Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (48 page)

Reluctantly, the delegation left, convinced that they had seen the spirit of the Lord moving among this poor, beleaguered people. They promised that they would return on the first Sabbath in November to administer the last supper and complete the baptism of the children.

As they rode away, Chief Joseph stood outside watching. He had declined to enter the building to be part of the church service but had remained among the crowd of observers, bearing witness and showing silent support for the efforts of his people to find a way to heal their hearts and gain the favor of the white leaders who might somehow help them in their efforts to escape this exile and return to their homeland.

The next day, at the laying of the cornerstone, the missionaries were surprised to see wagonloads of Nez Perce arriving for the ceremony. By the time festivities began, two hundred Nez Perce were present, far more than from any other tribe. Among them was Joseph.

The ceremony opened with hymns and proceeded with speeches. Reuben stood at the front of the Nez Perce delegation and, when the time came for testimony, told how Joseph's people had come down to this country in an almost savage condition but now sought to embrace Christianity and walk on the good path.

Tom Hill, who had been Joseph's first interpreter at the surrender and had been sent to Indian country after his return from the land of Sitting Bull, made an impassioned confession of his previous sins and bitter heart and spoke of how he believed there was no hope for Indian people unless they adopted the white man's beliefs and ways, as he himself had done.

When the time came for the actual laying of the cornerstone, a tin box was brought forth in which those present could place what the agent and missionaries referred to as “mementos,” which would allow people of the future to know the savage manner in which Indians had lived a thousand years before. People stepped forth and dropped in knife cases, beaded bracelets, and even a Sioux scalp. Reuben deposited a history he had written of the Nez Perce since the time of Lewis and Clark, and some of the women contributed a kouse root they had carried with them from Idaho. Then the box was placed in a hollowed-out rock, and the cornerstone was mortared into place.

Another hymn was sung, this time in English, and the ceremony was over. The people returned to their homes, having cemented their past into a rock on which the promise of a Christian future was to be built. As a gesture of unity with the others, Joseph had placed a small finger ring in the box before it was buried.

Joseph's quiet acquiescence to the ascendancy of Reuben was having an effect. By giving tacit support to the people in their Christian fervor, he was keeping the division between the Christian and non-Christian factions from breaking into the same open acrimony that had sundered the people back in the Lapwai.

But despite his claims in his letter to Howard, his own declared willingness to convert to Christianity did not run deep. When the pastor and the other Presbyterian elders returned in November for the promised baptism and last supper, he sat in a front seat wearing a white man's suit but not participating in the singing and prayers. While Tom Hill made another grand public confession of his past spiritual blindness and Husis Kute gave testimony about his previous savage ways as a worshiper of spirits in the mountains of Idaho, Joseph expressed neither approval nor disapproval. But his presence inside the meeting sent a message that could not be misunderstood.

However, keeping unity was not an easy task. The Christian converts had become zealous in their new faith, and those who opposed Reuben were becoming progressively more enraged as his influence grew. Many who had been through so much to save the old ways were embittered by the newfound influence of this man who had fought against them during the war and had belittled them as fools afterward. Often his translations were called into question by other Nez Perce who spoke and understood some English. It was felt that he twisted words to raise himself up in the eyes of the white authorities and that he misrepresented what was said in order to make the Nez Perce look more devoted to Christianity than they actually were. He also acted imperiously toward the people who remained faithful to the old seven-drum and Dreamer ways, demeaning them and berating them and speaking to them as if they were children.

But Joseph did not engage in these arguments. It mattered little to him if Reuben twisted words for his own benefit. If Reuben had the skill to influence the whites and draw them to the cause of the people, Joseph was quite willing to stand aside. He would simply use the man as he had used Chapman. For him, Reuben—like Chapman, like the telegraph, like the newspaper reporters—was but one more tool by which to work for the single goal of returning the people to their homeland.

