Nez Perce

• The Nez Perce were of the Idaho Plateau. They habited west of the Crow in the Rocky Mountains north of Yellowstone River. They were still consider to be of the Plains Indians though they were more commonly known as Plateau Indians. The Shoshone were south of the Nez Perce.
  
• They obtained horses in the early 1700's, about 20 years after the Shoshone. The Plains Apache probably acquired them around 1682, while every household of the Hasanai, owned at least four horses by 1690. So was born the classic image of Plains Indians: the arrival of the horse gave rise to the war-bonneted, face-painted, mobile people whose way of life, at once spiritual and militaristic, captured the world's imagination. (The Apaloosa was a breed developed primarily by the Nez Perce and Cayuse.)
  
• Abundant, dramatically beautiful, and crisscrossed by large, isolated valleys that provided security from enemy attack, the Columbia Rvier Plateau was home to a variety of peoples-the Nez Perce, Cayuse, Walla Walla, Flathead, Yakima, and others. Like most tribes of California and the Great Basin, they were generally hunters and gatherers, their seasonal travels dictated by food sources.
  
  Spring was the time for men to hunt rabbits and waterfowl and gather mussels from the rivers while women harvested roots. In summer the rivers filled with salmon, which the men netted or speared from platforms jutting over the rushing water. The scene shifted in fall to favorite bulb-digging grounds, where deer, elk, and other big game were also plentiful. By October it was time to return to winter villages with the stores of food for the cold months ahead, when women wove and repaired baskets while men played games and told stories that imparted sared traditions and practical knowledge to the young.
  
  In the winter the Plateau Indians also held ceremonial dances to assure good harvests, promote social harmony, and give protection from evil forces. They believed that each individual had a guardian spirit that provided a unique identity and a special skill in hunting, perhaps, or healing or quilling. Care was needed to protect the power; if it resided in a medicine bag, for example, that object must be kept in a particular way. Allowing it to be mishandled, damaged, or touched by the wrong person could have disastrous results.
  
  One malevolent force that could not be counteracted by traditional means was a new breed of disease. Geography had spared the Plateau from earlier white incursions, but contact was only a matter of time. When it occurred, the germs that swept through tribal populations caused not only terrible suffering-between 1780 and 1810, European diseases killed more than half the native population of the northern Rockies-but also a crisis of belief. Shamans were powerless against the new afflictions, and people could not help but wonder if the wise men had lost their spiritual strength. As if to deepen people's fears, a huge volcanic eruption in the Cascade Mountains in the late 1700's had deposited a suffocating blanket of "dry snow"-volcanic ash- over large areas and convinced many that the world was literally coming to an end.
  
  Over the next generation, the traditional winter dances of the Plateau were joined by a new ceremony, called the Prophet Dance for its connection to a mystical new breed of holy men whose voices carried a message of imminent and apocalyptic change. According to one prophetic vision, Chief, the supreme being who had ceated the world with Coyote's help, told the people: "Coyote and myself will not be seen again until the Earth-Woman is very old. Then we shall return to earth, for it will require a new change by that time. When he returned, all the spirits of the dead would come with him to dwell together with the living, and the Earth-Woman would regain her natural form and live as a mother among her children. On that day, Chief concluded, "things will be made right, and there will be much happiness."
  
• One of those reached by the Christian message [of the Black Robes-Catholic priests] was a young Nez Perce, Hol-lol-sote-tote, who heard Spokan Garry talk in the winter of 1830 and returned to his village brimming with excitement. His father was a village chief who had hosted Lewis and Clark in 1805 and never forgot their description of the benefits that would result from friendship between the Plateau people and the Americans. After discussions through the winter, the Nez Perce and their allies, the Flatheads, decided to send out a party of four men to seek the help of Christian holy men.
  
  The potent medicine they hoped the missionaries could share with them would make the Nez Perce and Flathead people "immortal before the Great Spirit," as one of them put it. On a practical level, the strong medicine might include guns that would also make them indestructible before the Blackfeet, the Sioux, and other bitter enemies. The small band set off from Montana in the spring of 1831 and reached St. Louis only after a harrowing five month, 1,500 mile journey by river and trail. Once there, however, the unusual delegation caught the fancy of the white press, sparking a flurry of activity as several missionary groups mounted new efforts west of the Rockies.
  
