Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (46 page)

When word passed that this strange party of diners had included the legendary Joseph, everyone of any note in the hotel began asking for a chance to meet the chief. Informed that he was holding an audience in room 200, they rushed up the stairs to become part of this once-in-a-lifetime event. Before long, the room was filled to overflowing with citizens hungry for the opportunity to be in the presence of the man who was rapidly becoming the most famous Indian in America. Among the assembled was a man who had served in the military at Lolo Pass and Fort Lapwai, and even a lieutenant who had been Miles's quartermaster.

Cigars were brought up and offered around, but Joseph demurred, indicating that he preferred to smoke his own pipe, which was wrapped in a beaded deerskin bag slung over the back of a nearby chair.

Chapman too was enjoying the notoriety. He had installed himself in a seat across the room and was engaged in a long, self-serving exposition of the history of Joseph's people and the retreat they had conducted. It was fundamentally accurate in its specifics; Chapman, after all, had heard and repeated the story many times as a translator in the last three-quarters of a year. It reflected the story as Joseph was now telling it in various venues— with reference to the threats and treaty violations that started the problems, the various battles that had been fought during the retreat, and the betrayals by the government of the promises issued by Miles and Howard at the time of the surrender. But it placed Chapman at the center of the action and underscored his supposed long friendship and loyalty to the Nez Perce. It also continued the growing tradition of placing Joseph in a position of leadership throughout the campaign, referring to his masterful acts of generalship and his centrality in all decision making. But, for all these distortions, it offered a compelling case regarding the breach of faith by the government and a plaintive plea for fair treatment of the Nez Perce people, who had been so misled and mistreated since the time of the surrender. The people in attendance listened with rapt fascination.

All this the reporter dutifully copied down, along with wide-eyed physical descriptions of the two chiefs. He described the men's clothes, the slopes of their foreheads, and the shapes of their noses. He reduced their nods of assent to “ughs,” but he also noted Joseph's generous responses to the assembled audience. He even captured some of Joseph's short speech to the group, as translated by Chapman.

“I think I am a true man,” he reported the chief as saying. “There is nothing deceitful about me. I always try to be open in everything I say or do. I will never forget you, nor any remarks you may make. I have good feelings toward you, and I hope that you have the same toward me. Although we may never meet each other again, and although we will part at a distance, we will think of each other in good feeling. I am very thankful to meet you here this evening. That is all I have to say.”

The people in the room gave Joseph a standing ovation after he had finished, and this too the reporter dutifully noted. He concluded with a description of the chief's meeting a young boy who also had the name Joseph, and an elaborate recounting of sharing in the smoking of Joseph's pipe of peace. He then followed the three men out of the hotel as they caught one of the horse-drawn streetcars and went off to the station to continue their trip east.

It was indeed a scoop for the reporter, and it made for great copy. But it also served Joseph's purposes perfectly. He had once again raised his visibility in the eyes of the white public and placed the story of his people in the forefront of their minds. Additionally, he had learned a new and valuable fact about white culture. The reporter had been taking his notes in shorthand, and when Joseph had been shown that the scrawlings captured his words exactly, he realized that he now had the power to make himself heard throughout white America, even if his speech was not transmitted by telegraph or telephone or captured on the odd wax cylinder that could hold and replay a person's voice. He now knew he was able to speak to any assembly that contained a reporter and that his words would be transmitted to white people anywhere. If he could get the audience he desired in Washington, perhaps he could finally get his people the fair hearing they deserved.

On the evening of January 17, 1879, an excited audience gathered in Lincoln Hall in Washington, D.C., to see and hear the man who indeed had become the most famous Indian in America.

Though the government and the military had done their best to quiet the furor over the hapless Nez Perce exiles, the legend of their leader had continued to grow. In
Harper's New Monthly
just a few weeks before, a poem entitled “Joseph, the Nez Perce” had been published, in which the author had demanded:

The poet had gone on to write of Joseph's noble journey, noting how the chief had traveled for months over “continental ridges” and “tottering torrent bridges by the verge of black abysses,” chased from behind by one army while another crouched in wait ahead, until, “burdened by his weak and wounded,” “like a lion,” he “stood at bay.” And all simply because this “chieftain of the Northland” had possessed the temerity to seek, in the author's words, “the home the good God gave him… the shelter of his children,” and “the right to be a man.”

