Saga of Chief Joseph

by Helen Addison Howard

  On Wednesday, I went down to call on Joseph and remind him of the engagement, lest he forget. When I told the clerk I would like to see Chief Joseph, he said, “He is not here any more.”

  I said, “Not here? How is that?”

  “They all left here yesterday morning.”

  “Why that’s strange. I understood they were to stay through the week and they promised to dine with the Camp Fire Club.”

  “Yes, but Chief Joseph said he wanted to get where he could see some trees.”2

  Comparatively happy again back among his beloved trees in Washington State, Joseph devoted himself to his people—that remnant of his band living on the Colville Reservation. He was a progressive Indian in that he had always evinced the greatest interest in the white man’s education for Nez Perce children.

  The aging chief’s fame had so far spread that he was considered a proper subject for a master of letters thesis. The young student, Edmond S. Meany, who became interested in this living topic for his academic study while attending the University of Wisconsin, was destined to become chairman of the History Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. The young man became acquainted with the old chief and paid him several visits. Through the kind permission of the late Professor Meany the following chapter is quoted from his master’s thesis:

  The week beginning with June 21, 1901, was devoted by the writer to a trip to Nespilem, on the Colville Indian Reservation, State of Washington, for the purpose of visiting Chief Joseph and his surviving warriors and to learn something of their present conditions. . . .

  The Colville Reservation has been cut in two. The Government has thus far neglected to pay the Indians the $1,500,000 agreed upon for the northern half. The southern half has also been thrown open for mineral entries and the familiar haunts and pasture lands of the Indians are now being overrun by a constant stream of prospectors. The writer visited one mining camp within two miles of Chief Joseph’s tepee where the herds of Indian ponies are startled twice a day by the blasting of the rocks. At the sub-agency are two stores where these miners procure supplies. . . .

  Chief Moses of the Columbians had been located on the Nespilem before Chief Joseph’s band was brought there. He had gone to Washington City and secured many favors for his people such as a saw-mill, grist-mill, physician, blacksmith and school and a yearly salary for himself of one thousand dollars. He also procured certain allowances of agricultural implements.

  Chief Joseph got no salary but the Government has issued his people regular rations of food, clothes and agricultural implements. From this fact and from the fact that he and the members of his band are supposed to ask permission if they wish to leave the reservation it is construed that Joseph’s band are still practically prisoners of war.

  The best agriculturalists in this vicinity are the remnants of the original Nespilems, who first occupied the land. They live in frame houses, till the soil and, with unusual pride, refuse to receive aid from the Government. If they get a reaper from the Government store-house they insist on paying for it in hay or labor.

  Joseph’s band, on the other hand, being supplied with everything they need, do not progress in the industrial activities. It is claimed that this idleness is a bad influence on the other Indians and the agents have been asking the Government to curtail and finally discontinue all rations to the Nez Perces.3

  In order to get lumber for houses, barns or other purposes, the Indians go to the hills and cut the logs, which they haul to the mill. Then they assist the Government sawyer to cut the logs into whatever shape is desired. They mark their own logs and keep track of all the details carrying the finished product to their homes.

  The Government built for Chief Joseph, a small, roughboard, battened house and a barn on the farm he selected about four miles from the sub-agency. The Chief will not live in his house and the roof of his barn is broken in. He prefers to live in the traditional tepee, winter and summer, and this tepee he has pitched near the sub-agency so he can be near his people and the school.

  The teacher of the school, Barnett Stillwell, who has been there for four years, says that Chief Joseph has manifested great interest in the children. He often visits the school, at which times the Indian children would remain almost motionless. On several occasions he administered light punishment to some of the little ones, who were not progressing to suit him.

  Not far from the school house is the Nez Perce burial ground. The headstones consist of poles set in the ground with bells or feathers ornamenting the tops. It forms a weird picture of mingled savagery and civilization. Chief Joseph presides at every Nez Perce funeral with great and solemn dignity.

  The interior of Chief Joseph’s tepee presents a model appearance of neatness. Indian mats cover the floor and in huge rolls around the edge are buffalo robes now quite scarce among the Indians, and blankets. From one of these rolls the Chief brought a small leather trunk in which were bundles of letters he had received from white men, and photographs of Indian and white friends. He knew each face and seemed glad to call up memories of his friends and relatives. At the bottom of his trunk were the eagle hat and saddle robe with which his high rank is proclaimed on all gala days.

  The Indians were making great preparations for the approaching Fourth of July when they would have a celebration extending over one or two weeks. Joseph would not allow his picture to be taken until that time when his wardrobe would be in better condition for such an important operation. The Indians of this whole region show their respect for Chief Joseph by according him, without any questioning, the principal place of honor on all great festivals or celebrations.

  Chief Moses had a great reputation among the Indians and whites of this section but he was dissipated. The Indians will manage at times to get liquor and Moses brought on his own death by a protracted spree. Chief Joseph never drinks intoxicants. “Nica Halo Bottlum,” as he puts it in Chinook (meaning, “I never touch the bottle”).

