Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (7 page)

But it was a government act, not an act of Reverend Spalding or the other teachers of spirit law, that finally led him to make the decision to leave. During a distribution of goods a man from the Soyapo government presented him with a tattered blanket in the presence of his own people. For a man who believed that a gift was a statement of a person's heart, this blanket was an insult too great to ignore. He threw the blanket at the man's feet and declared, “I am not a poor man. I have no need of your gifts. Why do you make fun of me before my own people by giving me a rotten blanket? You put shame on me in the eyes of all the chiefs.” Then he withdrew his people from the mission and vowed that they would have no more to do with the Soyapo and their insulting ways.

For several years he was able to keep this vow. His people returned to their traditional practices, wintering in the deep folds of the Imnaha Canyon near the banks of the Snake, then returning each spring along the narrow mountain trails to the high, mountain-rimmed Wallowa Valley. There they carried on life in the old way, respecting the traditions that had been taught to them by their ancestors. Aside from occasional visits to meet with relatives and friends who lived near the mission, they had little more to do with the Soyapo world.

But with each passing year it became increasingly difficult to keep out the influence of the Soyapo ways. More and more settlers were traveling through the low valleys on their way to the coast, and more and more contact was becoming inevitable. Roving bands from the Wallowa would ride down from their high mountain homeland, bringing horses grown strong from good breeding and feeding on the rich mountain grasses, and trade one healthy horse for two or more of the weary horses of the travelers. They would then take these worn-down mounts back to the Wallowa, fatten and strengthen them, and return the following year to trade them to new Soyapo travelers. In this way some families had been able to increase their herds to over 1500 horses. They had also been able to trade for oxen, guns, ammunition, and beef cattle.

But this wealth was coming at a price. Alcohol too was making its way into the Wallowa, and there were those among the people who behaved as if they were not in their right minds when they drank this Soyapo spirit water.

Tuekakas reminded the people to keep their distance from the white settlers. Raise horses, eat things that grow of their own, and come and go as you please, he said. But beyond trading for that which is good, do not get involved in Soyapo ways.

By and large, the people followed his advice. They continued to dress in the old manner and to keep their faith in the old truths. The young men wore their hair long, with braids at their right or left temple to designate their status as a favorite son or grandson. Families with a daughter as the firstborn raised her to be a basket hat woman, who could advise the men of the tribe when she grew to maturity. They kept to the sweats and the strict ways of the longhouse. They made their seasonal pilgrimages to sacred hunting grounds and fishing spots and gathering places and offered the firstfruits of any harvest to the Creator in the prescribed manner. In all ways they were becoming once again children of their ancestors rather than children of Jesus, if they could just stay free of Soyapo ways.

But Tuekakas could sense dark clouds gathering on the horizon. From the people who traveled to the great bitter-tasting water he had heard of new outbreaks of the sickness with the killing spots. Soyapo towns were springing up on Indian lands in the coastal valleys, and soldiers were arriving in increasing numbers to protect Soyapo travelers and enforce Soyapo laws.

Slowly but inevitably, the people were being surrounded by Soyapo. The river of settlers, traveling through the valleys, was quietly becoming a sea.

None of this had any immediate impact on young Joseph, who was now in the fullness of youth. Because he was now living in only the Wallowa and the Imnaha, his life was being shaped in all manner by the traditional ways. He bathed every morning, drank water as purification before eating, learned to honor each season and each gift of the Creator. He received training in the boyhood skills of riding and bridle making and caring for horses and was taught the deeper knowledge of the ways of the animals and the messages in the waters and winds.

But as the son of a chief, he was also being raised as a chief in the making. He was dressed differently and kept apart from the others in times of raucous play so he would learn the qualities of dignity and distance that must be reflected in a chief's character. If his playmates got into trouble, it was he who was punished, for it was imperative that he be taught to take responsibility for the actions of everyone around him. In all his words and behavior, he was held to strictest account, reminded constantly that he must think first of the people and only then of himself, and that he must never do anything unworthy of the best vision of the person he was expected to become.

None of this was hard for the young boy because by temperament he was a quiet and thoughtful child. Holding his tongue and shaping his thoughts came naturally to him, as did resisting the impulse to anger and rash actions. Even at this young age he commanded respect and demonstrated the clear, self-contained strength that would be needed in a leader of the people.