  One of the first to reach the Plateau was a Canadian-born Methodist, Jason Lee, who worked among the Chinook and Kalapuya in Oregon's Willamette Valley. About the same time, a Presbyterian society in Boston sent the pious physician Marcus Whitman and his wife and fellow missionary, Marcissa, to Ft Walla Walla in southeastern Oregon. Farther east, in Montana, Pierre DeSmet set up his much-anticipated Catholic mission in the Flathead country primed for it by Old Ignace.
  
• In the 1870's, a drama captured the public's imagination: the flight of the Nez Perce toward sanctuary in Canada....
  

I wish to insert here that the Nez Perce could boast they had never killed a white man before the following happened, always trying to avoid confrontation and retaliation. Even though white settlers were settling on their territory, they still refused to fight until after being given 30 days to move. One observer of the story wrote "in his [Chief Joseph] long career....cannot accuse the government...of one single act of justice."--Information from The World of North American Indians by National Geographic....

U.S. authorities, bowing to the demands of Oregon pioneers, had opened Nez Perce lands to white settlement and urged the Indians to move to a relatively large reservation in Idaho. Most of the Nez Perce agreed to settle there in 1855. But when gold was discovered on reservation land eight years later, they were forced out; under considerable duress, about 2,500 of them agreed to move to a much smaller reservation.

But 1,500 others refused to live on any reservation and instead settled along the lower Salmon River and in Oregon's Wallowa Valley. The leader of the Wallowa Nez Perce, Chief Joseph, insisted that his people had never agreed to give up the Wallowa country.  Ultimately, however, he and his fellow chiefs saw the hard reality of the situation-right or wrong, they had no choice but to leave.

The Nez Perce were on their way to Idaho in mid-June of 1877 when three young warriors took the opportunity to settle some old scores against local whites. Joseph and the others, fearing the army would retaliate against any Nez Perce they could find, flew a white flag and sought to parley with a cavlary unit of about 100 men near White Bird Creek. The troopers ignored the flag and attacked. It was a disastrous mistake: the outnumbered Nez Perce killed 34 soldiers without losing one of their own men.

Now there was no alternative but to fight on the run. Heading northeast, the Nez Perce hoped to find refuge among their friends, the Crow, in Montana. Or perhaps they could reach Sitting Bull and his followers in Canada, where they had fled after the Battle of the Little Bighorn the previous year.

The fighting retreat of the Nez Perce, spanning 1,700 miles and nearly four months, was one of the most remarkable feats of arms in American history. Pursued across Idaho by Gen Oliver O Howard, territorial military commander, they outmaneuvered his troops at every turn. In a battle above Clearwater River in July, the Nez Perce kept 600 soldiers equipped with artillery pinned down for almost 36 hours while Chief Joseph led their old men, women, and children toward Montana and out of Howard's territory.

Joseph, leading a group of some 800 men, women, and children, desperately pushed up the tortuous Lolo Trail over the Bitterroot Mountains and, they thought, out of Howard's reach. But as they were resting at Big Hole, 200 soldiers from Ft Missoula in Montana attacked at dawn on August 9 and overran the camp before a fercious counterattack drove them back. The Nez Perce suffered heavy casualties, but after 2 days they escaped again. Another column caught Joseph's people on September 13 and was beaten back, but the Nez Perce took little joy in this victory: Crow scouts, their former friends, rode with the soldiers.  Now Canada was their only hope.

On September 30 the exhausted fugitives rested by Snake Creek on the northern edge of the Bear Paw Mountains, less than 40 miles from the border. There troops from eastern Montana led by Col Nelson A Miles launched a sudden attack. Nez Perce riflemen were able to cut down 60 charging cavalrymen and forced Miles into a standoff. While the chiefs argued for five cold, miserable days about what to do, more than 200 Nez Perce slipped through the lines and made it to Canada. But 400 others were still trapped.

