Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (12 page)

The two men met on the Umatilla Reservation in the spring of 1875. Joseph had been leader of the Wallowa Nez Perce for almost four years, and Howard had been head of the Department of the Columbia for nearly six months. Joseph approached the general and fixed him with a clear-eyed, penetrating gaze. He wanted to know if Howard had any message for him and his people about the ownership of their land. Howard had none and told Joseph so. But in the meeting he fancied that he and Joseph had experienced a meeting of minds and, in some unspoken manner, had established the foundation of a deep understanding and friendship.

Shortly thereafter President Grant officially rescinded an order that had given Joseph part of the Wallowa as a reservation and opened it instead to white settlement. Agent Monteith informed Joseph, who took the news badly. But his response was mild compared to that of his young warriors, who immediately started clamoring for war.

Not wishing to run the risk of a fight with the U.S. Army, Joseph called a gathering of all the nontreaty chiefs. The meeting took place in the early summer of 1875 in Joseph's Wallowa Valley. In attendance were Eagle from the Light, who lived far toward the Bitterroot Mountains and was disgusted with the entire white presence; Looking Glass, son of the revered chief of the same name, who lived on a distant river bend many miles south of the white settlements and wished only to have his people be free to tend their gardens and travel to buffalo country to hunt in the old way; White Bird, whose craggy lands had been overrun by miners and whose people were suffering endless cruelties and indignities at the white intruders' hands; and Toohoolhoolzote, a strong follower of the ways of Smolholla and adamant believer that the earth would not long tolerate the cruelties and desecrations being visited upon her by the white settlers and those Indians who had chosen to follow the white man's ways.

Toohoolhoolzote, White Bird, and Eagle from the Light argued for war. Each, for his private reasons, had reached the breaking point. Joseph and Looking Glass counseled for prudence and restraint. Such a war, they believed, was unwinnable and would only bring the full force of the U.S. government down upon their people. Better to continue seeking a peaceful resolution to these endless white encroachments.

Because the tribal spiritual leaders agreed with the moderates, the cause of peace carried the day. But the pressure for action was now building within the bands, and their frequent gatherings and obvious dissatisfaction were not going unnoticed by the whites.

On all fronts, the situation was accelerating and deteriorating. From this point forward, every small encounter was fraught with significance. An old Indian man shooing some settler's horses away from his herd was accused of driving a white man's horses from their rightful grazing grounds. Tribal members who traveled to visit distant relatives were suspected of gathering to hold war councils. White men, frustrated with the government's indecisiveness, began moving into the Wallowa, taking over pasturage, and even building a toll road right past Tuekakas's hallowed stone barriers.

Finally, in June 1876, one of Joseph's close friends was shot and killed in an altercation with several white men who were convinced he had stolen their horses. Many versions of the story floated about, but the central issue was that Joseph's friend Wind Blowing was dead, and one of the most hated of the white men, a whiskey-peddling young thug named McNall, was alive and boastful and subject only to white justice.

McNall was well known for his arrogance and belligerence, and his family was notorious for castrating Nez Perce horses they found near their herd. Wind Blowing, in contrast, had always been a reasonable and honest man. When the supposedly stolen horses were found several days later grazing contentedly near the home of their owner, the more belligerent tribal members were ready to act. The time, they said, had come to exact justice in a Nez Perce fashion. But Joseph, again, stayed their hand. It was a white man's crime, and it should be dealt with by white man's justice, just as a Nez Perce crime should be dealt with by Nez Perce justice.

The potential for conflict was obvious, and the whites in the Wallowa feared violence, so they sent for government assistance. In short order the issue landed in Howard's lap. From his distant post in Fort Vancouver, he dispatched some of his most trusted aides to meet with Joseph and his followers at the Lapwai.