His closest companion was his brother, Ollokot, three years his junior. Ollokot was as fun loving and gregarious as Joseph was taciturn and watchful. Unlike Joseph, Ollokot was encouraged to run with the other boys because he was being raised to assume the important post of war chief, and it was essential that he learn to inspire loyalty and friendship. What was crucial in his upbringing was that he always be required to take a leadership role in group activities and that he learn to take decisive action in times of stress and crisis. With his strong physique, courageous attitude, and winning smile, he too seemed ideally suited to his task.

Together these two brothers—Ollokot, the fun-loving youth who inspired loyalty, and Joseph, the taciturn, thoughtful youth who commanded respect—offered promise and hope for a new generation of Nez Perce leadership that could keep the Wallowa people secure and free.

Then, in Joseph's seventh year, the year the whites called 1847, a great crisis erupted that brought that promise and hope into question. Some of the Cayuse rose up and murdered Dr. Whitman, his family, and many others at the mission.

There had been anger at the way the doctor had been favoring the Soyapo and anger at the way the Soyapo were now filling up their land. But more than that, many of the Cayuse people had begun to question whether his spirit power was good or evil or whether he even had spirit power at all.

Recently, the sickness with black spots had come among them, killing their elders and their children. Not only did the doctor's medicine not make them well, but many felt it was the medicine itself that was causing the illness and that it was part of the doctor's plan to kill the Cayuse so the Soyapo could have their land.

There had been other things too—the melons from the Whitmans' garden that had made people sick; the young boy who had choked to death on a piece of meat after Dr. Whitman had spoken angrily to him and touched him on the shoulder. For those who had eyes to see, it was clear that Dr. Whitman might be much worse than a false medicine man. He might be an evil spirit.

Even those among the Cayuse who doubted this could not deny that the doctor's medicine was weak. The great power shown them all by Lewis and Clark, the power they sought and for which they had given up their old ways, did not lie in the doctor's hands. Maybe the Black Robes were right. Maybe the medicine men were right. It did not matter. What was important was that the ways of Dr. Whitman were not right. And maybe they were something far worse.

So the angriest and most fearful members of the tribe had attacked the doctor's house, bludgeoned him to death with a pipe tomahawk, wounded his wife, then dragged her outside, where they threw her in the mud, shot her repeatedly, and whipped her as she died. They then went on a rampage and killed eleven more white people while taking forty-seven captives and burning all the mission buildings to the ground.

Such a savage attack spread fear throughout the entire Columbia Plateau. Many of the remaining settlers fled for their lives, and the tribes prepared for what they knew would be harsh retribution. Even those who had taken no part knew that whites did not differentiate among Indians when punishment was meted out and that a dark skin would mean a dark fate when the soldiers and settler fighters arrived to exact vengeance for the killings.

For some on both sides, however, the killings represented an opportunity. It was a chance, they believed, to come to a final resolution on ownership of the land. The whites who had long feared a great uprising saw this as a chance to annihilate all the Indians so the settlement of the Plateau could continue unimpeded. The Indians who had doubted the Soyapo ways and had become alarmed at the increasing Soyapo presence saw this as the opportunity to drive the settlers from their land and reclaim it for themselves and their children.

Those caught in the middle—the settlers who had become friends with the Indians and knew that these were the actions of a few individuals, and the Indians who had taken to white ways or believed that coexistence was the only route to peace—were forced to act quickly. The government was already mustering a military force made up of angry settlers and soldiers from as far away as San Francisco. They would soon ride into the Plateau, and a plague of violence would be unleashed that none on either side would be able to control.

At this point, a British trader the Indians respected came among them with an offer to exchange the forty-seven white captives for a ransom of blankets, bullets, guns, and tobacco. Though he pointedly refused to make any promises, the Indians agreed to the exchange in hopes that it would forestall any violent retribution.

But the freeing of the prisoners only exacerbated the situation. Once back in the white settlements by the coast, the captive settlers gave graphic descriptions of the skull-smashing and mutilating that had taken place at the Whitman mission. Any willingness to stay the hand of justice now ceased to exist among the whites.

Over the next several months, conditions deteriorated. Isolated clashes took place between belligerent Indians and groups of settlers and soldiers all throughout the Plateau. The situation was threatening to break out into full-scale war. The Reverend Spalding, who had run for his life with the rest of the settlers, sent a passionate plea to his friends among the Nez Perce to stay far from the violence. He entreated them to meet with a group of government representatives who were preparing to travel from the coastal regions into the Plateau. “With good hearts they meet you,” he wrote in his stilted prose. “The good are not to be punished…. Very many Americans are going to seek the bad Cayuses…. There will soon be large ships from California.”