With such sentiments moving among the populace, it was small wonder that the Lincoln Hall audience packed the auditorium early that evening, excited to hear the story directly from the mouth of the great chief himself.

And Joseph did not disappoint. He entered the room to tumultuous applause that did not let up until the entire entourage of Indian leaders and dignitaries was seated. When he was introduced and walked up on the stage, the applause cascaded forth again and redoubled when he paused to take a drink of water.

He was dressed in full Nez Perce regalia. His forelock was flipped back, as befitting a follower of the Dreamer way, and his long side braids were ornamented with beads. He wore a blanket coat adorned with skins and furs, and his moccasins were heavily decorated with beads. His carriage and bearing were solemn and self-contained, causing many in the audience to whisper that he seemed to be the very embodiment of Fenimore Cooper's noble savage.

When he began to speak, this image was only enhanced. His voice, clear and unwavering, filled the entire hall. In unhesitating words, translated almost simultaneously by Chapman, he unfolded the story of his people and the plight they had endured. “Some of you think an Indian is like a wild animal,” he began. “This is a great mistake. I will tell you all about our people, and then you can judge whether an Indian is a man or not.”

He proceeded to speak for an hour and twenty minutes, recounting the history of his people, from the laws passed down by the ancestors to the arrival of Lewis and Clark and the fur traders and Spalding.

He told of the tribes' troubled dealings with the whites, from the meetings with Stevens to the two treaties to General Howard's ultimatum and the great chase that had ended in their exile. He told of the difficulties his people had suffered in Leavenworth and the Quapaw and of the many promises that had been made, first by Miles, then by others in the government, all issuing in nothing.

He closed with entreaties mixed with excoriations and visionary hopes for the brotherhood of all people, where “we shall all be alike—brothers of one father and one mother, with one sky above us and one government for all.”

It was a masterful performance, honed over many months of telling and retelling, and in its presentation he and Chapman functioned almost as one. By the time they had finished, the audience had heard, for the first time and with stunning clarity, an exposition that made the long, confusing Nez Perce saga into an understandable narrative. And what they were left with was the firm conviction that Joseph, the eloquent, regal embodiment of the Fenimore Cooper noble Indian who stood before them, had led the Nez Perce on their tragic, perilous flight and led them still as they sought nothing more than the opportunity to be removed from the unhealthy squalor of their distant exile and returned to the land from which they had been so unjustly removed.

It had not been Joseph's intention to minimize the importance of the other chiefs or to raise himself into a position of sole leadership. He simply had recounted the decisions made by his own band and, after the surrender, referred to those who remained with him as “my people.” In Nez Perce fashion, not wishing to speak for another, he had not voiced the opinions of Looking Glass, White Bird, or any of the others and had kept his narrative grounded in his own personal experience.

But the audience, unfamiliar with the band structure of the Nez Perce and hungry to impute greatness to the man before them, took his words to mean that he was solely responsible for the journey, the surrender, and the care and protection of those who remained in Indian Territory.

They also gained a fuller picture of the man about whom they had heard so much. If his appearance had underscored their belief that he represented the noblest of red men, his words had convinced them even more. Reaching back to the distant teachings of the Reverend Spalding and his Book of Heaven, he had told them that “the Great Spirit sees and hears everything, and He never forgets; that hereafter He will give every man a spiritual home according to his deserts.” He had challenged the morality of the white leaders, wondering aloud how a government could send a man out to fight, as they had done with Miles, and then refuse to uphold his word.

“Such a government has something wrong about it,” he said. Then he had shamed them with his indictment that “I have heard talk and talk, but nothing is done. Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my country, now overrun by white men. They do not protect my father's grave. They do not pay for all my horses and cattle. Good words will not give me back my children… will not give my people good health and stop them from dying… will not get my people a home where they can live in peace….”

Indeed, all the good words seemed to belong to this man, and the cause of right seemed to be on his side. As they filed out that evening, the audience of dignitaries, cabinet members, congressmen, and ordinary citizens— many of whom had never seen an actual Indian before—took with them a picture of a man who represented everything good they wanted to believe about the red man and everything bad they wanted to believe about American policy and treatment of a people who had committed no crime other than wishing to live in peace in the way that their Creator had intended.

