Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (10 page)

To be sure, good families also entered the territory, and these the Nez Perce befriended, offering help with crops and caring for their children. But even the most morally upright of these newcomers had taken up residence in spite of, not because of, the Indians. The Nez Perce were, at best, a useful service population; at worst, they were an impediment to the newcomers' designs upon the land and its wealth.

Because the white towns followed the reports of gold, they had become floating, violent settlements. Whenever a miner entered a settlement like Lewiston with gold in his pockets, a stampede of men would set out for the place where he had filed his claim. The traders and prostitutes and peddlers with their barrels of whiskey would pack up and follow, and a rude, lawless town would spring up on the spot, no matter how distant or unlikely.

Elk City was typical. In the early summer of 1861, Elk City was nothing more than a forested mountainside deep in the foothills of the Bitterroots on the eastern edge of Nez Perce country. But when a prospector arrived back in Lewiston bragging about a potential strike, a thousand miners ran, rode, and scrambled their way up the hillsides toward the location. Within two weeks, the brush huts of those who had found the spot were replaced by twenty log buildings. By the end of that month, forty-six buildings straddled a crude main street, selling mining goods, alcohol, and the favors of women.

Though Elk City remained in existence after the gold was extracted, many similar settlements did not. When a vein dried up, towns were abandoned as quickly as they had been created. But while there was money to be made, the miners forced their way past all Indian resistance, bought the Indians off, or “pacified” them with liberal amounts of liquor.

As the strikes continued, the miners forced their way ever deeper into Nez Perce territory. The bands now being affected were not Christian bands positively disposed toward white settlement, but bands that had sought to avoid involvement or contact with whites. They were also bands who had received none of the purported benefits of the Treaty of 1855. Now the one benefit they had received—freedom from white intrusion— was being withdrawn.

It quickly became evident to government officials that the encroachment on Indian lands could not be stopped. So, instead of trying to enforce the provisions of the Treaty of 1855—an effort for which they had little heart in the first place—they tried to renegotiate its conditions and boundaries.

Stevens once again called the tribes together in council. Few of the Nez Perce even wished to attend. They well remembered Stevens's standing before them in 1855, grandiloquently proclaiming the sanctity and inviolability of the treaty boundaries for as long as the sun should shine. They remembered the promises of houses, tools, schools, hospitals, and annuities, none of which had been forthcoming. They saw no reason to meet with a man whose words sounded good but meant nothing. Consequently, many of them stayed home or kept far back from the proceedings.

Lawyer, however, and Timothy, the other most loyal and devoutly Christian of the leaders, did attend. They had been subject to ridicule for their naive trust in the whites and their promises, and they needed some explanation and reassurance that the situation was changing. They also saw the astonishing numbers of whites flooding into their country and realized that it was only through government assistance that this tide could be controlled at all. Better, they thought, to meet with the government and gain some promises and advantages than simply be overwhelmed by the lawless white settlers and their world of violence and alcohol. A new treaty might not get them back the lands they had lost, but perhaps it could stop further intrusion by limiting the settlers and miners to the towns they had already established and keeping them to the trails along the river bottoms while they moved back and forth in search of gold.

By this time, many of the chiefs who had been part of the initial treaty were getting older, and their sons, often men honored with the same names as their fathers, had come along to observe or participate. Young Looking Glass, young Lawyer, and young Joseph were among them. All were men of considerable character and personal magnetism in their own right. They had all grown to adulthood since the arrival of the whites, and it was not the handshake with Lewis and Clark that had influenced them most but the relationships with the subsequent white intruders.

If the chiefs were skeptical at the prospect of the treaty, they were astounded at what was actually offered. Far from asking only for a few towns and safe passage for miners, the government negotiators proposed that the Nez Perce give up all their land except for a small area around Lapwai and Kamiah and that they be paid for their forfeited country with small individual plots of land within these boundaries.

The presumptions on which this offer was based were astonishing to the chiefs. It presumed they would all become farmers and live on small bits of land; it assumed they would all give up their homelands that had been given them by the Creator and from whose soil their very bodies had been made; and it assumed that independent peoples, living far apart with their own leaders, their own cultural practices, and their own relationship to the animals and plants of the earth, would now be willing to blend together into a community of garden plots and farm animals. Even if the government could provide this—and previous experience indicated it could not—such a way of living was an affront to everything the people had believed since the Creator had put them on earth. It also was a direct violation of that to which they had agreed only a few short years before.

The negotiators tried to sweeten the offer by doubling the size of the land and throwing in promises of schools and teachers and mills. They even had the effrontery to say that this treaty would guarantee the payments that had been negotiated under the last treaty but thus far had not been received.

Any chief who had any relationship to the old beliefs or whose property lay outside the proposed boundaries or who had reason to doubt the good offices of the government simply refused to participate further. Even Lawyer was disgusted and threatened to leave.

The negotiators persisted, darkening their offer with threats. The chiefs then met in council to discuss the situation. There still was no unanimity among them as to whether they had acted as a group or as individuals representing only their own bands in signing the Treaty of 1855. And they saw no reason why the conditions of that treaty should not be upheld. “As long as the sun shall shine” did not mean “until the white man changes his mind.”

After a long, emotional council at which the many points of view were discussed, the Nez Perce made a momentous decision. If bands like Lawyer's wished to make agreements with the U.S. government on such terms as were proposed, they were free to do so. The others would stay together and speak with a common voice, refusing any further involvement with the white man and his promises. The Nez Perce nation, so long bound together by their common language and their common origin from the Creator, would cease to exist. From this point forward, they would be two distinct peoples.