The Nez Perce had no faith in these promises, but even those who were opposed to the Soyapo ways had no desire for this war that the Cayuse had started. They were willing to meet with these government men to express their desire to avoid conflict.

Unfortunately, the government representatives, who were coming from the Willamette Valley 250 miles away, were not traveling alone. Though the men had been instructed to travel with a minimal military presence in order to avoid increasing the tensions, the military man among them, a Colonel Gilliam, had insisted on bringing his entire contingent of 400 soldiers and armed volunteers. By the time they met with the Nez Perce, these soldiers had been involved in serious clashes with the Cayuse, and the Nez Perce were prepared for the worst.

The meeting took place at a camp that the soldier leader had set up on the site of the burned-out Whitman mission. The Nez Perce rode in 250 strong, showing no fear. Bypassing Ellis, they had designated Tuekakas to be their spokesman. His respect among the Nez Perce, his Cayuse blood, and his long-standing friendship with the Reverend Spalding made him the person most likely to be able to broker a peace, if there was peace to be had.

Tuekakas held up his Book of Heaven, given him by the Reverend Spalding. “It is my light,” he said. “I speak for all the Cayuses present, and all my people. I do not want my children engaged in this war…. You speak of the murderers. I shall not meddle with them. I bow my head. This much I speak.”

After the other chiefs had spoken, the government representatives were somewhat mollified. The Nez Perce, the most numerous and potentially dangerous of the Plateau tribes, seemed pacified. Without Nez Perce participation, there was little likelihood of an all-out war. In gratitude, they appointed one of the mountain men who had married a Nez Perce woman to serve as Indian agent to the tribe and promised that no more white people would ever be allowed to settle in Nez Perce lands.

Tuekakas went back to his distant Wallowa Valley, convinced that he had brokered a successful peace. His children, indeed, would not have to become engaged in a violent and fruitless war.

T
HE EFFORTS OF
Tuekakas and the other chiefs were partially successful. The Plateau did not break out into full-scale war. But some among the whites were still intent on finding the killers, and some among the Indians were intent upon keeping them hidden. As a result, skirmishes continued.

By and large, these skirmishes amounted to nothing. In a great landscape of green, rolling hills, deep canyons, and heavily forested, craggy mountain ranges stretching for hundreds of miles, it was impossible for the small numbers of whites to mount any concerted military action. And there was no common sentiment on the part of the various tribes as to what kind of stand to take in relation to white demands. So the encounters generally devolved into unfortunate incidents where white volunteers, coming upon a wandering band of peaceful Indians, shot them without provocation, or where old men were killed for protesting the confiscation of their cows.

It was a war of attrition, with neither side having the heart to do what was necessary to achieve all-out victory. Eventually, the soldiers and citizen volunteers, unable to either catch the killers or root out pockets of resistance, withdrew to the safer, more settled areas back in the Willamette Valley toward the coast. In leaving, they told the tribes that all could live in peace if the killers were handed over but that the Cayuse, because of their continued warlike behavior and stubborn refusal to assist in identifying the killers, had forfeited all rights to their land. It would now be open to settlement by the whites.

This angered the tribes, especially the Cayuse, because many of them had remained friendly toward the whites and had wanted the killers turned over for punishment. Now they too were being punished for the actions of a few.

But in reality, this edict had little practical effect because few settlers were willing to brave the dangerous wilds of a country that had seen a God-fearing man like Dr. Whitman suffer such a cruel and savage fate. So when five men purported to have been the killers were seized and hanged for their misdeeds on June 3, 1850, a kind of peace settled over the Plateau. The missionaries had fled, the white settlers had left for less dangerous territory, and newcomers traveling on the wagon trails wanted to do nothing more than pass through as quickly as possible. The punishment of the supposed killers had satisfied all but the most bloodthirsty of the whites, so there was little reason for military presence among them. The Nez Perce, the Cayuse, and all their kin seemed once again to have found peace in their own country.

But this peace could not last forever. In 1848, a year after the massacre and two years before the killers were hanged for their crimes, an event had taken place hundreds of miles away that would shape the world of the Plateau people for generations to come.

Gold had been discovered in California.

