41

THE PRIDE OF YOUNG JOSEPH

THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM HAD LONG BEEN OF two minds about the Indians. Americans who lived closest to the Indians, who stood to benefit from the seizure of Indian lands and felt at risk of Indian attack, tended to support repressive, dispossessive policies. Americans who lived at a greater distance, with less to gain or lose, often displayed greater sympathy toward Indians and supported more accommodating policies. Put simply, the East liked Indians a lot more than the West did.

The East liked no Indian more than Joseph, chief of the Nez Perce. “The Nez Percé comes into history as the white man’s friend,” the New York Times editorialized in 1877. The paper quoted Lewis and Clark: “The Pierced-Nose nation are among the most amiable men we have seen—stout, well-formed, well-looking, active, their character placid and gentle, rarely moved into passion, yet not often enlivened by gayety.” The editorialist noted that until the very recent past, there was no record of a full-blooded Nez Perce having killed a white man. “With the Nez Percés we have always been at peace; and when we have had wars with other neighboring tribes, the Nez Percés have invariably been the allies of our army.”

All of which, the Times declared, made the U.S. army’s war against the Nez Perce, beginning in the summer of 1877, so incomprehensible. The paper blamed the U.S. government. “These harmless and peaceful neighbors, these faithful allies in every war, were the nation that we drove to desperation and deeds of blood.” Acknowledging that the immediate responsibility was obscure, given the convoluted chain of events triggering the war, the paper nonetheless condemned the conflict as “a gigantic blunder and a crime.”

The Nez Perce war, like many other Indian wars, had roots in the distributed nature of governance in the tribe. Starting in the 1850s various bands of the tribe had agreed to relinquish land claims to the U.S. government in exchange for annuity payments of food and blankets. But other bands refused to sign. Among these were the followers of Joseph, the son of a chief who had been given the Christian name Joseph by Henry Spalding, Marcus Whitman’s missionary partner. The younger Joseph took pride in his father’s peaceful reputation. “There was no stain on his hands of the blood of a white man,” he said. “He left a good name on the earth.”

He also left young Joseph some advice. The elder Joseph and other Nez Perce of his generation had watched as whites came to their land. “At first our people made no complaint,” the younger Joseph said. “They thought there was room enough for all to live in peace, and they were learning many things from the white men that seemed to be good. But we soon found that the white men were growing rich very fast, and were greedy to possess everything the Indian had. My father was the first to see through the schemes of the white men, and he warned his tribe to be careful about trading with them. He had a suspicion of men who seemed so anxious to make money. I was a boy then, but I remember well my father’s caution. He had sharper eyes than the rest of our people.”

Some Nez Perce yielded to white pressure to sell the tribe’s lands. Old Joseph did not. “I have no other home than this,” he said. “I will not give it up to any man. My people would have no home.” He never changed his view. As he grew older, his son became chief of the band. Another council was called by the whites, and the younger Joseph made ready to represent the band. “When you go into council with the white man, always remember your country,” the father told the son. “Do not give it away. The white man will cheat you out of your home.”

Joseph. The Nez Perce chief became eastern America’s model of the noble warrior.

Young Joseph heeded his father’s advice. At the council he told the government officials, “I did not want to come to this council, but I came hoping that we could save blood. The white man has no right to come here and take our country. We have never accepted any presents from the government.” Other chiefs had agreed to sell the lands of Joseph’s band, but they had no right to do so. “It has always belonged to my people. It came unclouded to them from our fathers, and we will defend this land as long as a drop of Indian blood warms the hearts of our men.”

The Indian agent at the council said Joseph and his people must move. They had been assigned land on a reservation. They must go there.

“I will not,” Joseph answered. “We have plenty, and we are contented and happy if the white man will leave us alone. The reservation is too small for so many people with all their stock.” The agent offered presents; Joseph rejected them. “You can keep your presents. We can go to your towns and pay for all we need. We have plenty of horses and cattle to sell, and we won’t have any help from you. We are free now; we can go where we please. Our fathers were born here. Here they lived; here they died; here are their graves. We will never leave them.”

Shortly thereafter, Joseph’s father lay dying. He called for his son. “Always remember that your father never sold his country,” he said. “You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few years more, and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.”

Joseph nodded. “I pressed my father’s hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life. My father smiled and passed away to the spirit-land.”

JOSEPH REMAINED TRUE TO HIS FATHER’S ADMONITION, THOUGH the task became increasingly difficult. “White men had found gold in the mountains around the land of winding water”—the Wallowa Valley, the home of Joseph’s band. “They stole a great many horses from us, and we could not get them back because we were Indians. The white men told lies for each other. They drove off a great many of our cattle. Some white men branded our young cattle so they could claim them. We had no friend who would plead our cause before the law councils. It seemed to me that some of the white men in Wallowa were doing these things on purpose to get up a war. They knew that we were not strong enough to fight them.”

Government agents repeatedly told Joseph that he and his people had to move to the reservation. Joseph replied, equally often, that they would not. Finally came General Oliver Howard, who summoned Joseph to the reservation for a talk. He said he had many soldiers at his back, and would soon have more. “The country belongs to the government,” Howard told Joseph. “And I intend to make you go upon the reservation.”

Joseph responded, “We are all sprung from a woman, although we are unlike in many things. We can not be made over again. You are as you were made, and as you were made you can remain. We are just as we were made by the Great Spirit, and you can not change us. Then why should children of one mother and one father quarrel? Why should one try to cheat the other? I do not believe that the Great Spirit Chief gave one kind of men the right to tell another kind of men what they must do.”

