Category: 1855 treaty

New old news on treaties

It’s holiday time, Thanksgiving and I am in Oregon City at my son’s place, reading the morning news on my computer. The house is quiet with people sleeping off yesterday’s meal and working from home on their computers. I got up early and read for an hour in a book that hurts while I read it, The Oppermanns, a novel by a refugee German Jew published in 1934. The New York Times suggested in its review at the time that the world should be reading this fictional account of what happened in Germany in the years 1930-33. “Wake up! The barbarians are upon us.”Read Rich’s Post →

October 5; On this day…

October 5, 1877 is the day on which the wal’wá·ma band of the Nez Perce and members of other non-treaty bands lost their freedom. They’d intended to go quietly from the Wallowa to the reduced Idaho reservation, leaving and losing their homeland but continuing to live in nearby country among relatives from other bands. They crossed the Snake River into Idaho in spring runoff, and there the grief-stricken actions of some young Nez Perce in killing Idaho settlers—settlers known for their mistreatment of Indians—set off a fighting retreat of more than 1200 miles. It ended on this day 144 yeasr ago at the Bears Paw mountains in Montana, just 40 miles short of safety in Canada.Read Rich’s Post →

Sacred Lands

The recent Nez Perce reacquisition of 148 acres near the town of Joseph was a big event. Scores of walkers and riders with their horses gathered at the school on the hill on one side of Joseph, and made the journey through town and onto the airport road to the place just west of the city they now call Am’sáaxpa, or “place of boulders.” Drummers and singers in a “long tent”—a longhouse—prayed, sang, and spoke to scores of tribal people and local supporters, and reporters.Read Rich’s Post →

The “Roaming Nez Perce” on a level playing field

Our national founding documents talk about all men being created “equal,” and many see the history of the country as a gradual expansion of “all men” to include black men—14th Amendment, 1868; women—19th Amendment, 1920; and, in 1924, when they were finally given citizenship in the country that had swallowed up their native lands, Indians.

Read Rich’s Post →

Coho return to the Lostine River!

I got this “FYI” from Jim Harbeck at Nez Perce Fisheries here in Joseph last night:

“The first Coho Salmon to return to the Lostine River in over 40 years came back home this morning…  I think we’ll see at least a few hundred Coho this fall at our weir on the Lostine. And more importantly, once again the Nez Perce Tribe is proving to be a good steward here in Wallowa County. This fish returned to a reach of river just below old Chief Joseph’s original burial site. I’m sure he’d be proud of his people for this significant accomplishment (and Ken Witty would be too).”

Ken Witty was a long-time fish biologist for the State of Oregon, and did some consulting with the tribe after his retirement.

It’s a long story. 1855 Treaty; Fish Wars of the 70s (which Alvin Josephy wrote about); Boldt Decision awarding half the salmon catch to the tribes; Nez Perce, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, and other tribal fishery programs ramping up; mitigation money from Bonneville Power—and events like this!

I could go on, but encourage you to do so on your own. For now, we celebrate the return of the Coho Salmon to the Lostine River.

First Lostine River Coho in over 40 years!