On October 5 Joseph rode into Miles' camp to surrender. There were bullet scratches on his forehead, wrist, and back, and bullet holes in his shirt sleeves and leggings.


"I am tired of fighting....The old men are all dead....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....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."-Chief Joseph, Nez Perce

Miles assured Joseph that his people could return to the Idaho reservation, but Gen William Tecumseh Sherman overruled Miles and ordered the Nez Perce to be imprisoned at Ft Leavenworth in Kansas. After a brief stay they were sent to the Quapaw Agency in Indian Territory-later Oklahoma-and then to a hot, oppressively humid site on Salt Creek in the Cherokee Outlet, where many fell prey to disease.

After seven years in this alien place, Chief Joseph and his followers were relocated to the Colville Reservation in Washington. From there he tirelessly petitioned the US government to allow his people to return to their reservation, pointedly citing Miles' pledge to him in 1877. In January 1879 Joseph made a trip to Washington, DC where he spoke with riveting eloquence before an audience of congressmen, cabinet members, and other dignitaries eager to meet the already legendary "Indian Napolean."

"You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born free should be contented penned up and denied liberty....Let me be a free man-free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade, where I choose...free to think and act and talk for myself."-Chief Joseph


But it was no use. Not even personal intervention on Joseph's behalf by his old adversaries, Nelson Miles and Oliver Howard, succeeded in winning him the right to live where he chose: with his people in Idaho. Joseph was forced to remain on the Colville Reservation, and there he died in 1904.

Like other struggles by native peoples of the Plateau, the Great Basin, California, or elsewhere in the West to resist the juggernaut of American expansion, the Nez Perce's may have been doomed from the start. But in his life and deeds, Chief Joseph-whose tribal name, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, meant Thunder Traveling to Loftier Heights-came to embody a larger spirit, a strength of will that might not quarantee victory but would not allow him to bow his head before any conqueror.


Top

Nootka (truly the Nuu-chal-nuth)

• The Nuu-chal-nuth inhabited the lower Southwest corner of Canada on the coast. The Bella Coola (Nuxalk) and Kwakiutl were to the north, wth the Chinook to the south.
  
• When Captain James Cook sailed into the Nootka Sound in 1778, a squadron of 50 foot war canoes approached his ship. A shaman threw handfuls of feathers and began along harangue. Was it a greeting? A declaration of war? It turned out to be an invitation to trade, and Cook sailed off with a hold full of sea otter pelts-an event that would later the course of history in the Pacific Northwest.
  
  Even after years of contact, misapprehensions continued. Some years after Cook's departure, British Captain George Vancouver and Spanish Captain Bodega y Quadra met in Nootka Sound to settle their nations' conflicting land claims in the region. To honor their visit, Maquinna, powerful chief of the Nuu-chal-nuth tribe (mistakenly named Nootka by the foreigners), prepared a feast that included great vats of fricasseed porpoise, whale, seal, and other rich and oily delicacies. The two Europeans, knowing from experience what the menu was likely to be, brought their own food and drink-and so delivered an insult that no native leader would soon forget.
  
• A two-thousand mile ribbon of misty, forested seacoast runs along the continent's northwest margin, from the Gulf of Alaska to northern California, unfurling a landscape of astonishing beauty and abundance. A wall of snowcapped uplands-the Coast Mountains-rises abruptly on the landward side, its highest peaks cresting more than 15,000 feet above sea level. Rivers cascade down the slopes, past majestic stands of cedar, hemlock, spruce, and fir. The climate is mild and moist; rainfall can measure more than 200 inches a year in the wettest sections. Deer, elk, mountain goats, and grizzly bear graze the high meadows.
  
  To the west, deep ocean currents flood in from the Pacific, spilling past a long chain of barrier islands into a labyrinth of bays, inlets, reefs, marshes, fiords, and estuaries and generating one of the richest concentrations of marine life anywhere in the world. Vast quantities of fish inhabit this coast, including flounder, cod, rockfish, 400-pound halibut, and enormous schools of herring and smelt. Seals, sea lions, and sea otters swim in-shore to feed. Clams, mussels, crabs, and sea urchins litter the beaches, along with thousands of seabird eggs. A procession of whales and porpoises cruises offshore.
  
