I have been fascinated by President Grant’s proposed “Reservation for the Roaming Nez Perce Indians of the Wallowa Valley” since I saw the map of it in Grace Bartlett’s Wallowa Country: 1867-1877 years ago. I thought that if those Nez Perce had just had the foresight to put up picket fences and stop “roaming,” they might not have lost the Wallowa. More recently, I have seriously wondered what went wrong with it.Read Rich’s Post →
Which president, which time?
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| President Ulysses S. Grant |
Indian trails of tears are littered with Presidential lies. We could pick almost any one, but why not take the hero of the Civil War and the man on the $50 bill. He had some interesting dealings with the Nez Perce, so I am somewhat familiar with President Grant’s “Peace Policy” and stated attempts to do better by Indians than had his predecessors.
The Nez Perce had signed a treaty with the nation in 1855 that left them much of their traditional homeland, including the Wallowa Country. In 1863, gold was found on that reservation in Idaho, so the government negotiated a new treaty, centered in Lapwai, Idaho, which reduced the size of the reservation by about 90 percent. Old Joseph and the chiefs of several other Nez Perce bands did not sign, and Joseph went back to the Wallowas, where no gold had been discovered, and where he was briefly left alone.
Grant was elected in 1868. The Wallowa Country, which had been surveyed with the 1863 treaty (during the Civil War!), got its first white settlers in 1871, about the time that Old Joseph died and his son became the band’s headman. The first settlers and Indian hosts tried to get along, though fences and seasonal migrations immediately brought conflict.
Encouraged by the Presbyterian Indian Agent John Montieth (the Peace Policy gave tribal administration to the churches), knowing that Joseph’s Band had not signed the 1863 treaty (and that no Wallowa gold had been found) President Grant proposed a new treaty in 1873, giving the Indians half of the Wallowas. The government went so far as appraising improvements on the way to buying out settlers.
It of course didn’t happen—the “Proposed Reservation for Roaming Nez Perce Indians in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon” died when Indians did not build picket fences and “settle down” on the land and new settlers came into the Valley. The end of that series of broken promises was the Nez Perce War of 1877.
But here’s a new one I just learned about Grant’s dealing with Indians. The article in the March issue of the Smithsonian Magazine is titled “Ulysses S. Grant Launched an Illegal War against the Plains Indians, Then Lied About It.” And here are a couple of pertinent quotes:
“He had no legal reason for seizing the Black Hills, so he invented one, convening a secret White House cabal to plan a war against the Lakotas. Four documents, held at the Library of Congress and the United States Military Academy Library, leave no doubt: The Grant administration launched an illegal war and then lied to Congress and the American people about it. The episode hasn’t been examined outside the specialty literature on the Plains wars…
“In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the Lakotas were entitled to damages for the taking of their land. The sum, uncollected and accruing interest, now exceeds $1 billion. The Lakotas would rather have the Black Hills.”
And they would rather not have a pipeline either, but that is another series of lies. Here’s the link to the full story on Grant, the Sioux, and Custer:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ulysses-grant-launched-illegal-war-plains-indians-180960787/