Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (38 page)

But from within the procession the scene was anything but beautiful. The Nez Perce's clothes were torn and ragged; their moccasins were worn through, exposing their bruised and lacerated feet to the sharp grasses and frozen snows. Their wounded were slumped over on horses or laid out on makeshift travois and litters that shifted and jolted as they bumped across the uneven ground.

Many of those who had been injured in battle were close to death, and the lame and the elderly, who had been further weakened by their time in the shelter pits, were having great difficulty keeping up. Almost all had suffered some frostbite during the battle, causing an agonizing burning in their fingers and toes from which there was no relief.

The wounded soldiers were faring no better. They had been placed in hay- and grass-filled wagons, but this was not enough to keep the jostling from ripping apart sutures and jarring loose hastily set fractures. The bodies of two officers who had been killed in battle were being carried along for delivery to their families back east, and despite their being wrapped in blankets, the smell of their carrion flesh forced those directly downwind to cover their faces to block out the stench.

The captured horses too were faring poorly. The Nez Perce herd was still afflicted with the disease that caused cuts and scrapes to fester rather than heal. Their suppurating wounds made them nervous and skittish and increased the rankness in the air. Only the children seemed oblivious to the hardships, and their laughter and play provided a stark counterpoint to the suffering going on around them.

Joseph rode at the front with Miles. He knew that this journey was his best opportunity to communicate his understanding of events and to present the case of his people. He did not entirely trust Miles. After all, the man had kept him captive against his will after claiming to meet with him under a flag of truce. But since the end of the fighting, Miles had shown himself to be honorable and a man of his word. He had fed and warmed the people; he had used his own limited medical supplies and personnel to treat the Nez Perce wounded; he had shown great kindness to the children; and he had always spoken clearly and directly about his intentions. Joseph recalled having seen him ride unprotected on the hilltops among his soldiers on that first day of fighting. A man who had courage in battle could be counted on to have courage in peacetime, and Joseph desperately needed the aid and support of a man who spoke honestly and had the courage to stand behind his words.

So he took the chance of opening himself to Miles. He spent much of the journey recounting the flight and trying to make Miles understand the Nez Perce side of the war. He told of the crimes that had been committed against his people while they were still in their homeland, of the murders by whites that had gone unpunished, of the government promises left unfulfilled and the graft of the Indian agents. He explained how he and his people had been preparing to go on the reservation, but the young men's rash acts while the people were camped in the Camas Prairie had forced them to join the flight. He gave his version of the battles of Clearwater and the Big Hole and told of his people's sufferings along the way. He explained that he had always sought to protect the lives of white settlers they encountered and that alcohol had been at the root of the atrocities that the young Indians had committed.

All of this was relayed by Ad Chapman, who rode between the two men, interpreting from one language to the other. Joseph did not trust this craven little man with the sunken eyes and drooping mustache. White Bird's people had spoken of him as a cowardly bully back in their home country. They recounted stories of how he had whipped young boys who broke into his melon patch and how he had stolen Nez Perce horses yet had not possessed the courage to admit it when confronted. They told of the times he had bound young Nez Perce children and thrown them into corrals of wild horses, allowing them to be terrified as the horses raced and reared around them.

But all the Nez Perce who could speak passable English had either been killed or had fled with White Bird, so Joseph had no choice but to count on this spineless little rancher to pass his words along accurately. It was imperative that Miles be made to understand that not all the Nez Perce who had been part of this journey had wanted war and that those who had started things were now dead. Rumors and fears were rampant among the families that they were all soon to be killed. He needed to have Miles's word that there would be no hangings and that the people would be well cared for during the coming cold winter on the plains. Chapman was the only means he had to make himself understood and the only way he could gain the assurances he needed.

Miles listened patiently as Joseph spoke. He understood a leader's grief and a leader's responsibility. It was his conviction that history had doomed all native peoples to an inevitable extinction if they did not change from their primitive ways, but he felt obligated to accord this chief a fair hearing. Since the surrender, he had developed great respect for the way Joseph conducted himself and looked after those in his care. And as the journey progressed, and he heard more of Joseph's story, he became ever more convinced that he was in the presence of an extraordinary leader and an extraordinary group of Indians.

He retained his contempt for many of the cultural practices of the Nez Perce, such as the way the men allowed the women to do all the work while they sat around smoking and talking and playing cards. But he was well able to see the kindness with which the Nez Perce parents raised their young, the good behavior of the children, and the touching way the healthy cared for the elderly and the wounded. These were clearly Indians of a different order than any he had confronted before.

He marveled at the beautiful decoration on the Nez Perce clothing and saddles, and more than once his men commented on the strategic cleverness shown by the children as they engaged in mock battles using mud balls thrown by sticks. And all the men noted the unfailing good humor of this people who were clearly suffering and had every reason to be surly and uncooperative and morose.

Through it all, Miles observed that Joseph maintained peace and order by the sheer force of his personality. He seldom raised his voice, but could communicate more with one stern glance than many men could with an hour of haranguing and speechmaking. He was solemn but not severe. He seldom smiled but seldom expressed exasperation or sadness. The overall impression he communicated was one of great calm and self-control, and this attitude seemed to pervade the attitude of all the people under his command. Miles understood leadership, and it was rapidly becoming apparent to him that in Joseph he did not have a dangerous adversary so much as a worthy ally in bringing this unfortunate chapter in the Indian wars to a safe and honorable conclusion.