Joseph arrived with his brother, Ollokot, and forty of their people. If Howard's representatives had expected belligerence, they were pleasantly surprised. Joseph proved from the outset to be both conciliatory and thoughtful. Wind Blowing was a quiet, peaceable man, he said, and the white men who had killed him were known to be quarrelsome troublemakers. There was no need for war, but there was a need for justice to be done.

The government officials nodded in quiet agreement at the reasonable nature of this powerful chief. But then Joseph took his argument in an unexpected direction. The death of his friend, he explained, though unfortunate, was now a fact. But it was also a fact that his body had been buried in the Wallowa and his spilled blood had made the earth in that valley ever more sacred to the Nez Perce. Let the death of Wind Blowing hallow that land ever further in the minds of white men and cause them to commit themselves even more to preserving it for the Nez Perce for all time to come.

Howard's men were stunned. This was a serpent's logic—clear, efficient, and deviously lethal. It took the high-minded position of calling for peace rather than punishment—exactly what the white officials wanted—but it made the price of that peace exactly what the white officials could not give up. No member of the ancient Roman senate could have been more eloquent, no highly skilled barrister more guileful and succinct. It was clear that Joseph was a formidable presence, both in the power of his character and the quality of his mind. As one of the government representatives in attendance put it, he displayed “an alertness and dexterity in intellectual fencing… that was quite remarkable.”

Occasions like this only served to enhance the chief's reputation among the whites. To some, it marked him as a reasonable and eloquent man, far different from the other Indians they had known, while to others it further established him as a dangerous, wily adversary.

General Howard and his military subordinates were among the former. For them, it was a relief to be dealing with a peace-loving chief who was conciliatory in outlook. Howard immediately set out to bring the murderers to trial and to find an amicable solution to the impasse regarding the disputed Wallowa Valley.

But the agents and local residents resented the intrusion of a military man into civil affairs. To them, Howard had no investment in the outcome beyond peace, and he was far too willing to be conciliatory toward obdurate savages.

Months passed, and the killers were not even arrested. Their presence as free men wandering the Wallowa galled the Nez Perce, who began holding all-night dances with drumming and singing, and riding prominently along the ridgetops, stripped and painted for war. Joseph himself showed an ominous change of heart when he announced that since white men tried Indians who committed crimes, it was only right that Indians should try white men who committed crimes, and he demanded that the killers be turned over.

Tensions were escalating quickly. One of the young braggarts among the white settlers announced to some Indian women that he and his friends had taken about all they could tolerate and were going to kill and scalp all the Indians. He announced that he, personally, intended to kill Joseph and wear his scalp on his bridle. For their part, the Nez Perce warriors set up targets near the home of one of the men involved in the initial shooting and began engaging in very public displays of target practice. It was a strained situation. The wrong move, the wrong signal, and the entire valley would be engulfed in a bloody war.

Neither Joseph nor Howard wanted this. But Joseph's patience was wearing thin, and Howard was hundreds of miles away in Fort Vancouver. Finally, on September 2, Joseph and his people issued an ultimatum. It had been almost three months since the murder, and no white man had been arrested. The time had come for the settlers to turn over McNall and Findley, the two men the Nez Perce held responsible for the killing, then leave the Wallowa Valley. If this was not done by the following Sunday, Joseph's men would ride through the valley and burn down all the settlers' homes.

Some of the settlers left; others barricaded themselves in cabins. The Indians again stripped for war and stationed themselves on promontories. It seemed that an armed confrontation was inevitable.

But Joseph still did not want armed conflict. When some of the more reasonable settlers convinced him that all the threats to the Indians were coming from well-known hotheads and troublemakers, he again prevailed upon his warriors to harness their anger. Eventually, a small force of soldiers arrived from Fort Walla Walla. Their leader, who had been convinced by Howard that Joseph was a reasonable man, assured Joseph that the murderers would be turned over for trial and asked Joseph to stay on one side of the valley except to come to town for supplies. Joseph agreed and, to show good faith, made all his warriors dump their bullets on the ground as a symbol of their willingness to keep the peace.

