The Nez Perce and Wallowa Valley
Joseph was born in the spring or summer of 1840 in eastern Oregon in the area known as the Columbia Plateau. The Nez Perce lands included what today are northeastern Oregon, southeastern Washington, and western Idaho, although Nez Perce also went as far as Montana to hunt the buffalo. Joseph’s father was Tuekakas, head of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce. When Tuekakas accepted Christianity, he also accepted the Christian name of Joseph. The son also was baptized and received the same name, with father and son later commonly referred to as Old Joseph and Young Joseph. Tuekakas had been
Born into the Cayuse tribe but married a Nez Perce and joined his wife’s people. They also had a second son, Ollokot, about three years after Young Joseph’s birth. Ollokot would become his people’s war leader, while the elder son followed his father as civil leader of his band.
The heart of the Wallowa band was the Wallowa Valley within the Wallowa Mountains in northeastern Oregon, although they moved to lower ground during winter. The valley was especially dear to Tuekakas’ heart, and his son inherited both his father’s love for the area and an unyielding determination to maintain it as his people’s homeland.
Coming of the Euro-Americans
By the time that Young Joseph was born, the Nez Perce had been acquainted with Euro-Americans for several decades. Their first significant encounter was with the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition, whom the Nez Perce welcomed as the explorers passed through on their way to the Pacific in the fall of 1805 and on their return during the following spring. These initial interactions were friendly, and before long other Euro-Americans arrived, including traders and missionaries. In the years preceding Young Joseph’s birth, Presbyterian ministers Marcus Whitman (also a physician) and Henry Spalding came to the area. Whitman went on to work among the Cayuse to the southwest, but Spalding remained with the Nez Perce, for a time becoming a close friend of Tuekakas, who accepted the new religious teachings.
In 1843, Dr. Elijah White, subagent of Indian Affairs west of the Rockies, introduced a system of criminal laws to the Nez Perce, who also had been introduced to instructions in religion, farming, and traditional EuroAmerican education (reading, writing, and arithmetic) by Spalding. In an attempt to impose a Euro-American system of organizational hierarchy on the Nez Perce, White appointed a Nez Perce named Ellis as head chief, a decision thoroughly at odds with the local control and consensus-building approach natural to the Nez Perce and one roundly ridiculed by them. Tuekakas found White’s actions offensive and began turning back toward his traditional beliefs. That movement accelerated as more settlers began establishing themselves on traditional Nez Perce land.
Then in 1847, the Cayuse, angered by Dr. Whitman’s favoritism toward the settlers and fearful that his medicine was causing an illness (measles) that was killing especially the old and very young, turned on Whitman. Cayuse killed him, his wife, and 11 others, in addition to burning the mission and taking 47 captives. The Nez Perce had no involvement in the killings, but all Indians in the region suddenly became suspect. Even the Reverend Spalding and his family, escorted by 40 Nez Perce warriors, fled the area.
Subsequent peace talks occurred at the site of the former Whitman mission and included the Nez Perce. Despite the previous elevation of Ellis to head chief, the Nez Perce chose Tuekakas as their spokesman. He explicitly rejected war and refused to support those who committed the murders. Nonetheless,
Skirmishes between settlers and Indians continued until five Cayuse were apprehended. On June 3, 1850, they were hanged, temporarily bringing the crisis to a close.
In fact, changes were under way in the region that would increase tensions and lead to additional fighting. With the end of the gold boom of the late 1840s, growing numbers of Euro-American pioneers were looking to make their living by ranching and farming, and that pursuit took many to Cayuse and Nez Perce country. Other developments also were drawing settlers. The Oregon Compromise of 1846, which established the boundaries between Canada and the United States, had led to enactment of a law permitting each settler as well as his wife to claim 320 acres each in the northwest. In the near future, a gold rush into Nez Perce lands in 1860 and the Homestead Act of 1862 (which offered 160 acres to any homesteader who would live on and cultivate the land for five years) would place more Euro-Americans in close proximity to the Nez Perce.
The Treaty of 1855
The Nez Perce numbered only about 4,000 by the mid-1850s, but much of the land they occupied promised fertile fields for settlers’ crops and fine grazing for their cattle. Isaac Stevens, governor of the Washington Territory, was determined to settle the tribes of the Columbia Plateau on reservations. To that end, in May 1855 he met with area tribes. Stevens made extensive promises, assuring the Nez Perce, for example, that they would be able to travel freely, even continuing their buffalo hunts on the Plains, if they would accept the land Stevens designated for them. As had been done with Ellis earlier, Stevens chose one individual to act as spokesman for the entire group to facilitate an agreement. That individual was Lawyer, a Christian and advocate for accommodating Euro-American wishes.
By this time, Tuekakas was convinced that he could not trust government representatives, although he still wished to live in peace. He had retreated into his traditional culture and had become a “Dreamer,” one of those who accepted the vision of Smoholla, a Wanapam who had awakened from a three-day trance to share his vision of a revitalized Indian culture that included rejection of Euro-American ways. Farming was especially harmful, Smoholla taught, because it involved slicing into their mother, the earth, with which they should live in harmony.
After 18 days, all of the area tribes apparently agreed to something, although what they agreed to was (and remains) unclear. With all treaties, Indians were at a great disadvantage because they usually could neither read nor understand spoken English. Tuekakas understood the treaty not to affect his traditional homeland (which was included within the Nez Perce reservation), but did expect to receive money and goods from the U. S. authorities. Nothing was forthcoming, however, and Tuekakas soon grew even more wary of U. S. promises, including assurances that no additional settlers would move into their lands.