The men from the two sides then shook hands, and those who wished no involvement with the treaty process withdrew.

The five major chiefs who had withdrawn from the negotiations then left the treaty proceedings and returned to their own lands. Tuekakas, who was among them, was so upset by what he had seen that he returned to his beloved Wallowa and built cairns of rocks on the tops of the ridge that marked the end of his land. Inside this line was the part of the earth that the Creator had given to his people, and neither governments nor other bands in the tribe would ever cause him to abandon it.

But after the dissatisfied bands departed from the treaty gathering, Lawyer made a dangerous and momentous choice. He signed a treaty giving all the Nez Perce land outside the proposed boundaries to the United States in exchange for the goods and benefits that the government offered.

It was not clear to all that he believed he was signing for more than his own people and making an agreement that affected more than his own land, but in the eyes of the government he was the head chief, and this made him the spokesman and representative for all the Nez Perce. His signature was their signature, and to make sure of it, they had him round up fifty-one other men to make
X
s on the paper. The commissioners' thinking was simple: no one in Washington knew or cared who the actual chiefs were. If the number of signatories looked the same as the number on the Treaty of 1855, it would look like there had been universal accord.

With this piece of paper, they could claim that the Nez Perce had agreed to be settled on a tiny piece of land in Idaho and, in exchange for a few favors, had agreed to give away land that covered much of eastern Oregon, part of southern Washington, and all of Idaho Territory up to the edge of the mountains. Governor Stevens had achieved his goal, and the chiefs who had left the treaty proceedings were now, in the eyes of the government, living on land to which they had no claim.

Meanwhile, back in his distant Wallowa Valley, Tuekakas remained so incensed by what he had seen that he tore up his prized Book of Heaven, which the Reverend Spalding had given him. If the government's duplicity reflected the Christian way, he no longer wanted any part of it.

All this was observed by his sons, Joseph and Ollokot, who were now grown men. It was they who would have to deal with the fruits of this “thief treaty” when the mantle of leadership passed to them.

The mining boom soon passed, and the most craven of the opportunists left for greener pastures. What remained was the residue of white settlement in the form of towns, ranches, and farms. The residents of these white settlements were now firmly rooted in the area, mostly in the vicinity of the Nez Perce who had signed the treaty.

The white settlers had built homes and businesses, planted orchards, tilled land, and fenced gardens and livestock ranges. They had started newspapers, banks, theaters, and concert halls. Their children had been born here; their sweat had built lives here. They were Oregonians, Idahoans, or Washingtonians. Above all, they were Americans, and in their minds this was America.

The remaining Indians, whom they now greatly outnumbered, were little more to them than a nuisance or an impediment. They were simply a remnant, destined to disappear either by extermination from disease and alcohol or by acculturation to white ways. Some of the settlers made friends with the Indians, some simply used them. Others continued to live in fear of them and regarded them as animals or spoke out for their eradication. But in no way were they accorded respect as the legitimate owners or spiritual inheritors of the earth on which they all were living.

Many of the Nez Perce, especially those who had embraced Christian ways, willingly accepted this condition. Having survived the onslaught of the lawless gold seekers, they were now free to continue their own progress toward a more settled and civilized life. Many still kept to some of their old ways, living in skin shelters and traveling occasionally to buffalo country, but their impulse and trajectory lay toward the white way of living. There was good money to be made in trade with the whites, and they could avail themselves of schools and goods and modern practices of agriculture and animal husbandry. They dressed like whites, sought out white teachers and preachers, and tried in their own fashion to imitate and replicate white practices whenever possible.

Their only real difficulties arose when there was a confrontation with whites over property or behavior. Then the white voice was always heard above the Indian's. When those among the lawless element—and there were still many left over from the Gold Rush—killed or raped or stole from an Indian, the Indian had no recourse. But when an Indian committed a crime against a white, retribution was swift, often directed against any Indian who happened to be nearby.

The Nez Perce complained endlessly about this situation, but official corruption was rife. The agents appointed to protect them as often as not took the money designated for Indian projects and disappeared. One agent at Lapwai absconded with ten thousand dollars earmarked for teachers' salaries when there were not even any schools in existence. Justice, such as it was, remained vigilante justice for crimes committed by Indians, while Indians could expect no justice for crimes committed by whites.

Still, the treaty Nez Perce kept their faith in the white ways. Simply because some among the whites were unable to live up to the standards of their own culture and religion did not mean that those standards were wanting. There were weak and venal men among every race, and the Nez Perce had always taken the ways of others, perfected them, and practiced them with a sense of excellence that exceeded that of the people from whom the new knowledge had come. With regard to white religion and civilization, they intended to do the same.

With the exception of White Bird, the chief of the band whose canyoned and furrowed homeland had been overrun by miners, the nontreaty chiefs, by and large, had remained untouched by the white incursion. Their homelands had held little long-term interest for the gold seekers, and any arable land they possessed lay too far from main settlements to attract any but the most intrepid of the settlers. It was only after the gold began to dry up and the ranchers and other settlers began to fill up the areas of easy access that these outlying areas became more appealing. Then difficulties began to multiply.

The traditional camas-gathering places, though distant from the main settlements, were wide, flat expanses, attractive to the plow and the fence. The broad grazing prairies used by the Nez Perce for their horse herds offered promising possibilities for cattle raising. As white settlers began to move toward these areas, they moved directly into the paths, and into the lives, of those Nez Perce who specifically and pointedly had turned away from white culture and gone off to live in their traditional manner. Soon, a band entering its traditional camas grounds was as likely to find it destroyed by settlers' pigs as to find it full of the Creator's bounty of roots and beautiful purple flowers.