The evening was a stunning success for Joseph, and it became an even greater victory when he was given an audience with President Rutherford B. Hayes, Secretary Schurz of the Department of the Interior, and other important officials. He, Chapman, and Yellow Bull returned to the Quapaw hopeful that the government would now act fairly and uphold the promise it had made to allow the people to return to their homeland or, at least, to move to a healthier land farther north.

But their chance for celebration was short, for upon their return to the Quapaw they discovered that there was now even greater dissension among the people. Taking advantage of the absence of Joseph and his interpreter, Jones had begun spreading stories that Joseph was in Washington making deals to move some of the people back north while leaving others behind in the Quapaw. Husis Kute, who once again had been left out of the official delegation, had turned his allegiance toward Reuben and Jones, and many of the people, desperate for full rations, had done the same. Reuben's presence had also given them new hope. Here was another Nez Perce voice, familiar with their home and their people, who was promising them a better life and even holding out hope of a return to the homeland if they accepted the new Christian ways. Many among them even began asking the hard question of whether Reuben's Christian God might not truly have more power and speak of a more favored relationship to the Creator.

The tribe, once divided by missionaries, then separated by war, was now being divided again.

T
HE WINTER DRAGGED
on, and the anticipated positive governmental response to Joseph's Washington visit never materialized. Western congressmen, under heavy pressure to keep Joseph and his people from returning west, blocked every effort to allow the Nez Perce to return to their home country. They did not want the charismatic chief among the other tribes, and they did not want the troubles that would come from reopening the wounds with the settlers who had suffered so greatly during the time of the first killings. The army, not wishing the expense of keeping peace in the distant, expansive regions of the West, was quick to concur. All the goodwill that Joseph thought he had created during his Washington trip had come to nothing.

But, in fact, the trip was bearing slow fruit. Though the government resisted Nez Perce relocation, public sympathy was building once again for the Nez Perce cause. Joseph's eloquence and charisma had rekindled the public's imagination, and he and his people were slowly gaining the status of tragic victims. Joseph himself was being elevated ever higher as the very embodiment of the noble man of nature that the nation had decimated on its relentless march across the western expanses of the continent. When a widely read journal called the
North American Review
published what was understood to be a transcription of his Lincoln Hall speech, his fame spread even further and his reputation as America's premier Indian was cemented even more.

At the same time, another force was slowly coming into play, one that emerged from a very different source than Joseph's eloquence and charisma. Ever so subtly, the consistent righteous indignation of the clean-cut, civilized, English-speaking Reuben was beginning to make inroads with people who measured Indians not by the greatness of their past but by the promise of their future.

The issues that seemed so crucial up close—the dissension between Chapman and Reuben over who would serve as translator and thus serve as the voice of the Nez Perce, the constant bickering between Chapman and Jones, and even the struggle in the people's hearts between the old way of the seven drums and Dreamer faith and the new way of Christianity— were of no concern to the distant observers in whose hands the fate of the Nez Perce ultimately lay. What they saw, from their respective positions, were two men, one embodying the best of what the Indian had been, and one embodying the best of what the Indian could be.

Joseph's personal eloquence and persona were giving a public face to the Nez Perce struggle, while Reuben's Christian fervor was giving it a political base. Jones's decision to bring the Presbyterian Nez Perce down to subvert the influence of Joseph and Chapman had produced the unintended consequence of bringing the formidable political influence of the Presbyterian Church into play. When Reuben spoke, the Presbyterian establishment was there to listen, just as the American press listened when Joseph spoke. Together, these two men—the obstinate, charismatic chief and the self-righteous, clean-cut Christian minister—were unwittingly creating a potent mix of political power and public opinion that had the potential to do what neither man was able to do alone.

But this congealing of forces was the furthest thing from the minds of the Nez Perce themselves. They were engaged in a struggle that ran far deeper than any of the white observers understood. It was the same struggle that had taken place back in the Lapwai forty years earlier when Spalding preached the gospel and told the people to honor the old gods no more, the same struggle that had divided the tribe after the Treaty of 1855, the same struggle that had found part of the tribe assisting the whites after the outbreak and another part trying to escape over the mountains. It was the struggle over how to be a Nez Perce in the face of the new and overwhelming power of the intruding white nation and how to live in the manner that best reflected the wishes of the Creator. In short, it was a struggle for the Nez Perce soul.

