Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (2 page)

Everywhere I went I was overwhelmed with the presence of the forces that had created this landscape. The dry river courses with cataracts larger than Niagara, now only echoes of the water that once roared over their surface. Mountains shoved up on impossible angles, a tectonic wreckage stretching for miles and covered now with endless expanses of dark green forest. Dried lava flows. Deep, impassable river gorges that cut like knife wounds into the flesh of the land. Rolling, grass-covered beds of long-forgotten seas.

I drove through these misted valleys, high mountain meadows, and dizzying gorges with something approaching awe. I could not help but feel a hint of what the white soldiers of the 1860s and '70s—fresh recruits from somewhere back east or foreign-born young boys trying to make their way in the new country—must have felt in the presence of this landscape. It was a sensation bordering on terror—a terror of scale, of vastness, of indifference; of knowing that you could be swallowed up in this land and disappear without a trace.

These were spaces of such greatness and emptiness that a wrong turn and an hour of walking could get you so lost and so far from rescue that your loudest cries for help could go unheard, your signal fires and gunshots to draw attention washed into silence by the rustling of the trees and the great, empty howlings of the wind. There was no doubt in my mind that the bones of many soldiers and trappers and miners lie unburied on these forbidding hillsides and will remain there undiscovered forever. And the thought that settlers dragged their wives into this country and told them to set up households in rude shacks and rough-hewn cabins made me shudder with a kind of shapeless dread.

Yet this was the land the Nez Perce called home. It was the place where they developed the most dominant culture in the native Northwest, ranging out from their home villages on the Plateau as far as the Pacific Ocean to the west and the pipestone quarries of Minnesota to the east. It was on their trails that Lewis and Clark fumbled their way across the mountains from buffalo country, in their canoes and with their guarantee of safe passage that the Corps of Discovery made its way down the Columbia toward the great western sea.

These were the people who felt such confidence in their life and ways that they opened their hearts and minds to anything brought in from the outside. They were the people who figured out how to make the strongest and most accurate bows of any native people; who learned how to geld horses using sharpened rocks, and could do so with such precision that Lewis and Clark said their facility at the task exceeded that of white men with their finely honed knives. They were the people who would make a cradle board with a hundred thousand beads on it, who would swim across the ice-laden Salmon River every day all winter to keep their bodies strong.

They were the tribe whose men often stood well over six feet while the American soldiers of the same era were averaging five feet six or five feet seven inches in height, whose women owned the lodges and food sources of the people and were empowered to sell them for their own profit, while white women of the time were told to subjugate themselves to the will of their husbands and submit to them in all things under the control of God and man.

I was in a land of giants, and, like every white interloper since the time of Lewis and Clark and the fur traders, I had to either grow to meet the experience or shrivel to my quivering, domestic scale, turn tail, and run. In spite of strong inclinations to the contrary, I decided to grow into the task. I would traverse this landscape, meet the people, take the chances at rejection and downright hostility, speak the truth, show my heart, and see what emerged.

I am no stranger to the reality of contemporary reservations. My time among native people in northern Minnesota and the Dakotas has disabused me of any naive romantic notions. I did not expect to find bronzed men towering over me on horseback or women running onto battlefields to attack advancing warriors with hatchets. But I did expect to find men and women who shared some of the basic characteristics of their ancestors. And I was not mistaken.

From my first contact, I sensed that these people were different from the other native people I have known. They did not seem wounded by the dominant American culture so much as masters of it. It was not that they had become the proverbial “apples”—red on the outside and white on the inside. Rather, they had figured out what American culture offered and had accepted it with a kind of contemptuous indifference as if, though it had emerged victorious, it was an adversary not quite worthy enough to merit the expenditure of any emotional or spiritual energy. To put it a different way, they seemed bigger than the cultural battle they had lost.

I don't want to put too fine a point on this. The primary reservation town of Spalding, just outside of Lewiston, Idaho, was the usual tragic assemblage of decaying houses with abandoned cars propped up on concrete blocks. It was unemployed men hanging around a gritty, cinder-block supermarket, too many government vehicles and workers driving on too-dirty streets, kids wandering around in oversized jackets, too many of them smoking, too many of them too young to be doing so.

