Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (44 page)

Almost a dozen tribes had been moved there, mostly from the Midwest and East—tribes like the Peoria, the Ottawa, the Seneca, and the Wayandotte—all small remnants, none numbering more than 250, altogether totaling only 1381. The only western tribe among this number was the Modoc, who had been brought to the Quapaw four years earlier, handcuffed and chained in cattle cars. After losing over a third of their people to sickness and disease, they had decided that adapting to white ways was better than extinction.

Like the Nez Perce, they too still dreamed of their homeland. But they had done what was necessary to survive, and this meant adopting the white manner of dress, building wooden houses, fencing gardens, working as teamsters and hotel workers in nearby Baxter Springs, and living by the economic rules of American society. They were not rich, but at least they were alive, and even though their chief called the agency “good country to get rid of Indians in,” the Modoc had managed to stabilize their small tribe and had actually begun to prosper.

When Jones had gone north to accompany the Nez Perce on their journey, he had instructed the Modoc to harness their wagons and be waiting at the Baxter Springs railhead to transport the arrivals to their new home fifteen miles south in the Quapaw Agency. They were to serve not only as the teamsters and haulers but also as the temporary host people and model of successful acculturation for this new western tribe, which thus far had resisted adapting to civilized ways.

So while the desperately ill Nez Perce had been traveling south in the heat and humidity toward the rail terminus at Baxter Springs, the Modoc had been bumping their wagons north across the unfenced grasslands of Indian Territory to meet these arrivals with whom they were expected to share the small plot of land they so diligently, and at so great a human cost, had turned into a tolerable living situation for their few remaining people.

In the morning following their arrival at Baxter Springs, the Nez Perce awoke to find that the pigs roaming near the tracks had unearthed the bodies of their dead children and begun to eat them. In horror, they reburied the little bodies and did what they could to protect their graves.

But Jones had little patience for such niceties. He needed to get his new wards down to the agency as quickly as possible. He set the Modoc to the task of helping the sick Nez Perce into the wagons and driving them south. The people's goods and tents and tent poles would have to remain behind to be picked up later.

The move took all day because almost all the Nez Perce were too sick or too weak to walk. It was also slow going because they had to ford the wide Spring River, which ran between the railhead and the campsite. By the time all the Nez Perce had been transported, the wagons had made over forty trips between the railhead and the agency.

The Modoc Reserve where the people were to be quartered was only two and a half miles square. The place that was to serve as their campsite, a broad open field known as the Modoc Prairie, lay at its southern edge. The Modoc had built houses for themselves in the white man's style on the surrounding hills, and the valley itself, which had a small, meandering yard-wide creek passing through it, was open land used as a common grazing pasture for their cows and pigs.

The hundred surviving Modoc were not happy about having to share their small reserve with more than four hundred newcomers. So the Nez Perce were unloaded in the field and left there to fend for themselves. They had no tents, no cooking supplies, no fresh clothes, and almost no food. Most were too still too sick to move, so they once again huddled up as best they could and settled in for another long and difficult night.

That evening a violent storm arose, drenching the entire camp and turning it into a sea of mud and manure. Without shelter, the people were helpless to protect themselves. Three more of them had died on the wagon journey from Baxter, and others were fading quickly. They lay shivering on the soaking ground, hoping they would have the strength to survive until morning.

The following day when the sky had cleared, the people tried to return to the railhead for their goods. But the downpour had turned Spring River into a wild, surging torrent too strong to be forded. When, after several days, the river had receded enough for them to return for their possessions, they found that all their tent poles and packs had been stolen. What remained had been ruined by the rains. The people who had left Idaho with several thousand head of horses, gold dust, American dollars, buffalo skin lodges, guns, camp goods, and the finest clothes and blankets of any tribe in the West, were now without clothing, shelter, and anything more than the few personal items they had carried with them on the wagon journey from Baxter Springs.