Eventually the two men were turned over and tried, but because no Indian was willing to swear an oath in the white man's fashion, no witnesses were heard who contradicted the men's claims of self-defense. McNall and Findley were exonerated based on their own testimony.

But it was not this injustice that ultimately set the course of trouble for Joseph and his people; it was a promise made by General Howard during the time of escalating tensions. He had determined that a commission of reasonable men, sitting together, could come to a reasonable resolution to the problem of ownership and settlement of the Wallowa Valley, and he had sent word of this idea to Joseph.

Joseph, as always, was willing to seek a peaceful solution to problems that might lead other men to war, and he had used the promise of this commission to keep his young warriors in check. Now that the problem of the killing of Wind Blowing had been put to an uneasy rest, it was time to seek this peaceful solution.

But Howard's idea of a peaceful solution was far different from Joseph's. He acknowledged that the Indians and the white settlers could not share the Wallowa without constant trouble. But rather than remove the whites or establish hard boundaries between the two, his solution was to remove the Indians. He believed that since there was already a place set aside for the Nez Perce down by Lapwai, and since it was inevitable that the Nez Perce would accept the ways of progress and civilization, the only reasonable solution was for Joseph and his people to abandon the Wallowa and make their permanent residence on the distant Lapwai reservation among the settled, short-haired, Christian, farming Nez Perce. His commission of reasonable men was really just a forum in which he could deliver his preconceived “reasonable solution” to Joseph and the Nez Perce.

Howard's council did not prove successful. Three of the five men representing the government came from Washington, D.C., and they neither understood nor felt sympathy for the Indian situation in the West. They arrived in Idaho on November 7 and soon found themselves sitting in the lonely and isolated confines of the Lapwai while Joseph made his way at a leisurely pace from his home in the distant Wallowa Valley. When the chief finally arrived six days later with sixty warriors, he wasted no time in explaining his position. In a clear, measured, and well-reasoned manner, he declared that neither he nor his father had ever sold the Wallowa and that claiming they had was as absurd as if a neighbor sold your horse and then said you were responsible for delivering it to the purchaser. He refused to even discuss the possibility of moving to the reservation.

“What shall we tell the president when we get back?” the commissioners asked him.

“All I have to say is that I love my country,” Joseph responded. “We will not sell the land. We will not give up the land.”

Without giving even an inch from his initial position, he exited the council and returned to his home country.

Once again, Joseph's clarity and lack of rancor left the government representatives confused and frustrated. By every measure Joseph was a good and reasonable man, and his case for remaining on his land was not without legal merit. The Treaty of 1863 was still suspect, and every decision that had been made since that time was clouded with legal uncertainty. It was only the irreversible flow of white settlers that made the movement of the Wallowa Nez Perce onto the reservation seem necessary and inevitable.

But a fateful encounter on the plains of Dakota Territory five months before had put every military man in the West on edge. There, at a creek called the Little Bighorn, a large contingent of Lakota warriors under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had overwhelmed U.S. troops led by the vaunted Indian fighter, George Armstrong Custer, and murdered the soldiers in most hideous fashion. The gruesome murders and mutilations had imprinted themselves on the minds of every man who saddled a horse or picked up a gun in service of the United States, and the strategic success of the Indians had put every commander in the West on notice that large numbers of Indian warriors were nothing with which he wanted to trifle.

Consequently, the more reasonable and charismatic Joseph appeared, the more dangerous he became. In the government's eyes, it was just such a man who could galvanize Indian resistance in the Plateau and knit the many tribes and factions into a formidable, perhaps unbeatable, military force.

This danger was increased by the belief that Joseph was under the influence of Smolholla, who by now was teaching of an Indian messiah and the resurrection of the dead. Convinced that Joseph was being manipulated by a man they considered a “wizard,” the negotiators issued their report asserting that the entire affair had to be brought to an end— militarily, if necessary.