  But from the earliest times, the main resource was salmon in five different species. Beginning in late spring, the first huge runs would move inland, swarming over sandbars, battling river rapids, to spawn and die by the countless thousands. In just a few months, a Northwest Coast fisherman could spear or net enough salmon to sustain his family throughout the year. So massive was the influx, and so predictable, that some people came to think salmon were immortal. According to legend, a tribe of salmon people spent the winter in houses beneath the sea. Then, when the season warmed, they changed into fish and swam upriver to offer their bodies for human consumption. Their souls, released from the flesh, would return to the ocean.
  
• From the rain forest came the wood of the majestic red cedar-strong, aromatic, and resistant to rot. Massive cedar logs formed the framework of native houses, and split cedar planking sheathed their sides. The hull of each canoe began as a single cedar trunk, which the boat builders felled, scooped out with stone tools, then steamed to shape. Cedar boxes, intricately carved, served as storage space, household furniture, and containers for food and fish oil.
  
  Clothing and blankets were woven from cedar bark, which Northwest Coast women softened by pounding then cut into strips. Split cedar root (along with spruce root and grasses) became the raw material for the region's superb basketwork, with mesh so tight that the baskets held water. And a cedar-root raincoat kept the wearer dry in any weather.
  
  This bounty of sea and forest gave rise to a way of life unique in all the Americas.  Here such peoples as the Tlingit and Tsimshian, the Nuu-chal-nuth, Nuxalk, and Chinook fished, feasted, and vied among themselves for power and prestige....The Nuu-chal-nuth and Makah were renowned for their seamanship, venturing far into the ocean to harpoon the ultimate prey: whales. All of the region's people placed great importance on generosity, holding lavish ceremonies in which they gave out food, blankets, weapons, and other valuables.
  
• In each community the social order was built on family status. Centrueis ago, as the coast people's forebears settled in, certain families gained control of the best fishing grounds, berry patches, and cedar groves, thus appropriating most of the wealth. In time, as the rights to these assets passed from one generaton to the next, a complex social hierarchy developed that contrasted sharply with most other cultures in native North America.
  
  At the top stood a handful of aristocratic families-the taises, or chiefs of the wealthiest lineages and their close relatives. Some might be warriors, others powerful shamans, and still others trade chiefs who controlled the lines of commerce with other tribes or villages. Among the Nuu-chal-nuth and Makah, the captains of whaling canoes enjoyed the highest prestige.
  
  Below these elite families were their more distant relatives-the michimis, or ordinary people. Unlike their rich cousins, who almost never soiled their hands in labor, the nonelite relatives did much of the community's physical work. They felled the cedars, built the houses, hunted the game, repaired the fish weirs. On occasion, an artisan of unusual skill might rise above his normal station. But as a rule, rank was dictated by birth.
  
  Except for slaves. Up and down the coast, slavery was the bitter consequence of defeat in battle. Ambitous nobles would raid distant villages, looting valuables and seizing hostages. High-ranking prisoners might be sent home in exchange for a ransom payment, but all others remained the property of their captors. They were generally well treated. Slaves lived in the houses of their owners, ate the same food, and performed the same day-to-day tasks as other villagers. But their lives were always in jeopardy. When erecting a new family house, for example, some chiefs observed a custom of burying the body of a freshly killed slave under each corner post.
  
• Within each village the more powerful lineages took precedence. But the chief of every household automatically held noble rank. He presided from a raised platform along the rear wall, opposite the door, where he lived with his wife and younger children; an elaborately carved screen often separated this private space from the rest of the building. Other families in the household, all related to the house chief, lived along the two side walls in order of rank. Slaves laid their blankets near the entrance.
  
  Social standing told only half the story, however. Each household chief belonged to one of several hereditary clans-Owl, Whale, Sea Lion, Beaver, and others-in which everyone was presumably descended from a common ancestor. Additionally, communities were divided into two groups of roughly equal size....usually Raven or Eagle or in some Wolf or Raven.
  
