented any other type of concern was given civil hearing, then politely shown the door.

He also was fighting the tide of a reform movement that saw the “Indian problem” as an issue less of tribal sovereignty than of individual rights. The Indians' staunchest supporters both in government and society as a whole saw their primary task as bringing the Indian into the full status of American citizenship.

“Let us forget once and forever the word ‘Indian' and all that it has signified in the past,” said a participant at one of the Mohonk Conferences that were held annually in New York to help shape American policy toward the Indian, “and remember only that we are dealing with so many children of a common father.”

Such an attitude fit perfectly with the less visionary attitude of more practical politicians. “Three hundred thousand people have no right to hold a continent and keep at bay a race able to people it and provide the happy homes of civilization,” they declared. “We do owe the Indians sacred rights and obligations, but one of those duties is not the right to let them hold forever the land they did not occupy, and which they were not making fruitful for themselves or others.” At its best, the issue of Indian rights had become an issue of human rights. Land claims, apart from individual property claims, were a thing of the past.

So when Joseph went before officials in Washington complaining about the treatment of the Nez Perce at Colville and pleading for the legal rights of his people to their old lands, he was received as a curious anachronism and met with almost patronizing indifference. The public as well as governmental officials were more interested in seeing the noble chief in his regalia than in dealing with him as an aggrieved plaintiff in a land dispute with the United States government.

He was still lionized by the public, but in a very curious way. In 1897, after a fruitless visit to Washington, he was invited to New York to participate in the great parade and celebration for the dedication of Grant's Tomb. On the day before the dedication, he was invited to Madison Square Garden to watch Buffalo Bill's
Wild West
show. Both General Howard and General Miles were visiting the city for the dedication and also in attendance. Upon seeing Joseph, each came over to pay his respects. When Buffalo Bill, mounted on his horse and directing the festivities, realized the chief was in attendance, he too rode over and paid his regards. The assembled public was provided with a treat even greater than the
Wild West
show's recreations of great Indian battles and feats of frontier marksmanship. There, in their own great arena in downtown New York City, America's most celebrated Indian had encountered two of its most celebrated Indian fighters and its most celebrated Indian scout, now turned showman and, by all appearances, had conversed civilly and congenially with each of them.

When the
New York Times
reported the event the following day, they referred to Joseph as the leader of his people's “romantic flight in 1877.” The man who only a decade earlier had been viewed as the embodiment of America's unjust treatment of indigenous people had become instead the symbol of a bygone era and the embodiment of a romantic vision of America's past. The next day this image was emblazoned for all time on the public's imagination as Joseph, in full tribal regalia, rode alongside Buffalo Bill in the great parade honoring the deceased general and president.

Joseph returned home to the Colville an even greater hero in the public mind but no closer to achieving success in his quest to get his people back to the Wallowa. The American people, like the American government, were happy to lionize him as a symbol of the nation's exotic frontier past, but they had no interest in seeing him as a person with a legitimate legal dispute in the present.

There were still voices on his side. Miles, who had been promoted to Commander General of the Army, continued to advocate for the chief. He sometimes paid for Joseph's trips to Washington out of his own pocket, and he worked hard to make sure that the chief got fair hearing when he arrived. But he too was being swept up in the tides of change as the military was being forced to move from dealing with Indians and Mexicans and runaway slaves to offshore problems like the Spanish presence in the Caribbean. Howard made an occasional statement in support of Joseph, and Buffalo Bill Cody took up his cause. But by and large, the West of the Indian wars was receding into myth, and those who still represented that West were receding with it.

But in 1889 there seemed to be a glimmer of hope. Once again, Miles spoke up for the chief and arranged a visit to Washington, this time to include a hearing before the Indian Commission. The meeting went well, and Joseph had returned to the Colville convinced that he would finally be allowed to travel to the Wallowa to pick out the lands that he and his people would occupy.

The following spring, James McLaughlin was sent west to serve as inspector on Joseph's long-awaited journey to the Wallowa. He was to accompany the chief, assess the situation, and issue a report on which a determination would be made about allowing Joseph and his people to return to the land of their ancestors.

McLaughlin was a veteran of Indian affairs and fancied himself a friend of the red man. He had been the agent at Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota when Sitting Bull had returned from his Canadian exile, and he had managed to work with the stubborn Lakota chief and even get him to practice some rudimentary farming. He was quite certain that he could assess the legitimacy and advisability of Joseph's claim to be returned to the Wallowa.

In the last week of June 1900 the two men, along with several other Nez Perce, made their journey to the Wallowa. The snows of winter had receded, and the valley was filled with greenery and birdsong. Joseph remembered every hill and stream, savoring the experience as he walked upon the earth that he considered one with his own body. He visited the grave site of his father and mother, where he wept openly. Some sympathetic white settler had fenced it and kept it in good repair.

