Saga of Chief Joseph

by Helen Addison Howard

  “A priceless contribution.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A stirring and dramatic biography of a great man.”

  —Montreal Star

  “This work . . . is a standard in the field.”

  —Choice Books for College Libraries

  Saga of Chief Joseph

  Bison Classic Edition

  Helen Addison Howard

  New introduction by Nicole Tonkovich

  Maps and illustrations by George D. McGrath

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln & London

  Introduction to the Bison Classic Edition © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

  Copyright © 1941, 1965 by the Caxton Printers, Ltd. Caldwell, Idaho

  First Bison Books printing: 1978

  Reprinted by arrangement with The Caxton Printers, Ltd.

  Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Friends of the University of Nebraska Press.

  Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover art courtesy of National Archives.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Names: Howard, Helen Addison, author.

  Title: Saga of Chief Joseph / Helen Addison Howard; new introduction by Nicole Tonkovich; maps and illustrations by George D. McGrath.

  Other titles: War Chief Joseph.

  Description: Bison classic edition. | Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Originally published: War Chief Joseph. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1941.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017033955 (print)

  LCCN 2017034233 (ebook)

  ISBN 9781496200587 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 9781496204288 (epub)

  ISBN 9781496204295 (mobi)

  ISBN 9781496204301 (pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: Joseph (Nez Percé Chief), 1840–1904. | Nez Percé Indians—Wars, 1877. | Nez Percé Indians—Kings and rulers—Biography.

  Classification: LCC E99.N5 (ebook) | LCC E99.N5 J584 2017 (print) | DDC 979.004/9741240092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033955

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  To the original Americans—the red Indians of North America

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction to the Bison Classic Edition

  Prologue

  Part I. Early History

  1. The Valley of Winding Waters

  2. The Coming of the Missionaries

  3. Thunder-rolling-in-the-mountains

  Part II. Treaty History

  4. The Council Smoke of 1855

  5. War in the Columbia Basin—1856–58

  6. The Treaty of 1863

  7. The Tah-mah-ne-wes Beckons

  8. The Earth-mother Drinks Blood

  9. The Council at Fort Lapwai—1877

  10. Chief White Bird’s Murders

  Part III. The Military Campaign of 1877

  11. The Settlers Prepare for War

  12. The Battle of White Bird Canyon

  13. The Skirmish at Cottonwood

  14. The Battle of the Clearwater

  15. The March Over the Lolo Trail

  16. The Affair at “Fort Fizzle”

  17. The Battle of the Big Hole

  18. The Camas Meadows Raid

  19. The Attack on the Cowan and Weikert Parties

  20. The Battle of Canyon Creek

  21. The Skirmish at Cow Island

  22. Battle of the Bearpaw Mountains

  23. Joseph’s Surrender

  Part IV. Later History

  24. Prisoners of War

  25. “Somebody Has Got Our Horses”

  26. Return from Exile

  27. The Trail to the Setting Sun

  Appendix 1: Genealogy Chart

  Appendix 2: Sidelights

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  1. Monument to Tu-eka-kas, Chief Joseph’s father

  2. Major General O. O. Howard

  3. Chief Joseph

  4. Map of the Nez Perce country in 1877

  5. Retreat of the Nez Perces through Montana

  6. A hand-to-hand encounter in battle of Big Hole

  7. Big Hole battlefield, looking north

  8. In the face of Joseph were registered courage, etc.

  9. Eastward march of Chief Joseph and his Indians

  10. “He flung out his arm to its full length”

  11. Escape of Chief White Bird

  12. Joseph at Lapwai in 1895

  13–14. Monument at the grave of Chief Joseph, Nespelem, Washington

  Foreword

  One of the most romantic and important figures in the history of the Pacific Northwest is Chief Joseph, the reluctant but highly effective leader of the Nez Perce uprising of 1877. He has been called the “Indian Napoleon.” Endowed with unusual abilities, well informed in Indian lore, gifted with a forceful physique and a magnetic personality, Chief Joseph was by nature destined to be the leader of his people in their futile struggle against the encroachments of the whites.