  The distinction between the two sides was as basic as the difference between day and night. All Ravens, no matter how distant their blood relationship, felt a sense of spiritual kinship and commonly addressed each other as "brother" or "sister." At the same time, neither side could get along without the other. When a Raven chief wanted to build a new house or erect a totem pole, he would appeal to his Eagle counterpart, who then sent workmen to do the job. The very survival of the tribe depended on such cooperation, since marriage could occur only across group lines: Ravens wed Eagles, never other Ravens.
  
• The most dramatic celebration of family pride was the potlatch, an elaborate ritual of feasting, dancing, storytelling, and gift-giving that was a vital part of every Northwest Coast society. Whenever an important family moved into a new house, the occasion demanded a potlatch. So, too, did any dynastic event-a birth or a marriage, the death of a chief, the succession of an heir. Sometimes a clan leader would host a potlatch to repay a debt or erase a shame. No honors or titles were deemed valid until the recipient gave a potlatch "to make my name good," as the saying went.
  
  The festivities could last for days or even weeks. There would be formal speeches recounting the family legends, dance performances, a display of heirlooms and family emblems-all certifying the right of the host to his titles and privileges. Finally, he would hand out presents, divesting himself of blankets, animal pelts, carved boxes, shell necklaces, cartons of fish oil, weapons, and-most valuable of all-engraved metal slabs called coppers. The more lavish his generosity, the more honor he gained for himself and his lineage. some truly great chiefs were said to have distributed all they owned, then burned down their houses and executed their slaves. Such willful extravagance was the ultimate social gesture, worthy of enduring praise and esteem. (In practice, at least some of the wealth given out at potlatches came back to the owner, since the principal guest was honor bound to host a potlatch in return.)
  
  Potlatches were generally held in winter, when the coastal people turned from hunting and fishing to a virtually nonstop round of festivals and ceremonies. It was the season of spirits and demons, of mythic beings from distant worlds who arrived in the villages to the accompaniment of rattles, drums, and eerie whistles, inspiring awe and terror among viewers. Secret dance societies marked the occasion with ancient and sacred rites.
  
• The celebrated navigator James Cook sighted the coast at Vancouver Island in March 1778 and dropped anchor at a place he thought the inhabitants called Nootka. He heard wrong, in fact, since no local language contained this particular word. Even so, the place where Cook anchored continues to be called Nootka Sound, and its inhabitants, the Nuu-chal-nuth, became widely known as the Nootka.
  
  Cook stayed nearly a month, charting the waters and making friends. On first impression he thought Nuu-chal-nuth people "mild and inoffensive"-until their trading savvy revealed itself. "These people got a greater medley and variety of things from us than any other," he noted. By the time Cook set sail, his ship had been stripped of virtually all surplus metal: copper kettles, tin tea canisters, brass candlesticks and bureau fittings, even the buttons off officers' uniforms. In return, Cook filled his hold with native artifacts-and a fortune in sea otter pelts.
  
  The success of Cook's voyage ignited a worldwide frinzy of excitement. Ships from England, Spain, Portugal, France, and the soon-to-be-independent United States swarmed into the region. Profits were unbelievably high. One trader from New England arrived in 1785 and swapped some cheap metal items for 560 pelts, which commanded $20,000 in the China market....American ships alone gathered some 350,000 sea otter pelts altogether, for which native suppliers received an estimated $7 million worth of trade goods.
  
• In the end there was plenty for everyone, native and foreigner alike. Among the Haida, prominent families were amassing fortunes in coppers, blankets, firearms, and other valuable items. Down the coast it was the same. White traders coming into the region often preferred to deal with one or two powerful families, who became exceptionally wealthy as a result. Such was the case with the Nuu-chal-nuth chief, Maquinna.
  
