Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (9 page)

Young Nez Perce boys traditionally kept a distance from their fathers in order to foster an attitude of respect, and young Joseph, though being groomed to take his father's role as chief, was no different. He had received much of his training about manhood from favorite uncles and had been taught the ways of the longhouse and the important feasts from the elders. His childhood learning had come at the hands of the grandmothers, and his understanding of the animals and birds and plants had been given him by those with medicine knowledge. His father's role was to embody the principles of leadership and pass them on to his son through example. But the character and spiritual formation of the boy had been guided by others in accord with the strict requirements for the raising of a future leader.

By the time Joseph had gone with his father to the treaty gathering, he was truly a child of the old ways. He had been on his
wayakin
quest and had met the spirit power that would be his guide throughout his life. He had learned the song that the spirit guide had given him and had revealed his newly given name to the tribe at the autumn feast where such announcements were made. Young Joseph, son of Tuekakas, was now Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht—Thunder Rising over Distant Mountains—and his character as well as his demeanor were well reflected in this name.

The treaty that resulted from the proceedings young Joseph had attended was an uneasy agreement at best. Most of the tribes were unclear about the agreement, and scratches on paper did not bind an Indian heart when it felt it had been wronged.

Unknown to the Indians when they had signed the agreement was a prior law, made at the time the Pacific Northwest had come into American hands, that any white man could claim for himself 320 acres of land in this new territory and another 320 acres in the name of his wife. The broad and sometimes imprecise boundaries negotiated with the various tribes meant little to the incoming settlers, and the government was almost completely unable to enforce even those boundaries that could be defined. Add in the dissatisfaction many of the tribal members felt with the conditions of the agreement, the favoritism shown to those tribes and leaders who were most compliant with white wishes, and the venality and criminality of many of the whites who were coming north from the gold fields, and it was inevitable that the fragile peace would not hold.

Soon the Plateau was once again riddled with war. Bloody encounters were taking place between government soldiers and various disaffected tribes who felt betrayed by the treaty conditions. White men were having their throats cut and their bodies burned by marauding bands of warriors, and white soldiers were killing elderly Indian men, cutting off their fingers, and using strips of their flesh for razor strops.

It did not help that the U.S. Senate was dragging its feet on ratification. The tribes were watching their homelands fill up with settlers while seeing none of the proposed benefits from their agreeing to government terms. No money was forthcoming; neither were the promised goods, schools, mills, cattle, or tools. Those tribal leaders who had argued most strongly for accepting the white conditions were now losing prestige most rapidly. And those who had opposed the treaty were finding their influence growing.

Stevens and the other government officials were counting on the Nez Perce to be the voice of reason. They numbered around 4000, making their population equal to all the other tribes combined. They had always been friendly toward the whites, and some had even shown great promise, as the white leaders saw it, in “abandoning their Indian ways to become productive members of society.” They also had been given the most of what they wanted in terms of land, and that land, with its rocky inclines, deep gorges, and deep winter snows, was the least desirable to white settlers of any land in the Plateau. If being left alone constituted the desired outcome of the treaty, the Nez Perce had received the greatest benefit of any of the signatory tribes.

But the failure of the government to deliver on its treaty promises of goods and amenities was fracturing their seemingly solid front. While some Nez Perce stood so loyally by the whites that they donned soldiers' uniforms and served as escorts for government officials traveling around the Plateau, others were beginning to have serious doubts about the agreement. Lawyer was being openly ridiculed by other tribal leaders for his naive trust in the good offices of the whites, and Tuekakas was brooding over the massacre of twenty-seven Cayuse women, elders, and children who had traveled to his country to visit their relatives. What had been a difference in philosophy about how to deal with the whites was becoming an actual rift in the tribe.

In general, the rift was following familiar lines. The Christian bands— those who had lived along the river edges and had been visited most easily by missionaries—were standing by the white government and the treaties. Those who had traditionally lived far from the sites of white visitation and had not had Christian missionaries actually live among them were turning away from the empty promises of the government. Among this latter group were the people of Tuekakas, who lived in closer proximity to the Cayuse than to the Christian Nez Perce, and Looking Glass, who spent much of his time across the mountains in buffalo country.

Unlike their Christian brothers and sisters, these more disaffected bands had not taken to sedentary living and had not experienced the material benefit of shifting to a life based on raising crops and domestic animals. They even began insisting that they had not understood the conditions of the treaty and wished it to be revisited. Lawyer stood strong against them, even becoming a spokesman for the government, publicly declaring that all fifty-eight men who had signed the treaty had been well aware of its contents and had signed of their own volition.

This fracturing of the fragile peace, and the relationships behind it, was taking place all across the Plateau. Not only were the benefits of the treaty not forthcoming, its protections were not being upheld. White men, with little interest in Indian claims and points of view, were moving into the land to claim the acreage they felt was their due under the new territorial laws. They had no interest in the niceties of governmental treaties, especially those that had not been ratified by the Senate and signed by the president, which this one had not. The government itself was powerless to stop them. Its military presence was too small and spread out, and even if the soldiers had chosen to act, their authority was limited as long as the treaty remained unratified.

Meanwhile, the land-hungry settlers poured onto Indian lands. Like the Indians themselves, these settlers valued areas with ready sources of water and good farming and grazing sites. Lands that were highly valued by the tribes and that lay clearly inside the boundaries of the treaty lines were being brazenly occupied and claimed by white intruders.

Some of the tribes remained peaceful, hoping that the white government would stand by its promises. Others, convinced they had been wronged, engaged in direct confrontation. Still others took advantage of white land hunger to sell some of their own lands and to find employment as scouts or ferrymen.

