by Timothy Egan
“Rah, rah, rah!” The spectators at Athletic Field took up a chant, and one of Joseph’s escorts said they were cheering in his honor. Turn and wave, he was told—they want to see you! The new boots on his feet were muddied by the stone-and-clay gumbo of the field, and the wind bit at his face. A thick woolen blanket was wrapped around his shoulders. It was late November, the darkest, wettest, bleakest time of the year, days when the sun might not be seen for weeks and the light would flee in midafternoon. “The most noted Indian now living,” as the papers put it, was in Seattle at the invitation of the Washington Historical Society. What better exhibition could they put on? A famous Indian! An exotic from the past! See him and hear him and touch him while he’s still alive! He was allowed to leave the virtual prison of his plot of reservation ground on the Columbia River Plateau, to cross the mountains and come to speak as the society’s guest. Joseph had accepted the offer, not because he liked being on display, but because he hoped to persuade influential people to take up his cause.
Not since Teddy Roosevelt came to town a few months earlier had Seattle been so stirred by a visitor. The president gave a speech before fifty thousand people, urging citizens of the Northwest to conserve their salmon and forests. A big news story on the Sunday before Joseph’s arrival included pictures of the chief on his latest trip to Washington, D.C., there to “plead with the Great Father for the return of the Wallowa Valley, the home of his fathers.” He had met with Roosevelt on the visit, to little avail; the Nez Perce leader was poor, aging and without any leverage but his renown. That celebrity had given him access, if not influence, during his extensive travels over the past five years. In the spring of 1900, he’d met President William McKinley. While on the East Coast that year, he was very much in demand. Would he come to New York for the dedication of General Grant’s tomb? No, the chief said, he couldn’t afford it. Well then, Buffalo Bill Cody offered to pay his way and put Joseph up at the Astor House with him, which did more for the consummate showman than it did for the single-minded cause of the Nez Perce chief. In Manhattan, Joseph walked around town one day in a full war bonnet, at the prompting of Cody; the rest of the time he wore a suit jacket.
“Did you ever scalp anyone?” a woman asked him in New York. Joseph didn’t speak English. But using a translator, he tried to convey a single message: the once mighty Nez Perce, beloved and celebrated by Lewis and Clark and expeditions that followed, known for their horsemanship, their good looks and manners, their prosperous villages spreading over three states, were in crisis. The Joseph band, which had never converted to Christianity and refused to acknowledge a clearly fraudulent rewrite of a treaty, had dwindled to 127 people. The war of 1877 had ended badly for the bedraggled tribe, an assemblage of elders, women, children, babies and very few warriors. They had eluded about two thousand American soldiers in a chase that took them to the depths of Hells Canyon, over the most rugged mountains of Idaho and into Yellowstone National Park, north through Montana to the Canadian border, where they would have been safe had they been able to cross over. Along the way, small groups of Nez Perce had twice surprised and attacked much larger battalions of American troops. Their luck ran out at Bear Paw, on the last day of September. The Indians were hungry, some of them frostbitten, when the soldiers surrounded them. Joseph surrendered with the memorable words, “My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
The survivors, and Nez Perce sympathetic to Joseph who were not part of the war, were manacled, shipped to a prison in Kansas and then to a six-hundred-acre compound that was little more than a POW camp in the designated Indian Territory of Oklahoma. During the first four years in Oklahoma, 103 of the 431 Nez Perce died. By 1885, Joseph and his followers were allowed to move to the Colville reservation of central Washington, home to more than half a dozen different tribal bands, none of them particularly friendly to the Nez Perce. Colville was still a long way from the green meadows of northeastern Oregon, which Joseph’s people had been promised by earlier treaty. The struggle to see the sun rise again in the Wallowas consumed the last quarter century of Joseph’s life.
The press in New York wasn’t interested in any of that. Broken treaties were old news. The Wallowa Valley? Couldn’t find it on a map. A wild Indian on Broadway, especially one so photogenic, in full-feathered head bonnet—that was a story. “The Red Napoleon,” reported the New York Sun, was “tall, straight as an arrow, and wonderfully handsome.”
