| Thunder Rolling Down the Valley--Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce in1877. |
On October 5, 1877 Hinmuuttu-yalatlat—Thunder
Rolling Down the Valley—surrendered the
battered and exhausted survivors of his Willowa band to U.S. Army troops under the command of General
Nelson A. Miles in the Bear Paw Mountains of the Montana
Territory, less than 40 miles south of the Canadian border. Known to his pursuers as Chief Joseph, the 37
year old had helped lead his band on
an epic 1,600 mile
fighting retreat across modern Oregon,
Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana in hopes of finding refuge and safety in the land of “The
Grandmother Queen.”
Young Joseph, as he would
come to be called was born in 1840 in the lush Willowa Valley in what is now the north east
corner of Oregon. His father, Tuekakas, was a hereditary
civil, or peace chief, of his
people and had taken the name Joseph when baptized by Christian missionaries.
The Niimíipu,
as they called themselves, were a tribe of
fishing and hunting people who were among the first northern tribes west of the
Rocky Mountains, to adopt the horse
and elements of the Plains horse
culture. They were encountered by the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805. The party
entrusted the band with their horses when they had to proceed by canoe and were able to retrieve them as
agreed on the way back from the Pacific. Confusing them with the Chinook
people, who did practice nose piercing,
William Clark called them Chopunnish which was rendered in French
as Nez Percé, people of the pierced noses.
The thirty or
so principle villages and bands of
the Nez Percé were spread over wide areas with the Willowa Valley at its heart.
The tribe was peaceful and had generally good
relations with Whites as they began to move into Oregon.
As settling
accelerated, Joseph the Elder and other chiefs agreed on a treaty in 1855 establishing a Nez Percé reservation of 7.7 million acres in present-day Idaho, Washington,
and Oregon and maintained most of the traditional
tribal lands, including Wallowa Valley. In 1863 the government
demanded more concessions. Lawyer, who the Whites identified as head chief of the Nez Percé and one
other tribal leader signed a new treaty agreeing to move to a
780,000 acres reservation centered around the village of Lapwai in
Idaho which did not include the Willowa Valley. Joseph the Elder and the
other chiefs refused to sign and the tribe split between treaty and anti-treaty bands.
Despite the
refusal to sign the treaty, the government did not immediately move against the
non-treaty bands, who continued to live in their relatively remote homelands for several
years. They did face provocations
and incursions by whites, but Joseph
the Elder and the other chiefs maintained a strict peace policy and did not allow retaliations
for fear of encouraging an Army assault.
In 1871 the
Elder Joseph died, leaving leadership of his band to his son, who he
instructed, “Never give up the bones of
your Father and Mother.” Beginning in 1873 Joseph began long
negotiations with the government in hopes of getting the Willowa Valley
included in a new reservation. In 1877 the government cut off
negotiations and gave Joseph a hard
deadline to begin relocating his people to the Lapwai reservation. To
avoid war, Joseph reluctantly agreed. But he was only offered land on the
Idaho reservation that was already occupied by other Nez Percé bands and by squatting Whites. Although the
Army offered to clear these people out to make way for his band, Joseph refused
because it was not their tribal tradition to take what did not belong to them.
General Oliver
Howard gave the band thirty days to move
with their livestock or be
considered renegades and
attacked. Joseph called a council where he advised acceding to the
demands to avoid war. Another prominent leader, Too-hul-hul-sote advocated
war. During a second council, the chiefs received word that impatient
young warriors had acted on their
own, killing four Whites and
taking their horses. Realizing that war was inevitable, but unwinnable,
Joseph determined to lead his people to safety
among their traditional friends the Crow
or, failing that, to refuge from the
Army in Canada.
Eight hundred
men women and children began to move, pursued by 2,000 troops. Joseph was not a war
leader and was not responsible for the brilliant
tactical retreat that stymied
the Cavalry at every hand while trying to avoid pitch battles or even molesting
white settlers when they were encountered. War leaders used rear-guard actions, field fortifications, and a tactic of
bands falling back, leapfrogging fresh warriors, and then
setting up new defense lines.
They also employed advance scouts
and guards to avoid being encircled or flanked. General Howard was so impressed with the conduct of
the retreat that he compared it to campaigns
of classical antiquity.
After escaping
east through the narrow Lolo Pass, the band turned to the south.
There was a sharp fight at Big Hole and another at Camas Meadows.
Both times the band escaped capture.
Tourists in Yellowstone Park were startled to encounter
the retreating band as it crossed from west to east but were unmolested by the fleeing Indians.
But no matter
how skillfully conducted, each clash
cost the lives of irreplaceable
warriors and the long trek without fresh supplies or time to stop for hunting caused widespread hunger and
hardship among the people.
After the Crow,
a tribe who had firmly allied themselves
with the Army and whose braves served as the most reliable of cavalry scouts,
betrayed their old friends, the band
turned north for a final dash for
the border.
General Miles’s
fresh troops caught them at the Bear Paw
Mountains. After a five day fight with most of his war chiefs and
warriors dead, and his people too exhausted to make a final three or four day
dash to the border, Joseph offered his surrender.
Joseph’s famous
surrender speech was recorded by Lieutenant
Charles Erskine Scott Wood, who would later achieve some recognition as a poet. Modern scholars believe
that Wood may have embellished
Joseph’s words, although all witnesses
reported being moved by his dignity
and eloquence. As Wood
recorded it, Joseph said:
Tell General
Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am
tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead,
Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say
yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no
blankets; 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 of them 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.
The story of
the plight of the Nez Percé and of
Chief Joseph stirred up considerable sympathy
in the eastern press. But
sympathy did them little good. Despite promises of at least being
reunited with their fellow Nez Percé on the Idaho reservation, Joseph and 400
survivors were taken to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas in unheated cattle cars. They were interred there for eight months and
then sent to the totally alien
environment of a reservation in Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma)
where disease continued to take its
toll.
In 1879 Joseph
went to Washington to appeal to President Rutherford B. Hayes.
But it was not until 1885 that his band was finally allowed to return to the
Northwest. They were assigned to a reservation at the Colville Indian
Reservation with 11 other tribes. This was far from both the Willowa
and the other Nez Percé in Idaho. Joseph remained the chief of his people
until he died in 1904.
No comments:
Post a Comment