On the following Saturday afternoon he was escorted to a meeting hall in the small Wallowa Valley town of Enterprise to present his case to the white residents of the area. A large crowd gathered to hear and see the long-exiled chief. Some of them had known him and counted him among their friends. Some were against the idea of even allowing him to speak at all.

He spoke through an interpreter, explaining that neither his father nor anyone else had ever sold this land and that he wished now to have the land near the forks of the creek where his father was buried, as well as the country around the lake and the distant Imnaha Valley, where his people had traditionally camped and which they had always held sacred. But the crowd jeered and made sport of him. He was asking for the best land in the entire valley.

At the completion of Joseph's speech, a Mr. Smith, who had lived in the area for years and had known both Joseph and his father, offered a long, patronizing response. He recounted the history of white–Nez Perce relations in the Wallowa and reminded Joseph that he had agreed to trade this country for land near the Lapwai reservation. Joseph vigorously denied ever having made such an agreement, which apparently referred to the ride he and White Bird had taken with Howard during the “showing of the rifle” council at Lapwai more than twenty years before. But his denials were to no avail.

In the end, the locals gave him no support. They denigrated his spiritual connection to the land as a simple fondness and looked upon his claims as antiquated and delusional. They expressed no willingness to allow him any land, even if purchased at fair market value. He left having received neither satisfaction nor respect. His only great joy had been to see the well-kept grave of his father and mother.

Nonetheless, he hoped that Inspector McLaughlin would write a supportive report. But two months passed, and the report had not been issued. Finally, Joseph enlisted the aid of a local teacher to write a letter to his white friend, Professor Edmond Meany, at the University of Washington, outlining his concerns and aspirations. “I told the inspector I would be satisfied with some land on one side of the river where there were only a few whites, and where creeks and mountains afforded good pasturage,” he wrote. “I would be happy with very little.”

But when McLaughlin's report finally arrived, it told a very different story. The land is “thickly settled by prosperous people,” it stated. “It is enough that the white man has turned the desert into a garden that he should enjoy the profit of his enterprise.”

In McLaughlin's view, Joseph was better off staying in the Colville.

The Indian Commission accepted his recommendation.

Meanwhile, the situation at Colville had worsened. The agent in place, Mr. Albert Anderson, was proving to be nearly the equal of Hiram Jones in his punitive practices. He was outraged at the Nez Perce's continued nomadic wanderings, the men's willingness to take in the wives of their deceased brothers, their fondness for horse races, and their refusal to engage in efficient agriculture.

“They are strictly ‘blanket Indians,'” he wrote in his annual report in 1900. “They have no religion, believe in no creed, and their morality is at a low ebb.” He advocated “abolishing the issue of subsistence and clothing to them” in order to force them to take up farming and other white pursuits.

Joseph in particular drew his ire because of the chief's insistence on living in his teepee even though a wooden house had been constructed for him. “He, with his handful of unworthy followers, prefers the traditional tepee, living on the generosity of the Government and passing away their time in a filthy and licentious way of living,” he wrote. To Anderson, history had been partial to Joseph. “The appalling wrongs done by him are crying from the bloodstained soil of Idaho for restitution,” he concluded.

He announced that Nez Perce children henceforth would be sent to boarding school at Fort Spokane, several miles across the Columbia River and outside the reservation, where a strong tradition of military discipline was imposed. Joseph recognized this as another effort to remove the children from their traditional language and practices, and he refused to send them. Anderson responded by stopping all rations and withdrawing privileges at the sawmill and blacksmith shop.

Though it created great hardships for them, the people stayed loyal to Joseph. They continued to revere him as the chief, in direct contradiction of the agent's efforts to break the tribal system and make all men equal in status. They built a longhouse in which they held their traditional seven-drum ceremonies. They refused to cut their children's hair or force them to learn the white people's language and adamantly refused to involve themselves in meaningful agricultural pursuits, even as the market for horses, their primary source of wealth and income, was beginning to dry up.

Joseph too persisted in the old ways. He would wear a white man's flannel shirt, but he preferred his Indian leggings and breechcloth and always wore moccasins. He went by his Nez Perce name of Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, and he accepted the deference that his status as chief accorded him. He always presided at Sunday breakfasts for his lodge, offering the prayers of thanksgiving before the meal, and took the lead in conducting the funerals of any who died in his tribe.

His tribe continued to consult him on all matters, even such insignificant issues as how to divide up a kill of venison. In all manners and actions, he remained every bit the traditional Nez Perce leader and chief—a man of grave and dignified presence with an air of unfailing calm and personal authority.

But the years were taking their toll. Though he was only in his early sixties, his body had begun to fail. His legs had become bowed, his back bent, and his body thick and heavy. His step was uncertain, and his energy had begun to ebb. Yet he continued to serve his people and advocate for their return to their homeland. In 1901 he wrote plaintively to his friend Meany, “My old home is in the Wallowa valley and I want to go back there to live. My mother and father are buried there. If the government would only give me small piece of land for my people in the Wallowa Valley with a teacher, that is all that I would ask.”