For almost two weeks the soldiers and the Nez Perce traveled together over difficult terrain, sharing the bounty of the soldiers' hunts and watching each other bury their comrades who died in the course of the journey. With each passing day, Miles became more convinced that the civil, uncomplaining Nez Perce people and their quiet, dignified leader were far superior to any Indians that he and the rest of the military had previously encountered. They surely bore no resemblance to the bloodthirsty Sioux with whom they were frequently linked, and they deserved better treatment than the harsh punishment bordering on extermination that was destined to be meted out under General Sherman's Indian policies. He did not share Sherman's purported belief that the only good Indian was a dead Indian; rather, he believed that the only good Indian was a changed Indian, and he saw in these people the capacity not only for change but also for becoming valuable participants in American civilization.

By the time they had completed their five-hundred-mile journey to Fort Keogh, he had determined to help his captives as best he could and, as much as it was in his power to do so, to be their champion in dealing with the complexities of the United States governmental system.

What Joseph did not understand—and what Miles failed to fully take into account—was the power of the great forces swirling far above their heads as they made their lonely journey across the high wintry plains of the Montana Territory.

The U.S. government, still reeling from the devastating human and economic cost of the Civil War, was engaged in a heated debate over the future status of the army. Some wanted it built up further so civil and external strife could never again threaten the strength of the union. Others wanted it pared back to save money and correct the excesses and graft to which it had become prone during the Reconstruction period after the war. Still others were concerned about the idea of institutionalizing a standing army during peacetime and wished to see the whole military apparatus disbanded and absorbed into a more peace-oriented Department of the Interior, while opponents of this saw the idea of combining military and civilian affairs under a single department as a dangerous step toward militarizing the entire United States government.

Added to these concerns was a lack of appreciation in the populous East for the problems people were facing in the sparsely settled West and a complete misunderstanding of what would be required to keep an effective standing army in such a vast and underpopulated landscape.

The whole Indian question too had come to the forefront of the national agenda. While Joseph saw the Nez Perce struggles with the United States as a disagreement between sovereign peoples and expected it to be treated as such, the U.S. government had come to see all Indians as part of a single problem and each tribal conflict as the equivalent of the individual battles in the War Between the States.

The Nez Perce were just the latest skirmish in the great sweep of the U.S. military across Indian-held territory. The Kiowas and the Modoc and Comanches and a host of other tribes had been pacified through resettlement and containment. The Nez Perce were just the next in line. Once they had been addressed, the government could turn its attention to the next tribe that stood in the path of the growth and progress of the expanding nation. No more energy and focus would be expended on one tribe's situation than were necessary to put it to an expeditious rest.

At the same time, the question of what to do with conquered Indians had become part of a national policy debate. The financially strapped military did not want to incur the costs of housing, feeding, and providing medical treatment for a perpetual prisoner class; they had enough trouble just paying and maintaining their own men with the penurious appropriations Congress was approving. There were even those in the military establishment who spoke privately about the benefits of complete extermination—dead Indians cost nothing to maintain—or the wisdom of driving all the tribes into Canada and Mexico, where they would be the responsibility and wards of another nation. But if the hostiles had to be captured and maintained, all agreed that they were to be passed along to other branches of the government or society as quickly as possible. While they remained under military jurisdiction, they were to be dealt with in whatever fashion minimized the costs involved in their maintenance.

But national sentiment complicated the issue. White America had always been decidedly ambivalent toward the native inhabitants of the land. On one hand, these indigenous people were seen as indolent savages who raped, pillaged, and violated all standards of civilized behavior. On the other, they were seen as children of nature, unspoiled by the ways of cities and civilization. This fissure in the American consciousness had only deepened as the East had become settled and the Indian situation in the West had become more dire.

The easterners, steeped in literary lore of men like Fenimore Cooper and Longfellow and no longer directly threatened by hostile Indian tribes, were quite willing to mythologize the Indians and elevate them to the status of noble children of the plains and forests. This attitude was further strengthened by the claims from Christian churches that the Indians were simply untutored innocents who had not been afforded the opportunity for conversion and salvation. Treating them as prisoners and bloodthirsty savages rather than as helpless children in need of Christian care and teaching in order to advance in the ways of civilization was seen as callousness bordering on criminality.

Meanwhile, in the West, where fledgling settlements were springing up on traditional tribal lands, the Indians were seen in a far different light. Their cultures appeared cruel and violent, their people showed no willingness to stay put and accept the rule of law and property, and their numbers compared to those of white settlers were frightening and in some cases overwhelming. When they felt wronged, which they often did, they rose up in varying degrees, and failing to get justice or even fair hearing in the frontier judicial system, they visited violence upon the towns and settlers with indiscriminate fury, as the Nez Perce had done in their raids and murders along the Salmon River and Slate Creek.

Whenever such violence occurred, rumors abounded and reality was embellished until the worst abominations became the expected. Any sentiment toward Indians as other than dangerous, wily, untrustworthy savages likely to kill and steal without provocation was seen as a weak-kneed, naive fantasy of the rich and comfortable in the East. When tribes became restless, the whole thinly settled West was gripped with the fear that the many tribes would join together and sweep across the land, killing and raping and burning and maiming until all settlers were driven off or exterminated and the land had been reclaimed for the savage lifestyle that the white people so despised and the Indian people seemed so unwilling and unable to give up.

The telegraph too had become a significant factor in the country's intellectual and political landscape. Information about Indian activities and the Indian wars had become a part of the daily discourse of all newspaper-reading Americans, wherever they happened to live.

The
New York Herald
and the
Chicago Tribune
, which had been following “the Indian problem” for years, had reporters in Montana Territory with General Terry at the time of the Nez Perce surrender. These reporters sent couriers to the nearest telegraph station at Helena with reports of the events taking place on the snowy plains of the Bear's Paw.
Harper's Weekly
published field sketches purporting to depict the battle site and siege. Soon people sitting at their kitchen tables in Boston and San Francisco and New York and Chicago were avidly following the ongoing national drama of the conflict between the Indians and the military.