Smoholla
Smoholla (circa 1815-1895) was a dreamer-prophet of the Wanapum who was born in the current state of Washington. Suffering from a humpback, short legs, and an unusually large head, but eloquent of speech, he established a considerable reputation for himself as an important figure in the Indian revitalization movement. In the late 1850s, Smoholla disappeared for a time. When he returned, he claimed to have died and undergone a journey during which he was given divine powers and a vision of the future. The teachings that he conveyed he called Washani, which refers to Dancers. Those who followed him became known as the Dreamers.
According to Smoholla, Euro-Americans were evil and their manner of life should be rejected. In the spirit world, he had been taught certain rituals, among them the Washat, a dance accompanied by the ringing of bells. The number seven was supposedly sacred, and men knelt in rows of seven behind the prophet during singing. Smoholla was accompanied during the rituals by boys dressed in white, reminiscent of altar boys at Catholic mass. Indeed, Smoholla apparently borrowed some elements of his religion from Catholic rituals he had observed. He insisted that people should live naturally off what came from the earth, and stated that because the earth was their mother, no one should cut into it (as Euro-Americans did with the plow).
As with some of the other revitalization visions, Smoholla taught that the rituals and beliefs that he offered, if followed zealously, would bring back the Indians and the game that had disappeared from overhunting. In addition, Euro-Americans would be driven out. In short, the world would return to how it had been before the traders, settlers, and soldiers came.
Although Smoholla's vision did not come to pass, his descendants continued to practice the Washani way well into the twentieth century.
Congress did not ratify the treaty until 1859, when some of the promised payments began to arrive. Despite the long wait, the Christian “treaty” Nez Perce remained patiently accepting of their new way of life. By this time, a division was well under way between those Nez Perce who accepted Christianity and reservation life and the “nontreaty” Nez Perce.
The outbreak of the Civil War exacerbated tensions between the nontreaty Indians in the region and their Euro-American neighbors, who by 1862 numbered approximately 18,000.1 In addition to farmers struggling to make a living for their families, the newcomers included criminals of many types who posed constant threats to the Indians, including their wives and daughters. Murder and rape were common dangers. From the viewpoint of U. S. officials, the tensions associated with the increased numbers of non-Indians required a simple (but not necessarily easy) solution: take more land from the tribes.
The Treaty of 1863 and the Splitting of the Nez Perce
Government representatives met at a council called by Stevens in 1863 and proposed that all Nez Perce move to a reservation near Lapwai in western Idaho, where each family would receive a small allotment of land and become farmers. The allotment approach was a common way for the government to secure additional land for settlers because it freed up most of the area in which Indians had traditionally lived and hunted. The payment for the land yielded would be the individual allotments near Lapwai. In other words, the Nez Perce would give up most of their land and be paid for what they had relinquished with a small percentage of the land that had also been theirs. The deal was analogous to asking someone to give up nine of ten dollars and be paid for the nine with the one dollar the person is permitted to keep.
The injustice of the plan was obvious to Tuekakas and his sons, who by now were fully grown men. Other Nez Perce apparently believed that they had no viable option or had so thoroughly accepted Euro-American ways, including Christianity, that they were prepared to accept the terms. Consequently, the Nez Perce decided to accept a reality that had been developing for years: a split between the treaty and nontreaty Nez Perce.
Lawyer (along with his son of the same name), Big Thunder, and their bands chose to accept reservation life near Lapwai, in part because their homes were already located within the reservation area. Other Nez Perce leaders, including Tuekakas, took their bands back home, resolving to stand together in defense of their traditional lands and way of life.
Lawyer, without authorization from the other Nez Perce, signed away five-sixths of his people’s ancestral lands, including the Wallowa Valley. In an attempt to convey Nez Perce unanimity regarding the treaty, government officials arranged for 51 Indians to mark an X on the treaty—the same number who had marked the agreement of 1855. Four years later, President Andrew Johnson announced ratification of the treaty. After the council, Tuekakas returned to the Wallowa Valley and set up posts to mark his ancestral land, determined not to yield any of it.
A New Leader
Over the next few years, Tuekakas suffered from declining health and failing eyesight. He leaned more heavily on Joseph, who would succeed him as leader of the Wallowa band, which now numbered about 500. In an early biography of Joseph, Helen Addison Howard offers a vivid, if somewhat romanticized, description of the young man who was about to embark on his mission to lead the Wallowa Nez Perce:
At full growth he possessed an athletic figure and a handsome, intelligent face. He stood six feet two inches in his moccasins, weighed two hundred pounds, and was broad of shoulder and deep of chest. With a square chin, finely shaped
Features, and black piercing eyes he was an Indian Apollo. He had a dignified and quiet demeanor, and he clung to the aboriginal habit of wearing his hair in two long braids over his shoulders.2
As Tuekakas lay dying in 1871, he called for his elder son and imparted a message that would become Joseph’s lifelong mission. On a trip to Washington, D. C., in 1879, Joseph recalled his father’s words, although the prose cannot be assumed to be precisely Joseph’s, as it went through translation and editing before being published in the North American Review. “Always remember,” Tuekakas said, “that your father never sold his country. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few years more, and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.”
Joseph promised his father that he would protect his grave even with his own life and later carried out his father’s wishes by burying him in his beloved valley. Joseph assured his Washington audience that he loved his homeland more than “all the rest of the world,” and offered a fundamental principle by which he had tried to live: “A man who would not love his father’s grave is worse than a wild animal.”3
World History
