Category: Nez Perce War

Grace Bartlett, the Nez Perce, and the Wallowa Country

This summer we have been doing Friday conversations on local and Nez Perce history. This Friday was the last session for 2024. We focused on Grace Bartlett and her book, The Wallowa Country, 1866-76. I hadn’t read the book in years, remembering always that it was a day-by-day account of the first ten years of white tenure in the Wallowas—and the last ten years of Native, Nez Perce tenure. I’ve always thought the book a unique contribution to local and Nez Perce history, but had not remembered details and some of the book’s signature elements. I skimmed it on Thursday night, and was even more appreciative of Grace’s work.

Grace (Sawyer) Bartlett moved to Wallowa County in 1932, after schooling in Mrs. Catlin’s School in Portland, and Reed College. She married a Wallowa County rancher and moved here, soon becoming acquainted with Harley Horner, the early and important historian of the place. She helped Horner organize his “scrapbooks” and letters to and from early settlers and Nez Perce Indians. That work, now represented as the “Horner Papers” and available online from the Oregon Historical Society, is a treasure trove of stories about people and places in the Wallowa Country.

In 1965, Alvin Josephy, who had encountered the Nez Perce while working for Time Magazine in the early 1950s published The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. Grace, who had spent 30 years interviewing early settlers and descendants herself, and written—often co-authoring with Horner—numerous articles for The Oregon Historical Quarterly, told Josephy that he had not been fair to the early settlers. Josephy suggested that she write her own book, and she did.

The way she “redeemed” the reputations of some early settlers was to individualize events and people in the history. There were some villains—the newspaper editor of the Mountain Sentinel in Union County, two wise-acre youths who boasted intent to “scalp” Chief Joseph, and a few others she thought either ignorant or wrong-headed in their dealings with Indians—and with their settler neighbors—get strong criticism. The people she thought intelligent, fair, thoughtful, and interested in good relations with the Indians, she praised.

Here are a few notable Bartlett contributions to our history, some rarely mentioned in the many serious books of Nez Perce history:

The importance of geography. Grace begins the book with a one-page description of the geology and geography of the Wallowa Country. The acknowledgement of the severe physical isolation of the country behind mountains and across canyons and rivers led to later white settlement. The Oregon trail passed through the Grande Ronde Valley and the Umatilla in the 1840s. The earliest “looks” into the Wallowa Valley proper by White stockmen came in the 1860s, and the earliest actual immigration did not happen until 1871. In that quarter century, the Grande Ronde Valley and the Umatilla had filled with homesteaders, and pressures for more and better grazing land grew fiercely.

The Nez Perce kept track of whites’ actions. Grace mentions the various actions regarding the surveys of the country. First, the 1864 survey of the Oregon-Washington state line, and the later surveys of townships in the Wallowa. She argues that Chief Old Joseph, on seeing the state line monuments, put up his own markers above the Minam, often referred to in the Nez Perce histories as “Joseph’s markers,” or “Joseph’s deadline.” She gives first person accounts of Indians pulling up stakes of the later surveys.

Failed communications. An entire series of mixed messages and misinformation led to a failed attempt to allow the Nez Perce to have their own reservation in a large part of the Wallowa Country. First, reports were of a “small group” of settlers, which officials thought meant a handful, or at least in low double digit number of squatters and homesteaders. In fact, messages to and from Lapwai, Salem, and Washington D. C. resulted in an executive order “Reservation for the Roaming Nez Perce Indians in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon,” while land appraisals that showed 87 settlers and over $67,000 in improvements. Some settlers sold to neighbors, or just up and left, but new people keep coming in, and the money to buy out the Wallowa was never appropriated.

Meanwhile, the land markers described in the documents led to confusion between Western authorities and those in the East. Grace speculates that part of the problem was local geography. The “upper” valley was actually north, while the “lower” valley lay to the south and west. In mapping, upper is always north, and the actual document returned from Washington had the Indians retaining the north half of the Wallowa, which included most of the white settlers’ claims, and the settlers getting Wallowa Lake and the mountains. An impossible situation on all sides.

Roaming. Grace says that the earliest settlers were fine with the Indians coming into the valley with their herds of horses in the summer months of serious salmon fishing. The Indians stayed their few months and returned to lower river villages on their seasonal round. As the number of settlers increased, conflicts over grazing grew, and as negotiations for partition grew, white authorities’ insistence that the Indians settle down and “occupy” the country allotted them and stop their “roaming” grew as well. And the Nez Perce insistence that they wanted the freedom to travel and continue their own traditional uses of the country grew as well.