  The tragic and dramatic story of Chief Joseph has never been told in its fullness. Many have written about him, dwelling upon some particular episode in his eventful life. He has been the subject of several magazine articles, and he moves across the pages of many a book on Northwest history. A few have endeavored to set forth his story in more completeness, but such works have been open to the criticism of inaccuracy and partiality. Now for the first time serious-minded and well-trained students have set themselves to the task of telling a story that needs to be told.

  Mr. Dan McGrath, whose parents were witnesses of some of the stirring events of those times, assisted in the assembling of the necessary historical data. Miss Helen Addison Howard, also a native of the Northwest and a historian in her own right, began this project several years ago. She has added new material to the work of her collaborator and has done the final writing of the original manuscript. Deliberately and conscientiously, the author has sought to tell the story of Chief Joseph with strict historical accuracy and in all of its details. Every known source bearing upon this episode has been examined. Old-timers whose memories go back to those stirring days have been interviewed. With literary skill Miss Howard has woven a multitude of widely scattered facts into an absorbing story.

  While this book will no doubt stand for years as the authoritative life of Chief Joseph, at the same time it will have a fascination for those who are not historically minded. Let the reader get but a few pages into this book and, if he has any compassion in his heart for the mistreated red men, or any interest in a dramatic story, he will be loath to lay the book aside until he has read the full account. No novelist could ever have conceived such a tale. This book gives proof to the old adage that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

  Clifford M. Drury,

  San Anselmo, Calif.

  Acknowledgments

  The author gratefully wishes to acknowledge the help and cooperation of the many people who so willingly and generously aided her in obtaining source material for this biography. She is especially indebted to the late Dan L. McGrath who assisted her in the original research in 1933–34 for War Chief Joseph; to the late William Andrews Clark, Jr., whose splendid collection of Americana made it possible to study the subject thoroughly; and to Dr. Clifford M. Drury for his constructive criticism.

  Among those to whom special credit is due are: Mrs. Rowena Lung Alcorn, th
e well-known artist of Tacoma, Washington, for permission to reproduce her fine oil portrait of Chief Joseph [not included in this edition]; and to the following who assisted in the preparation of the original volume during the 1930s: Chief James Allicott, Umatilla Reservation; Mr. Omar Babcock, superintendent of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Pendleton, Oregon; Mr. Jean Baptiste, Flathead Indian Reservation, Arlee, Montana; Mr. Joseph Blackeagle, Nez Perce Reservation, Lapwai, Idaho; Martin L. Brown, Missoula, Montana; Mr. John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Washington DC; Mr. John Connolly, Long Beach, California; the late Mr. Bernard DeVoto; Mr. George W. Fuller, former librarian, Public Library, Spokane, Washington; Dr. Garland Greever, Professor of English, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Mr. J. H. Horner, Enterprise, Oregon; Judge William I. Lippincott, Butte, Montana; Mr. George D. McGrath, Columbia Studio, Hollywood, California; the late Dr. Edmond S. Meany, Professor of History, University of Washington, Seattle; Dr. Harold G. Merriam, chairman of the English Department, University of Montana, Missoula; Miss Cora Sanders, librarian, Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles; Chief Nipo Strongheart of the Yakima tribe, Hollywood, California; Mrs. Adeline Stumph, Los Angeles; Mr. Samuel Tilden, Flathead Indian Reservation, Arlee, Montana; Mr. W. Joseph Williams, Umatilla Reservation, Pendleton, Oregon; the staffs of the public libraries of Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; and Spokane, Washington; Mrs. Esther Hanifen, former assistant librarian, Idaho State Historical Library, Boise, Idaho; the staff of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Clark Memorial Library; and to the Library of the University of California at Los Angeles. The author also wishes to express her gratitude to Mrs. Charlotte Tufts, Western Americana Librarian, Public Library, Burbank, California, for recent assistance in supplying additional materials.