  Moses had two wives who survive him. Joseph is now the only Indian on the reservation who has two wives. His wives are Wa-win-te-pi-ksat, aged forty-six, and I-a-tu-ton-my, aged thirty-nine. Joseph’s Nez Perce name is Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht meaning “Thunder rolling in the mountains.” He claims that he is fifty-three years old but General Howard estimated his age at thirty-seven at the time of his war, which would make him sixty-one years old now.

  Henry M. Steele, the sub-agent at Nespilem, says that Joseph’s wives do all the work about the home and always call for the rations on issue day. He says that Joseph is appealed to when there are harnesses or other such goods to give out to the Nez Perces. The Chief will designate the ones to be thus favored but he usually begins the process by claiming one of the articles for himself.

  On our visit to the tepee, the writer saw Joseph unharnessing his team and on another day he was saddling a pony. The sub-agent said on both occasions that it was unusual. The wives or his helpers usually did such things for him.

  The Government has built for Joseph two small “ietas” houses in which are kept his many precious properties. In one are four rifles. One of these is old and worn. Joseph says it is the one he carried through the war. Here is also seen nicely framed the certificate of Chief Joseph’s appointment as an aid in the New York parade at the dedication of the Grant memorial monument on April 27, 1897. On that occasion he marched side by side with his friend Buffalo Bill.

  Joseph was asked what Indian chief he considered the greatest and he answered that he thought his father, also a Chief Joseph, was the greatest. To another question he said he thought his brother Ollicutt was the next greatest chief.

  Joseph has had nine children, five girls and four boys, but they are all dead. One died since living at Nespilem, two died in Indian Territory and the rest died in Idaho. One daughter grew to womanhood and was married. He seems especially fond of her memory and tells what a good girl she was while showing her picture. On the back of this tintype picture is written “for Chief Joseph from his lovi
ng Daughter Sarah Moses.”

  Bereft of his children the Chief now leads a quiet life sustained by the Government against whose authority he waged a long and bitter warfare. His last effort to regain the Wallowa Valley has been investigated by Inspector James McLaughlin who has reported strongly against the request.4 But Joseph still longs for that old home the “Valley of Winding Waters.” In a dictated letter to the writer, dated at Nespilem, May 27, 1901, he says: “My old home is in the Wallowa Valley and I want to go back there to live. My father and mother are buried there. If the Government would only give me a small piece of land for my people in the Wallowa Valley, with a teacher, that is all I would ask.”

  The white people in Wallowa Valley have named one of their towns Joseph and their newspaper was called Chieftain but there the sentiment ends. They enter strong protest when it is talked of sending any of the Nez Perces back to that home of their forefathers.5

  A vain dream which Joseph was never to realize. So set was his heart, however, on returning to the ancestral land of his people that in 1903 he went to Washington again, this time to petition President Theodore Roosevelt to grant his tribe the Wallowa Valley. Since the land was taken up by white settlers the request was once more denied. On this occasion Joseph stayed East long enough to join Cummin’s “Indian Congress and Life on the Plains,” then exhibiting at Madison Square Garden. An anecdote is told of him that he was given a stiff measure of whiskey, as some whites were anxious to see what effect it would have. The chief swallowed the contents in one gulp and said nothing!

  Twenty-seven years after the Nez Perce War, in 1904, Joseph attended the commencement exercises of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, and sat at the same banquet table with his former enemy, Major General O. O. Howard. A queer prank indeed of fate, that a red fighter and a white general should toast each other! Howard called his one-time foe “the greatest Indian warrior I ever fought with,” while the said warrior made a speech that was reported in translation by a special correspondent of the Inter Ocean:

  Friends, I meet here my friend, General Howard. I used to be so anxious to meet him. I wanted to kill him in war. Today I am glad to meet him, and glad to meet everybody here, and to be friends with General Howard. We are both old men, still we live and I am glad. We both fought in many wars and we are both alive. Ever since the war I have made up my mind to be friendly to the whites and to everybody. I wish you, my friends, would believe me as I believe myself in my heart in what I say. When my friend, General Howard, and I fought together I had no idea that we would ever sit down to a meal together, as today, but we have, and I am glad. I have lost many friends, and many men, women and children, but I have no grievance against any of the white people, General Howard or any one. If General Howard dies first, of course I will be sorry. I understand and I know that learning of books is a nice thing, and I have some children here in school from my tribe that are trying to learn something, and I am thankful to know there are some of my children here struggling to learn the white man’s ways and his books. I repeat again I have no enmity against anybody. I want to be friends to everybody. I wish my children would learn more and more every day, so they can mingle with the white people and do business with them as well as anybody else. I shall try to get Indians to send their children to school.6

  Following his visit to Carlisle, Joseph went to Seattle at the invitation of James J. Hill, the railroad magnate, who was attempting “to enlist public opinion for the restoration of Wallowa.” The largest auditorium in Seattle was filled to capacity. Joseph and another chief, Red Thunder, were introduced by Professor Meany, who says they took so long making themselves presentable that he had to extemporize for twenty minutes on Nez Perce history and the war until the chiefs appeared on the platform.