Getting along. One of Grace’s original purposes in writing this history was to show that not all settlers should be painted with the same brush. She gives numerous incidences of friendships, and tells us that even in times of trouble over the stolen horse and killing of one Indian by settlers A.B. Findley and Wells McNall in 1876, the event that many histories count as a major step in the move towards removal and, ultimately, the Nez Perce War of 1877, Chief Young Joseph visited and ate dinner with Findley in his home. And she claims it was not the first or only time. Other settlers are signaled out for their understandings of and sympathies for the Indians.

I could go on with other Bartlett gems—I love the way women get their own names rather than always being “Mrs. John” or “Mrs. A.B.” She takes pains to describe the early settlers as small-time farmers and stockmen who went to the Grande Ronde Valley and Walla Walla to work for cash money before coming home for later harvests. And the big cattle herds that caused friction on the Imnaha were out of the Grande Ronde and numbered in the hundreds, while local settlers counted their stock in much smaller numbers

In sum, by individualizing the actors in the early days of settlement and recounting the specific events in so far as possible by first person accounts, Grace Bartlett shows a human struggle that involved land AND culture, official and unofficial errors in geography and judgement, and individual personalities. She finds the good, the bad, and the stupid in her subjects.

But in the end, the fate of the Wallowa and the Nez Perce who had made it their home for millennia seems foreordained. The national government’s efforts to take over Indian lands with treaties and the promotion of white settlement were constant. And the inexorable pressure of that settlement, of white immigrants’ dreams of a better life than the ones they’d left behind in Ohio or in Europe were unstoppable. (Grace didn’t say it, but I will. The U.S. government derived a good deal of its income from the takeovers and sales of Indian lands over centuries, avoiding the imposition of income tax, enacted briefly during the Civil War and then, finally and officially in 1913.)

And the bad apples, the opportunistic characters with their spurious claims, and the out and out racist ones who played their lives out in Northeastern Oregon in the 1870s are most likely with us still.

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Photo on Wallowa County home page by David Jensen

The Equestrian Revolution

I’ve written before about Ned Blackhawk’s outstanding book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Here’s more.

The title itself is revolutionary—“rediscovering” echoing and countering the decades of homage to Columbus for “discovering” America. And “unmaking history” indicating that we have that part wrong too. That the history we—our government offices, popular presses, and academic and popular historians—have made, is wrong.

Orthodoxy traces U.S. history to the New England colonies and their English origins. This makes our history is a continuation of European and especially Anglo history. Blackhawk stands this history on its head, putting Native Peoples at the center of five centuries of European invasion. And he starts not with the English, but with the Spanish and their invasion of Southwestern North America. And he shows that at each instance of European intrusion, Native America counters, parries, accommodates, fights, makes and breaks alliances, moves away from—voluntarily or by force, and dies with the scourge of European diseases.

(I cannot fathom why all the American history texts and classes of long ago missed this most devastating impact on indigenous people—maybe because we were busy tracing the actions and thoughts of white men, the successions of kings, queens, explorers, generals, admirals, and presidents to pay mind to the mundane roles of smallpox, malaria, viral influenza, yellow fever, measles, typhus, bubonic plague, typhoid fever, cholera, and whooping cough that killed more indigenous Americans than did all the warfare, the sieges, and purposeful starvations visited on them by the Euro-Americans.)

Forgive the digression. Before the Mayflower, before Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin, the Spanish brought devastation to the Southwest. Santa Fe, the oldest state capitol in North America, was founded in 1610. And well before there was a United States, there was a successful Pueblo revolt. In 1680, under the leadership of the spiritual leader, Popé, several Pueblos rose up and leveled Spanish houses, churches, and towns. The government abandoned Santa Fe and for a dozen years the Indians struggled to remain united, and the Spanish struggled to regain traction. The revolution was never complete; not all the pueblos joined, and eventually and ironically the Spanish became protectors in a chaotic tribal world and regained Santa Fe in 1692. But what Blackhawk calls the “equestrian revolution” had begun.

“Surrounding Native nations that had once been entirely pedestrian now incorporated runaway, stolen, and traded horses into their societies. Before 1680 this transfer had been slow and gradual but afterward an equestrian revolution engulfed the region. None could have anticipated the far-reaching impacts… as worlds of Indigenous power increasingly stretched across the continent.” (Blackhawk, page 42)

One of my first lessons from Alvin Josephy in the 1970s was that the American government had broadcast to the world, through its State Department and the USIA—United States Information Agency—a picture of Native America that was a lie. Romantic yes, but the US icon of a Sioux Indian on horseback on the Great Plains led people to believe that Indians always had horses and that the Sioux—the Lakota—had always been on the Great Plains. Newer histories tell us that the Lakota started in the Great Lake region, and gradually moved across the country, gaining horses and guns along the way, until they were the most powerful tribe in the American heartland, controlling, for a time, the Mississippi and tributaries from its Minnesota source to the Gulf of Mexico—some 2300 miles!