At first, the discovery worked to the advantage of the Indians in the Northwest because the troubling tide of immigrants into their country almost completely dried up. There was precious little reason to brave uncertain Indian Territory when there was wealth for the taking in the streams and creek beds of the country seven hundred miles to the south.

But it took only the end of the Gold Rush dream to turn the attention of the travelers back toward the north. By the early 1850s, wagon trains from the East were hearing from returning stragglers that the gold boom was over, and they suddenly looked with more favor upon the old Oregon Trail, which had been almost forgotten in the frenzy to get to the California gold fields. Wagons began diverting at the cutoff near Salt Lake City and heading toward the Northwest and the more reasonable, if less sensational, promises of riches in ranch and farmland. At the same time, disenchanted, destitute miners from California headed north in hopes of salvaging something from a dream that had turned to dust.

All manner of immigrant and American-born dreamers who had left their homes for the promise of wealth headed toward the Pacific Northwest. Oregon Territory, so long the woolly domain of fur trappers and proselytizers, was suddenly in the sights of miners, claim jumpers, hustlers, laborers, landless former farmers, entrepreneurs, prostitutes, and all manner of humanity who had been drawn to the promise of easy riches in California.

At first these newcomers were interested in only the fertile coastal valleys. But as those valleys began to fill up, settlers cast their eyes over the Cascade Mountains and across the dry high-country desert toward the rich grazing lands of the distant eastern Columbia Plateau. For emigrants who had not been part of the Whitman massacre or its bloody aftermath, the land seemed more promising than dangerous. The isolated and rugged terrain and fear of hostile Indians, which for several years had acted as a barrier to the whites and a protection of the native peoples, once again seemed like no barrier at all.

It was at this point that the government edict regarding the opening of the Cayuse country for settlement began to affect the tribes. It was exacerbated by a political act that had taken place shortly before the Whitman massacre and about which the Indians had no understanding at all.

Since the time of the first white incursions into the Northwest, the area had been almost without government. The British and Americans had shared it under an uneasy truce of joint occupancy, leaving it mostly to its own devices. It was too far removed from any centers of power, too sparsely populated, and of too little economic interest to merit the expenditures of will and finances necessary to bring it under government control. Such order as existed had been maintained by the fur companies, the various missionaries, and shadowy opportunists who got themselves appointed to vague roles as Indian agents or liaisons. But all of this had amounted to nothing. People had done what they chose and solved their problems between themselves by whatever means they had at their disposal.

But as Britain and the United States had begun to see the economic and strategic value of the area, it had become an object of greater political contention. Each nation wanted ownership in order to claim the resources and seaports, but neither could afford to expend military or financial resources in an attempt to control it. So, rather than engage in armed conflict, settlers had been encouraged to move into the territory and stake their claims so ownership could be taken by a kind of tacit eminent domain.

Dr. Whitman's journeys back east, ostensibly to get supplies for the continued effort to bring the gospel to the natives, had been as much about bringing new American settlers to the West as they had been about replenishing depleted supplies. New settlers would increase the American (and Protestant) presence and would help establish the right of ownership when the time of decision came.

When that decision had finally been made by the Oregon Compromise agreement of 1846 and the country below the 49th parallel was granted to the United States, the fate of Indian people took a turn that would influence them forever.

The United States had evolved its practices regarding Indians during the settling of the East and had begun shaping these practices into national policy. Under this policy, Indian tribes were to be dealt with as separate nations. Treaties were to be made, and both signatories were to be bound to certain behaviors and limits by the terms of those treaties.

This rule of mutual legal compact, with its European roots, had no precedent among the individualistic native peoples of the continent. No concept of “tribe” as a political unit even existed among them. They were bound together by language, family, and cultural affinity. You knew who your people were, but there was no formal line by which someone was designated in or out. People married into a group based on custom or circumstance; people lived with and became part of other groups with whom they had friendly relations. And within the groups, no person spoke for the rest in all matters, and even consensus did not bind those who had not given their consent. If you disagreed with a decision, you simply were not bound by the agreement. Your decisions were your own, based on your own sense of honor and responsibility, and these were governed not by external laws but by the obligations you felt to spiritual forces, your ancestors, and the people whose care you felt had been entrusted to your hands. If you did not agree with the decision of a leader, you simply moved away or refused to comply.