  The next day Joseph gave a short talk before the students at the University of Washington and shook hands with members of the faculty and each of the students. In the afternoon he attended a football game where he created as much interest as the game did! He followed the plays with deep absorption, and excitedly got to his feet to watch intently whenever the players would pile up in scrimmage after being tackled. Then, when they untangled themselves, he would draw a long breath and sit down again.

  Once only did Joseph return to his beloved valley—the last time he would ever see that place so hallowed in his memory. It was during June and July of 1900 in company with Indian Inspector James McLaughlin, whom the government had appointed to investigate the feasibility of restoring part of the Wallowa country to its rightful owners. For Joseph it was a kind of pilgrimage to his ancestral home. When he gazed once more upon the grave of his father, preserved by a white friend who had enclosed it with a fence, the tears brimmed over in the old chief’s eyes.

  McLaughlin’s adverse report decided the government never to remove the Nez Perces to Oregon. With the fulfillment of that desire still cherished in his heart, Joseph went on his last journey over the trail to the setting sun that led to the Spirit Land of Indian religious belief. Toward the end he sat beside his campfire, gazing long and earnestly at the tawny hills as he murmured, “Halo manitah,” meaning that he would not live to see another winter. Silent and brooding he would stoically sit whole days without speaking or moving. So sitting before his fire on September 21, 1904, he fell forward on his face. Dr. Latham, the agency physician, said, “Joseph died of a broken heart.”

  The Anaconda Standard of September 25, 1904, stated that his surviving relatives were a brother at Lapwai; a nephew, Amos, the son of his sister; John Moses, the son of his brother; Red Thunder, a nephew, and Ollicutt, another nephew, but makes mention of only one wife.7

  Joseph was quietly laid to rest, but the following year on June 20, 1905, when the monument to his memory was unveiled at Nespelem, he was “reburied” with great ceremony.

  The monument is a white marble shaft, standing seven and a half feet high. A fine likeness of the famous warrior-chief is carved on the front, and below it appears his name in raised letters, “Chief Joseph.” On another side his name is carved both in Nez Perce and in its English translation, “Thunder-rolling-in-the-mountains.” On still a third side is the inscription: “He led his people in the Nez Perce war of 1877. Died 21 September, 1904, age, about 60 years.”8 On the back of the monument is inscribed: “Erected 20 June, 1905, by the Washington University State Historical Society.”

  13–14. Monument at the grave of Chief Joseph, Nespelem, Washington. Photo taken by the author, August, 1940.

  The young men of the tribe dug a new grave and placed the remains in it with the head toward the east and facing the monument. When the coffin was reopened so that relatives and friends of the old chief could look upon his face for the last time, “the Nez Perces circled around the body of Joseph,” while the whites stood respectfully in the background. Tears came into the eyes of the old warriors, and the widows of the war “gave voice to the wail of the grieving Indian.”9

  Late in the afternoon whites and Indians reassembled to dedicate the monument.10 Among the principal speakers were the nearly blind Yellow Bull, the newly elected chief, Albert Waters, Ess-Kow-Ess (Espowyes—Light-in-the-Mountain), a prominent spokesman of the tribe, and Professor Edmond Meany, who delivered the main address for the whites on behalf of Samuel Hill, donator of the monument, and of the Washington University State Historical Society.

  The next day, following the banquet at noon, a huge potlatch or gift feast took place, being the greatest affair of that kind of which there is any record. A very large council lodge was filled to capacity with Indians, whites, and the heaps of Chief Joseph’s worldly possessions which were guarded by his three nephews, Ollicutt and Black Eagle of Montana, and Chief Tow-at-way of the Umatillas. According to a reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who covered the dedication:

  In the only chair in the lodge sat the official announcer, Pio-pio-mox-mox, “Yellow Bird,” who is one of the noted men of the tribe. At his right hand on the ground sat Joseph
’s younger widow. Back of these relatives sat the blind chief, Yellow Bull. From this end of the long tepee or council lodge were ranged the men, all reclining on reed mats and robed in brilliant blankets . . . for nearly half the length of the lodge, and beyond the men were the women and children.11

  Before the distribution of Joseph’s property, Chief Yellow Bull delivered the principal address for the Indians. He recited the speech on horseback while riding three times slowly around the outside of the council lodge on Joseph’s horse. “Besides that dignity,” notes the reporter, “he wore all of Chief Joseph’s war clothes, including the famous eagle-feather war-bonnet.”12

  Yellow Bull’s speech was interpreted by Camille Williams, an educated full blood Nez Perce. It is a characteristic example of the older Indian oratory:

  I am very glad to meet you all here today, my brothers and sisters and children and white friends. When the Creator created us, He put us on this earth, and the flowers on the earth, and He takes us all in His arms and keeps us in peace and friendship, and our friendship and peace shall never fade, but it will shine forever. Our people love our old customs. I am very glad to see our white friends here attending this ceremony, and it seems like we all have the same sad feelings, and that fact helps to wipe away my tears and the loss of our dead chief.

  Joseph is dead, but his words are not dead; his words will live forever. This monument will stand—Joseph’s words will stand as long as this monument.

  We [the red and the white people] are both here, and the Great Spirit looks down on us both; and now if we are good and live right, like Joseph, we shall see Him. I have finished.13