The Pueblo, Navajo, Apache, Ute, Comanche, and Shoshone were early horse tribes, but we also see the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Gros Vent as horse cultures. And, in the Pacific Northwest, the Umatilla, Cayuse, and the Nez Perce as historic equestrian powers.

American Tribes and Tribal peoples took to horses as they did to no other European introduction. One cannot say or envision Comanche, Lakota, or Nez Perce without seeing horses. When one thinks about buffalo before their decimation for hides and bones, for starving Indians and for pure sport, one pictures horses and Indians with buffalo on the Great Plains. The Lakota horse power on the high plains; and, to the South, the Comanche did battle with other tribes and for a time ruled huge swaths of the country mounted on horses.

In the Northwest, Lewis and Clark marveled at Nez Perce horsemanship in 1805, and the Nez Perce 1200-mile five month fighting retreat just 72 years later is unimaginable without horses. Today among the Nez Perce, there is horse revival alongside language revival, and we see horses, like their riders, dressed in regalia.

The Nez Perce and their Plateau Tribal cousins see themselves as horse people. A recent article by a Comanche archeologist pushes that horse culture back before the Pueblo revolt. Even so, we are talking Indian horse history in the hundreds of years, not the fifteen or twenty thousand years—or more—that we now know Indian cultures have grown on these lands.

One wonders if there is some kind of genetic memory of earlier times, when horses did roam across North America. New world horses were reportedly smaller, and I’ve not heard any reports of them being ridden, but 10,000 years ago, or maybe as recently as 6,000 years ago, they were here.

I once read a Navajo quoted that his people knew horses in the past, and that the modern meeting of Native and horse was only picking up an older story.

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Photo: Native American Indians of the Columbia Plateau on horses in front of tipis, 1908. Gelatin silver print from a glass negative. Photo by Benjamin Gifford.

The Last Indian War—Horses and Technology

Elliot West’s “The Last Indian War” was published in 2009, so it has been around. I’d not read it, but it was handy and I needed to check a date or name, so picked it up. And read a page or two. And decided I should read it. Read it because what West does is put the Nez Perce War in context of the Westward movement and US history.

We know that the War parties—Nez Perce and pursuing armies—moved through Yellowstone National Park. Some writers even tell us that it—Yellowstone—was a first, and that tourists were encountered and captured. But West tells us that yes, Yellowstone was the first National Park, and that it “reflected three powerful forces creating and defining the West.”Read Rich’s Post →

Intolerable

David Remnick of the “New Yorker” calls it “intolerable.” The last few weeks in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank have stretched us for words to describe the awful goings on. We mostly agree that the initial Hamas invasion of Israel and killing of innocents was barbaric—and that Israel’s response is horrific. We can’t see what happens next. Can history tell us?Read Rich’s Post →

Anne Richardson and General Howard

My friend Anne Richardson passed away a few years ago. Her husband, Dennis Nyback, brought a box of her books and notebooks to the Josephy Library about a year ago, and then he passed away.

I didn’t write a eulogy for Anne at the time of her passing, although I have told bits of her fascinating life story to a few people—the little bits that I know. Now I feel remiss at not having written something sooner, maybe written something before her passing, because of all the people I know, Anne Richardson knew more about General O.O. Howard than anyone else. Hers might have been a valuable voice to anyone trying to untangle the story of Howard and his role in the Nez Perce War.Read Rich’s Post →

The Longest War(s)

My friend Charlie texted me this morning to remind me that President Biden will announce today that he has ended America’s “longest war.” Charlie says that the Indian wars went on longer, that his people’s war, what we call the Nez Perce War, was one of the last of a continuing string of them, and that the suffering caused by Indian Wars cannot be measured.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 →

Fourth of July-Nespelem

I’ve written before about how Indians, and especially the Nez Perce exiles on the Colville Reservation, used the holiday as a day to bring out drums, regalia, and songs that had been suppressed in the 1880s rush to assimilation. In an exhibit two years ago on “Nez Perce Music,” we used images from a 1903 Fourth of July Celebration on the Coville Reservation in Washington. There were photos of drummers and dancers, but when I asked elder Albert Andrews Redstar to comment on the event, he focused on the photo of a horse procession. It seems to me that this photo and his words are an appropriate way to remember that “Independence Day” does not celebrate or remember “independence” for all of us.Read Rich’s Post →

Race in America

I don’t know where I first heard or read that history books are often more about the time they are written in than the time they are written about. Several new books on Indians, and specifically the Nez Perce, support the idea.