  Introduction to the Bison Classic Edition

  Nicole Tonkovich

  Helen Addison Howard’s biography of Chief Joseph has been in print, albeit under two different titles, since 1941. As Frederick E. Hoxie observed in 1979, the book’s “durability is evidence of its quality as well as of the paucity of serious studies of the Nez Percé leader.”1 While in the intervening years many “serious studies” have been published, this reprinting of Saga of Chief Joseph confirms the book’s lasting appeal as a narrative biography based on meticulous secondary research. Originally titled War Chief Joseph, the book was first published when U.S. involvement in an escalating worldwide conflict became inevitable. The book found renewed appeal during two subsequent wars. Also of significance is the fact that when Howard published Saga of Chief Joseph, an ambitious revision of War Chief Joseph, she was among the first to incorporate new scholarship that emphasized the importance of Native accounts of this period of Nez Perce history.

  Helen Addison Howard Overland was born in 1904, the year of Chief Joseph’s death. As a young woman journalist, she published historical sketches based on the recollections of Montana “old-timers.” She graduated from the State University of Montana and, in the early 1930s, moved to Los Angeles and earned a master’s degree in history at the University of Southern California. In 1938 she attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where she continued to work on the manuscript of War Chief Joseph, which had been in progress for several years. There she met Bernard DeVoto, who offered “to recommend [the work] for publication.”2 She later published widely on western history while working for Paramount studios and for the Los Angeles Police Department as a clerk and typist. During World War II, she undertook “medical corps work in Civilian Defense, and Chemical Warfare . . . training.”3

  Throughout her career Howard associated with men who assumed a woman was at best a quaint intruder into their professional realms. This was especially apparent among the western scholars and antiquarians of Los Angeles, who did their research in the William Andrews Clark Collection of Western Americana, encountered each other in Hollywood studios, associated with Native actors such as the activist Nipo Strongheart (Yakima), and socialized at “cowboy chuck-wagon feeds” or at the University Club.4 Many of those who specialized in Pacific Northwest history corresponded with Lucullus V. McWhorter, who was then drafting Yellow Wolf, a book about the Nez Perce War of 1877. They exchanged books, shared resources, and published their work in magazines such as The Cattleman and Hunter-Trader-Trapper as well as in academic journals specializing in regional history.

  While the men of this circle were publicly polite to the few women who were their peers, their private correspondence suggests more exclusive fraternal affiliations. This claim is perhaps best exemplified in the correspondence of E. A. Brininstool—a “cowboy poet,” amateur historian, and journalist—with McWhorter. Brininstool socialized in the same Los Angeles circles and published in many of the same periodicals as Helen Howard. In a 1933 letter to “Big Foot,” “Brin” wrote of his associate Grace Raymond Hebard, who was a distinguished professor, the first woman to serve on the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees, the first woman admitted to the Wyoming State Bar Association, and Brininstool’s coauthor of The Bozeman Trail: “[O]l’ Doc Hebard . . . is just a fussy old maid 70 and over now, and now retired from teaching.” He then advised McWhorter to “take no stock in this Agnes Laut dame. [Laut was a Canadian historian who had published on Northwest history.] I’ll bet she is also an old maid like Hebard. Her dope is full of unreliable statements and inaccuracies—and that dont [sic] get by those who KNOW. You bet I wrote her publishers and dressed the old gal down on her Fort Kearney dope.”5 Such private exchanges among “those who KNOW” measure the climate in which Howard and women like her worked. Her way of navigating these conditions was to be coolly professional, persistent, unexceptionably competent, confident in the value of her work, and always willing to revise it in the face of new information.

