Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (8 page)

The “chief” to whom these rumors referred was Isaac Stevens, an energetic whippet of a man who had gotten himself appointed as the governor of Washington Territory, a new jurisdiction carved out of the vast original Oregon Territory. Stevens was an impetuous man, impatient with obstacles and wasted time. In addition to being appointed governor, he had convinced the Department of War to make him head of a survey team that would try to find a potential railroad route to the Pacific. In his efforts to learn the best trails and pathways he had hired Indian guides who had passed the word of his coming from band to band until it had crossed the mountains and reached the ears of the Yakima, and then the Palouse and Cayuse and Nez Perce.

With forces gathering around them, the chiefs of the Plateau tribes determined that they needed to take preemptive action. They met in grand council and decided that none would act alone to make agreements with this new white chief and that if they had to draw lines around their land to keep the white settlers out, all the land that the Creator had given to each tribe must be protected by those lines.

Though the sentiment for protecting the land was universal, opinions on how to achieve this were not. Many among the Nez Perce, and some among the Cayuse, had embraced the ways taught by the now-departed missionaries. They had no quarrel with the white newcomers, only a desire to protect the land that the Creator had given their people as a birthright, and a healthy fear of the diseases that the white settlers brought in their wake. Others, like Tuekakas, wished to remain on friendly terms, even if they did not wish to embrace the white people's ways. Then there were those who still harbored ill will toward the white invaders and happily would have taken up arms against the interlopers who demanded land, fealty, and abandonment of the old ways as taught by the ancestors. Many of these were followers of Smolholla, a diminutive, hunchbacked man from the Wanapum tribe that lived on the edge of the Columbia River in the dry country west of the Nez Perce.

Smolholla was a person of great spiritual power who had fallen into a death state and awakened three days later with a vision from the spirit world. In his vision, he had been told that the white ways were bad for Indian people—that they caused sickness and confusion and that all the strife in their country and in their people's hearts was because they had abandoned the old ways and begun cutting the earth and living in a manner displeasing to the Creator.

His message spoke not only to those who had been opposed to the missionaries but also to many who had begun to have doubts about the suitability of the Christian way for Indian people. Just as they had accepted Jesus because he seemed to embody many of the traditional ways of the people, they now listened to Smolholla because his experience seemed to reflect the experience of Jesus while reclaiming those traditional ways. He and his followers were known as “Dreamers.”

With these different points of view, the members of the Plateau tribes— Christians, Dreamers, and followers of the seven-drums longhouse ways of their ancestors—prepared to meet in council with the new law chief, Stevens, to see what sort of guarantees they could gain regarding the protection of their land and the continued freedom and safety of their people.

Stevens was more than willing to meet with the tribes. He wanted issues settled as quickly as possible so he could get on with the business of developing the country. He did not wish to have any trouble either with or from the Indians and was prepared to provide each tribe with a reasonable amount of land in the form of a reservation. But if the Indians were too obdurate or too excessive in their demands, he intended to take what he wanted on whatever terms he chose.

Stevens had no taste for long negotiations or equivocation, but he knew that long negotiations were part of the Indian way of arriving at decisions. Discussions went back and forth, with extended formal prologues, oblique references to issues, constant revisiting of points, and grand rhetorical soliloquies by various leaders, all in the effort to reach a meaningful consensus. He was willing to endure this, but in his mind the outcome was already decided: he would have their lands. The only issue was on what terms.

In late May 1855, Stevens set up an arbor in a grove of trees just down the river from where the Whitman mission had stood, and prepared to meet the Indians with feasts and gifts. When the Nez Perce rode in first, over 2400 people strong, and circled his 100 men with 1000 stripped, painted, shield-thumping warriors, it became abundantly clear that the negotiations would have to be handled delicately. The Nez Perce had intended no threat, only a grand ceremonial entry, and Stevens understood this. Nonetheless, their numbers were daunting.

The demeanor of the Cayuse and Walla Wallas and Umatillas, who arrived shortly thereafter, however, spoke of a different attitude. They did not make a grand entry but merely camped sullenly behind a distant grove of trees, refusing to acknowledge Stevens or to accept any gifts or provisions. But Stevens was undeterred. He had stocked a wooden storehouse with gifts for the various tribes, and he believed that his feasts, gifts, and promises would eventually bring all the people to his side.

When all the tribes had arrived, he began his council. Despite rumors of threats against him and his men, he bravely stood his ground in the face of some 5000 assembled Indians, constantly and even brazenly making the case for the benefits of reservation life.

In the course of the next twelve days, he told them that the reservations were the only way the Great Father back East could protect them from the incursions of whites flooding into the area; he made outrageous claims that the Cherokee removal far to the east had resulted in prosperity for the Cherokee people; he promised more schools, more tools, more cattle, more money; he insisted that the government would keep white people off the reservations while Indians would have the perpetual right to hunt and fish on all their traditional grounds, whether within or beyond the boundaries of the reservations.

He even claimed that the Nez Perce would be free to continue their wide-ranging journeys across the mountains into buffalo country and that the government would assist in bringing a lasting peace between the Nez Perce and the Blackfeet. There was hardly a promise he would not make so long as the Indians accepted the basic premise that they be limited to living on a designated piece of land. This same model of negotiations had been used successfully in the East, and if the end result was betrayal of promises, that was of less import than the immediate need to get the tribes to accept the premise of confinement on well-defined pieces of land.

To those people and tribes who were positively disposed toward the whites, his offer was tempting, so long as all their traditional homelands were included in those designated reservations. But to others who mistrusted white promises or who were being deprived of their lands, these offers rang hollow. And to those, like the Dreamers of Smolholla and the strict followers of the seven-drum way, who believed that the earth was the living, breathing mother from whom they had been born, such talk of buying and selling parcels of the earth was spiritually repugnant.