O.O. Howard and Chief Joseph

I’m only 80 pages into the Vanderbilt professor Daniel Sharfstein’s just published Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard and the Nez Perce War. The first pages take us from the Civil War to Howard’s tenure as head of the Freedmen’s Bureau and responsibilities for the care of four million freed slaves. An early agonizing account follows General Howard, newly appointed head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, as he is dispatched to South Carolina by President Andrew Johnson; his task is to tell freed slaves who had been given “forty acres and a mule” by General Sherman that they must return the land to their former masters. This is a book about Reconstruction and race in America.

I’ll not argue about the horse and cart, whether a renewed interest in race helped propel Trump and his people into office, or whether Trump and his followers’ statements on race—and the opposition to them—have become the national conversation.  “Black Lives Matter” preceded this election cycle, and my thought is that the topic—race—has been welling for some time, that it emerged pronouncedly in the campaign, and that the authors and books dealing with race, which have always been there in some measure, are now moving through publishing channels at a fevered pitch.

Slavery and the Civil War have always been the starting points for discussion of race in America. What is different is that American Indians are now part of the discussion. General Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Nez Perce War is a natural vehicle for Indians’ entry into the race conversation.

But his is not the only story that brings Indians into the discussion of race in America. Another recent book, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez, reminds us that Columbus sent Indian slaves back to Europe, and that enslavement of American Indians was practiced on a grand scale across the continents.

Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 recounts the decimation and brutality carried out against the Indians of California. And in In the Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, historian Peter Cozzens, who has written much on the Civil War and on Western tribes, ties the stories together.

The Nez Perce story has been used to tell stories of military competence—and incompetence, of Westward expansion and the inevitable white progress across the continent that begins with Lewis and Clark. It has revealed stories of heroism, and of government betrayal, eloquent speech and the storybook endings of former foes in battle talking in comfort and mutual admiration in their retirements. It’s as though generals Howard and Gibbons sought opportunity to sit with Chief Joseph and, somehow, make things right. (The looks on Joseph’s tired face tell you that they are not.)

Now the Nez Perce Story becomes part of the conversation about America’s racial struggles.

David Osborne’s The Coming follows the Nez Perce story through the life of Daytime Smoke, William Clark’s Nez Perce son. Daytime Smoke is a true character that we know little about—he probably died in captivity after the War—but Osborne uses the story to talk about a failure of Indian-White relations with tragic consequences.

I’ve not made it through William Vollmann’s The Dying Grass, a 1300 page volume of historical fiction with footnotes, but know that it is the fourth or fifth volume in a projected series of seven—Seven Dreams—focused on the European conquest of America.

In other words, expect more. And, as a friend with academic creds told me, “it’s about time that Indians become part of this conversation.”

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Another Nez Perce book

Oregon Public Radio’s Dave Miller interviewed Daniel Sharfstein, author of the latest Nez Perce book, Thunder in the Mountains, yesterday on his “Think-Out-Loud” program. That came right on the heels of my reading David Osborne’s just released novel, The Coming, which is the Nez Perce story with William Clark’s Nez Perce son at its center.

Daytime Smoke, William Clark’s Nez Perce son

We know, by the way, that a Nez Perce woman bore Clark a son, Halaftooki (Daytime Smoke), and that he became a tribal elder who hoped his mixed heritage would insulate him from growing conflicts between Indians and white miners and settlers. When conflict broke out, however, he joined the non-treaties, and, as far as I know, died in captivity. Osborne’s book is a fine retelling of that story, with fictional characters and events scattered among the real ones to get Daytime Smoke from birth through the War.

But I digress. This new book, according to Miller’s interview with Sharfstein, follows the pre-Nez Perce career of O.O. Howard in the Civil War and as head of “The U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands,” popularly known as the “Freedmen’s Bureau,” established in 1865 to assist freed slaves in the reconstruction era.  Follows him to Portland, describes lectures on the Civil War he gave there (a general’s retirement program), and then describes Joseph’s prewar meanderings among the Cayuse, Umatilla, and white settlers of the Grande Ronde Valley.