And in fact Reuben's activities, along with the honest piety of Archie Lawyer, were having an effect. Word was spreading throughout the Presbyterian congregations that the Nez Perce, so recently a wild and savage people engaged in a running battle with the U.S. military, were now rapidly being brought to Christ. They held prayer meetings each day and twice on Sunday. They greeted visiting tribes with prayer sessions rather than dances. And all of this without any formal spiritual guidance or training other than that provided by James Reuben and Archie Lawyer.

The Presbyterian congregation in nearby Arkansas City began promoting the Nez Perce cause to the Kansas synod, and the synod in turn began making the Nez Perce case to the U.S. government through a series of memorial messages submitted to Congress in the form of petitions to be read at the opening of each day's business.

But time was of the essence. The people were getting sicker, and despite their appearance as well-scrubbed Christian converts in the eyes of ministers and visitors, their depression had continued to deepen. All the children were being born dead or were dying shortly after birth. Diseases of the lungs were taking the lives of the sick and the elderly, and neither Christian prayer nor white-man medicine was saving them.

Even Yellow Wolf, the strong warrior who had seen all the death and sadness on the trail of the exodus, could not hide his melancholy. “All the newborn babies died,” he said, “and many of the old people, too…. Everything so different from our old homes. No mountains, no springs, no clear running rivers.”

Finally, one of the agents, Thomas Jordan, said what all knew but none had possessed the courage to say. “The tribe, unless something is done for them, will soon be extinct.”

Urged on by such ominous predictions, the Presbyterians redoubled their efforts to have the people returned to their home country. With the earnest support of sympathetic agents such as Jordan, they continued to make the case to officials in Washington for the return of the Indians to their homeland in Idaho.

But western resistance was still strong. These warlike belligerents could yet foment rebellion among the peaceful Indians of the Northwest, and their presence would surely call forth retribution from the white settlers in the area. Yet even the most adamant among them could not make a case against the repatriation of the widows—who the government called “surplus women”—and orphans. So, in the spring of 1883, under intense pressure from the influential Presbyterian lobby, the government finally relented.

In June of that year, almost four years to the day after the Nez Perce had arrived in the empty flatlands of central Indian Territory, thirty-one widows and orphans and two elderly men set out under the care of James Reuben on the long journey back to their homeland. The government had refused to appropriate any money for the relocation, so the tribe paid for it themselves—the women by selling gloves and moccasins, the men by selling foodstuffs and contributing the wages they had earned as teamsters.

The refugees arrived in the Lapwai several weeks later, led by Reuben, dressed impeccably in a dark blue business suit and riding regally on horseback. They were met by a throng of more than a hundred waiting friends and relatives who grabbed them, kissed them, and shared in the tearful reunion that all had so long desired but few had ever believed would come to pass.

But the Presbyterian churches in Kansas who had seen both the faith and the despair of the Nez Perce firsthand were not yet mollified. They wanted to see the rest of the Nez Perce returned to their home country. They continued to petition their church authorities to take up the cause of this exiled remnant who even their own agent praised as a “brave, good, and generous” people.

Under the relentless pressure from their churches in southern Kansas, the Presbyterian General Assembly decided to send Dr. George Spining to assess the situation. Spining had spent much of his life among Indians and was thought to be a man whose observations and judgments could be trusted.

In November 1883 he made the journey south from Arkansas City to the area where Joseph and his people were residing. He spoke with the agent in charge, who informed him that he knew of no community of whites who were of such good character. “They do not steal, they do not drink, they do not swear, and they observe the Sabbath,” he said.

Spining then went out to the children's graveyard with the minister, Archie Lawyer, to see for himself the extent of the tragedy the Nez Perce had suffered. Lawyer pointed to two small mounds of earth. “Those are mine,” he said, sobbing. The graves contained two of his young children who had lost their lives since his arrival in Indian country, and a third was back at home clinging to life at that very moment.

Spining then began counting the graves. They numbered almost a hundred. A single bell tinkled mournfully above one of the small mounds as the men stood quietly in the midst of this burial ground of the innocents.

When the doctor looked up, he saw a solitary figure sitting silently on horseback, observing him. The man was dressed in white man's clothing. “Keep this in your heart,” he said. “Tell it to the Great Father in Washington, that maybe his heart will be touched and he will take pity upon this suffering people.”