The Civil War and Nez Perce Treaties


Yesterday in line at the grocery store, a new young clerk was telling someone how interested he was in the Civil War, and how he really wanted to go east and visit Antietam.  I piped up to suggest that he think about the civil war in the west. Had he ever wondered how Union County got its name, and why there is a Sumter close by? And did he know about the impact of the Civil War on Indian tribes, and specifically on the Nez Perce treaties?
I’m teaching a short, non-credit class on the Nez Perce and the Wallowas, and plan to devote one of five sessions to the treaties. Thinking about the grocery store clerk and about the upcoming class, it occurred to me that Alvin Josephy’s treatment of the treaties—in his books and in a long article for American Heritage on the 1855 Treaty—might have been different had he done the Civil War in the West book first. 
Briefly, here’s the chronology: 1855 is the Stevens treaty talks in Walla Walla. As a lawyer friend points out, the Nez Perce negotiated a pretty good treaty. They were the only ones to get their own reservation—the initial Stevens goal was to put them together with others on a confederated reservation. And they ceded very small amounts of their traditional village and migratory grounds.
Then, in 1861, gold was discovered on the Nez Perce Reservation. In 1862, directly contravening the provisions of the treaty, 18,000 white miners flooded the reservation. Remember, the Civil War is underway. There is no way that the federal government can remove 18,000 miners from the reservation. And the Union wants the gold!
I remember as a child that Civil War currency—like Weimar marks—was available for cereal box tops (well, I don’t remember any specific box top offers, but it seemed that there were; kids had Confederate dollars). Lincoln and the Union wanted the trails West open for many reasons, but one of them was to retrieve the gold which made Union currency hard currency. Currency that could buy arms and goods from other countries. What would have happened had the Confederacy controlled roads west? Why was the first road West the trail in the Southwest? Prior to the Civil War, none of the central or northern routes for rails or trails was agreeable to Southern Senators (including the Northern rail route surveyed by Stevens).
So the series of Indian treaties and broken treaties, the Minnesota uprising and the Mankato hangings, the Sand Creek and Bear River massacres, all owed to keeping Western trails open and retrieving Western gold. Yes, there were other factors, including fights over votes leading up to the War, recruitment of volunteers, etc. But, as Alvin points out in Civil War in the American West, the decimation of Indian tribes that goes on during the War and that continues after the War is all intricately tied to the great War that most Americans associate with Antietam and Gettysburg.
At War’s end, with the Nez Perce situation still unsettled and President Grant trying to deal with the “Indian problem” with his 1868 Peace Policy—giving reservation administration to the churches, with military commanders having their own solutions to the Indian problem, with Custer and Black Hills gold strikes and a War-time legacy of making and breaking treaties, everything that happens to the Nez Perce is in the shadow of that War.
Which all makes me wonder whether Alvin would have written those treaty chapters differently had he pulled all of the Civil War in the West material together first. It is one of many questions I failed to ask him when he was with us.
# # #

History counts


It’s an old saw—you learn by teaching. This fall I am teaching a class for the Oregon State University Ag program on the Eastern Oregon U campus in La Grande. The class is “Ecosystems and Pacific Northwest Tribes.”  We looked briefly at the pre-Columbian Americas and the impacts of contact—the “Columbian Exchange”—and then moved on to the pre-contact Northwest (realizing that such a designation is loaded with post-contact geography), the impacts of the fur trade, missionaries, treaties, and settlers, and finally now, are looking at how the region’s ecosystems are working today.
We read a few chapters of Charles Mann’s 1491, a wonderful essay, “People of the Salmon,” by Richard Daugherty in Josephy’s America in 1492, and bits and pieces on the fur trade, treaties, missionaries, and Oregon tribes. This week our reading was the Klamath chapter from First Oregonians, and our guest speaker was Jeff Oveson, long-time executive director of Grande Ronde Model Watershed.  
As I re-read the short version of the Klamath-Modoc story and thought about a recent rebroadcast of the “Oregon Experience” program on the Modoc War (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv3NSN-8b3o) it struck me that the Klamath and associated tribes (Modoc and Yahooskin are joined on the reservation) experience of white contact had hit the nadirs of government Indian policy in case after case—loss of land and resources, treaty, war, and assimilation through schools, allotment, termination, and urbanization. Controversy and strife haunt the region still, and Indian-white, Indian-government, and white-government relations are tenuous and controversial.
The Nez Perce story, also a sad one, also follows the patterns and hazards of contact—disease, loss of land, settlement, allotment. But the Nez Perce—I now speak of families dispersed on three reservations in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho—were spared termination. And going back further, the Nez Perce came out of the 1855 treaty negotiations with heads held highest of all inland tribes. They retained most of their ancestral lands and were the only people to emerge with a reservation of their own—one not shared with other, confederated, tribes.
Yes, land was taken away in the “Liars Treaty” of 1863, and negotiations with President Grant, promising to rescind part of that treaty and give back some Wallowa land, failed. Yes, there was a war that drove Nez Perce from the Wallowa and from other ancestral lands. And yes, lands were allotted and much tribal land was lost with the Dawes Act.
But the Nez Perce, known in Governor Stevens time as a strong tribe with skilled negotiator chiefs, acknowledged and often celebrated for their arduous and skillfully managed fighting retreat toward Canada in the Nez Perce War, and successful, with Chief Joseph’s skilled diplomacy, in returning from Indian Territory to the Northwest less than a decade after the 1877 War, as much as any tribal people, always saw themselves as peers in relationships with whites and white governments.
J.T. Willizams, Nez Perce Fisheries
I see this today in the faces and actions of Nez Perce tribal leaders, Nez Perce Fisheries personnel, and in those of their cousins on the Umatilla. I ask Jeff about working with tribal fisheries—Nez Perce and Umatilla—and he concurs. Tribal workers in our part of the country are confident, skilled, and see themselves as and are seen as partners in working with the region’s natural resources.
History counts.