When Reuben, Lawyer, and Williams had arrived, they had brought with them the whole weight of that struggle. They were the inheritors of Spalding, the offspring of the treaty Nez Perce, the embodiment of the successful transition that had been made since the first Nez Perce had spread boughs on the ground before the Reverend Parker on the journey back from the rendezvous. They were the living presence of the success that had accrued to those who cast their lot with the spiritual powers of the Christian way. But, with their short hair, white man's clothing, and white man's ways, they were also the embodiment of all that the Nez Perce had lost in embarking on the Christian path.

What Joseph saw when he looked at them were men who had betrayed the sacred trust of the ancestors and violated the laws of the Creator; men who dug into the earth and disrespected the spirits and set the children on a path away from the teachings of the grandmothers and grandfathers. What they saw when they looked at Joseph was a misguided adherent to a discredited past who clung obstinately to a backward stage of cultural and spiritual development, a man who had failed to grow in accord with the new knowledge revealed by the Creator. In their own minds, they were simply shepherds coming to gather the lost sheep and bring their brothers and sisters up from darkness and into the light.

So while the white public was slowly being drawn back into a sympathetic awareness of the Nez Perce plight by the potent combination of a romanticized Fenimore Cooper noble savage and a successful, Christianized, “civilized” Indian, the men who embodied these two visions of Indian identity were engaged in a struggle for the hearts and minds and spirits of the suffering tribal members they were both trying to serve.

It was a struggle that Joseph could not easily win.

Over the winter the tides ebbed and flowed. Jones succeeded in driving a wedge between the people by issuing two separate sets of rations: one for the followers of Joseph and his ways, another, more plentiful, for those who cast their lot with Reuben, Husis Kute, and Christianity. Sometimes he gave the followers of Joseph no rations at all.

He claimed publicly that the money Joseph and his people had collected to send Chapman to Washington had actually been extorted from them, and when Joseph traveled over to the nearby town of Seneca, Missouri, to engage a notary to witness that the money had been given of the people's own free will, he pointed out that the person translating the document Joseph signed was none other than Chapman himself. He even told the Nez Perce that those who continued to side with Joseph would be sent farther south while those who accepted the Christian ways would be allowed to return to their homeland.

Joseph, for his part, continued with Chapman's help to send telegrams to Washington complaining of Jones's cruel practices. They rode on the tide of sentiment growing throughout the country that the only real solution to the Indian “problem” was to remove corrupt agents and place the responsibility for disbursing funds and goods in the hands of military paymasters, who at least were accountable and able to keep honest records. Joseph even proposed exchanging his old country in Oregon for land farther to the west in Indian Territory and a quarter of a million dollars in government bonds so they would have their own funds and not be dependent upon the whims of the agent.

Meanwhile, the winter deepened, and every day more of the heartsick, hopeless, frightened people died. The wet climate, poor food, and lack of medicine allowed diseases to run rampant, killing almost all the elderly and the newborns. Stillbirths were common, and miscarriages even more so. Even Jones's more liberal allotment of rations to the Christian Nez Perce could not save the people from death. And all of them lived in fear of what the agent would do next—send them farther south, poison their medicines, or withhold their rations altogether.

Eventually, the Quakers and the government could no longer avoid the truth of Jones's regime. The Bureau of Indian Affairs ordered him removed, and in early May 1878 he left in disgrace, owing the government more than $38,000 and leaving in his wake a devastated, disheartened, and divided people.

With Jones's departure, and no other agent yet in place, Joseph moved his people back up to the Spring River near the place they had first crossed when they had been transported by the Modoc from the railhead at Baxter Springs. The campsite was on a flat piece of land at river's edge, graced by towering canopied oak and abundant with nuts and berries. But, more important, it was only several easy miles from Baxter Springs, so the people could walk to town to trade the gloves and other hide goods they had made and purchase goods with their government cards.

The Arden Smith joint congressional commission of the previous fall had been so disgusted with Jones's practices that they had ordered the Indians be provided ration cards that they could use with any merchant they pleased. But Jones had easily circumvented this by allowing the tribes access only to his trader compatriots, who brought their wagons into the Indian camp and sold supplies at exorbitant prices. With Jones gone, the possibility of free trade opened up. Joseph knew that the site near the edge of Indian Territory offered his people the best opportunity to engage in this trade. It also kept them nearer the white settlements and white oversight in case the new agent proved to be as cruel and corrupt as Jones. And in the event that he and Chapman needed to send or receive telegrams, they were now only a short journey from the towns where this could take place. Slowly, Joseph was moving his people out of the hellish exile into which they had been thrust since their arrival in Indian Territory over half a year earlier.

