But Tuekakas was growing frail, his sight now so weak that a Nez Perce boy was assigned to share his saddle, acting as his eyes. His sons would soon have to lead the band — the gregarious and vigorous Ollokot, revered as a hunter and warrior, and the more thoughtful Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, a name approximately anglicized to Thunder Rolling over the Mountains. Having accompanied his father to many councils and meetings, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, just thirty-one, had developed an impressive ability to handle the eccentricities of white people, one reason why he would soon acquire nationwide fame; another, in the rapidly simplifying world of the mass media, was that he had a second, recognizable and pronounceable name. He had adopted his father’s baptized title, and had come to be known as Joseph.
Tuekakas died in August 1871. His son Joseph would later eloquently describe his final moments in a famous passage that, while possibly unreliable in translation, is piercingly clear in sentiment:
Soon after this my father sent for me. I saw he was dying. I took his hand in mine. He said, ‘My son, my body is returning to my mother earth, and my spirit is going to see the Great Spirit Chief. When I am gone, think of your country. You are the chief of these people. They look to you to guide them. Always remember that your father never sold his country. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few more years and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and mother.’
I pressed my father’s hand and told him that I would protect his grave with my life. My father smiled and passed away to the spirit land. I buried him in that beautiful valley of winding waters. I love that land more than all the rest of the world. A man who would not love his father’s grave is worse than a wild animal.
Tuekakas was buried near his favourite summer camp at the confluence of the Wallowa and Lostine rivers. Later, in 1926, his (probable) remains were moved to the head of Wallowa Lake in a sombre and unlikely funeral procession of costumed warriors and Model-T Fords, where an obelisk was erected in his honour. (Next to the monument there is now a patch of open pasture, whose owner has been campaigning for more than a decade for the right to turn the land neighbouring the likely resting place of one of Native America’s most important leaders into a subdivision of luxury homes, or, failing that, a trailer park. The memorial to a man who died proclaiming his people’s right to their homeland is currently overlooked by a giant Stars and Stripes, next to a large placard bearing the slogan ‘Private Property is the Foundation of Freedom’.)
Joseph’s pledge to his father would be tested within weeks. The well-settled Grande Ronde Valley experienced a drought in 1871, and the failing pastures forced a handful of enterprising cattle and sheep farmers to enter the Wallowa in search of lush grazing and a harvest of hay. Finding almost unlimited forage for their herds, as well as a river stocked with mysterious but delectable red fish and nearby forests crammed with game, they resolved to settle, and in 1872 brought their wives and children. By the end of that year seventy-five settlers had laid claim to a patch of land in the Wallowa. Joseph met these settlers at a series of good-natured but inconclusive meetings, where he would patiently explain that his father had never sold the valley, while they would insist that they had been informed that it was now United States public land, to which they had a rightful claim. Under the homesteading law designed to inspire westward settlement, you simply paid $16 at a registry office, took your fence posts and marked out 160 vacant acres; once you could prove that you’d occupied and worked on the land for two years, it was yours.
The next spring, the stalemate became slightly worse. Eleven of the less congenial settlers sent a petition to the local Indian Agent claiming that Joseph had ‘threatened to burn our houses etc. etc.’ and demanding armed protection. This inflammatory nonsense caught something of a nerve, for on the southern border of Oregon a charismatic tribal leader known as Captain Jack was cutting a swathe through neighbouring settler communities in the opening exchanges of what would be known as the Modoc War. Perhaps wary of getting too involved in another Indian dispute on the ground — Captain Jack had responded to the peace proposals of the government’s representative, General Edward Canby, by shooting him in the face, stabbing him repeatedly and stealing his coat — the responsible powers tried to impose a solution from a distance. In an office in Washington a map of the Wallowa Valley was divided in two: one end (the one with almost all the white settlements in it) was assigned to the Nez Perce, while the other (unsettled, and dominated by Indian fishing grounds and hunting trails) was handed to the whites. Back in the valley, both sides largely ignored the plan, confident that someone would eventually recognize its idiocy.
In fact, such a sane and sanguine attitude continued to characterize most white and Indian relations in the Wallowa. The Nez Perce were willing to tolerate such a small amount of settlement, provided their lifestyle remained sustainable, and the settlers, by and large, simply wanted their status confirmed one way or the other. Numerically, the settlers knew they faced only obliteration if trouble truly flared (there were fewer than 150 of them, actually only slightly less than the Wallowa band, but the Indians had access to fearsome reinforcements) and they were by no means wedded to the Wallowa — many admitted they were just hanging on for a government payout to leave the land to the Indians. One observer, Captain Whipple, noted the settlers’ willingness to ‘sell out at the first opportunity and move to a more promising locality. This shows how the white people who reside here regard this valley. On the other hand, the Indians love it.’ In this relatively level-headed context, friendships could form — a shared love of horse-racing (and gambling on it) offered a sporting common ground, while most of the settlers were happy for their children to hero-worship the playful Joseph.
Sadly, however, beyond the valley, hysteria reigned. The petitioners’ scaremongering fused with lurid newspaper reports of the Modoc War to convince the citizens of the surrounding towns of Lewiston and the Grande Ronde Valley that, in the words of one local paper, ‘another Indian scare is about to transpire’ in the Wallowa. In February 1873 the citizens of La Grande, the nearest large town west of the Wallowa, sent for two hundred rifles to put down the imminent uprising, while Joseph was mythologized as a kind of pirate king, certain to join forces with Captain Jack, and the settlers’ funeral eulogies were written, casting them, of course, as the pristine victims of the piece. When the government’s map-making folly was announced, the Union County Mountain Sentinel called it ‘the crowning act of infamy…actually driving earnest, honest and hardy pioneers from their homes’, before the editor, unexpectedly, slipped into blank verse: ‘The Wallowa Gone; Dirty, Greasy Indians to Hold the Valley; Two hundred white men and families driven from the beauty spot of Oregon…Citizens of Wallowa! Awake and Drive Joseph and his Band from the face of the Earth.’
Such enthusiasm for another man’s squabble should have aroused suspicion. In fact, this was the overture for a persistent theme — the image of the doughty, impoverished settler, keeper of the pioneer flame, was being invoked by those in less straitened circumstances, to force the hand of a government wedded to the homesteading myth. The reality was that the struggle for the Wallowa wasn’t being fought on behalf of a couple of hundred settlers, but for many thousands of cattle. The prosperous stockmen of the Grande Ronde Valley were growing dependent on the summer range of the Wallowa (the number of cows that summered in the valley trebled between 1873 and 1874, while human settlement at best stagnated) and they resented the competition for grass from the Nez Perce’s own herds of cattle, and particularly their thousands of horses. From early 1873 an alliance of influential stockmen, malleable local politicians and bilious newspaper editors, almost none of whom lived in the Wallowa and many of whom had never even seen it, waged a voluble campaign ostensibly upholding the rights of the valley’s heroic settlers over the demands of the transient, ‘roaming’ Indians. They got their way, and on 16 June 1875 President Grant signed a bill abandoning all efforts to redeem the map-making farce, and simply reopened the entire valley to white settlement. Most of the young warriors in the Wallowa band, in concert with the leaders of other dissident Nez Perce bands, such as White Bird and Toohoolhoolzote,