In the course of the lengthy negotiations, Lawyer, one of the Nez Perce chiefs who long had been a friend of the whites, ingratiated himself with Stevens by moving his teepee near the governor's camp, ostensibly to protect the governor from a murder plot that some of the disaffected Indians were said to be hatching. Lawyer was a practicing Christian and a convert to white ways as well as an advocate for accommodation, so it was not clear that his move wasn't really an attempt to place himself and his family closer to the governor in order to gain protection from the less conciliatory Nez Perce. But his apparently magnanimous gesture as well his facility with English and his fervent Christian prayer sessions, which took place within earshot of Stevens, immediately made him a favorite of the governor. Stevens soon designated him as the head chief and spokesman for the Nez Perce people.

This designation was met with derision and contempt by the other Nez Perce leaders, who knew that Lawyer held no such authority. He was no more the chief over all the people than Ellis had been, and Lawyer himself knew it. But, both for self-serving purposes and because he believed he could use his English to negotiate the best conditions for the Nez Perce, he accepted the mantle with relish. He had been intimately involved in the negotiations to turn over the Cayuse responsible for the massacre at the Whitman mission and felt that he had a better understanding of the white man and the white man's laws than any of the more traditional chiefs.

The negotiations went on for eighteen days. The tribes were of varying minds and had varying concerns. Some did not like the proposed boundaries. Some were skeptical of white motives. Some were offended by the greater level of favors that seemed to be being promised to the most conciliatory or overtly Christian of the bands and tribes. Some simply opposed the process or the very concept itself. And some were resistant because all the affected tribes of the Plateau were not even present at the gathering.

In the end, after two and a half weeks, Stevens had made his case sufficiently to bring all those present, either willingly or reluctantly, to the brink of signing an agreement. But on that day, Chief Looking Glass, the seventy-year-old patriarch among the Nez Perce chiefs, rode into the assembly. He had been informed of the council while he was across the mountains in buffalo country and had ridden almost without stop in order to arrive at the gathering before the bands acted.

Because of his age, experience, and stature as a warrior and buffalo hunter, he was the closest thing the Nez Perce had to a head chief. He certainly commanded more respect than Lawyer. Without even getting off his horse, he berated the assembled Nez Perce and told them to go back to their lodges. “I will talk to you,” he said. His brusque manner and insulting lack of ceremony in the presence of Stevens could not be misinterpreted.

But during the ensuing discussions with his people, Looking Glass inexplicably had a change of heart. There was some speculation that he and Lawyer had staged the entire event to extract more concessions from Stevens, but the enmity between the two men made that unlikely. Nonetheless, two days later, all the Nez Perce representatives, along with those of the Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, Yakima, and minor assembled tribes, all acceded to the agreement.

But it was not clear to what they had agreed. Though Stevens had made many grand promises during the negotiations, it was not clear exactly what was in the treaty itself. Translation of terms was an arduous process, going from one language to another, and none could be sure that the translations were accurate. Then, in the actual signing, some of the chiefs merely touched the end of the writing implement while white scribes marked
X
s next to their name, and in more than one instance they claimed they believed that they were agreeing only to friendship with the whites.

With the exception of Lawyer, even those who were able to sign their names were not permitted to do so, leaving a document with only
X
s as proof of the Indians' agreement to its terms. There was also talk that Stevens had visited the tribes separately and in private and told those who did not sign that their people would soon find themselves walking “knee-deep in blood.”

But, whatever the forces were that drove the decision, on Monday, June 11, 1855, the document was completed and sent to Washington to await Senate approval and presidential signature before becoming a legally binding agreement between the United States and the tribes of the Columbia Plateau.

The Nez Perce had accepted this treaty in no small part because all their lands were contained within its designated boundaries. Many among them were devout Christians and willing converts to the white way of life. To such people, and even to those who did not look so fondly on white culture, the promise of schools, plows, grist mills, lumber mills, teachers, blankets, clothing, and money seemed a worthy return for an
X
on an agreement that otherwise seemed to have no impact on them.

But the Nez Perce, by signing, had agreed to much more than they knew. They had given tacit acceptance to the idea of land as something salable and negotiable and had allowed the white government to set the terms by which the two peoples thereafter would come to agreements. They had also established themselves unwittingly as a unitary group for the purposes of negotiation. If they did not now realize this, or did not appreciate its full implications, they soon would.

Tuekakas had played no large part in the negotiations. Though he was one of the most respected chiefs and the government representatives had eagerly sought his agreement, he had stayed in the background, secure that his distant Wallowa was of no interest to whites and concerned only that the final boundaries include all his traditional land. Since they did, he left the treaty proceedings satisfied that the real effect of the new agreement was not to limit the place of his people on the earth, but to protect that place from white incursions. In his mind, he had signed as the representative of the Wallowa band, and his signature was binding only in regard to the Wallowa band and its lands.

Young Joseph had accompanied him to the proceedings and had watched with great interest. Though only fourteen, the boy was already being groomed for leadership, and this was an opportunity to observe the art of negotiation and the ways of the whites. And it had been time well spent. He had heard different arguments, different ways of expression, different positions, and different points of view. He had been able to observe not only the Nez Perce, but also the white government officials. And he had heard firsthand that to which the U.S. government and his people had agreed.

Young Joseph was very different from his father. Though Tuekakas was a man of traditional roots, he still read his Book of Heaven and honored the teachings of the Reverend Spalding. Young Joseph had learned a common human respect for the whites as people while a child at the Lapwai, but he had been too young to be deeply immersed in the beliefs that the Reverend espoused. As a result, he had grown to manhood with both a more singular sense of the old ways and a more conciliatory attitude toward whites than his father now possessed.