At first the Nez Perce were not deeply affected by these intrusions. Their land, being craggy, cold in the winter, and far to the east on the edge of the mountains, had not initially drawn many of the white settlers. The biggest issues they were facing were the nonperformance of the government in meeting its terms of payment of goods and money and the spillover of outrages such as the one Tuekakas's visitors had suffered.

As to the white settlers themselves, most of the Nez Perce remained on friendly terms with them. Since the departure of the missionaries, the Christian bands had taken on the governance of their own people and had developed settlements that mirrored white settlements in appearance and in practices. They were quite happy to see the return of white goods and opportunities. Bands of a more traditional bent simply kept their distance.

But many of the white immigrants flooding north were not interested in becoming settlers. They had not lost the gold fever that had brought them west, and they still sought the big strike. They knew how to read landscapes for telltale geological signs as well as what to look for in hillsides and creeks. They also knew what to ask when they spoke with Indians and what to watch for as they surveyed tribal handicrafts and decoration. And when they saw evidence of gold, they knew what to do.

Many of the Nez Perce who were friendly to the whites were happy to show off their gold. To them it was simply a beautiful adornment with no more or less intrinsic value than an abalone shell or a sky-colored bead. Its greatest value, they felt, was as a trade good with the white people, who obviously valued it far beyond its reasonable worth.

Soon stories abounded of gold in the hills and streams of Nez Perce country, and white adventurers were wandering the reservation lands in search of the metal. This did not meet with great favor among all the tribal members, but as long as the intruders kept to trails near the rivers and continued to enrich the Nez Perce through trade, they could be tolerated.

Then, in February 1860, an intrepid miner named Pierce convinced one of the Christian Nez Perce to assist him and his party in their search for the metal. Their preliminary pannings and makeshift sluicings produced eighty dollars in gold dust. Word spread quickly, and the people who had drifted north from the gold fields of California once again had a focus for their gold hunger. They poured into Nez Perce country on foot, on horseback, or by any means they could. The rush was on.

The Treaty of 1855 had finally been ratified the previous year, so the miners now were trespassing on land that officially belonged to the Nez Perce. But gold fever knew no boundaries. Soon ferries filled with prospectors were churning up the Columbia to its junction with the Snake, then heading up the Snake toward Nez Perce country. Ferries could go only as far as the bend where the Snake met the Clearwater, so the men coming from the coast disembarked at this point. It was only several miles down the river from the Lapwai and lay well within the boundaries of the reservation.

Lawyer, who felt himself in charge of this territory, agreed to allow several buildings to be built as storehouses for goods for soldiers who would enforce the treaty provisions. But the miners quickly built tent shelters and canvas lean-tos and began turning this drop-off point into their base of operations. They named the place Lewiston, but it was better known as Ragtown, and before a short month was out, it was the site of a shabby makeshift village of more than 1200 inhabitants.

Soon the area was overrun with prostitutes, liquor peddlers, hardware outfitters, and land speculators all plying their trades from the confines of their tents and shelters. Newspapers from the larger settlements like Portland printed overblown stories of gold fields bigger than those in California in hopes of drawing a larger population base and thus more economic opportunity to the sparsely settled Northwest.

Many of the Christian Nez Perce from nearby Lapwai and Kamiah saw opportunity as well. They could sell foodstuffs and horses and could serve as ferrymen and guides. The white incursion, though in violation of the treaties, seemed as much a boon as a problem so long as the miners did not establish permanent settlements and contributed to the Nez Perce economy through their purchase of goods and services.

By 1861, the goods promised by the Treaty of 1855 finally began to flow in, albeit at a trickle. Lawyer believed that they should go to the burgeoning riverfront Christian villages to aid in bringing the Nez Perce the economic benefits of American society. But the outlying distant tribes felt otherwise. They too had signed the treaty, and they felt that they too should benefit. At a minimum, they should be repaid for the horses they had supplied to the U.S. government during its clashes with more belligerent tribes.

But if there was any chance of this happening, that chance disappeared when the attack on Fort Sumter took place thousands of miles away on the Atlantic seacoast of America. Suddenly the nation's interest, as well as its finances, all headed East. Promises to ragged Indian bands in the West would have to be put on hold. Such goods as were promised came in slowly and were of mediocre quality. Blankets held together by glue rather than stitching, and hoes made of iron rather than steel were typical of the violations of the treaty. Promised buildings were erected as shells, if at all, and unscrupulous agents claimed thousands of dollars for fences that were never built.

Soldiers too were suddenly at a premium. Men were needed back East to preserve the Union, and those who originally had hailed from the South felt compelled to go home to fight for their cause. The Columbia Plateau, in the throes of a chaotic population explosion where beliefs, cultures, gold, and land were being stirred into a volatile mix, was left largely without an army to keep that mix under control.

By 1862 the chaos had become incendiary. There were more than 18,000 whites in the Nez Perce country, and precious few of them were broad-minded civilization builders. They were criminals, hustlers, down-and-outers, desperate family men who had seen their California dreams turn to dust, foreigners seeking opportunity, and all manner of miscreants and idiosyncratic individualists for whom life in an unsettled frontier seemed more appealing than a sedate life in a growing, orderly country. Vigilante justice was the order of the day, and claim jumping, thievery, and murder were common. White settlement that had originated in the service of the Lord was now operating on the fuel of alcohol and greed.

It went without saying that the Dreamers and other Nez Perce who held to the traditional belief in the sanctity of the earth were appalled at the violation of the land. But even those less committed to the old ways were outraged by the white men taking their land, raping their women, hanging their sons and brothers and fathers and friends, and turning the weak among them into beggars for drink.