Examination of the Nez Perce—and especially of the Nez Perce War—is a small industry. My friend, Mike Andrews, who grew up in La Grande, has read a lot of it, and wonders what kind of patterns there are, and why the burst of new books NOW. William Vollman’s The Dying Grass, a 900 page novel with footnotes!, came out less than two years ago; Osborne’s book a couple of months ago; and T.J. Stiles, in Portland recently to talk about a new biography of Custer, announced that his next book is Joseph.

Mike asks why all the Nez Perce books; I think the more specific question might be why all the Chief Joseph books. Joseph was handsome at a time when photography was new; Joseph had a proper Christian name people could pronounce. The Nez Perce had kicked the army’s butt during the War, and as that could not have been accomplished by a bunch of ignorant heathens, Joseph must have been a military genius, the “Red Napoleon,” as the newspapers called him. And this last of the Indian wars was indeed reported by Eastern newspapers. As Joseph learned as his people were transported from Bismarck by train after surrender, the new telegraph had played a part in the War. His surrender speech and later eloquent speeches about his lost homeland, the white man’s forked tongues and rules, and requests for fair treatment, would be published, and he would be photographed.

Although early books called it Chief Joseph’s War, later books pointed out that Joseph was never a war chief—but Looking Glass and his brother Ollokot, who had been war chiefs, were dead at Bears Paw, White Bird crossed to Canada, and it was Joseph who surrendered.

And Joseph, the diplomat, who would lead his people in captivity for eight long years in the “hot country,” and, eventually, after meetings with Congress and Presidents, badgering of generals and politicians, and astute lobbying of the local and national Presbyterians, lead them back to the West.

As some one—or many—have said, history is often more about the time it is written in than the time it is written about. I would like to line up all of the Nez Perce books –455 titles now in our SAGE Library System—and see what patterns emerge.

More importantly, what histories might our times call for?

I’ve heard much about Joseph’s War, the Nez Perce War, Indian wars; it might be time to look at Indian diplomacy, at patience and endurance amidst chaos, at survival against all odds, at revival of culture and language in an electronic age, at purpose and will and heroism off the battlefield that have kept the Nez Perce, and Indian peoples across North America, alive.

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Another Nez Perce Book

William Vollman’s new novel, The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War, is getting rave reviews. I have it, have glanced at the first few pages and looked at the extended notes and acknowledgements—and hoisted the 1350 page and what must be five-pound volume—but have not begun reading it. I am waiting for a five or six hour piece of time to take the plunge—seeing it and reading reviews having convinced me that I cannot do it justice or give myself an honest go at it in bedtime snatches.

But I have been thinking about it, and thinking about how the Nez Perce story captured Alvin Josephy 65 years ago and continues to capture writers and readers 138 years after the Nez Perce War put it on the front pages of New York newspapers. So this is a quick—pre-Vollman book-read—meditation on the enduring and captivating nature of the Nez Perce Story.

1. The Nez Perce came to national consciousness with Lewis and Clark, an iconic event in American history. And, according to accounts, they saved the Corps of Discovery—from wrong routes across the mountains and starvation—and impressed the Captains with intelligence, physical appearance and stature. According to the explorers, the Nez Perce also impressed with their horsemanship—European-Americans could not match the Indians with gelding technique and selective breeding.

2. Many of the Nez Perce did convert to Christianity, and they did not turn on their missionaries as the Cayuse and others turned on the Whitmans. (I credit this to chance: the Nez Perce got Eliza Spalding, the only one of the first four missionaries who invited Indians into her home and bothered to learn their language. Her husband, Henry Spalding had a temper in the name of the Lord, and the Whitmans, in my reading, were distant and mean. And of course measles visited the Whitmans and the Cayuse and not the Spaldings and their Nez Perce hosts.)

3. This conversion gave one band of Indians—what would become the lead non-treaty band—a Christian name, “Joseph.” It was a name the public could pronounce and relate to; it was not “foreign” like Toohoolhoolzote, and not an unlikely name translation like White Bird or Looking Glass. It was your brother’s or father’s name.

4. The Nez Perce were strong and smart. A lawyer friend says that a careful reading of the 1855 treaty, a treaty that resulted in only one tribe getting its own reservation, shows skilled negotiators. And Looking Glass’s arrival at the Walla Walla treaty site from buffalo country, which occurred after the other chiefs and tribes were assembled and is commemorated in the Gustav Sohon drawing, must have been palpable in its demonstration of power and dignity.