  In the late 1930s historians turned to capturing the firsthand accounts of the remaining members of the generation that had participated in the Nez Perce War of 1877, a watershed moment in western history. Among them was Dan McGrath, Howard’s research assistant, who claimed that his “grandmother knew Chief Joseph as a friend and had frequent contacts with members of the tribe.”6 This attention resulted in the near-simultaneous publication of four similar books: Chester A. Fee’s Chief Joseph: The Biography of a Great Indian (1936), F. J. Haines’s Red Eagles of the Northwest: The Story of Chief Joseph and His People (1939), Lucullus V. McWhorter’s Yellow Wolf: His Own Story (1940), and Howard’s War Chief Joseph (1941). Howard portrayed Joseph as a tragically doomed but worthy foe whose defeat enabled the spread of white civilization. Such an approach was consistent with then-dominant approaches of consensus historiography that, in light of the world political situation, vaunted white settler–colonial American values. As Howard wrote to Caxton Printers, her book would have “timely appeal to the general American reading public whose attention is now focussed [sic] on the U. S. A. due to the European war.”7 Thus War Chief Joseph celebrated the leader as a “hero with moral courage” who “had accomplished a military exploit of the first magnitude, and displayed the tactical skill of a Napoleon.”8

  Howard’s skills as a writer and researcher recommended her work to a wide range of readers. From the beginning she tried to interest Hollywood producers in War Chief Joseph as the basis for a film.9 She continued these efforts for nearly twenty years without success. Still, the book was well received by local history buffs. A reviewer for the Lewiston, Idaho, Daily Tribune praised the “years of careful research evident in its preparation” and proclaimed, “Years may prove the book authoritative on Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce war.”10 It was added to recommended and required reading lists for middle school and university students in Idaho and Washington. Thus Caxton produced three reprints in 1946, 1952, and 1958 that, like the first, interested a public whose attention was focused on a war, this time in Korea.

  Academic historians’ estimates of War Chief Joseph were mixed and sometimes marked by territorial disputes over topic and approach. McWhorter, who had read portions of
McGrath’s part of the manuscript, deemed it “very good; though largely library made.”11 A reviewer for the Oregon Historical Quarterly noted the book to be “more comprehensive” than those by Fee and Haines but lacking in critical evaluation of its sources. Haines, however, bluntly proclaimed War Chief Joseph “a disappointment,” “largely . . . a rehash of time-worn materials plus an uncritical compilation of unreliable pioneer reminiscences.”12 This criticism Howard met with indignation, protesting to the editors of Pacific Northwest Quarterly that the review was “unfair, dishonest, petty and puerile.”13 Her publishers dissuaded her from bringing a lawsuit against Haines.

  Perhaps spurred by these reviews, Howard updated each reprinting of the book. Early on, she became interested in McWhorter’s Yellow Wolf, also published by Caxton just eight months before War Chief Joseph.14 Rather than tell the story of the war from a white point of view as Howard had, McWhorter foregrounded the oral histories shared with him by Yellow Wolf, a combatant in the Nez Perce War. His was the “first published military account of the Nez Perce War from an Indian perspective.”15

  Just a month after War Chief Joseph appeared, Howard wrote to McWhorter, offering to exchange books with him and hinting she would be interested in his “material bearing on the Joseph story.” He was happy to exchange books, but declined to share his source material, saying, “I have considerable field gathered data concerning Chief Joseph but I doubt very seriously if you would be at all interested in it since your book is off press.” He underestimated Howard’s persistence. She wrote again, saying she would be “extremely interested” in his “field gathered data” since she was planning revisions for her book’s second edition. He declined: “I am on a Field History of the 1877 conquest, from the Nez Perce point of view, and for this reason I hesitate about breaking in on any of it for an outside work. I am afraid, too, that you would be sorely disapointed [sic] as to its nature.”16 McWhorter died in 1944, his “Field History” incomplete. It was published as Hear Me, My Chiefs! Nez Perce History and Legend in 1952, edited by Ruth Bordin, who wrote its concluding chapters. The materials Howard had longed to see were now available.