But there was something else going on—something I couldn't put my finger on—and I confronted it every time I stopped in a store or on a corner or to pick up a hitchhiker. It had to do with a willingness to meet me eye to eye, a “who are you?” that had an honest openness to the possibility that I might be a good man, notwithstanding my whiteness, and that my skin color and
auslander
status would not necessarily be held against me.

Conversations did not get shut down with one-word answers. A request for directions did not get shunted aside with a muffled “I don't know” followed by a hurried exit. The people met me as I had hoped to be met: with a cautious skepticism and a willingness to listen. In some strange fashion, I felt like I was beginning to get a grasp on the character of the people from whom Joseph had sprung.

But none of my growing confidence and understanding prepared me for the response I would get when I mentioned the man himself. Eyes darkened. Body language changed. People glanced around as if worried that they were being observed. Some of this was clearly discomfort with the prospect of another white man come in search of the legendary Joseph. But there was something deeper here, something more personal. Joseph touched a chord in these people that resonated far below my understanding, and it was not some bright, sunlit, major-key harmonic.

All through the reservation I confronted this—in the Nez Perce interpretive center at Lapwai, in the reservation headquarters town of Spalding, in the small village of Kamiah, where the strange mound of land called the Heart of the Monster marks the spot where Coyote is said to have created the Nez Perce from drops of a monster's blood. Everywhere I went, the openness and friendliness became a hooded reticence when I mentioned the name of Joseph.

Confused and troubled, I left the reservation and headed north toward the town of Nespelem on the Colville Reservation, two hundred miles to the northwest near the Canadian border in Washington. It was there on the Colville Reservation that Chief Joseph and a small remnant of the tribe had been forced to settle after their return from exile in Oklahoma and there that Joseph himself is buried. I thought that perhaps I could get some answers in this isolated, rolling country where Joseph's direct ancestors still live today.

Nespelem is far different from Spalding. Spalding is a Nez Perce town. But Nespelem is the center for twelve tribes that were shoehorned together by the U.S. government in the 1800s in an effort to amalgamate the native peoples and reduce their landholdings to as small an area as possible. The Nez Perce are just one of these twelve, and they reside here in an uneasy peace with the eleven other tribes, many miles from their aboriginal homeland.

Over the years they have made this their home, and they are proud of it. But it hurts and angers them that all the notoriety—and all the attendant benefit—resulting from their famous chief seems to accrue to the Lapwai branch of the tribe, despite the fact that the Colville people are his true heirs and inheritors and that it is near Nespelem that Joseph lived out his later years and is buried. But if they feel slighted, they also feel protective. They are even more skeptical about “Joseph seekers” than their Nez Perce brothers and sisters two hundred miles to the south.

After a few stops at gas stations and a few cautious inquiries, I was directed to some of the people in charge of the Nez Perce legacy in Nespelem. These encounters proved to be even more disconcerting than the encounters at Lapwai. In short order I was measured, parsed, and dismissed with ominously coded messages about seeking contact with people without tribal approval. I left chastened and sobered and wondering about the wisdom of my entire enterprise.

There was only one stop left. It was the town of Joseph, Oregon, two hundred miles south of Colville and a hundred miles from Lapwai across the jaw-dropping grandeur of the Snake River gorge. Far outside the borders of any contemporary reservation, the town stands on the aboriginal land where Joseph's band once lived and where the chief himself was raised. It is situated in the stunning, high mountain Wallowa valley, surrounded by tall, snow-covered peaks and graced in its center by a blue jewel of an alpine lake. It is easy to see why Joseph said, “I love that land more than all the rest of the world.” Anyone who grew up here would feel the same.

Unlike Spalding, with its cinder-block grocery store and worn-down reservation housing, or Nespelem, with its few small gas stations and reservation stores, Joseph is a western, single-main-street tourist town filled with gift shops and massive post-and-beam bed-and-breakfasts and a plethora of boutique bronze casting foundries and their attendant galleries.

