Finally, a more sympathetic answer is on offer. Like the protection racketeers they were, the US negotiators had spoken of their desire to shield the Nez Perce from the threat of violence — while taking the sinister step of calling their troops to the treaty grounds. No one needed to explain that the tiny US Army garrison at Lapwai was the tip of a martial iceberg of a magnitude the tribe could scarcely contemplate. Military obliteration was never mentioned — Hale knew that to threaten violence, or ‘show the rifle’, was a scandalous breach of tribal council etiquette — but it didn’t need to be. As Rebecca Miles, the chairwoman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, said of the Thief Treaty in 2006: ‘Our leaders had no choice. They were being threatened with being wiped out.’
Betrayal or not, the Christian tribes received very few pieces of silver for their troubles. The treaty set a price of just £262,500 for almost seven million acres of land, plus the usual sweeping promises of education, healthcare, farming instruction and so on. Once again, the treaty got held up in Washington, and any money that did reach Idaho rarely got past the web of government graft and waste. In 1864 the governor of Idaho, Caleb Lyon, visited Lapwai and gave this assessment of what had been done for the Nez Perce by the Indian Agents employed to serve their needs and fight their corner:
I find no schoolhouse, church or Indians under instruction…I find that the farmers at the Agency have lived on the United States, seemingly in indolence, not raising enough for their own sustenance, neither devoting any time to instructing the Indians…I find the wife of one of the employees set down on the papers as a Blacksmith and the wife of another employee to be an Assistant Teacher, who has never taught a single hour…I find the name of a Physician on the papers at a salary of $1,200 per annum who is not at the Agency more than three hours per week …
The only work being done was dishonest. The Agents sold timber on Nez Perce land to local lumbermen, then realized that they could actually sell it twice — once as standing trees, then, after buying the felled logs back with federal funds (to build all those promised tribal buildings), they could then shift it again as firewood. Agents took bribes to let settlers occupy the buildings that were constructed for tribal purposes, or to use the mill and blacksmiths intended exclusively for tribal use. Appalled, the inspecting governor accurately summarized the US government’s record for keeping its treaty promises to Native America: ‘I find nothing but criminal negligence and indifference to the treaty stipulations with the Indians.’ His outrage, though justified, may not have been entirely sincere -Governor Lyon’s later career was dogged by the allegation that he’d faked a robbery in a Washington hotel room in order personally to pilfer $40,000 of Nez Perce appropriations.
Lawyer’s frustrations were far from unique. The US government would soon lose patience with negotiating with Native America, but not before reaching a grand total in excess of 370 individual treaties brokered, drawn up, and, in every single case, breached.
Just as signing the treaty garnered no immediate benefit for the Christian Nez Perce, not signing was of little instant consequence to the dissident, or non-treaty, bands. They returned to their homelands and no effort was made to evict them, nor did any flood of settlers invade — the Idaho gold was already playing out, and many adventurers were moving on. Those who stayed, however, were putting down roots, either as farmers and ranchers claiming bottomland in the Salmon and Inmaha valleys or as traders and civic leaders in Lewiston, a town now on firmer legal foundations, well situated to serve as a mercantile crossroads for the Northwest. As one local historian put it in conversation: ‘Think of Lewiston as a Wal-Mart. It sold everything to everybody for miles around.’
Most vigorously, it sold Idaho, with newspapers and local politicians entering the most competitive fray in the West — boosterism. Immigration was the lifeblood of a newly founded town, and leaflets, exhibition stalls and newspaper articles eulogizing a new life in Western towns desperate for warm bodies were sprayed across the country in a Darwinian marketing brawl. An article in the Lewiston Teller — in response, as most such examples were, to a fictitious enquiry about the area from a potential emigrant back East — sets the tone: ‘Our soil cannot be excelled…Our climate is mild, healthy and invigorating…[Immigrants] will prosper and become more affluent more readily than in any other locality we know of.’
Taking up the familiar theme of divine design, another local paper offered this fragrant analysis of the just purchased Camas Prairie in response to another ‘letter to the editor’: ‘The Almighty never planned a piece of country so big as this with less waste land. Every element of prosperity lies at the doorstep of every man who has the good fortune to own a quarter section of this fertile soil. Tickle it with a plough and it will laugh you a harvest of flour.’
With luring new arrivals a prerequisite for survival, Lewiston and its farming outposts hardened towards the dissident Nez Perce -north-central Idaho had to appear placid and safe to outsiders, not a haven for, as they were now routinely called in the local press, ‘outlaw Indians’. The small number of sympathetic voices faced a chorus of antagonism towards the non-treaty tribes that grew louder by the year. And anyway, as the anglicized dress, language and financial success of a handful of Christian Nez Perce headmen was taken to prove, ’Indianness’ would, it was widely believed, prove an impermanent local feature.
In fact, the opposite was growing more likely. Bewildered and embittered by the Thief Treaty and harassed by settlers arriving in their valleys with fence posts and ploughshares, the dissident Nez Perce were returning to their traditional rites and belief systems with the zeal of the recently unconverted. Life had manifestly been better before the whites had arrived, so band leaders such as Tuekakas, Toohoolhoolzote and White Bird encouraged their people to replicate those times in their hunting and gathering, celebrations and prayers. The teachings of a local prophet, Smohalla, also chimed with this ambition: armed with a tale of his own resurrection, that borrowed from both a wyakin quest and the Easter teachings of his missionary rivals, the hunchback Smohalla preached that a return to traditional faiths and the ancient reverence for Mother Earth would rid the Northwest of the white newcomers and return to life those killed by their diseases and devil water. Considering the ubiquitous evidence that hymns and haircuts were not serving the best interest of the natives of the Northwest, Smohalla’s individual influence is hard to quantify, but the widespread revival of traditional Indian rites in the 1860s and 1870s came to be associated with his ‘Dreamer’ movement. This association was most widely promoted by white advocates seeking to belittle the claims of any discontented tribes -the Oregonian Telegram suggested that any tribal leader connected to the Dreamers should be banished from the Northwest, as the ‘cult’ was ‘teaching them to despise civilisation and ignore the authority of the United States’ while the San Francisco Chronicle offered this eerie analysis of their public enemy number one:
Smohalla, the Dreamer, is a sort of Indian Mohamet. His doctrine is a destroying one — to exterminate the palefaces, and to restore the whole country to the Indians. He has a most inspiring manner, and has thousands of followers. All the disaffected and renegade Indians who refuse to go upon the reservations…will wage war upon the whites, agreeably to the teachings of Smohalla.
Tuekakas, despairing of his efforts to make peace between competing faiths, had indeed torn up his Bible in 1863, and imposed strict rules of traditional worship, language and practice on his people. Protected by the natural isolation of their valley and the ample unclaimed land that still lay beyond their borders, the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce were now among the last Native peoples within the United States whose lifestyles remained largely unsullied by colonial influence. Tuekakas fiercely protected their independence, marking the boundaries of his homelands by building a line of cairns running over Minam Summit, refusing the offers of free government beef that were clearly intended to undercut the band’s hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and destroying the equipment of any speculators