Old Joseph was so furious at this betrayal that he tore up his Bible and renounced his Christian name. He told his sons Ollokot and Joseph to do the same. Young Josephs Indian name, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, meaning Thunder Traveling to Loftier Mountain Heights, was evocative, but a mouthful. He was still called Joseph. Some members of his band returned to an old religion—the Dreamer faith, led by a shaman named Smohalla, who lived in a hovel on the Columbia River, not far from what would later be the birthplace of the atomic bomb. The Dreamers went on vision quests, seeking spirits through dreams, trances, fasts, and extended periods alone. By returning to a purer life, the Dreamers believed, they could banish the white man, and they would be rewarded. Digging a hoe in a meadow or burrowing into the ground for gold was seen as a desecration of the earth.
“You ask me to plough the ground!” Smohalla said. “Shall I take a knife and tear at my mothers bosom.
“You ask me to dig for a stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones.
“You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men! But how dare I cut off my mothers hair.”
Just as the Irish clung to Catholicism at the lowest point of their long subjugation, and early Mormons held to a much-ridiculed faith as they were driven out of Illinois, the last best tribe of American Indians looked to a familiar God for help.
Old Joseph would not budge from the Wallowas. “Always remember that your father never sold his country,” he told his son Joseph, just before he died in 1871. “This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.”
Young Joseph did not sell. An army commission assigned to look into Josephs claims sided with the Nez Perce, but to no avail. Joseph likened the treaty of 1863 to naked theft. “Suppose a white man should come to me and say, ‘Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.’ I say to him I will not sell them. Then he goes to my neighbor and says to him, ‘Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.’ My neighbor answers, ‘Pay me the money and I will sell you Josephs horses.’ The white man turns to me and says, ‘Joseph, I have bought your horses and you must let me have them.’ ”
Today, when there is talk about property rights at the angry Wise Use rallies in towns like Joseph, or in public hearings chaired by Representative Helen Chenoweth or Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, the indignant never mention the biggest and most flagrant violation of all.
After the Nez Perce were told to get out, the whites were emboldened, rushing in to take the prime land in the valley even before the Indians had gathered up their stock. Two settlers entered an Indian hunting camp, got spooked, and then shot and killed a Nez Perce man. The Indians cried out for justice. The government said they would take care of it, bringing the men to trial. But there was one insurmountable legal problem for the Nez Perce: it was against the law for an Indian to testify against a white. Without a witness, the killers went free. And so, with this final indignity burning inside them, the Nez Perce retreated down into the deepest river-carved canyon in the world, heading for an uncertain fate as they crossed the swollen Snake. Hells Canyon, the whites called it. Of course.
“Bereft of their own culture, their strength, self-respect, and dignity, they became a subjugated and lost people, a second-class minority in their own homeland,” wrote Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., the preeminent historian of American Indians.
The prospects of an Indian treaty being honored in nineteenth-century America were no more likely than Abraham Lincoln’s coming back from the dead. And 1877 was a particularly bad year to be pressing for an aboriginal claim. The year before, George Armstrong Custer had blundered into the lopsided defeat at Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull and a large band of Sioux had escaped to Canada. The army was not about to let another Indian war sully It’s image. Besides, the battles with native people were said to be over; it was mop-up time, with some ill-trained conscripts chasing Apaches and other renegades in the Southwest.
But there was a heartbeat, still, in the Nez Perce even as they retreated. Josephs followers envisioned a new life in Canada, perhaps among the Sioux. There was very little time for debate, however. Avenging the death in the Wallowas, and other slights, a few Indian warriors killed some whites—one the local whiskey merchant, the other a man known for siccing his dogs on Nez Perce children. The settlers, occupying Idaho land they had only recently taken from the more docile and Christianized Nez Perce, demanded that the army take immediate punitive measures. A young captain was sent by General Oliver O. Howard to chase the Indians. Howard, mindful of Custer, told Captain David Perry not to get whipped. “There is no chance of that happening, sir,” Perry replied.
In White Bird Canyon, not far from what is now the moribund town of Grangerville, Idaho, Captain Perry sent about ninety troops down the bare valley at dawn to round up the Nez Perce. His trumpeter was the first to die, a bullet in the chest before he could even bring lips to bugle. Then, a dozen soldiers were knocked from their mounts. By midmorning, the entire platoon was in retreat. They were sprinting uphill, literally running for their lives. At the end of the day, thirty-four soldiers lay dead. The Nez Perce lost not a man.
Telegraphs carried news of this second “massacre,” this Little Bighorn all over again. The nation was stunned. And so it went throughout the summer, on a seventeen-hundred-mile chase over Lolo Pass in the Bitterroots, which the starving Lewis and Clark company had crossed seventy-two years before, down Montana’s western valleys, up the Snake River and into Yellowstone Park and then over a high rock pass that had been labeled impassable, and north, into the fall snows, within a day or so of freedom in Canada, where it all ended with a wounded, wailing band of Indians in a frozen coulee, surrounded on all sides. Most of those details are familiar, but a few points seem all the more remarkable with each passing year.