Large, representational bronze sculptures line the streets—high-quality, high-dollar, Charles M. Russell kinds of works, all depicting cowboy and Indian themes. The town is awash in romanticized Americana, all focused on frontier themes, all directly or indirectly related to Chief Joseph or his time. “The Chieftain Visitors Guide.” “The Chief Joseph Days Rodeo.” Cowboy bronzes, Indian jewelry. It's “the town that Joseph built,” right in the middle of the beautiful, isolated, Switzerlandlike ancestral homeland of Joseph's band. Here Joseph is not a historical figure but a cultural commodity, a brand name, a hood ornament on the vehicle of American tourist enterprise.

But what struck me most was that the name Nez Perce, with its clumsy anglicized French origins, was nowhere to be seen. While the man who signified the tribe in the public imagination was memorialized on almost every sign and storefront, the tribe itself was almost nonexistent.

Slowly, I began to understand the Nez Perce ambivalence toward Joseph and their reticence toward me when I asked about him. The man was a conundrum that they could not easily resolve. White culture had elevated him to heroic, even iconic, status—after all, why was I there if not to continue the cultural canonization of Joseph?—while effectively expunging the Nez Perce people themselves from the national historical consciousness. This sort of hero worship fit perfectly with the American penchant for glorifying the individual, but it stood in direct opposition to the fundamental native belief that the group is more important than any individual member. Yet it was only through Joseph that the Nez Perce retained any cultural status or visibility. Without him, they would slip into the same cultural invisibility as the Potawatomi or the Lemhi or the Gros Ventres.

But I knew that this was only half the story. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse are elevated by the Lakota people and, to a large extent, give the Lakota their identity within the larger context of American culture; Tecumseh is held in proud regard by the Shawnee; Geronimo is highly praised and revered among the Apache. Each of these tribes holds a similar cultural bias against celebrating the individual over the group, yet these men are proudly held up by their respective peoples and seen as a source of pride. Why would the Nez Perce feel any different about Joseph?

It took breakfast with a Nez Perce man in a small roadside café on the outskirts of Lewiston, Idaho, to lead me toward an answer. There, over Denver omelets and cups of coffee, he began talking about the astonishing, tragic journey that his people had undertaken in 1877—the very same journey that had initially fired my fascination with Joseph back when I had been compiling the book of native voices for my students on the Red Lake Reservation.

“What people don't realize,” he said, “is that in the flight—the only thing that any white person knows or cares about us—Joseph was a bit player. He just took charge at the end because the other chiefs were gone. He didn't even want to go. But you look at the history books, it's all ‘Joseph's journey,' ‘Joseph's retreat.' Many of our people even see him as a coward and a traitor for surrendering. But without him no one pays any attention to us.”

He gestured vaguely in the direction of the Bitterroot Mountains, which begin their ragged ascent just a few miles to the east of the restaurant where we were sitting. “Right now the National Park Service is up there widening the traditional trail our people used to travel to buffalo country—the same one we used to escape from the soldiers. But they're not doing it to commemorate us, they're doing it to commemorate Lewis and Clark.”

He put his fork down and looked out the window in the direction of the mountains. “We made that trail. We'd been traveling across it for centuries. Lewis and Clark just used it. If that trail hadn't been there, they would never have made it across. There wouldn't have been any Lewis and Clark to celebrate. But no one cares about that. We're just a footnote, a curio, like we've always been. If it wasn't for Joseph we wouldn't even be on the historical radar. We'd just be roadkill on the Lewis and Clark superhighway.”

Suddenly, the whole picture began to fall into place. In the great shadow of the national orgy of self-congratulation over the journey of Lewis and Clark, the Nez Perce people had undertaken another journey, one far more difficult, far more taxing, far more tragic, and every bit as much a part of the American experience as that of the two celebrated explorers. But their journey was almost unknown, almost ignored. The only reason it was kept alive at all was because of a man who, until the last moments, had been a “bit player.”