As night fell the crowd in the bleachers grew larger, the dancing more expressive, the darkness adding theatre and concentrating our minds on this unlikely circle of light. Brian Conner, Fred’s cousin, was serving as emcee and announced that the central moment of the weekend was due — the veterans’ honour dance. ‘This is a time for us to heal, a time for us to come together — and that’s what this ceremony is all about.’
Any veterans of military service, Indian and non-Indian, were invited to take to the floor and follow the flags of the armed forces in a circle dance (forty-eight men and women stepped up, many of whom, it transpired, had travelled hundreds of miles just for this moment), then the whole crowd, maybe three hundred of us, walked the circle shaking each hand and offering our thanks for their sacrifices, to starch-pressed veterans of Omaha Beach and Korea, bearded and Hawaiian-shirted baby boomers with Vietnam tours to recall, eerily fresh-faced returnees from the War on Terror. ‘The warriors are home,’ declared Brian as we circled, reminding us that Native Americans contribute a greater proportion of military servants than any other ethnic group in the US, that more than four hundred Nez Perce have served in the past century: ‘These people fought for the freedom to sing our songs, and tonight we pay tribute.’
The microphone was passed around, each veteran asked in turn to describe their service, each lengthily applauded, many unable to hold back the tears as they spoke of fallen friends and stolen youths. Steve Reuben, a Nez Perce, recalled, ‘I never met a single Native American in Vietnam — then I came home and went to a clinic for post-traumatic stress disorder, and it was all Indians — from twenty-two tribes!* And it’s all hard to forget, and we cry now, but these are tears of happiness, because we’re here with you all today, in a circle.’
The last man to take the microphone wore a Purple Heart on his white short-sleeved shirt, his flawless ponytail falling beneath a US Marines cap: ‘I just want to thank you all; this is a heartwarming experience for me, and a healing…’ He began to weep deeply, quietly. ‘I was in Vietnam, and…I’ve still got the stress disorder, the dreams. When I think about some of the things I’ve seen…and when I think about some of the things I’ve done…’ Most of us are crying now…‘Well, this is the most healing I’ve done in a long time, and, just, thank you all.’
The dancing went on late into the night.
On Sunday Tamkaliks wound to a close, with a traditional Nez Perce religious ceremony in the morning, a friendship feast of buffalo, elk and salmon, then there was a final round of dances, a closing prayer, and that was that. The tepees started to come down, the vendors shut up their vans. As the heat of the day passed, I climbed Tick Hill, reaching the low summit and overlooking the meadow from beneath a hackberry tree that had forced its way through the rock face. Below, the arbour was still glowing at the centre of the emptying meadow, as a few sparks of dry lightning fled from the blood-red clouds to the east, and the local patrol of Canada geese cruised soundlessly over the river on their daily route home. The Wallowa band of the Nez Perce were packing their cars, facing the long drive home to Idaho, Washington, the Oregon Prairie and elsewhere, leaving the valley to its placid routine of yard sales, baseball games, fundraising breakfasts and coffee-morning gossip.
‘We ask the children to dance first,’ Brian Conner had said, ‘then the women and then the men. We do this to honour first those children, then those women and those men, who took part in that long retreat, when we left this valley, one hundred and thirty years ago. Because, as we all know, one hundred and thirty years is not a very long time.’
The wagon train was trapped in the Rocky Mountains when the blizzard struck, scattering the horses, enfeebling the children and obscuring the onward path. The emigrants had been travelling since spring, and for many this was the final straw. They had overcome the sapping monotony of the prairies, driven their creaking, oxen-hauled wagons through mud, marshlands and boulder fields, crossed the swollen Snake River, lost friends and family to sickness and accidents, and faced down the constant terror of Indian attack for the past five months. Some of the tribes they’d met had been friendly, and the settlers had followed the orders of their leader, the legendary scout and mountain man Breck Coleman, to ease their path through Indian Country — ‘They’ll probably bring their families to beg, so feed them well and feed them right.’ But other bands had been implacable, staging daring raids that had forced the wagons into a defensive circle, arrows and bullets filling the air. And now winter was approaching, the snow was falling ever thicker, and spirits were sagging — the heads of each family took a vote on turning back, and the decision to accept defeat was made. Dreams of a new life in the lush, unsettled valleys of the Oregon Territory were set aside.
Breck Coleman was having none of it. Knee-deep in the drifting whiteness, seemingly impervious to the cold, he urged the travellers not to lose heart:
‘We can’t turn back! We’re blazing a trail that started in England! Not even the storms of the sea could turn back those first settlers. And then they carried it on further, they blazed it on through the wilderness of Kentucky — famine, hunger, not even massacres could stop them. And now we’ve picked up the trail again — and nothing can stop us, not even the snows of winter nor the peaks of the highest mountains. We’re building a nation! But we’ve got to suffer — no great trail was ever blazed without hardship. And you gotta fight, that’s life, and when you stop fighting, that’s death. So whaddya gonna do, lie down and die? Not in a thousand years — you’re going on with me!’
With a mighty cheer the emigrants hitched their wagons and rolled on, finally coming to rest and building their new lives in the fertile, unpopulated valley of their fantasies. As for young Breck Coleman, his towering, lopsided figure would later be seen defending the Alamo, taking the sands of Iwo Jima, riding the Rio Grande and shooting Liberty Valance, in a fifty-year career for which The Big Trail (Fox Films, 1930, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring John Wayne and Marguerite Churchill) would prove a mere canapé.
Tuekakas’ favourite summer camp lay at the junction of the Wallowa and Lostine rivers, just a few miles south-east of Tick Hill. There was plentiful grazing for his people’s horses, the two rivers ran red with trout and salmon, and the narrow Lostine Valley led away from the flat-bottomed plain and up into the forested mountains where deer and elk abounded. In his time, when only the unreliable rains brought growth, the valley floor was a semi-desert of sagebrush and hardy, tawny grasses, mingled with pine groves and, where the rivers fled their banks, the odd patch of floodland, thick with migrating fowl. Now, however, the relentless tsk-tsk-tsk of the irrigation machines shared the rivers’ flow across a confected delta, turning the ceaseless pasture and hayfields an unlikely luscious green under the fierce sun. The pine groves were long gone, while the rivers had been straightened in places, dredged and divided up between each farmstead.
‘This