As their leader, Joseph was heartsick. This was the result of the promise Miles had made to him at the Bear's Paw, the promise on which he had convinced his people to lay down their weapons and trust in the white man's good faith.

The time at Fort Leavenworth had been bad, especially toward the end. They had been curiosities, gazed at like animals in a pen, and had been left with nothing to do and no shape to their lives. But at least they had been given food and white medicines.

Here, sickness was everywhere, and nobody knew or cared. Each day more of their children died; each evening more of their dead were buried in unfamiliar lands. The pigs of the Modoc roamed everywhere, trying to unearth the bodies, and the water in their small stream was made filthy by the cattle and hogs that wallowed in it. The mosquitoes were frightful, and the few canvas shelters that they were given rotted and leaked.

All through the camp the moans of the dying could be heard; all night the drumming and singing of the people filled the air as they tried vainly to heal the sick before giving them up to the spirit world. There was no white leader to speak to, no white man to ask for medicine other than the corrupt Agent Jones. And they had no faith that any medicine he might offer would not be in fact a poison that increased their illness. This is what the Modoc claimed that Jones had done to them, and the Nez Perce had no reason to doubt that they would not suffer an identical fate.

Day by day their position deteriorated. They no longer cared about good housing; they no longer cared about proper rations. Memories of their long lodges and the clear waters of the Snake and the Salmon and the Clearwater seemed like distant, impossible dreams. They were a people without hope, living in the daily shadow of death.

On August 14, three weeks after their arrival, the Nez Perce looked up from their squalor and lethargy and saw several well-dressed white men arriving with Agent Jones. The white men were introduced to Joseph as Mr. Stickney and Mr. Fisk. They explained that they had come from the government and were there to assist him in choosing land of his own so he and his people would no longer have to live among the Modoc. With good land, they said, his people could begin their journey upward toward civilization. They proposed that he join them the next day to search for a place on the agency that was more to his people's liking.

Joseph resisted. The only journey he and his people wished to take was back to their homeland far across the western mountains. This Quapaw place, he said, might be fine land for a white man, but it was land that killed the Nez Perce. The air, the strangeness, the sicknesses were all signs to him that this was not earth that was meant for his people. He wished to remain where he was until he was allowed to go back to his homeland as he had been promised. He instructed Chapman to read the visitors an extract from the report in which Miles had promised him and his people the right to return to their home country after the snows had melted. Then he refused to accompany them on their journey.

Stickney and Fisk were at a loss. They could see the conditions in the Nez Perce camp, and they were appalled. The people were living in flimsy tents among the Modoc pigs and cattle, drinking water that had been polluted by human and animal waste. Many of them were too sick to stand, and they were dying at an alarming rate, sometimes as many as four a day. The camp area was filthy, and the Modoc were antagonistic and accusatory. At all times, wails could be heard coming from the tents of the dying, only to fall silent, then rise again from another tent somewhere else in the camp. By every indication, they were a people simply waiting to die. Nonetheless, Joseph was refusing to consider a move.

In an attempt to change the chief's mind, Stickney arranged for a telegram to be sent from A. E. Hayt, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, explaining that Joseph and his people were being permanently resettled in the Quapaw and that they would have to find a way to make the best of it.

This telegram was the first official notice Joseph had received indicating that he and his people were not to be returned to their home, and it affected him deeply. When the next day came, and Fisk and Stickney came to begin the search for a new campsite, the chief sent word through Chapman that he was too sick to travel and would remain in his tent. The telegraph message from the highest law authority telling him that he must live in this place forever had wounded his heart. He would not take part in any search for a new home camp.

Unable to persuade the chief to go, Chapman, Stickney, and the others of the commission set off on their own to select a new home site for the Nez Perce. After surveying various locations, they selected a beautiful piece of land, seven thousand acres in extent, several miles from the Modoc encampment. It was rolling, verdant hill country, dotted with berry bushes and graced with groves of great canopied nut trees. A wide, clear, spring-fed stream meandered through its center. There was open prairie for grazing cattle and sufficient timber for houses and firewood. It was among the choicest land in the entire Quapaw, better than almost any other land in all of Indian Territory. Any white man within a hundred miles would have been ecstatic to have owned it for himself and his family.