The Nez Perce knew nothing of war, save a few long-ago skirmishes with other tribes, but they were unmatched marksmen. They could shoot bighorn sheep from a half-mile vertical flank; mounted soldiers in blue were much easier. They were motivated, fighting as any patriots would for their home and lives. While the army was a unit composed entirely of soldiers and suppliers, the Nez Perce were a traveling town—barely a third of them warriors. The rest were elderly, or children, or babies, or mothers, carrying their life possessions, their two thousand horses, their dogs, their tipis, their food—everything. They could not just sprint up a hill or march to a position at the sound of a horn. The only real battle in which the army did significant damage, the Battle of Big Hole, was a surprise attack on a sleeping camp; children and old people were the main casualties. And even in that battle, after the warriors roused themselves, they put General Howard’s men to flight.
As Alvin Josephy has pointed out, the Indian fighters of General Miles and General Howard, memorialized in bronze since the late nineteenth century, hailed by the Daughters of the American Revolution, were in reality a rather hapless and mediocre army—beaten time and again in this, one of the few Indian wars that had some actual pitched battles. The army had superior manpower and superior firepower, with Gatling guns and mountain howitzers, and still it was routed all summer long by a retreating band of natives with families in tow.
During the war, the Nez Perce remained honorable. They paid for goods along the way, buying coffee, sugar, tobacco, flour, and other food with gold dust from white merchants. They were betrayed by numerous Indians, notably the Crow in Montana, the Shoshone in Idaho, and their own Nez Perce brethren in the Lapwai Reservation—something the more militant revisionists tend to forget. After the surrender, each of about thirty Sioux and Cheyenne scouts were given five Nez Perce horses per man for their service on behalf of the army.
Inside Yellowstone Park, the Nez Perce kidnapped a handful of campers, but only for protection. The tourists were released with a tale to last a lifetime. And it was just outside the park that one of the most astonishing escapes occurred. The Nez Perce went up the Lamar Valley—today, the h
aunt of large bison herds, elk, and the transplanted wolf packs—and then veered north. With the press following every move, General Howard at last breathed a sigh of relief; the Indians were trapped. During the war, Howard was known to the Nez Perce as General Day After Tomorrow. But now he was advancing from the rear, certain of at last catching his prey, and General Miles’s troops from the east were closing in from the other side. The canyon to the north was so narrow a horse could barely get by. There was simply nowhere to go, unless the Indians sprouted wings. But backed up at Canyon Creek, the Nez Perce families shinnied up a rock wall and slipped away.
Three weeks later, Joseph surrendered in order to save what was left of the families. Unlike other Indian leaders, he had the sympathy of much of the non-Indian world by this time. The Nez Perce War, “on our part, in It’s origin and motive, was nothing short of a gigantic blunder and a crime,” the New York Times wrote in 1877.
Miles, after rounding up the tribe, said, “They were a very bright and energetic body of Indians; indeed, the most intelligent that I had ever seen. Exceedingly self-reliant, each man seemed to be able to do his own thinking, to be purely democratic and independent in his ideas and purpose.” He sounds patronizing. But compared with comments by other generals, he was a booster. Ten years earlier, General William Tecumseh Sherman had said of the remaining free tribes: “The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war. For the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or maintained as a species of paupers.”
The press had dubbed Joseph the “Indian Napoleon,” but in truth he was not the military mind behind the war. He was an organizer, an eloquent speaker. At six feet two inches, his regal bearing drew many a camera. But the many flattering words and haunting poses did little to help him. He was sent to Oklahoma Territory, to the dry, leftover country, the wasteland reserved for defeated Indians. There, more than a hundred Nez Perce, once the most healthy and prosperous tribe in the Pacific Northwest, died in the heat. Among the dead was a descendant of the first white man to sing praises to the Nez Perce, Captain William Clark. So far from the blue Wallowas, from salmon, elk, and water never more than days remove from snow, the Northwesterners called Oklahoma Eeikish Pah—the Hot Place.
Joseph later met two presidents and was treated like a grand celebrity during a tour in New York, but he never got an acre of his land back. Until the end of his life in a little shack among Dreamer faithful at the Colville Indian Reservation, he made a simple request. “Let me be a free man. Free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself.” It was an old American refrain—what Thomas Jefferson had asked the King of England to grant the colonists, and what the Acomas in New Mexico had asked the Spanish to give them.
INDIANS, Earl Conner knows, are best appreciated by Americans in the past tense. We love underdogs in story form. We are less sure of Indians with lawyers, Indians who go to court, Indians who want something other than our sympathy. An Indian can put on a headdress, and it usually does him no good in the halls of Congress or a court of law. It’s just the opposite for cowboys. A few of the ranchers in Joseph put on their cowboy hats, slipped into their snakeskin boots, and went before congressional hearings, where they begged for protection from the forces of time.
But all the cowboy posturing, the bills introduced in C-Span prime time by protectors of property rights, could not bring the Wallowa Valley back to the days of daguerreotype glory. The last years of the twentieth century ticked by. Andy Kerr and Ric Bailey kept their homes. The rodeo—known as Chief Joseph Days—continued as the old-guard high holiday. But more than ever, what the tourists wanted to see were the Nez Perce camped for a few days near the rodeo site. And downriver, a small miracle hatched at the confluence of the Wallowa and Lostine Rivers. Earl Conner, the great-great-grandson of Old Joseph, stood on ground that was one of the last places where the Nez Perce had slept before being driven out, and he was welcomed home.