It was on his second trip to the East, months before the football game, that he met Teddy Roosevelt. At the same time, his former enemy, General Oliver Howard, whose six hundred men had been surprised by one of the attacks from a small force of fleeing Nez Perce, invited the chief to speak at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. This institution was a high-minded boarding school for Indians from all over the country. The students came in as savages, educators proclaimed, and came out as model citizens. Joseph spoke to the children in his native tongue, as always, which only a few of them could understand. What exactly did he say? The teachers and important guests gasped when they heard the translation: “For a long time I wanted to kill General Howard.”
In Seattle, Joseph’s escort was a red-bearded, buoyant young professor of history at the University of Washington, Edmond S. Meany. Like Curtis, Meany was a Northwest Renaissance man, drawn to the wonders of the fledgling city by the sea. And like Curtis, he had come from the Midwest and a family that had lost its father at a young age, forcing Meany to be the breadwinner while still a teenager. Meany did not look down on Curtis for his lack of education, and Curtis did not begrudge Meany his advanced degrees. They became fast friends. Meany was tall, persuasive, an intellectual omnivore. Before his thirtieth birthday, he had started a news agency, been elected to the state legislature—where he was instrumental in passing a bill that made tuition free at the two state colleges—and climbed the highest peaks in the region. He also founded his own alpine club, the Mountaineers. He was fascinated by native people, especially those east of the Cascades, and took up their cause while still a student, earning his master’s degree in 1901 with a thesis on Chief Joseph. The professor and the tribal leader were so close that Joseph gave Meany an Indian name, Three Knives. It was Meany who publicized the notion that this most famous of living Indians was “practically a prisoner of war, receiving rations and requiring permission to leave the reservation.” Though he taught forestry, American history and the occasional literature class, Meany was at his professorial best when expounding on Indian life. He wanted his students to see Indians not as an academic subject, not as trees to be closely examined or distant historical figures to be deconstructed, but as living people who understood the Northwest better than any who came after them.
On the day Joseph arrived in Seattle, Meany put him up at the Lincoln Hotel and said he would try to find a car to drive him to the game. The press would surely want a picture of that. Seven years after Angeline’s death, just having an Indian in the city—any Indian—was a curiosity. Seattle had bulged to 150,000 people and was growing like blackberry bramble in midsummer; the roads were lined with horse-drawn carriages, streetcars, bicycles and sputtering automobiles. Mechanical sluicing machines and hoses hissed around the clock, leveling the hills. And down in Pioneer Square, a large cedar totem pole, carved by Tlingit Indians, was erected as the centerpiece for the historic heart of the city.
Meany introduced Joseph to the only other man in Seattle who knew as much about native people as he did—the portrait photographer with the studio downtown. And in Curtis the old chief found a motivated listener. They were the same height, well over six feet, though separated by thirty years. Curtis asked Joseph about his distinctive hairstyle, a combed-back upsweep rising several inches above his forehead, with long braids on his chest. In Nez Perce culture, Joseph explained, a man who had fought the enemy many times, or had scalped a living man, was entitled to this kind of proud, showy display. He talked about how much he and h
is fellow native northwesterners hated their exile in Oklahoma, where it was hot, dry, flat and windswept when it wasn’t cold, tornado-lashed, hail-pelted or barren. His people had starved there, and longed to see green forests and blue mountains. But the most revealing thing the chief told Curtis was about the Nez Perce War of 1877. Contrary to what had been accepted by most historians, Joseph was not the Indian Napoleon. He was not a crafty general, or even a particularly good warrior. There were other Nez Perce who planned the attacks. Joseph simply tried to hold his people together, to speak for them and argue for a resolution that would prevent total annihilation. The fact that they had eluded the cavalry for so long was due to luck and guile, not good generalship.
Curtis was astonished: the official story was wrong. Here was another chance to correct the record. And he was moved by the saga. Who could hear of the last hundred years of the Nez Perce—from rescuing Lewis and Clark at a time when they were starving, to being chased down as outlaws through the first national park—and not feel that a tremendous injustice had been done? But Curtis had vowed to Grinnell and in print at the start of his pictorial odyssey not to revisit Indian political fights or to get into contemporary clashes over treaty rights. The stories of mistreatment, lies and betrayal were not worth rehashing. He wanted more than anything to take Joseph’s picture.
