Saga of Chief Joseph
Page 39
18. Report of Secretary of Interior, 1911. Senate Executive Documents, No. 97, 62nd Congress, 1st Session, XXX, 44. “Memorial of the Nez Percés Indians.” From the notarized statement of Yellow Bull.
19. “An Indian’s Views . . . ,” op. cit., p. 429.
23. Joseph’s Surrender
1. Fee, Chief Joseph; the Biography of a Great Indian, p. 324.
2. Ibid., p. 326.
3. Ibid.
4. Report of Secretary of War, 1877, I, 630. Report of Brigadier General Howard.
5. “An Indian’s Views of Indian Affairs,” North American Review, April, 1879, p. 429.
6. Wood, “Chief Joseph, the Nez Percé,” Centry Magazine, May, 1884, p. 141.
7. Howard, in Report of Secretary of War, 1877, I, 630.
8. Ibid.
9. Miles, in Report of Secretary of War, 1877, I, 515.
10. Sam Tilden relates: “After this capture I got away with Chief Poker Joe [Tilden was in error; Poker Joe was killed at Bearpaw] and some other Indians. Some of us had kept horses saddled since early in the morning.
“We got away and camped with the Sioux. Sitting Bull let us stay with his people a few months. Then we came over toward home by way of Canada and some of us came back four or five at a time. We stayed near Fort McLeod three years.
“We had a sort of ranch and stayed with some other tribes, and after a while we came over to the Flathead reservation—although it was an open place then. We stayed there about three or four years, and there was no trouble in Idaho. That is how I got home.
“After a while we took up some allotments—that is where my home is now—Lewiston.”
11. R. G. Bailey, formerly Nez Perce County historian for the Idaho State Historical Society, states in his volume, River of No Return—the Great Salmon River of Idaho, on pp. 195 ff., that White Bird was working in the motion pictures in Spokane, Washington, in 1920. He met there Felix Warren, a dispatch carrier during the Nez Perce War. After escaping into Canada, White Bird supposedly returned to the United States during the Bannock Indian War in 1878. Felix Warren maintains that White Bird told him that he (the chief) and fifty other renegade Indians from Northwestern tribes had returned for reprisal raids on the settlers. But Warren claims that he dissuaded them. Felix Warren offers no proof for this fantastic tale.
In a letter to the author, dated July 12, 1939, Mr. Bailey clarifies the above:
“The picture in my book is that of young White Bird—chief by courtesy. He was the son of the sister of old Chief White Bird. At the battle of the Big Hole, he was holding the hand of his mother, and both were running for the bushes. A bullet from one of the army men’s rifles, struck his thumb and cut it off as well as a finger of his mother.”
Old Chief White Bird was murdered by one of his own men about 1882, according to Yellow Wolf, after he, in the role of medicine man, unsuccessfully treated the small son of another Nez Perce medicine man. The dying boy stated that it was White Bird’s “power” killing him. When another son died making the same claim, the father shot the old chief. He was buried near Fort McLeod. McWhorter, Hear Me, My Chiefs!, p. 524.
12. Miles states, in Report of Secretary of War, 1877, I, 655, that twenty-five were killed and forty-six wounded.
13. These figures are based on Brady, Northwestern Fights and Fighters, p. 39. Haines, Red Eagles of the Northwest, p. 318, lists 127 killed and 147 wounded. He compiled his own list.
14. Joseph’s younger wife had been wounded at the Big Hole but she recovered. He mentions her in his own story. See p. 271 of this text.
15. Brady, op. cit., p. 39. A revised list, compiled later by McWhorter, gives the Indian losses as ninety-six killed, including thirty-six women and children. While these figures may be too low, they seem more reasonable than the number of dead given in Brady as the Nez Perce mortalities were consistently fewer, except at the Big Hole, than were the troops’ casualties. McWhorter, Hear Me, My Chiefs!, p. 501.
16. McLaughlin, My Friend the Indian, p. 352.
17. Ibid.
18. Miles, in Report of Secretary of War, 1877, I, 529.
24. Prisoners of War
1. Miles, Personal Recollections of General Miles, p. 277.
2. Ibid., pp. 278–79.
3. Ibid., p. 279.
25. “Somebody Has Got Our Horses”
1. Report of Secretary of War, 1877, I, 529. Report of Col. Miles.
2. Wood, “Chief Joseph, the Nez Percé,” Century Magazine, May, 1884, p. 142.
3. Major General (then Lieutenant) Scott’s Troop I, Seventh Cavalry, and a company of the First Infantry were detailed to conduct the Nez Perce prisoners from Fort Buford, near the mouth of the Yellowstone, to Bismarck, 225 miles away. He rode in the wagon with Joseph together with Interpreter Chapman. General Scott’s comments on Joseph and the Nez Perces are in line with the consensus of all other Army men who had contact with these unhappy Indians. He writes that “Joseph was then a tall, stalwart, active, fine-looking young man of great force and dignity. His life in Kansas and the Indian Territory, where many of his people, died, did much to break his body and spirit; this was quite patent at the times I saw him in Washington in after years. He and his people were among the finest Indians America produced, but they were treated most unjustly by the government, first as to their lands, and secondly in their deportation to Oklahoma, where they could not live. These Nez Perces received Lewis and Clark, Bonneville, and many other white men with great hospitality and kindness, but their treatment by the white men is a black page in our history.” Scott, Some Memories of a Soldier, p. 84.