But their exile was not over; it was only entering a new phase. Jones might be gone, but the sickness and sadness and internal division remained. And there was still no prospect for return to the home country, only the hope that the harsh, killing conditions might lessen and that the people might have a better chance to survive.

When the new agent arrived, he was indeed a better man than Jones. His name was Haworth, and he was a man much more in line with the best of Quaker beliefs and values. He immediately set about preparing the Nez Perce for the move west to the land that Joseph had chosen the previous fall on the ride with Hayt and Yellow Bull and Husis Kute. He knew that time was of the essence, because in little more than a month the killing heat of summer would descend in full force, bringing with it the thunderstorms and flash floods that would make the passage almost impossible.

He issued twenty wagons to the anxious Nez Perce and purchased forty broodmares to pull them. He helped the Indians mate the horses in suitable teams and gave them a quick day's lesson in how to drive the horses in harness, something that the expert Nez Perce horsemen had never done before. He outfitted them with bacon, medicine, and flour for the journey and secured the employment of several locals to travel along with them to keep the wagons in good repair. When early June arrived, the people were ready to travel to their new homeland 180 miles farther to the west in Indian Territory.

The departure was not easy because most of the people were too sick or weak or simply refused to walk, and the number of wagons was not sufficient to carry them. So Haworth had to have an extra thirty-nine wagons sent down to the campsite on Spring River to assist the people on their journey.

But despite the problems, on the morning of June 6, 1879, almost a year after their arrival in the Eekish Pah, or “hot place,” which had claimed so many of their friends and family, the Nez Perce, led by Chief Joseph on horseback, set out in fifty-nine wagons for a new, unknown country and a new, uncertain life. Of the 800 people who had begun the journey in the Camas Prairie, only 370 now remained.

The journey took nine days, most of it on a rough wagon trail that had been made thirty years before by an army surveying crew. It wound through open, rolling, tallgrass prairie laced with many small creeks. The Indians, including Joseph himself, were constantly having to drag rocks and deadfall off the trail or assist in pulling the wagons up and down the banks and across the streams.

They began each day early, getting on the trail by five and stopping by two in the afternoon to avoid the heat of midday and the vicious, sky-splitting thunderstorms that often rose up in the afternoon and early evening. Even so, one woman died on the journey and was buried along the trail, and many others lay sick in the wagons as they lurched and bumped over the rough prairie landscape.

Haworth had appointed Chapman master of the wagon train, so it fell to Reuben to serve as Joseph's interpreter. The relationship between the two was distant at best, though Reuben was, in fact, a relative of Joseph's. But Reuben's Christianity, as well as his role as Howard's chief scout during the war and his subsequent friendship with Jones, had made Joseph wary of the man and distrustful of his integrity as an interpreter.

Nonetheless, Joseph wanted to stop in any town they passed and go into the newspaper office to tell his story. So while Chapman was guiding the wagons, Joseph and Reuben were visiting editors and recounting the struggles and broken promises the Nez Perce had endured.

Joseph, as always, painted the picture of a people betrayed and expressed hope that the government might see fit to make things right. He spoke of his good feelings toward white people and his hope that all races might live together under common laws and a common sky. He would end by leaving his signature, a rough scrawling of the words “Young Joseph,” which always delighted the recipient and pleased the chief himself.

But Reuben, as an interpreter, had very different intentions from Chapman. He would tell Joseph's story but would add that the Nez Perce now had among their numbers a substantial number of Presbyterians, a fact that was not significant to Joseph but that helped to advance the cause of the Nez Perce among a sympathetic Christian population.

The people arrived at the site of what was to be their new home at two in the afternoon on the fourteenth of June. The country that Joseph had visited in November, when the temperature was in the sixties and the grass as high as a saddle's pommel, was now sweltering in the summer sun and thick with black flies. It was flat and formless as far as the eye could see, and the river that was to provide their water ran slow and torpid and brown with silt. Above them, ponderous cumulus clouds rose miles into an empty sky, and the wind blew hot and breathless and without relief.