Would the Nez Perce leader sit for him? Joseph demurred. He would think about it. Curtis pleaded. Take a look, he suggested, at the work he had already done on the Nez Perce, some of it on the walls of his studio. One picture was a full-body portrait of a child no more than a few months old, tightly wrapped in painted buckskin against a wood backboard with a flower drawing on it, entitled Nez Perce Babe, from 1900. In that face was the future of Joseph’s people. Another picture showed an adult man in all his glory. He had the good looks that the Nez Perce were known for, with a fine, prominent nose, a strong jaw and full-flowing hair, swept back from his brow in the way Joseph wore his, braids exposed down to the middle of his chest. His was not the face of a dying race or a conquered people, and it epitomized the positive feelings that Curtis had of this tribe. He labeled it Typical Nez Perce, from 1899.
OLD CHIEF LIKES CITY,
MEETS A FAMOUS INDIAN ARTIST
THEN TAKES A BATH
His every move was front-page news, even if the tone was patronizing and superficial in the extreme. Curtis was referred to in the Post-Intelligencer as a “professional Indian tamer,” akin to a man who could calm lions in a circus tent. The centerpiece of Joseph’s visit to Seattle was a speech, sold out for weeks in advance, that the Nez Perce leader was to deliver at the city’s largest auditorium on Saturday night. But there was something else on the calendar that November weekend that had people in a frenzy: the football showdown. “The championship of a stretch of country from the Rockies to the sea lay in the balance,” the Seattle Times noted. “It was an important contest, beside which the corruption of the steel trust, the robbery of a canal or the polypus in an emperor’s larynx sinks into insignificance.” The 1903 Sun Dodgers of the University of Washington were in the midst of an unbeaten season. November 20 was the big match with Nevada. Joseph’s hosts had concocted an idea that would bring the two worlds together: perhaps the Indian chief would like to watch the region’s biggest football game? But how would this help him return to the Wallowas? And why would a contest with an odd-shaped pigskin be more significant than all the major news of the day? What could it possibly mean for the Nez Perce, or even for the polyp in the emperor’s throat?
On Friday afternoon, game day, Joseph boarded a streetcar to make his way up the steep hill from downtown to the field on Capitol Hill. The chief, accompanied by Meany, was led to the Washington sideline, where he was handed three cigars. The game was a ferocious defensive battle: players without face protection slammed into cold mud, bones crunching on many of the tackles, blood splattering. The crowd did an Indian chant—common at Sun Dodger games—“Skookum, Skookum! Washington!” Newspaper stories said the chief watched the game in stony silence: “his face never changed expression except when the ball was kicked, and then he appeared to laugh.” Late in the fourth quarter, Washington got a safety. The 2–0 score held, and the Sun Dodgers—later known as the Huskies—emerged triumphant, kings of the Pacific Coast.
NEZ PERCE CHIEF SEES FIRST FOOTBALL
SMILES THREE TIMES
After the game, Joseph was asked his impressions of this wildly popular American sport, a game that was coming under fire for its excessive violence and serious injuries. Joseph spoke for nearly a minute to Meany, who translated.
“I saw a lot of white men almost fight today,” Joseph said. “I do not think this is good.”
The address, the following day, was a disappointment. Joseph appeared tired, his posture showing his weariness. He did not engage the audience. He did not tell war stories, or give accounts of derring-do, or offer details about fighting white soldiers in Yellowstone National Park, or explain how his people survived for so long on so little food, or drop the names of presidents and other important people he had met over the years. He spoke entirely in his own language, and what he had to say was the narrative of people who were always good to the Americans and had been betrayed for their friendliness. His life was full of broken promises. He wanted his homeland back. He wanted to return to ground rightfully belonging to the Nez Perce. “A lot of grunts” was how one of the papers summarized his talk.
On his last day in Seattle, Joseph went with Meany to visit Curtis again at his studio on Second Avenue. Three Knives had talked him into it: the chief would sit for a Curtis portrait. Curtis had watched Joseph’s speech on Saturday, the audience growing restless when the chief failed to show up at the scheduled time, and then sitting on their hands while he explained the plight of the Nez Perce in words none of them could understand. Curtis had been moved by the chief’s quiet charisma, on his insistence on returning to the Wallowas, and he was convinced that the tribe had been robbed. He made plans to visit Joseph at the Colville reservation, to study Nez Perce ways, record their language on his wax cylinder and shoot pictures of the tribe.