The solitary figure was Joseph.

Spining was overwhelmed by his visit. He returned to the synod and issued an impassioned plea for aid to be given to the suffering Nez Perce people. They have no newspapers and few advocates, he said, and they have surely suffered enough, no matter what crimes they may have committed in the past. He noted how more than half of them had become Christian and that none had done anything in their time in the agency that had stood in violation of any of the laws of God or man. Almost all the belligerents, he said, had either been incarcerated or killed long ago, and those who remained were merely a pitiful remnant made up mostly of women, children, and the elderly. Surely Christian charity demanded the return of these people to their native land, or at least to a healthier climate somewhere in the north.

Spining's plea was widely distributed and touched the hearts of all who read it. The time had come to override the resistance of the western congressmen and other opponents of relocation and force the issue before the Nez Perce people perished to the last one.

M
EANWHILE, THE REST
of the Nez Perce exiles remained in Indian Territory, trying to survive as best they could. Joseph had quietly continued the tradition of the seven drums, holding services for the people on Sundays while the Christians were raising their voices nearby in song and prayer. He also had taken to leading groups of men to the sun dances held by other tribes, both to show respect and in order to build up the people's herd of horses. He knew that it was a widespread custom to offer gifts to visitors who honored you with their presence and that horses were the gifts most traditionally given. Sometimes he and the other men would leave their agency for months, traveling the length of Indian Territory, then returning late in the summer with a long string of ponies that could serve as the breeding stock to build up the herd that had been taken away from them by Miles at the time of surrender.

He also continued his efforts to use the white governmental system for the good of his people. When it was discovered that white ranchers were grazing their cattle on Nez Perce land, instead of appealing to the government to have them removed, Joseph worked to have the land leased to a white rancher who was willing to pay for the right to use it as pasture.

But it was the Presbyterian influence, more than Joseph's, that kept the Nez Perce cause alive in the halls of government. They wanted to see all the Nez Perce returned to their home country, albeit to the care and oversight of the Presbyterian agents in the Lapwai. In a petition submitted to the president several years before, and subsequently distributed to Presbyterian churches all across the country, they had declared, “These Indians today are simply prisoners of war, wrongfully held and dishonorably treated.” They had noted that no Nez Perce had ever scalped a white person during the entire time of their flight and warfare and that the bulk of the Nez Perce were law-abiding, prospering people back in Idaho. Joseph, they said, “stands before the American people a victim of duplicity… his confidence wantonly betrayed… his people rapidly wasting by pestilence.”

By the time Reuben had left for Idaho with his small contingent, this sympathy for the people had begun to spread throughout the nation's Presbyterian synods. By the following spring it had reached a zealous fervor. In a coordinated effort, the Presbyterian churches across the country began issuing their own memorial petitions to the Congress as statements to be read into the congressional record each day before the beginning of official business.

In formal language, and in the prescribed manner of governmental presentations, they outlined the wrongs that had been done to the Nez Perce, the promises made to them and never fulfilled, the great progress they had made in the ways of Christian civilization, and the rapid deterioration of the people in the hostile and inhospitable climate of Indian Territory. They concluded with the plea that the exiles be returned to their own native country, where they would be welcomed and cared for by their waiting brothers and sisters at no cost to the government, and where they could prosper in the Christian manner that they were so willingly and successfully embracing.

On April 21, 1884, a petition was received in Congress signed by “the citizens of Kansas.” On April 29, petitions arrived from the congregations of Osage City and Derby, Kansas. On May 5, Eldorado, Kansas, and Lawrence County, Indiana, weighed in. On May 7, New Haven, Connecticut, was heard from; on May 12, it was Vincennes, Indiana. In unending succession, these petitions arrived, praying that Congress would return these wronged people to their homelands.