5. The Nez Perce War is recent; some call it the “last” Indian war. As Joseph discovered after the War in North Dakota, by 1877 trains and telegraphs moved people and messages across the land, and photographers documented events. The Nez Perce War was covered by the eastern press. And when Joseph passed away in 1904, New York newspapers announced the death of America’s “most famous Indian.”

6. Nez Perce Country. The lands of the Nez Perce, from the Wallowas north and east, across the Grand Ronde and Snake River canyons, are rugged and, in comparison to most traditional Indian lands, unchanged from the eons of Indian occupation. One can approximate the 1200-mile Nez Perce fighting retreat in a car, but foot or horseback one can make it—and some do, even today, across the same landscape with most of the 1877 landmarks.

7. The Euro-American ambivalence towards Indians: From the first meetings in Jamestown and New England, new settlers’ attitudes towards Indians were confused and confusing. Settlers depended on tribes for survival, did not understand or want to understand different cultures, feared what was different, admired what was different, but in any case wanted the land, the beaver pelts, the tobacco, fish and the whales. Indians were paraded in front of European courts. There were white women who were captured by Indians, and, in some cases, did not want to return to their own; and white men—think of the fur traders, who happily married Indian women and in many ways became natives; and there were also Indians who demonstrated that they could learn white ways. When the Nez Perce evaded American armies, Joseph—who, as historians have labored to show was not a war chief—was depicted as the “Red Napoleon.” Our advanced armies could not have fallen victim to uneducated savages! He must be brilliant. The Nez Perce gained supporters in the Eastern Press.

I’ll stop at 7—the number of drummers at a traditional ceremony.  And this one, number 8 it would be, is primarily a white issue, because most importantly, the Nez Perce War came near the end of 200 years of growing white dominance of the continent, and has raised and continues to raise feelings of guilt for injustices done the Nez Perce people—and to all Indians. The guilt is accompanied by admiration for Indian courage in the face of mistreatment, and astonishment that Indians have survived.

Now I think I am ready to start reading Vollman.

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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.

The most famous Indian in America


Note: We just completed a four week examination of the “Wallowa Country: 1855-1900” at the Josephy Center. Teaching is new to me, but four high school juniors and a fine group of eighteen older history buffs, curious newcomers to the Wallowa, and serious students of Indian affairs led me to learn and organize what I am learning as I try to follow Alvin Josephy’s intellectual and emotional  life journey in Indian America. Much has been written about the Nez Perce War and about Chief Joseph; less about his attempts to return to the Wallowa Homeland at War’s end.