Conner had recently lost his right foot to an infection, and his kidneys were failing him, but on this day, with the summer winds as sweet as a blackberry milkshake, he felt young and free of pain. All around him, other Nez Perce were arriving. Joseph McCormack, a fifth-generation descendant of Joseph, moved to the Wallowas—becoming the only full-time Nez Perce resident in the county. At the river confluence, the Nez Perce were planning to dance, to feast on salmon and elk, to play drums, renew aquaintances.
And when it was all over, some of the longtime residents of the valley had a gift they wanted to give the Indians. These men, a social-studies teacher, a few small business owners, a retired contractor, a historian— all of them white—wanted people to know they had nothing to do with the hanging-in-effigy crowd.
“We’re not all like that,” said Terry Crenshaw, who lives in Wallowa, a town just downriver from Joseph. “If you look at What’s been going on in this county, you can see that the logging industry suffered because they shaved the damn forest bald. It’s as simple as that.”
A few years earlier, during the yearlong celebration for the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail, Crenshaw and a handful of other people began to meet and talk about that other trail, from the Wallowa Valley down to Hells Canyon through two other states and ending near the Canadian border, the one the Nez Perce followed in 1877. A Nez Perce National Historic Trail, along the route of the war, was in place—drawing the curious to the battefields where Howard went after Joseph. History was Crenshaw’s passion. “I always knew they lived here for centuries, but it was so curious that they were not here now,” he said. “They should at least feel like they’re welcomed back.”
It took a century for dominant sentiment in Wallowa County to arrive at such a conclusion, or for a white man like Crenshaw, who teaches history to children of the valley, to say such a thing without fear of harassment. After Young Joseph was exiled to the Colville Reservation, he came back to the Wallowas on a one-day mission, and all but begged the settlers to let him buy a little home not far from his father’s bones. There was a big turnout for him in town, pictures snapped and published in all the papers of the West, the mayor greeting him, everybody wanting to slap the chief on the back. But things were too unstable, the town leaders said in 1904, to let Joseph back, to even allow him to buy a home. He died that year, one night while staring into his fire. His father’s bones were dug from a field that a farmer wanted to plow. Somebody broke the skull from the neck, and it ended up in a dentist’s office in Baker, Oregon. In 1926, the bones of Old Joseph were buried at the foot of Wallowa Lake, where they remain.
Over the years, a few Nez Perce occasionally came back to the valley, as happened during the rodeo, to ride on the parade grounds or set up tipis near Joseph’s grave. They never felt at home.
“The whites thought of us as drunken Indians,” said Soy Red Thunder, another descendant of Joseph. “They wanted us for their cowboy festival, but they were highly indifferent.”
But then a handful of Nez Perce and Terry Crenshaw and others began to meet, trying to figure out some way to give something back to the tribe. They raised money, through grants and donations. It wasn’t, of course, an entirely charitable act: the Nez Perce, as merchants had found out, were good box office—like wolves in Yellowstone and bison in Montana. Guilt was a factor. Those whom the government had crushed to make the old myth live could not be brought back without finger-pointing and pain. Some longtime residents felt not unlike modern Germans, struggling with how much guilt to carry or ignore. During the Oregon Trail celebration, state officials had found that something called “heritage tourism” was very profitable. People did not want to merely know about the past; they wanted to touch it.
Finally, with nearly $200,000 in hand, the Wallowa group made plans to purchase a tract of land atop a little nub known as Tic Hill, just above the Wallowa River. The white rancher who of
fered to sell it to them said it was a great honor to know it was going back to the Indians. The hill would belong to the Nez Perce. They would build a cultural center, a place for visitors to see a real live Nez Perce, while looking down at the source of all the fighting. To the whites, many of them at least, this was as solid a commercial boost as the valley could get short of a new sawmill. With the announcement of the cultural center plan came some new businesses, restaurants, carpentry jobs. News traveled across the Atlantic, and soon the Chamber of Commerce was getting inquiries from Germany and France: when I can come see a Nez Perce in the home of Chief Joseph?
To the Indians, it was something else. They did not see themselves as tourist props. “We look at this as a homecoming,” said Red Thunder. He lives on the Colville Reservation and practices the old religion. The band has about a hundred and fifty members.
At the river confluence, Josephs descendants prepared to dine on Wallowa salmon and Wallowa elk. The bounty was not dead—yet. The Indians used to catch steelhead trout and thirty-pound chinook salmon in the rivers, using a wallowa, a fishtrap. When a series of dams all but killed off the great salmon runs of eastern Oregon, in It’s place came a multimillion-dollar apology, as legal mitigation—a fish hatchery. In the manner of modern American things that draw on the name of whatever it is they displaced, the hatchery was named for one of the leaders of the Nez Perce war, looking Glass. (A salmon-killing dam on the Columbia is named for Chief Joseph.)