In a studio stuffed with Navajo rugs and Hopi baskets, Curtis had the chief sit with Meany and Red Thunder. They were entertained by ten-year-old Harold Curtis, called Hal, getting a glimpse of how his father worked with native subjects. Curtis tried to find the man in the face, experimenting with the light, studying the angles. The chief looked worn, older than his years, gloomy, and it seemed to Curtis that much of the life was drained from him. Curtis took a few shots of Joseph and his nephew sitting down, shrunken in their seats, Meany standing over them in the middle. All three men are glowering. Then Curtis had the chief sit by himself, and he tried a number of poses. One was with feathered headdress, looking directly into the camera, a shot later finished as a photogravure titled Joseph—Nez Perce. This portrait shows him with a dozen rows of shell necklaces, the traditional bonnet tied beneath his chin, no hair visible. The chief is frowning. His gaze is distant. Then a second portrait, this one with the full upsweep of Joseph’s hair, no headdress. The light is less gauzy, more harsh, the stare intense, the frown still there but somewhat empathetic. The picture shows even more of the topography of Joseph’s extraordinary face: scars and nicks, prominent lines formed from habitual sorrow. He’s wearing two large shell earrings, each bigger than a silver dollar. This photogravure was also titled Joseph—Nez Perce. It has multiple dimensions and conveys multiple emotions: that stare, those eyes, that hair, that mouth. It is unforgiving, without a hint of artifice, full of life even as Joseph neared his death.
When Joseph returned to the reservation, the long winter siege had already taken hold of the little village of Nespelem, Washington. He told his family that his bones ached, his rheumatism was acting up, and he had trouble sleeping. He said, “I shall live to see one more snow.” He died the following year, on September 21, 1904, never having returned to the Wallowas. In keeping with Nez Perce custom, Joseph’s wid
ow cut her hair short; she would not be allowed to remarry until it once again touched her shoulders. He was buried under a mound of stones not far from the geologic scar of the Grand Coulee, with a simple rock cairn atop it. It was widely reported that Joseph, in the estimation of the reservation doctor, had died of a broken heart.
“Well, our old friend Chief Joseph has passed on,” Curtis wrote to Meany a few weeks later. “At last his long, endless fight for his return to the old home is at end. For some strange reason, the thought of the old fellow’s life and death gives me rather a feeling of sadness.” He had interviewed more than a dozen Nez Perce after first meeting Joseph, and felt that he understood his place and their place in history. Bill Cody had called him “the greatest Indian American ever,” but Curtis was more specific in his assessment: “Perhaps he was not quite what we in our minds had pictured him, but I still think he was one of the greatest men that has ever lived.” It was significant that Curtis did not qualify his last statement with “Indian”—Joseph was a great man, regardless of his race.
The restraints on the Nez Perce, members of a conquered nation living by the fiat of a faraway government, were felt even among the smallest of other tribes at the time of Joseph’s death. When Curtis went to see the Havasupai on his summer trip in 1903, he heard the same kinds of complaints he had heard on the Colville reservation. For that trip, he traveled again by train to the heart of Arizona Territory, and then by coach and horseback to the high plateau in the north, to where it dropped into the Grand Canyon. From the great chasm’s edge, he hired a mule, which was loaded with his gear, and hiked with a translator down the narrow trail, dropping more than three thousand vertical feet over nine miles, stepping gently over crushed pebbles and knuckle-sized stones through tiers of time wearing the colors of different ages, at last reaching the village of Supai, home of the People of the Blue-Green Water. “The strangest dwelling place of any tribe in America,” Curtis called it. They had lived in the most remote area of the United States for about seven hundred years, the natives told Curtis, and been relatively undisturbed. Yes, they had trouble with the Navajo—who didn’t? When Kit Carson burned the Navajo peach orchards to the ground and marched those Diné, as the tribe called itself, off to exile in New Mexico, the Havasupai were left untouched. They were too small a tribe to bother with, hidden in a deep pocket of the Colorado Plateau. Over the years, few whites had visited: a Spanish missionary, Father Garces, dropped into the canyon in 1776, and an American explorer, Frank Cushing, came along more than a hundred years later. They found well-watered little gardens of squash, beans and corn, and a tribe that wanted to be left alone. By the start of the twentieth century, the Havasupai were penciled into a tiny reservation just off the floor of the Grand Canyon, less than a single square mile. The Indians were tired of being told how to live and what to do by government agents—a familiar complaint in the Southwest. But they were powerless to do anything because of their peculiar limbo status: neither citizens nor foreign nationals. “We are no longer men,” a Havasupai leader told Curtis. “We are like little children. We must always ask Washington.”