There was a time when Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce was the most famous and (mostly) admired Indian in the land.
At the surrender at Bear’s Paw, after the siege and forty miles short of the Canadian border and Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph and his remnant band of Nez Perce and allies from other bands and tribes who had joined in the Nez Perce War were told by General Miles that they would be taken to Fort Keogh, 500 miles away. They were told that they would winter at Keogh, and then be allowed to return to their homeland.
Joseph’s brother, Ollokot, and most of the young warriors were dead. Women and children were hungry and cold. White Bird and a few others actually would make it to Canada, and Joseph and the other able-bodied could have done so, but they would have had to leave women, children, and the wounded behind. Joseph would not do that.
And that, I think, is the point at which his fame—and the story of Joseph as the leader of the Nez Perce people—begins to grow.
At War’s the generals needed the story of a brilliant opponent to make their own war efforts worthy. The Indian survivors were truly hungry and cold and distraught over the loss of people and land. And if not the military genius that the generals and a growing public made of him—the “Red Napoleon”—Joseph soon proved himself brilliant as a speaker and leader of his people in exile.
On the 500 mile ride to Fort Keogh, Joseph and Miles became closer, and Miles promised again to help Joseph return to his homeland. Of course the next chapter in the story is the next in the litany of broken promises: the Nez Perce are not to winter at Fort Keogh, but to be moved to Bismarck in Dakota Territory, where there is a railhead and it will be easier to keep them supplied. And then it is Leavenworth and Baxter Springs and Indian Territory (further removed from Sitting Bull and White Bird in Canada, though this is not what they told Joseph). No hanging—which Miles had also promised—but no return to his homeland either.
In Bismarck Joseph and Miles were both greeted as heroes and feted with dinners (the Bismarckians seemed interested in being part of a drama that was being covered by the national press rather than supporters of either of its combatant factions). And Joseph learned about the press—and the telegraph, and he began to tell the story of broken promises.
He would tell that story at Fort Leavenworth and Baxter Springs and in Washington D.C. He would tell it to commissioners and Congressmen and Presidents. He would gain sympathy of Presbyterian ministers and congregations, ally even with Christian Nez Perce—old adversaries sent from Lapwai to convert the non-treaty and traditional religionist Joseph Band while they were in exile. His words would appear in the leading magazines of the day, Harpers and North American Review.
And eventually, after almost eight years in exile, Joseph and the remaining Indians—many died in captivity—would be allowed to return to the Northwest. But not to the Wallowa—118 would go to live among the mostly Christian and mostly treaty Nez Perce at Lapwai in Idaho; Joseph and 150 followers to Colville, to live among Indians of other tribes and languages. Joseph continued his efforts at return to the Wallowa.
But East and West are different, and the country was changing rapidly. In 1885, Western landholders were still at odds with Indians, still homesteading on land recently held by Indians. And stories of the Nez Perce War and even Custer’s defeat were not distant. The newspapers and politicians ranted against Nez Perce return. And Indian accommodations—bands and tribes thrown together with no notion of historical relationships—were hard. It was not easy for the Nez Perce at Colville.
Joseph made two trips east, continuing his audiences with Congressmen, bureaucrats, and Presidents. From War’s end through exile and the move to Colville, Joseph was the most famous, respected Indian in the land. In the first years at Colville, the eastern press, intellectuals, and the churches continued to lament his treatment and promote his cause. But in two trips to the Wallowas, the last in 1900, he was told that no land would be given him, no land sold to him.
By 1900 the West was overrun by white settlers, the Indians tucked away in mostly hard places. The “hostiles” had been killed or put away: Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were dead; Geronimo had surrendered and appeared in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.  Even Joseph took his turn with Buffalo Bill, accompanying him to the parade in New York City at the dedication of Grant’s Tomb.
On his last trip to the Wallowa, in 1900, an Indian commissioner came along—and reported back against Joseph’s return. The country, he said, was fully inhabited and being well used by whites. The local paper reported that “considerable sport was made of the man” when he said he wanted some land by his father’s grave near Wallowa, at the Lake, and in the Imnaha country. The homeland dream was no longer a cause célèbre of eastern intellectuals, no longer a fear of Western settlers. Joseph’s star and his hopes had risen and been buoyed by an enthusiastic nation, but that nation had passed him by.
On September 24, 1904, Joseph made a last New York appearance:  the New York Sun said that “With the death of Chief Joseph, the famous leader of the Nez Perces, the United States has lost its most celebrated Indian.”
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Afterword:  Although I have picked up pieces of information about the years of exile and attempts at return in other places—Joseph’s famous and widely published speech on his 1879 visit to Washington D.C.; Steve Evans’ excellent Voice of the Old Wolf, which tells the story of Nez Perce friend and chronicler Lucullus McWhorter; local newspaper files, etc.—the last 120 pages of Kent Nerburn’s Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perceis the best synopsis of the post-war years that I have found.

Alvin and Grace: Nez Perce and settlers in the Wallowa Country

Grace Bartlett left Reed College in 1932 to marry a Wallowa Country rancher. She worked on the ranch, raised children, and apprenticed with Harley Horner, the unofficial county historian at the time. With Horner and on her own, she wrote for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, the Wallowa County Chieftain, the Walla Walla Union Bulletin, and once, on the sockeye salmon, for Sunset Magazine.

When Alvin’s big Nez Perce book came out, Grace quibbled with his descriptions of early people and events in the Wallowas. Alvin told her to “write it,” and she did. In the wonderful and, I am beginning to believe, unique, The Wallowa Country 1867-1877, published in 1976, 11 years after The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, Grace detailed the 10-year transition of the Wallowa Country from Indian to white occupation.

We learn about the early “open” winter (much like this one) when the whites first brought stock into the valley. They didn’t feed all fall and early winter and the news went to Union County newspapers and then to the Oregonian and the rest of the West that the Wallowas was a “Stockman’s paradise.” It was the first of many misunderstandings.

The settlers soon did learn from the Indians to move cattle to lower canyon ground in winter months. The Indians were not in the upper valleys in winter months—or even spring months. They generally arrived in August and hunted, fished, and gathered foods through the fall. There were meeting places—the forks of the rivers above present day Wallowa, where Old Joseph was originally buried; Indian Town on Chesnimnus Creek, and Wallowa Lake for the sockeye salmon harvest. They kept their own herds of horses and cows in the canyons, and moved there themselves after their summer-fall upper valley sojourns.

