Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (54 page)

General Howard's own interpretation can be found in
Nez Percé Joseph.
Insight into military equipment beyond that presented in Brown and Greene can be found in Randy Steffen's
The Horse Soldier, 1776–1943
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978).

One of the most overlooked and important documents for the Indian point of view is Starr Maxwell's collection of first-person testimony in
Memorial of the Nez Perce Indians Residing in the State of Idaho.
Stands In Timber's
Cheyenne Memories
offers a Cheyenne point of view. Sitting Bull's situation is well covered in Robert Utley's
The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of
Sitting Bull
(New York: Ballantine, 1993). Duncan McDonald's “Through Nez Perce Eyes” follows the path of White Bird and his escapees, while Garcia's
Tough Trip Through Paradise
presents a haunting first-person account of the affair through the eyes of his Nez Perce wife, In-Who-lise.

Wilfong's
Following the Nez Perce Trail
is full of first-person observations and quotes and is of great value to the visitor to the Bear's Paw.

Though I have made it a practice not to cite individual informants among the Nez Perce, I feel comfortable noting the work of non-native Jim Magera of Havre, Montana, in collecting source materials and providing ongoing interpretation of the Bear's Paw battlefield.

Several final notes: The archival materials in the McWhorter Collection at Washington State University, in Pullman, Washington, are filled with Nez Perce accounts of this episode, and the small museum at Chinook, Montana, tells the story poignantly for those who visit.

Here I add a personal observation. For the immediate future, people who wish to have a physical experience of a historical event can do no better than to choose the confrontation at the Bear's Paw. The battle site is almost unmarked, untouched, and unchanged. It sits unnoticed on the side of a lonely Montana highway far from any major city and a good distance from any town at all. A few walking trails take you to small stakes that designate individual campsites and places where warriors fell. But there are no pavilions, no interpretive centers with dioramas and bookstores, no large expanses of asphalt with painted lines and designated RV parking. There are just the hills, the blowing grasses, and the ghosts.

It is a place where you can be alone with your thoughts, where you can touch a rock that bears the scars of a bullet strike, where you can see the impressions in the ground where the women dug frantically with knives and frying pans to create shelter pits for their families.

This is about to change. An interpretive center will soon be constructed there, and to my mind, it will be our national loss. No memorial we could construct, no interpretive center we could build, could make the experience of this battlefield more powerful or understandable. In its undeveloped state, it speaks with an eloquence that we cannot augment. There are places where the winds carry messages. This is one of them.

Part 3: A Time of Betrayal and Exile
18. “You Will Be Returned to Your Homeland”

Miles's
Personal Recollections
are essential reading for this sparsely documented period. Redington's “Scouting in Montana in the 1870's,”
Frontier
(vol. 13, 1933), offers first-person insight, as does Zimmer's
Frontier Soldier.
The observations of Captain Henry Romeyn, published in
Contributions to the Montana Historical Society,
2 (1896), also offer first-person experience.

The best secondary source for this period is Beal's
I Will Fight No More Forever.
Other than that, archived military recollections of men such as Henry Remsen Tilton, an example of whose recollections can be found in
Forest and Stream and Rod and Gun,
9 (1877), provide the best picture.

19. “You Must Move Again”

Again, there is little documentation of this period with one significant exception:
Flatboating on the Yellowstone, 1877
(1925; reprint, Staten Island, NY: Ward Hill Press, 1998) by Fred Bond tells the story of the river journey from the point of view of one of the hired boatmen. Like Garcia's
Tough Trip Through Paradise
and Carpenter's
Adventures in Geyser Land,
this is the work of a nonprofessional chronicler and, with those other two, brings the period of the exile alive with an earthy flavor unmatched by any other non-native source. Like the other two, it is also fanciful in its interpretation and unreliable in its details.

20. “When Will These White Chiefs Begin to Tell the Truth?”
21. “Is It Possible That the Noble Red Man Is Not a Myth?”