With such an outpouring of sentiment from such an influential and extensive part of the electorate, the politicians began to take notice. A petition from five hundred Ohio Presbyterians, claiming the backing of “4000 of the best citizens of Cleveland ” was not to be taken lightly, especially when it was delivered by the widow of President James Garfield and was only one of many from a widely spread, interconnected group of people who all seemed to be of like mind about these exiled Indians. The complaints from western lawmakers suddenly began to sound fainter to the ears of vote-counting politicians, many of whom shared the sentiment that the U.S. Indian policy had been somehow flawed from the outset and who felt that, frankly, the government had more important issues on which to spend its time.

The last real reason for resisting the return of the people was the issue of keeping the peace in the West. Even if these Indians indeed had converted, the memory of their atrocities and belligerence still remained, and many settlers in Idaho and Oregon were not about to abandon their cries for justice and vengeance.

In this regard, the Nez Perce found themselves with a fortunate and familiar ally. In 1880, Colonel Miles's relentless self-promotion, along with his very real accomplishments as an Indian fighter and pacifier, had gained him his general's star. In 1881 he had parleyed this into an appointment as head of the Department of the Columbia, Howard's old post. Even before taking over the position, he had begun campaigning for the return of Joseph and his people to their home territory. He pointed out that no judicial investigation had ever been made to ascertain exactly which of the Indians had been responsible for the killings on Slate Creek and the Salmon and that all of the people, including women and children and wounded, had been held in virtual confinement since their capture.

When the Secretary of the Interior and others chastised him for being presumptuous and instructed him to hold his tongue and carry out the orders of the president, he merely pushed forward in his typical fashion, claiming, “I still adhere to my opinion that to banish a village of people, many of them innocent, is not in accordance with any law or just rule, and I therefore recommend that that portion of the tribe not charged with crime be allowed to return to their reservation.”

From the pen of anyone else, this would have been but one more plea for leniency and compassion toward the Indians. But Miles was not only the preeminent Indian fighter in America; his new appointment would put him in charge of keeping the peace in the Plateau region. If he said that these people could be safely returned to their homeland, who was anyone to argue?

In July 1884, a year after the first group of widows and orphans had been allowed to return, and almost seven years after the outbreak in Camas Prairie, Congress authorized the Secretary of the Interior to return the Nez Perce people to their home territory.

But the issue was not yet finished. Miles's assurances notwithstanding, many remained opposed to the relocation, including the Presbyterian missionary in the Lapwai. “It is difficult for men and women to forgive and forget such hellish treatment as they were subjected to when their houses were burned, their property destroyed, their husbands and children murdered, and their wives ravished,” the minister declared. The editor of the
Lewiston Teller
carried the threat a step further. “We won't be responsible for their lives 24 hours after their arrival,” he wrote.

Even the confident assurances of Miles could not completely remove the unease created by such veiled threats of vigilantism. After all, he was based in Fort Vancouver, 360 miles away. These ominous words were being issued by residents who lived in the very towns and valleys where the exiles would be resettled.

The Commissioner of Indian Affairs instructed the local agent in Oakland to put the matter to the Nez Perce, explaining the situation. He encouraged them to separate into two groups to be relocated to two separate areas, one among the treaty Nez Perce, the other in a farther exile somewhere else in the Northwest. There were still warrants out for a number of specific Indians, including Joseph, and it was deemed best to keep this group far removed from the angry settlers who held them responsible for the killings. Even Miles thought it would be prudent for Joseph and the others with warrants against them to consider relocating, at least temporarily, to a spot outside the jurisdiction of the state of Idaho, where the warrants had been issued.

Joseph was angered and frustrated that he was seen as a belligerent. “If I could, I would take my heart out and hold it in my hand and let the Great Father and the white people see that there is nothing in it but kind feelings and love for him and them,” he said. He had taken no part in any killings and had resisted hostilities from the outset. But he had long since learned that white people did not listen to the voice of Indians unless the Indians looked and lived as white people. He understood the wisdom, and even the necessity, of the proposed division. He did not want the safety of his people jeopardized by white rancor and animosity, even if it was unjustified and unfounded.

He was also concerned about the rights of those among the exiles who had not willingly or deeply embraced the Christian ways. Lapwai was Christian and had been so since the time of the Reverend Spalding. It was run by Presbyterians and overseen by Presbyterian agents. Many of the Lapwai Presbyterians were so opposed to the old ways that they had even gathered and burned clothing worn by their traditional brothers and sisters. It was not an environment conducive to the practice of the old ways and beliefs.