In general, Indians and settlers got along with each other. There were a few “Indian haters” among the settlers, and, according to Grace, they were known by their neighbors and not much appreciated. There was also a rabble rousing newspaper in Union County. But most of the settlers—even as war loomed with a conflict over horses and a white man killing an Indian, with subsequent “councils” of Indians and whites, movements of soldiers from Walla Walla, and meetings of Indians, generals, and Indian agents in Lapwai—were busy planting and harvesting crops, dealing with their livestock, arranging schooling for children, and going to the Walla Walla Valley to work for cash during the earlier harvest time there.

There were attempts to reconcile the treaty of 1855, which left the Wallowa Country to the Indians, and which the Joseph or Wallowa band Nez Perce had signed, with the 1863 treaty, which took away the Wallowas, and which they and several other bands had not signed. These attempts involved Washington D.C. and the Indian agency in Lapwai.

Without going into details, a division of the valley was envisioned, but Lapwai Indian agent Montieth, Washington authorities and the settlers could not seem to pull it off, because they could not get the “roaming Nez Perce,” as they called them, to agree to settle down. In other words, if Joseph and his people had just agreed to “become white” in their culture and
agriculture, they might not have been expelled from the Wallowa Country.

Alvin said many times that from the beginning of the European adventure in the Americas, we killed Indians with war and disease, but, more importantly, we overwhelmed them with Euro-centered culture. Often, it was the best intentioned who tried to assimilate them, and kill what he called “Indianness.”

Grace Bartlett’s book, written with Alvin’s strong encouragement, gives a blow by blow account of the way that played out in the Wallowa Country.

Josiah Red Wolf: Nez Perce War vet–and musician

I was digging through the small—and often most interesting—pieces of literature that Alvin collected along the way to his books and work as an advocate for Indians and the earth. Among the conference reports, ethnographic studies, newspaper clippings, and student papers was an article from Westways magazine, September 1977 by M. Woodbridge Williams, “Legacy of Survival.” The piece recounts a 1970 meeting with Josiah Red Wolf, at that time the lone survivor of the Nez Perce War. (When Alvin began his research in the early 50s, there were three: Red Wolf, Albert Moore, and Sam Tilden.)
Angus Wilson, one-time tribal chair and a good friend of Alvin’s, accompanied Woodbridge. Josiah was 98 at the time, but he and Wilson soon had an animated conversation going in Nez Perce—Wilson had to get him off an agitated rant on the treaties.
Red Wolf had been just five years old during the War, had spent a year at Leavenworth and five in Indian Territory. He may have been among the first 29—all widows and orphans—to return to Lapwai, under the care of James Rubin.
From Lapwai he went to the Chilico Indian School in Oklahoma, and from there, in 1890, to the Carlisle Institute for Indians in Pennsylvania. At Carlisle he learned the cobbler’s trade, and he learned to play the saxophone and cornet. In fact—no small irony here—he marched with the Carlisle school band in a Columbus Day parade in New York City.
Red Wolf eventually came back west,”became a cobbler for the North Idaho Indian Agency and also directed a prize winning band.” He married in 1896, farmed in the Stites area, and played in an orchestra for Saturday night dances.
All this music sent me in two directions. First, I have talked at length over the years with Anne Richardson and her husband, Dennis Nyback, about early jazz and blues singers. Dennis has written about a woman named Lee Morse, who grew up in Kooskia, Idaho, and who he thinks is the first recorded woman jazz singer. Morse went to New York and Broadway in 1923. Richardson and Nyback want to know where and how she started singing jazz in Kooskia in the early 1920s. Player pianos? Maybe?
And Indian dance bands. I happen to have a picture of “Chief White and his Five Redskins” from Lapwai, Idaho on the wall here at Fishtrap. I don’t remember how it got here, but the band is on a flatbed truck, circa 1920. I have heard other stories of Indian dance bands in the early part of the twentieth century. (Beth Piatote, who was our Fishtrap writer in residence a dozen years ago or more, is enrolled at Colville where her Nez Perce grandfather or great-grandfather left the reservation to play music in 1919!)
Could it all have started at Carlisle, with Indians from across the country pulled and pushed to Pennsylvania, taught to be seamstresses and cobblers, but allowed music and then returned—some of them; many never made it back to their home reservations—to put together dance bands which played the hippest white music their white neighbors—who had not been to New York or Pennsylvania themselves—had ever heard? Chief White looks to be a novelty act from the picture, but if the band played “every Saturday night” they had to be good musicians. I wonder how many of these Indian bands there were across the country.
And whether the Nez Perce and Idaho gave Lee Morse, the “first female jazz singer,” back to New York! Nyback is still doing his research.
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