Howard began to bandy about the idea of a commission of wise Washington men that would judge the case of the Nez Perce bands which had not signed in ‘63 — and, once the Wilhautyah murder and Bighorn rout had focused their minds, the politicians agreed. In October 1876, Howard hand-picked three estimable easterners whom a Lapwai local would later describe as ‘excellent men…all kings of finance, but with not a speck of Indian sense, experience, or knowledge’ and set off back for Idaho. The dissident Nez Perce bands converged to meet the commission at the Indian Agency in Lapwai in hopeful spirits — knowing that their self-proclaimed friends, General Howard and Henry Clay Wood, would be the fourth and fifth wise men.
The commission performed quite startlingly badly. Stark falsehoods were accepted as fact — for example, that Tuekakas had been bound by the treaty of 1863 (Howard would claim his was the third signature on the paper), while some statements from the Washington magi, for example that the Wallowa was too cold for Indians to live in, bordered on the infantile. The Dreamer movement was endlessly referred to as a cross between a blood-drinking cult and a pan-American guerrilla network, and Joseph’s patient, placatory descriptions of the legal reality and moral rightness of the tribes’ demands were cut short and discounted. His now famous analysis of the US government’s negotiating tactics — that they took your horses, but paid your neighbour for them — cut no ice.
Realizing they were facing a stitch-up, the non-treaty bands walked out, leaving the commission to draft its recommendations alone — the non-treaty Nez Perce were to be moved out of their homelands and onto the Christian reservation under the threat of force, where each family would receive a twenty-acre plot of the worst available land; the leaders of the Dreamer ‘fanaticism’ were to be banished to Indian Territory in distant Oklahoma to end their pernicious influence on the Northwest; and, finally, the army was requested to occupy the Wallowa Valley immediately to usher Joseph’s band permanently over the mountains and away.
To his considerable historical credit, Henry Clay Wood refused to sign the report. Howard, by contrast, had all but written it, dominating the commission from start to finish. His conversion, in less than a year, from Nez Perce advocate to their oppressor in chief is as instructive as it is disconcerting.
Firstly, he was demonstrating the extent to which events at the Little Big Horn had changed everything. Howard knew that, just four months after banner headlines of massacres and scalpings, his elected paymasters were in no mood to negotiate with renegades.
Traditionalist, or ‘Dreamer’ Nez Perce in 1876. Timlpusman, second from right, is the great-grandfather of the Nez Perce spiritual leader Horace Axtell.
Secondly, his Christianity had been challenged. In the days prior to the commission, the non-treaty bands’ implacable foes (including the federal Indian Agent who was supposed to represent them, and a handful of Christian Nez Perce leaders) had bombarded Howard with testimony regarding the heathen Dreamers, persuading him that Joseph had fallen under the mind control of the hunchback sorcerer Smohalla. It was a gross misrepresentation of the Wallowa band’s independent commitment to their traditional faith, but it worked: the commission reported to Washington that ‘a kind of wizard’ was now Joseph’s spiritual string-puller, ‘who is understood to have great power over him and the whole band’. Under such circumstances, the Christian General felt that legal niceties should be shelved, and the non-treaty bands needed hastily corralling as close to a pastor as possible.
Finally, after two years in the Northwest, Howard had clearly learned the realities of settler politics. Helping the Nez Perce would have been profoundly unpopular, and almost certainly impermanent. To understand why, one needs to turn to Lewiston.
The last few years had not been kind to the tent city at the confluence of the Snake and the Clearwater. None of the local gold strikes had lasted much longer than Pierce’s, the estimated $50 million that had been dug from the surrounding hills in a decade had generated little permanent wealth, locally at least, and catering for the new wave of farming settlers offered steady, but certainly not spectacular, business. By 1876 many of Lewiston’s traders had, in the ceaselessly mobile fortune-hunting style of the early white West, simply drifted away. The town’s status as territorial capital of Idaho had also been stolen — literally, the governor making a daring overnight escape with the Territorial Seal, in response to a better offer from the city of Boise. Lewiston’s sole growth industries were now prostitution and corruption — the arrival of the libidinous US Army and the supposed flow of funds to the Christian Nez Perce offering easy pickings — and the town’s population had fallen well below the boom-time peak of ten thousand souls.
One reason for leaving Lewiston must have been that it was a profoundly challenging place to love. Situated at the entrance to a canyon, this was the lowest point in Idaho, a suntrap capable of sustaining fearsome summer temperatures, with little hope of the blessed intervention of rain — local lore has it that drenching thunderclouds often roll down the Clearwater Valley, divide to leave Lewiston bone dry, then re-form as they head towards the Wallowa. Nez Perce legend recalls that when this land was young, Símíínekem, the place where two rivers meet, was considered unfit for human habitation, ‘because it was far too hot’ (a conclusion with which this author can sympathize: in the heatwave of August 2006 the downtown temperature reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit — no time to be living in a camper van in the parking lot of the Lewiston Wal-Mart).
In 1873 a sterling remedy to Lewiston’s permanently parched state was proposed, and work began on a ditch that would run precious water out of the Clearwater and into the Snake, via the centre of town. The project was blighted and ultimately bankrupted by the legal wrangling that would soon come to dominate the West -deciding who owned the water — but the ditch finally opened in 1874, conferring upon Lewiston the joys of orchards, rose gardens and the town’s very own defining characteristic: a dreadful smell. The ditch immediately became the local sewer, garbage dump, pet cemetery and livestock trough, noxious at the best of times, overwhelming during the frequent water cut-offs for repairs. One reporter (actually writing in 1889, by when the town had been forced to put a lid over the open pit) described a flow of ‘iron pots, oil cans, fruit cans, vegetable cuttings of all kinds, dead hens, dead cats and dogs…the stench which arises from some portions of the covered ditch must be very offensive. There must be dead carcasses or other putrid matter lodged along its margin.’
As the ditch also served as Lewiston’s main source of drinking water, the municipal baths and the best place to leave a rowdy drunk, public health was far from robust — a local doctor estimated in the mid-1870s that two-thirds of the town was sick at any one time. Those who drank from the ditch may have been the lucky ones -many of Lewiston’s inhabitants sourced their water from a spring that percolated through the town’s hilltop cemetery.
In the relentless, rootless search for the riches of the new West -land, gold, timber, salmon — death always walked too close to leave room for sentiment. If an enterprise wasn’t raising a profit, you got out, and if a town was dying, you packed up, and it promptly died. In 1876, Lewiston’s very survival remained uncertain. The craving for the lifeblood of immigration was palpable — as the Lewiston Teller stated in an editorial, the only future for the town lay with attracting ‘the great number of robust and healthy people entirely destitute of remunerative employment’ on the eastern seaboard ‘to our fertile and healthy soil’. For Lewiston’s press boosters, Indian uprisings such as Captain Jack’s war and the Sioux and Cheyenne rebellions were an unthinkable prospect in their back yard, as ‘report of it abroad would greatly check immigration to our borders’. Not surprisingly, petitions were regularly drawn up demanding the prompt subjugation of the dissident Nez Perce and (in a consistent request across the frontier West) the generous reinforcement of the local military presence.
When Henry Clay Wood’s legal opinion was published, suggesting a magnanimous response to the Wallowa controversy, Lewiston laughed in his face, proclaiming him a Washington meddler who should leave such matters to the locals, ‘who comprehend the situation’, and suggesting, in what may be one of the earliest printed instances of the Mountain West’s