“You deny my authority, do you?” demanded Howard. “You want to dictate to me, do you?” Howard grew angry. “The law says you shall go upon the reservation to live, and I want you to do so. But you persist in disobeying the law. If you do not move, I will take the matter into my own hand, and make you suffer for your disobedience.”

A Nez Perce who had accompanied Joseph answered Howard. “Are you the Great Spirit? Did you make the world? Did you make the sun? Did you make the rivers for us to drink? Did you make the grass to grow? Did you make all these things, that you talk to us as though we were boys? If you did, then you have the right to talk to us as you do.”

“You are an impudent fellow,” Howard said. “I will put you in the guard house.” He ordered him arrested.

The others in Joseph’s party looked to him to stop the arrest. “I counseled them to submit,” Joseph recalled. “I knew if we resisted that all the white men present, including General Howard, would be killed in a moment, and we would be blamed.”

The council broke up that day, with no violence. Howard returned twenty-four hours later with an ultimatum. Joseph had thirty days to move his people and their belongings to the reservation. “If you are not here in that time, I shall consider that you want to fight, and will send my soldiers to drive you on.”

Joseph concluded from this that Howard had already decided on war. It would be physically impossible to round up all the band’s cattle and horses, cross the melt-swollen Snake River, and reach the reservation in thirty days. “I am sure that he began to prepare for war at once,” Joseph said.

JOSEPH RETURNED TO HIS PEOPLE. HE CALLED A COUNCIL. HE said he didn’t want war. Some of the young men did want war, in revenge for Nez Perce slain by whites in the past. While the council was meeting, a party of the young men, led by one whose father had been killed by whites, rode into a white settlement and killed four people. The leader of the party came back to the council and denounced those who still sought peace. “Why do you sit here like women?” he said. “The war has begun already.”

Joseph realized that his hand had been forced. “I knew that their acts would involve all my people,” he recounted. “I saw that war could not then be prevented.”

But it was a war unlike any other in the history of the American West. Joseph recognized that he couldn’t stand against Howard and the army; his people would be destroyed. Instead, he and the chiefs of some allied bands determined to conduct a fighting retreat into the mountains, and through the mountains to the buffalo country of the Great Plains.

The Nez Perce withdrew from Wallowa; the soldiers followed. The Nez Perce doubled back and ambushed the soldiers, killing a few, slowing their progress, and then resuming the retreat. The Nez Perce crossed the Salmon River, intending for Howard to follow. When he did, the Indians got behind him and cut his supply lines. The Nez Perce knew the terrain better than Howard and the soldiers did; in the few pitched battles, the soldiers almost always came off worse. Scanty ammunition imposed discipline on the Nez Perce warriors. “When an Indian fights, he only shoots to kill,” Joseph said. “But soldiers shoot at random.” The Nez Perce held themselves to a higher standard than the soldiers and other tribes. “None of the soldiers were scalped,” Joseph explained. “We do not believe in scalping, nor in killing wounded men. Soldiers do not kill many Indians unless they are wounded and left upon the battlefield. Then they kill Indians.”

Howard’s force got help from a separate column coming from the east, under John Gibbon. Gibbon caught the Nez Perce off guard and inflicted the heaviest losses of the campaign: thirty warriors killed and fifty women and children. The Nez Perce changed direction, angling north into the Yellowstone basin.

En route they came upon isolated white settlements. “We captured one white man and two white women,” Joseph recalled. “We released them at the end of three days. They were treated kindly. The women were not insulted. Can the white soldiers tell me of one time when Indian women were taken prisoners, and held three days and then released without being insulted?” They captured two white men several days later. “One of them stole a horse and escaped. We gave the other a poor horse and told him he was free.”

A third column intercepted them, under Samuel Sturgis. The warriors fought the new soldiers to a standstill while the women and children were moved out of reach.

Finally a fourth column—which, like each of the others, alone outnumbered the Nez Perce fighters—engaged them. This one was led by Nelson Miles, the captor of Crazy Horse. Another pitched battle followed, ending in a truce offer by Miles to Joseph.

Joseph weighed the offer. His people were hungry and weary. They had traveled over a thousand miles. The original plan, to find refuge on the plains, had been thwarted by the appearance of Sturgis and Miles. Joseph considered crossing into Canada and linking up with Sitting Bull and other Lakotas who had refused to join Crazy Horse on the Sioux reservation.

But winter was coming, and the Nez Perce were not a people of the plains. One reason, besides its surpassing beauty, that Joseph and his people were so attached to the Wallowa Valley was that the mountains that encircled it protected them from winter winds like those that raked the plains.

Joseph could have left the women, children and wounded behind and dashed across the border, now only forty miles away. “I knew that we were near Sitting Bull’s camp in King George’s land,” he said. But he wouldn’t leave the defenseless to the mercy of the soldiers. “We had never heard of a wounded Indian recovering while in the hands of white men.”

Nelson Miles had made a pledge to Joseph. “If you will come out and give up your arms, I will spare your lives and send you to your reservation.”

Joseph thought Miles an honorable man. “General Miles had promised that we might return to our own country with what stock we had left. I thought we could start again. I believed General Miles, or I never would have surrendered.”

Joseph returned to the truce tent. He handed his rifle to Miles. “It is cold and we have no blankets,” he said. “The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”