In addition, the idea of land as personal property, a key principle on which the United States was basing its treaties, was alien to the native people. How could one “own” the land? You were born from the land, nurtured by it. It was your mother, and you could no more buy or sell it than you could buy or sell your birthright as a child of your mother. Agreements based on hard lines of land ownership lay beyond both understanding and any acceptable practices of moral responsibility toward the earth.

Prior to the actual establishment of a border between Canada and the United States in 1846, this had not been an issue because even the whites in the vast territory of the Pacific Northwest had operated on the more amorphous principles of usage and occupation. But the conclusion of the border agreement changed everything. America could now expand without resistance into the previously ungoverned Pacific Northwest, and it could do so under its own self-defined rules of ownership and legally binding treaties.

Suddenly, the tribes—people with no tradition of a single, dominating leader, no belief in the actions of one binding the behavior of all, and no precedent for establishing hard, arbitrary lines of property ownership— were being asked to make legally binding decisions about who owned what and who could go where and under what circumstances. The earth, which had once been understood as a spiritual gift and birthright, had become a negotiable legal entity. Land had become property.

This was a recipe for disaster for all Indian people, but especially for tribes that ranged freely, like the Nez Perce. They moved with the seasons, wandered hundreds of miles, and sometimes would leave their home territory for years at a time to travel to buffalo country. But in their minds, they were bound to those homelands like one is bound to a family, or the salmon is bound to the waters of its birth, and their presence or absence did not in any way change or compromise that bond.

But to settlers, and to the country that now was claiming the right to define the rules of settlement, nonoccupation meant nonownership, and inefficient usage reflected moral failure. Christian scriptures commanded people to subdue the earth and make it fruitful, and the United States was a country that believed itself founded on scripture. People who did not occupy land or who used it inefficiently could be demanded to move, and the land could be given over to more industrious sorts who would fulfill the biblical injunction to make it yield and bear fruit. At minimum, the amount of space claimed by wandering people could be cut down to more realistic size based on practices of efficient agrarian usage, which, it was assumed, they would eventually adopt.

So roaming tribes like the Nez Perce presented a real problem. The only way to work a viable agreement with them was to put all the lands they claimed as their homelands inside the area reserved by the treaty and to allow them hunting and fishing rights in their traditional migration patterns, or to pay them handsomely to accept less.

This was what the earlier treaties with Indian peoples in the East, at their best, had tried to do. And this was what the government hoped to do with the tribes in the Northwest. However, since the ultimate purpose of the treaties was not fairness and equity but control and containment that enabled white settlement to continue unrestricted and unabated, all legal and extralegal measures necessary to ensure this had to be taken. If bribes had to be offered, lies told, or conditions abrogated in order to meet changing circumstances or to overcome Indian obstinacy, so be it. If, ultimately, Indians had to be removed by force and resettled in distant lands, so be that as well. The flood of white settlement, it was believed, could not be stopped. It was both a physical and historical inevitability. The white race was destined by nature to overrun the Indian people, and any concessions made to protect these unfortunate souls were understood by settlers and the government to be acts of unnecessary generosity.

Consequently, when the post–Gold Rush tide of settlers began to flow in from California and the East, the Nez Perce and the other Plateau tribes found themselves facing a very different set of circumstances than they had confronted even a few years before. Now they were being overrun by people who sought not to share the land, but to take it. And these people had a government behind them to enforce their right to do so.

Tuekakas watched all this from his hawk's eye vantage point in the high, mountainous Wallowa. Visitors from the tribes near the coast were telling of white settlers flooding into their land, going where they would, doing what they wished, killing native people, and bringing new sicknesses that could not be cured. They were drawing lines and building fences and shooting Indians who ventured across. Their numbers were so large that Soyapo leaders could not hold them back, and even when they could, they chose not to.

The coastal chiefs were being told that the only way to survive was to choose a small piece of land and to move onto it so the government soldiers could protect them. This met with no one's favor. No person had the right to tell another where to go or not go. No one could claim to make laws about the land that went against the teachings of the Creator.

From across the mountains toward buffalo country, stories were filtering in of new forts being built on rivers and new Soyapo towns growing up in places that native peoples had always known as their own. Even in the Nez Perce's own country, the trails were now alive with the groaning wheels of white-topped Soyapo wagons moving in formation across the hills and along the river valleys.

Most disturbing of all was the rumor of a white chief from the East who was coming with soldiers to buy Indian land and open it to white settlement.