4. Nelson C. Titus, “Last Stand of the Nez Perces,” Washington Historical Quarterly, VI, No. 3 (July, 1915), 152.
5. Miles, Personal Recollections of General Miles, p. 280.
6. Fred G. Bond, Flatboating on the Yellowstone. A pamphlet.
7. Ibid.
8. Miles, in Report of Secretary of War, 1877, I, 529.
9. Sherman, in Report of Secretary of War, 1877, I, 15.
10. Ibid.
11. “An Indian’s Views of Indian Affairs,” North American Review, April, 1879, p. 430.
12. Annual Report of U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1878, pp. 32–35.
13. Fourteenth Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, Part II, 1892–93, p. 715.
14. “An Indian’s Views . . . ,” op. cit., p. 432.
15. Ibid., p. 433.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Miles, “The Indian’s Problem,” North American Review, 1879, p. 312.
19. Kate McBeth, The Nez Percés Since Lewis and Clark, pp. 100–101. Since the railroad did not extend beyond Boise at the time, the Indians had to complete the journey to Lapwai by horseback.
20. Annual Report of U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1881, p. 94.
26. Return from Exile
1. McWhorter, Hear Me, My Chiefs!, pp. 536, 538.
2. Miles, Personal Recollections of General Miles, p. 412.
3. Fuller, A History of the Pacific Northwest, p. 276.
4. Judge William I. Lippincott, of Butte, Montana, recounted this anecdote to the author and Dan McGrath in a personal interview at Los Angeles, California, in 1934.
5. Addison Howard in Sunday Missoulian, June 14, 1925, Missoula, Montana. From a newspaper feature article.
6. Erskine Wood, “A Boy’s Visit to Chief Joseph,” St. Nicholas Magazine, September, 1893, p. 816.
7. Ibid.
27. The Trail to the Setting Sun
1. Edward S. Ellis, Thrilling Adventures among the American Indians, p. 240.
2. Shields, The Blanket Indians of the Northwest, p. 117.
3. Annual Reports of U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1888, p. 223; 1890, pp. 217–18; 1891, p. 442; 1892, p. 493; 1893, p. 321; 1894, p. 311; 1897, p. 290; 1898, p. 298; 1899, pp. 354–55.
4. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 8, 1900; Chicago Record, August 8, 1900.
5. Meany, “Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce,” Master of Let
ters thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison. A manuscript copy of this thesis was kindly loaned to the author by the late Dr. Meany.
6. Wood, Lives of Famous Indians, p. 525.
7. The author can find no supporting evidence for this statement. However, according to a newspaper clipping in J. H. Horner’s possession, Joseph’s wife, Wa-win-tip-yah-le-ka-set, died near Nespelem in February, 1929, aged nearly one hundred years.
8. Joseph was nearer sixty-four.
9. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 25, 1905.
10. While on a field trip to the Wallowa Valley in August, 1940, the author was told of a plan being organized to have Joseph’s body again removed and reburied beside that of his father at the foot of Wallowa Lake. The movement was strenuously opposed by the last survivors of the chief’s band at Nespelem.
11. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 25, 1905.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid. Only four or five of Joseph’s original band were still alive and residing on the Colville Reservation in 1939.
15. Ibid.
16. Mrs. Eliza Spalding Warren, Memoirs of the West: The Spaldings, p. 142. Mrs. Warren was the daughter of the Reverend H. H. Spalding who conducted the mission for the Nez Perces at Lapwai at the time of the Whitman massacre.
Appendix 1
1. This chart is at variance with the testimony of several old Indians. For example, Toy-Wate was the father of old Joseph (Tu-eka-kas), according to Young Alokut, son of old Alokut. Young Alokut made the statement to J. H. Horner, Wallowa County historian, Enterprise, Oregon. Old Indians also told Mr. Horner that old Alokut’s mother was not Nez Perce Woman, but a sister of hers. This would make Alokut a half-brother to young Joseph. However, when questioned by the author. Joseph Black Eagle, grand-nephew of the chief, could give no definite information on this point. He stated, though, that Sarah Conner was a sister of Alokut’s, not a daughter; Celia, also a sister of Alokut’s, became the mother of James Black Eagle, who became the father of himself, Joseph Black Eagle (Blackeagle).
Appendix 2
1. Reprinted through the kind permission of Mrs. Grace Bartlett from her booklet, Wallowa, the Land of Winding Waters, Joseph, Oregon, 1967.
Bibliography
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