Ignored and encroached upon, the Cayuse simmered with resentment until, in 1847, the wagons brought an outbreak of measles to their homeland. Whitman tried his best to administer care but could do little, and more than half the tribe died — while the evidence of precious few white fatalities spread rumours that Whitman’s doctoring was actually spreading the disease. On 29 November of that year rough justice was applied: Marcus Whitman was shot then hacked to bits on his front porch, and Narcissa met the same fate on the living-room settee. Eleven more settlers died in the subsequent bloodletting. Oregon’s tiny white population flew into a panic (among them Spalding, who quit Nez Perce territory) and demanded military protection, an army of four hundred arriving on a punitive mission against the Cayuse. The Nez Perce were instrumental in defusing the situation (especially Tuekakas, who had Cayuse blood) but while the Whitman massacre didn’t spark a full ‘Indian war’, it did set the Columbia Plateau, and the Nez Perce, on a very familiar course. As the settlers began to return to the Oregon Territory, they were now burnishing one of the most potent myths of American expansion — the conquerors as victims. The pioneer yeoman farmers, fulfilling the demands of faith and history and carrying the soul of the nation, were forever on the brink of being massacred, kidnapped and (for complex psycho-sexual reasons that need not detain us) getting ‘ravaged’ by Indians. This image, immortalized in numerous newspaper accounts of attacks and hostage takings, insisted upon two conclusions: first, that the settlers’ mission warranted military protection, a demand served by the growing number of army forts dotting the West’s immigrant trails; secondly, that the white and red man were as oil and water, incapable of safely sharing a landscape. As Oregon’s valleys began to fill more rapidly with settlers in the early 1850s, drawn by rumours that the California gold fields might have a northern outcrop, and by a law passed in 1850 clarifying the offer of 320 acres of free Oregon land to any family who could till it, the Northwest became the last corner of America to develop its own ‘Indian problem’. Savagery and civilization needed to be separated, and the solution was one that had long been established on the continent: the Columbia Plateau tribes belonged on a reservation.
The Walla Walla grand council of May 1855 must have been a sight to scorch the memory. The Nez Perce arrived first, more than five hundred warriors parading the treaty grounds in full regalia before establishing camp, followed two days later by more than four hundred Cayuse men, dressed for war, beating their drums and firing their rifles in the air. The Yakama came next, then the Umatilla and Palouse — around five thousand Indians were present at the opening of the council, their tepees clustered across the grassland in temporary townships. Representing the United States of America was a young man called Isaac Stevens, whose prodigious energies and ambitions as a soldier and administrator had secured him the governorship of the Washington Territory of the far Northwest at just thirty-seven. Under pressure to guarantee the safety of the settlers, and eager to secure the land for his grand plan of a north-western rail route, Stevens had set off on a whirlwind treaty tour of the territories in late 1854. His negotiating tactics were simple — he would offer almost anything that came to mind — from free education to free healthcare, cash, farming equipment, fishing boats, apprenticeships, a blacksmith’s shop, a carpenter — until the tribes of the Northwest agreed to limit themselves to reserved lands, leaving the remainder open to settlement. The Walla Walla council was Stevens’ sixth in five months, and the mission was going well — at his first meeting the coastal tribes of Puget Sound had handed him more than two and a half million acres of homeland, limiting themselves to less than 4000 acres, and only a handful of tribes had refused similar deals since. Now he and his right-hand man, Superintendent Joel Palmer, spread out the map and told the Nez Perce and their neighbours where they were being asked to live.
In the context of nineteenth-century Indian-American treaties, the Nez Perce were offered a reasonable deal. Their reservation would at least be within their traditional territories, covering an area of 7.5 million acres, just over half of the aboriginal homelands, and it contained many of their most treasured areas, such as the Wallowa Valley, the Camas Prairie and the junction of the Clearwater and Snake rivers. Stevens promised financial compensation for the ceded land, government protection from trespassing settlers in the form of a federal Agent, and the freedom to leave the reservation to hunt, fish and gather in the tribe’s ‘usual and accustomed places’. There were a few voices of dissent, particularly from the still-fractious Cayuse, led by Young Chief: ‘I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said? I hear what the ground says. The Great Spirit appointed the roots to feed the Indians on. The water says the same thing. Neither Indians nor the whites have the right to change these names. The ground says “it is from me man was made".’
But the Nez Perce leaders were eventually united in the belief that this treaty held the best hope of a secure future. In fact, just as it had been for tribes stretching across the continent, this was the beginning of the end.
The US government’s treaties with the peoples of Native America rested on the flyweight foundation of two huge misunderstandings and one bald lie — and the Nez Perce had just placed their future on such a footing. Firstly, by exchanging land for money and gifts, they had accepted the white man’s ideas of property- Mother Earth could be owned, and sold, and what had been negotiated for money once could be negotiated again, regardless of any promises of permanence. Secondly, they had been driven into the white concept of representative leadership — fifty-six chiefs had signed the treaty, the Christian ‘head chief Lawyer first on the list, and under the white man’s law the whole tribe was now bound, whether or not they agreed. The freedom to walk your own path had been signed away, and the Nez Perce had just become a nation.
A sketch of Tuekakas drawn by Gustavus Sohon during the Walla Walla Treaty Council of 1855.
Finally, they had been deceived. Stevens knew the government had neither the reach nor the desire to control the movement of settlers, who would take what land they wished as they struggled for survival in the unfamiliar, inhospitable Northwest. The settlers had been sold the West as a sacred national mission, a haven of individual freedom, inviolable property rights and determined progress, and the government was irretrievably committed to serving as their protector and facilitator. To frustrate their dreams — particularly in order to protect a reservation whose inhabitants still enjoyed more than 1000 acres of land per person — was unthinkable. The nearby Yakama tribe learned this lesson sharply: within six months of signing their version of the Walla Walla treaty their new reservation had become overrun with settlers. When the Yakama violently affirmed their property rights, Stevens crushed them in a punitive war.
Tuekakas saw the future. After signing the 1855 treaty he returned to the quiet of the Wallowa Valley, and resolved to have as little contact with the white man as possible, to raise his sons, Joseph and Ollokot, according to the traditional Nimiipuu beliefs, and to encourage his people to follow the ways of their ancestors. For a few more years, the Wallowa Nez Perce could live in peace.
The advertisement took up most of a page in the local paper, promising a huckleberry bake-off, a Dutch-oven cooking contest, a softball tournament, a parade, a firewood auction and more. The town of Pierce, just across the border from Oregon into Idaho, tucked away in the north-east corner of the 1855 Nez Perce reservation, was throwing its own Days the following weekend. This