Summer in the Library—brown bag lunches, art books, OHQs, and a student intern!
We’re doing brown bag lunches on Tuesdays this summer, so if you are in Joseph at noon on a Tuesday, please stop in and join the conversation.  Next week—May 28—we will be talking about Indian treaties, especially the Nez Perce treaties of 1855 and 1863 and the aborted attempt by President Grant to change or rescind the 1863 version.
This week we talked about art—specifically the paintings and drawings by Europeans of American Indians. Mike Rosenbaum, who drove up from La Grande to join us, brought along a few gorgeous art books featuring George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, Paul Kane and others. And on leaving Mike decided that the books should stay here!  So a big thanks to him, and an invitation to everyone to take these books down from the shelves and take a look at how early Europeans saw the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Two things have struck me about these European views over months of looking at Josephy books and articles:  First, the “first meetings,” in almost all cases, of Europeans and First Peoples (a term used in Canada and one I like) were almost always friendly, and the Europeans often commented on the good qualities, looks, and helpfulness of their hosts. Second, the early drawings and paintings almost always portray the Indians as handsome people, robust and muscular—and often with little clothing so as to accentuate these qualities. I put this together with the state of things in Europe at the time—still in a little ice age, suffering from drought and famine—and have said that the Indians must have looked like gods to the immigrants. At least the ones who escaped smallpox and measles and other infectious diseases. And from there I go to Rousseau and the romantic view of Indians.
But local artist Mike Kolaski joined the conversation, and offered another view. He suggested that we look at what Europeans were painting in Europe at the time—much of the 1600s, and thought that the first art work in the new world reflected the contemporary art work in the old. And, as time moved on and other artists—Bodmer, Catlin, et al—came to the new world or grew up on this side of the pond looking across the sea, the art work became less romantic and more ruggedly realistic, as it was in Europe at the time.
Thanks Mike. Both views, I think, are consistent with what Alvin called the “Eurocentric” treatment of first peoples. It is good to have more ways to think about the same set of images and events. And now we have Alvin’s books and words and the new books donated by Mike Rosenbaum for reference.
Quickly, a couple of additional notes on collections and summer. We got a nice slug of old—1920s-40s—Oregon Historical Quarterly from the Harney County Library, so we are on our way to a full run of that fine journal. We have an index for 1900-1940, and Google has yet to catch up with everything, so come and explore. 
Volunteer Bruce Stubblefield has organized our collection of Idaho Yesterdays, and made a short index of articles related to the Nez Perce, so more fertile ground for exploration.  Throw in long runs of Montana History, Journal of the West, American West, Kansas Quarterly, and journals from Minnesota, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, Missouri, and a handful of other states and it is easy to spend an afternoon checking out old –photos and the detailed kind of research carried on by the historians who kept the West alive, while the writers of textbook histories often ignored it. 
Finally, I want to welcome Erik Anderson, a student from Whitman College in nearby Walla Walla, who will be joining us in a few days as a summer intern. He’ll get to pick some of his projects, but cataloging books and putting these historical journals into a data base you can use will be a big part of it.
Finally finally—we are not a circulating library, but we do have extra copies of some Josephy material which we are loaning out, and we are happy to make copies of other materials and get them to you by mail or email. Loaner copies of 500 Nations, The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, 1492, many of the American Heritage hardback magazines with Josephy articles  can be checked out for two week periods.