The entire trek from Bismarck to Leavenworth is completely undocumented except for military reports and newspaper accounts, primarily in the
Bismarck Tri-Weekly Tribune,
the
New York Herald,
the
St. Paul Pioneer Press,
and to a lesser extent, in
Harper's Weekly.
Smaller newspapers along the route of travels carried local responses to the passing prisoners.

Miles conveys the feel of military rail travel of the time in his
Personal Recollections,
and the recollections of Colonel Hugh Reed, who accompanied the exiles on their journey, provide a close-up look at their travels.

22. “A Good Country to Get Rid of Indians In”
23. “I Have Heard Talk and Talk but Nothing Is Done”

There is, as yet, no comprehensive and reliable secondary source for the study of the Leavenworth incarceration. The time from the surrender on has been treated mostly as a burdensome but necessary coda by historians and writers. For now, the best picture of this essential period can be gained by perusing the archives of the
Leavenworth Times
of 1877–1878, where a picture of the life in exile can be gleaned secondhand.

The Quapaw period is covered briefly but accurately by Velma Neiberding in “The Nez Perce in the Quapaw Agency, 1878–1879,” published by in the
Chronicles of Oklahoma
(Spring 1966)
.
J. Stanley Clark's “The Nez Perces in Exile,”
Pacific Northwest Quarterly
36 ( July 1945), is an excellent overview of the entire exile period. D. David Tate's “The Nez Perces in Eastern Indian Territory: The Quapaw Agency Experience,” in
Oklahoma's Forgotten Indians,
edited by Robert E. Smith (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1981), is also extremely valuable.

A soon-to-be published book edited by Larry D. O'Neal,
The Nez Perce: An Anthology of a Tribe in Exile
(Moscow: University of Idaho Library, forthcoming), will consolidate the extant source materials on this period and begin a reassessment of the Quapaw exile, which will fundamentally change our historical understanding of this period.

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

The Oakland agency period, again, is sparsely researched.
Chief Joseph's Allies,
by Clifford E. Trafzer and Richard Scheuerman (Newcastle, CA: Sierra Oaks Publishing, 1992), discusses the Palouse in this period. Clark's “The Nez Perces in Exile” gives a solid accounting, as does “Nez Perces in Indian Territory: An Archival Study” by Berlin Chapman,
Oregon Historical Quarterly
(vol. 50, 1949). A recent work by J. Diane Pearson, “Numipu Narratives: The Essence of Survival in Indian Territory,”
Journal of Northwest Anthropology
(Spring 2004), breaks new ground in the study of this neglected period and offers the possibility of a rich reassessment of the Oakland relocation. Her work builds upon that done by Archie Phinney in
Nez Perce Texts
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1934).

Beal in
I Will Fight No More Forever
gives a quick and accurate overview, as does McWhorter in
Hear Me, My Chiefs!
Government documents, including agents' annual reports, provide factual data about Nez Perce adaptation to their Oakland Agency life. Documents from the Presbyterian churches show the changing public perception and the influence of Reuben and the Lapwai Christians. Of special interest are the letters written by James Reuben. The archives of the
Arkansas City Gazette
are most instructive about the interaction of the agents, the citizens, the churches, and the tribes.

Last, Kate McBeth's work,
The Nez Perces Since Lewis and Clark
(1908; reprint, Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1993), offers a look at the return of the exiles to Lapwai.

25. “We Won't Be Responsible for Their Lives 24 Hours After Their Arrival”
26. “I Would Be Happy with Very Little”

The best books on the period in the Colville and the Lapwai after the return from exile are Steven Evans's
Voice of the Old Wolf: Lucullus Virgil McWhorter and the Nez Perce Indians
(Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1996); Mick Gidley's
Kopet: A Documentary Narrative of Joseph's Last Years
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); and Gidley's
With One Sky Above Us: Life on an Indian Reservation at the Turn of the Century
(New York: Putnam, 1979).

Robert Ruby and John Brown discuss the overall situation on the Colville reservation in
Half-Sun on the Columbia: A Biography of Chief Moses
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965).

Last, and of particular note, is Erskine Wood's
Days with Chief Joseph: Diary, Recollections, and Photos
(Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1970), in which the son of General Howard's aide records his experiences as a boy during summers spent with Joseph in Colville.