And he had one further concern. The Lapwai, though Nez Perce country, was not his homeland. It was to the distant Wallowa, among the bones of his ancestors, that he wished to be returned. He feared that if he accepted a place in the Lapwai, that would be seen as accepting the government's conditions, and he would never have a chance to return to the winding waters and snow-covered peaks that his band knew as home.

But in the end, the people reluctantly agreed to split. Joseph had been offered a home by his old friend, Chief Moses, on the Colville Reservation two hundred miles north of Lapwai near the Canadian border in the state of Washington. It was country similar to his own, and it was out of the jurisdiction of Idaho, so he and any others with warrants against them would not be subject to arrest and trial. There he and his people would be free to live in the old ways and to practice their own religion. And from there they could continue negotiations to return to the valley of the Wallowa.

Those who chose to go to Lapwai and live as Christians would receive a joyous welcome from their Christian friends and relatives, who would provide for them and assist them in rebuilding their lives. Any who still practiced the old ways but were willing to risk the dangers of being seen as a traditional in this land of Christians and angry white settlers would be welcome to go to the Lapwai too.

Only one stumbling block remained. In an attempt to accelerate the acculturation of the people, the children of the tribe had been sent to a recently constructed boarding school in Chilocco, several miles south of Arkansas City just inside the border of Indian Territory. The Chilocco school was run by Dr. H. J. Minthorn, one of the men who had been in the entourage that visited the Nez Perce when they had been petitioning to set up a church in the Oakland agency. The Chilocco school had been modeled on the famous Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that had been dedicated to converting the Indian “in all ways but color into a white man.” And in this, the school was making good progress. They had cut the children's hair, dressed them in suits and dresses, and taught them to read and cipher and practice the ways of blacksmithing, efficient farming, and domestic arts.

The Chilocco school wanted to keep these children in Oklahoma to complete their education. They would be the first true fruits of the labors of the Christian missionaries—children of the forests who had abandoned all vestiges of the past to become full participating members of American society. Their presence would also allow the school to continue to receive the government subsidies that were based on the number of children in residence at the school.

The people met in council to discuss the issue. They were of common accord that they would not leave their children behind. One by one, they spoke their peace, drawing nods of assent from the others that this was not a subject on which they could compromise. If they were to leave, their children must leave with them.

Finally, the government officials gave in. It was agreed that the children should meet up with the people at the station in Arkansas City, and together they would all be allowed to return to their homeland.

On the morning of May 21, 1885, in a steady mist and drizzle, the people turned their backs for the last time on the Oakland agency and began their journey to the railhead at Arkansas City, thirty-five miles to the north. The government had provided them with several wagons on which to carry their goods and a few of the weaker among them, but most of the men and women were forced to walk.

The man in charge of their move, a Dr. W. H. Faulkner, had come down several weeks earlier to oversee their transfer. He was a fair man but impatient, and he had told them that all their stock and possessions that could not be brought with them would have to be disposed of by the twenty-first. Once again, in a dark echo of General Howard's order to leave the Wallowa those many years ago, the people were forced to leave much of worth and value behind. Luckily, the local rancher C. M. Scott, who had been their friend since he had first escorted them from Arkansas City upon their arrival from the Quapaw, agreed to sell what they could not dispose of before their departure and send the money to them. Nonetheless, they had been forced to sell much of their stock at unfairly low prices and were leaving with little to show for their five years of labor in Indian Territory.

They had been allowed to visit the graves of their loved ones several days before the departure, and this had caused them great sorrow. Of the more than eight hundred people who had begun the journey over the Lolo eight years before, fewer than three hundred remained. The rest were scattered in alien earth along the trail, in the bottomlands by Leavenworth, in the hillsides of the Quapaw, and here in the cruel flatness of the Indian Territory, where more than a hundred lay buried. In leaving this dark exile, they were leaving a part of their heart, which could never be reclaimed.