A puzzle re the Treaty of 1863


In 1863 the Joseph or Wallowa Band Nez Perce lived quietly in the Wallowa Country, isolated by mountains on three sides and the Snake River Canyon to the east. There were no white settlers—though a couple of French trappers married to Nez Perce women had lived among them from time to time—just a few hundred Indians who gathered summers in the Wallowa valley and at the Lake to hunt and socialize and catch and dry fish, and then spread out in family groups along the tributaries of the Snake River in colder times. 
In 1863, to the north, over high timbered country and across what is now called the Grande Ronde River and then more high country and then about at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, white men made new lines on maps drawn at Walla Walla in 1855 that had promised the Wallowa Country and a total of almost 8,000,000 acres total to the Nez Perce people forever. The new lines would exclude the Wallowas and whittle the Nez Perce Reservation down to fewer than 800,000 acres.  
Nez Perce arrive at Walla Walla in 1855
The reservation lines of 1855 had been made impossible by the discovery of gold and the intrusion of 18,000 white miners on the Reservation and a Civil War in the East that needed the gold and left no time or desire on the part of the federal government to understand and protect Indians from the economies and the greed of its white citizens. 
I had wondered why the new lines needed to omit the Wallowa Country. The Wallowa Nez Perce were not engaged in all that was going on in the outer world—the mission churches, the alcohol, the gold commerce that was growing like cancer to the north. Old Joseph, who had once invited the Reverend Spalding in, had given up his Bible after the doings in Walla Walla, no gold had been found, and there were no white settlers demanding land in the Wallowas. 
If the 1863 treaty had allowed the Nez Perce to keep the Wallowa country, I reasoned, the War of 1877 might not have happened. What were Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Washington Territory Calvin Hale and Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the new state of Oregon, W.H. Rector, and their white colleagues thinking? And Lawyer and the other Indian treaty signers?
In the end, after carefully reading the Josephy chapters in the big Nez Perce book and related chapters in his Civil War in the West book and looking at a map, I realize that I was the simple thinker. Joseph and his small band and the Wallowa Country were an island in a growing sea of whites and rapidly changing economies and religious activities that were transforming the region
.
The Nez Perce, who had escaped with ceding only small portions of their territories in the 1855 Treaty, were awash in white miners, missionaries, and, maybe most importantly, changing attitudes towards land. At Walla Walla, Indian chiefs argued that the land was their mother and could not be divided and sold. But others had started talking about the sale of land, and, in essence, agreed to compensation for ceded lands. Some tried to hold both ideas in their heads simultaneously. 
In 1861 gold was discovered on Nez Perce lands, and soon the Nez Perce, some of whom now spoke and wrote in English, many who called themselves Christians, met and traded with the hoards of white miners. They operated ferries and sold them meat, and took their gold. Of course whites didn’t wait for the Nez Perce to build their cities and overrun their land, and 3,000 Indians had little overall power over 18,600 whites who had bounded onto reservation lands by 1862. The Indians were divided, and increasingly powerless, people.
And the white miners weren’t only on the Clearwater to the north, but also east, across the Snake River, where the city of Florence boasted 9,000 whites. To the south, there were gold strikes in Powder River country—not Nez Perce land, but land bordering the Wallowas. 
To the west, in the Grande Ronde Valley, settlers were growing crops, building towns, raising cattle, and looking for more grazing ground over the mountains. Joseph and the others had been told at Walla Walla that the whites would come like grasshoppers—and they were. 
Old Joseph did not sign the new treaty in 1863, but left Lapwai and came back to the Wallowas. He lived until 1871 or 72, long enough for the Civil War in the East to end, for the surveyors to come into the valley, long enough to see the first grasshoppers, but not to see the War that would drive his people away. His sons, Young Joseph and Ollicot, would have to deal with the swarms and the armies—released now from that other War—who would come to take the Wallowa country from them.
# # #