But Joseph wanted nothing to do with it. Even after the land was purchased and his people were moved there, he insisted that the soil was poor, the timber scarce, and water insufficient. He would grant no good to any piece of land if it meant giving up the dreams of returning to his home and the land the Creator had given them.

Meanwhile, Chapman was gaining firsthand insight into Jones and the way he ran his agency. An unapologetic opportunist himself, Chapman was well acquainted with using the U.S. government to personal advantage. But Jones's behavior went beyond anything even he could conceive. Jones withheld Nez Perce rations, refused them medicine, charged the government for corn that was never provided, and allowed his personal friends to come onto the reserve and charge the Indians exorbitant prices for foodstuffs and supplies while keeping honest traders out.

He short-weighted the rations given the Nez Perce and provided them with mealy, tainted flour. Chapman saw the beef that Jones was providing, and as a man who had raised cattle back in the West, he could easily estimate the hoof weight of an animal. The amount the agent actually delivered was less than half of what he claimed. Some of it was so unhealthy that the white man in charge of the cattle said it was unfit for human consumption. And all this while Jones was accepting kickbacks from traders and building himself a beautiful two-story house with oak floors and walnut newel posts.

Two years earlier, when he had lived on his ranch in Nez Perce country, none of this would have bothered Chapman. But since the capture he had traveled with the exiles, lived with them, spoken for them, even fallen ill with them. In some strange way, he had developed a sympathy for them that he had never felt while living near them in the steep canyon country of the Snake and the Salmon. The man who had beaten Nez Perce youth back in Idaho and fired the first shot in the war was now, slowly, becoming their champion.

He refused to rent a room in Jones's home and stayed instead in a tent in the Nez Perce camp. In addition, he began a vociferous writing campaign against Jones and on behalf of the Nez Perce. On August 29, barely a month after the Nez Perce had arrived, he sent off letters to distant newspapers exclaiming, “I have never heard of so much suffering among the same number of people in all my life… and nothing to eat but beans and bread. Mothers dying, leaving children six and eight months old to be taken care of, and no milk or anything else to feed them on….” With Joseph's blessing, he took advantage of the nearby telegraph offices and newspapers to mount a relentless attack on the corruption of the Quaker “man of God” who was systematically exterminating the very people he was supposed to be protecting.

Jones's practices had been suspect ever since his appointment as agent in 1872. The government had even sent an investigator to assess his superintendency on several occasions, but all the claims against him had been hearsay, and his ability to keep the tribes pacified had constituted sufficient success for him to avoid any real censure.

But with Chapman's arrival, hearsay turned to direct witness. Chapman could not be dismissed as a disgruntled trader or some local harboring personal animosities. He was, in fact, a government-salaried interpreter. So when he began barraging the local papers and Washington officials with chapter and verse of Jones's graft and cruelty, it not only caused governmental officials to take notice, it also gave heart to Jones's local critics, who had been complaining for years about his practices. They joined in the outcry, haranguing the Secretary of the Interior through their own letters, pointing out that the Nez Perce were dying from “cruel unmitigated neglect—having been unprovided with medicines for days, weeks— forced to live on damaged insufficient rations—left to die like sheep with the rot.”

For the next several months, Chapman and the angry locals kept up this deluge. They pointed out that Jones charged a dollar more per pound of flour than was being paid only three miles away; that he was selling bacon for sixteen to eighteen cents a pound that could be bought for twelve cents a pound at the local store; that he gave the Nez Perce meat so tainted that it was not fit to eat; that he was selling the Nez Perce worn-out ten-year-old wagons purchased from his friends for the same price as brand-new wagons in town. They cited the fact that almost all the money allocated for maintenance of the Indians was going to salaries of the agency personnel and that eleven of twelve agency employees were related to Jones in some way.