  By the late 1700's Maquinna had established himself as the most powerful figure in Nootka Sound. Playing host to visiting explorers like Cook and Vancouver, he became the principal middleman between the foreign sea captains and native fur hunters living in other sections of the island. And while most of his fortune came from trade, Maquinna did not ignore other opportunities. To avenge an insult from an American captain in 1803, he seized the ship and summarily killed nearly all if its crewmen. (Maquinna spared the blacksmith, John Jewett, and set him to work repairing guns and metal tools.  Jewett's later account caused a sensation among readers back east.) In addition, the chief took possession of most of the vessel's cargo.
  
  To celebrate hishaul, Maquinna stage one of the grandest potlatches yet seen on that stretch of coast. Among the presents he was said to have given out were 200 muskets, 200 yards of cloth, 100 chemises, 100 mirrors, and seven barrels of gunpowder. After that, no one questioned his status as the paramount chief of the region.
  
• While the land based fur trade opened new opportunities for those who lived close to the inland forests, it spelled disaster for some others. As sea captains stopped calling on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Nuu-chal-nuth quietly declined.
  
  During the fur trade era, most whites came only briefly to the Northwest Coast, conducting their business and then departing. Even in the trading posts of the giant fur companies, the permanent foreign population remained small. As a tiny minority dependent on the goodwill of their native hosts, the white traders tended to treat the local population with a certain respect. Bonds of genuine affection gradually took hold. Many of the whites took Indian wives. Then, in scarcely more than a decade, everything changed.
  
  The governments of Canada and the United States settled a long-standing boundary dispute in 1846, in effect opening the region to settlers. Before long, shiny yellow nuggets began showing up at the trading posts. There was a ripple of excitement over some gold deposits found in 1852 in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Then a true bonanza followed on the Fraser River in 1857.
  
  White settlers poured in by the boatload: prospectors from England, the eastern US, and California, then tradesmen, innkeepers, shipping agents, carpenters, farmers, bankers, brewers-all the supporting characters of a full-fledged gold rush. The effect was devastating. These new immigrants, unlike the whites of fur trade days, viewed the region's native inhabitants as "dirty, nasty-smelling creatures" with swarthy complexions and bodies that stank of fish oil. (Few settlers seemed to notice that most Indians bathed regularly in the ocean, and whites rarely.) Native customs were regarded with scorn; native art seemed "grossly obscene." A few years earlier, when a group of 500 Haida had paddled into Victoria, hoping to trade, they so alarmed the fledgling colony that Governor James Douglas (himself a former trader married to the granddaughter of a Cree chief) begged them to leave.
  
  But still more Indians came, and the pressures multiplied. Most settled in squalid slums on the city's outskirts, elbow to elbow with white laborers and roustabouts. Alcohol flowed freely, and minor disputes exploded into ethic violence. A cry went out for the Indians' removal. "How much longer are we to be inflicted with the intolerable nuisance of hideous, half-naked, drunken savages...reeling about and shouting?" demanded an angry letter to a Candian newspaper in 1859.
  
  Equally dismaying was the growing trade in female flesh. In the past, native chiefs had occasionally made village women available to European traders and explorers, with no taint of dishonor. The trade goods obtained in return would be handed out at the next potlatch. Now village women, usually slaves or commoners, would spend their nights "earning blankets" (as the saying went) at Victoria's brothels and dance halls. Returning home with their pay, some carried the deadly seeds of syphilis.
  
  Other diseases also took a dreadful toll. Malaria, influenza, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and the like had struck periodically since the early days of the fur trade. Now came a smallpox epidemic that raged through the Victoria slums in 1862. In the crowded conditions of the native shantytowns, it spread like an invisible, poisonous fog. The authorities seized the opportunity to evict the inhabitants and burn their houses.
  
  The refugees fled up the coast to their old villages, bearing the infection with them. Travelers reported seeing bodies festering along the shoreline, with canoes, blankets, and guns scattered nearby. The disease touched almost every village on Vancouver Island and on the mainland opposite. The death count among the Nuu-chal-nuth, Kwakiutl, and Coast Salish reached one in three. Among the Haida, so many died that entire communities ceased to function. The one exception was Sitka, where the Russian authorities had seen fit to vaccinate all residents, Tlingit and white alike. Elsewhere, down the length of the Northwest Coast, an estimated 20,000 native people died.