Selling Your Father’s Bones: The Epic Fate of the American West. Brian Schofield

though, little had changed. As the warrior Yellow Wolf recalled: ‘Chief Toohoolhoolzote stood up to talk for the Indians. He told how the land always belonged to the Indians, how it came down to us from our fathers. How the earth was a great law, how everything must remain as fixed by the Earth-Chief. How the land must not be sold! That we came from the earth, and our bodies must go back to the earth, our mother.’

      Howard had heard enough, and cut in, a considerable breach of council etiquette: ‘I don’t want to offend your religion, but you must talk about practicable things; twenty times over I hear that the earth is your mother and about chieftainship from the earth. I want to hear it no more, but come to business at once.’

      The details of the slanging match that followed have been obscured by time and language. It seems that Toohoolhoolzote, a chief whose remote mountain homeland had helped cultivate a generous contempt for white culture, challenged the authority of Washington and the sanity of those who would divide and parcel the earth, while Howard demanded in ever more aggressive terms whether the chief was choosing submission or rebellion. Finally, according to some reports, Toohoolhoolzote dismissed Howard’s conduct as an insult to his manhood, while taking an illustrative grip on his own manhood, a gesture which drove the prudish Christian General over the edge. Incandescent, Howard ordered Toohoolhoolzote arrested and locked in the guardhouse, before bellowing to the remaining chiefs that the time for talk had ended: ‘If you do not mind me, I will take my soldiers and drive you onto the reservation!’ Howard had shown the rifle. The threat of violence in a treaty council was a shattering transgression, an insult and a challenge that breached the very purpose of peaceful dialogue. For many of the young Nez Perce warriors this was the declaration of war they had long hoped for, but the chiefs knew that the satisfaction of slaughtering Howard and his tiny garrison would surely be followed by vengeful annihilation from the East. Prudence won the day, and subjugation was grudgingly accepted. The chiefs agreed to ride out with Howard the next day and choose the reservation land for their new homes.

      It’s an indication of the optimism and resilience of the Nez Perce leadership that the five-day search for their reservation patches took place in largely good humour. Despite the theft with menaces they were being subjected to, the chiefs joked with Howard, challenged his cavalrymen to horse races, and declared themselves satisfied with the lands they chose to rehouse their peoples, along the Clearwater and Sweetwater rivers. On his release from the stockade, it even emerged that Toohoolhoolzote had struck up an unlikely friendship with one of his fellow inmates, a gregarious young army bugler called John Jones whose intemperate enjoyment of a good drink had recently offended General Howard’s piety. It seemed the Nez Perce problem was going to be solved amicably, if not fairly.

      But Howard had one more insult to hurl. On the final morning of the council he announced the timetable for the Nez Perce to move permanently onto the reservation — they had just thirty days. It was an impossible demand: the bands needed more time than that to gather their horse and cattle herds from their scattered pastures, let alone make the journey, with all their possessions, to their new homes. Worst of all, late spring would mark the high point of the thunderous floods in the great Snake and Salmon rivers, ensuring treacherous crossing for the elderly, the infirm and, in Joseph’s particular case, his heavily pregnant wife, Toma Alwawinmi. The chiefs begged for more time, but Howard was implacable, citing a petition he had just received from the white settlers on White Bird’s tribal lands (a particularly rancorous and prejudiced bunch of pioneers) proclaiming that only the very swiftest eviction would prevent an outbreak of violence. (Some years later, Howard would claim that the chiefs never asked for more time — this was a stark lie, intended to deflect any blame for the rough justice that was about to befall those very same white inhabitants of White Bird’s territory.) Howard let his ‘good friend’ Joseph know that the troops stationed at the entrance to the Wallowa would resort to force if the deadline was missed by a single day.

      Crestfallen, Joseph and Ollokot returned to their people to organize the gathering of the herds, the collection of their band’s sacred and valuable possessions, and the preparations for the final caravan away from the land of the winding waters. The son would have to break his promise to his dying father, but only to protect the lives of those who were his pastoral responsibility. Some years later, Joseph would admit that the inevitability of this moment had long weighed on his mind:

      I have carried a heavy load on my back ever since I was a boy. I learned then that we were but few, but the white men were many, and that we could not hold our own against them. We were like deer. They were like grizzly bears. We had a small country. Their country was large. We were contented to let things remain as the Great Spirit Chief made them. They were not; and would change the rivers and mountains if it did not suit them.

      The band congregated at a peaceful valley floor in their winter range, camping by the confluence of the Grande Ronde River and a narrow stream now known as Joseph Creek, where herons gathered to pluck eels from the shallow riffles. The mood was far from placid, though — Joseph and Ollokot were struggling to control their young warriors, whose pride could bear no more scars. As the truth sank in — that much of the band’s carefully raised livestock, its very wealth, would have to be left behind for the white settlers to appropriate -the clamour for action grew, and the arrival of Toohoolhoolzote and his followers only fuelled the rage, the old chief proclaiming his willingness to join the Wallowa’s young men and die defending his homeland. Somehow, the brothers retained control, and the retreat began peacefully, but in gloomy spirits, for ahead lay some of the roughest, least forgiving terrain in the whole Northwest.

      With their worldly possessions packed on their backs or loaded on horses, the Nez Perce fought their way down narrow, precipitous gullies to the river bottom of the Inmaha Canyon, driving what was left of their herds ahead of them. Almost impassable in the dry season, in the mud and loose rock of the spring thaw these exhausting descents needed every ounce of the band’s animal sense and wilderness skills. Then, after grazing the herd in the relative ease of the valley bottom, it was up and over once more, slowly climbing then descending a steep flank of land to drop into Hell’s Canyon -the lair of the great Snake River.

      This baked, chaotic, barren gorge, the deepest in America, is not a place to tarry. The wrinkles of land fold away for a bewildering distance, obscuring the shining path of the thick, brooding river, while above the earth loses its grip on the valley’s towering slopes, as if exhausted by their relentless gradient, to fall away and reveal crumbling, disorderly cliff faces. Rarely less than broiling hot, the valley floor is thick with rattlesnakes. Nearly one hundred years later, on 8 September 1974, the canyon’s gruelling inhospitability would be forever fixed in America’s national consciousness when Bobby ‘Evel’ Knievel endured one of his trademark near-death experiences during a failed rocket leap across the gorge. And now, in late May 1877, the Nez Perce scrambled down to the banks of the Snake to find that the river, just as predicted, was in full flood.

      For the young men this was no challenge. Swimming swollen rivers had long been a means for warriors and hunters to build and prove their strength — indeed, a more dramatic display involved driving a wild horse into a torrent, swimming in after it and riding it out. But the entire band had never attempted such a crossing as this, with the elderly and children included, plus thousands of cattle and horses. Makeshift rafts were built in a well-worn piece of fieldcraft, stretching buffalo hides across a ring of wood, and the elderly clung to horses that the young dragged and drove through the current. Some people were taken by the flood, and only reached the far bank, bedraggled and exhausted, up to a mile downstream. The whole shattering, terrifying effort took two days, and it was astonishing that no lives were lost. Crucial possessions did drift away forever, though: cooking and hunting equipment, robes, hides and blankets, and, most importantly, horses and cattle in their hundreds. Those horses that had been ridden across largely made it, but many of the wider herd drowned or bolted. The cattle fared far worse — the calves stood little chance, nor did the older beasts, whose calm heads were vital for making the herd manageable. Their bloated carcasses washed up and rotted in the shallows downstream.