University Of Wisconsin photo
The other day my friend and I were talking about Native Americans in the Northwest, where we’re both from. She told me a story about her great-great-grandfather, a white settler who’d been given 160 acres of government land in Idaho near the Colville Indian Reservation in the late 1800s.
The settler and his family were cutting logs for a cabin when an Indian -- okay -- Native American, emerged from the woods and watched the family at work for awhile, then, without a word, pitched in and helped. He shared the family's lunch of venison stew and biscuits, after which everyone returned to work until darkness fell. Then the Indian faded back into the forest, returning the next day and every day after that until the cabin was built.
My friend said her great-great-grandfather eventually learned the Indian’s name, which translated as Thunder Rolling Down The Mountain. He was better known by another name: Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.
He was one of the chiefs who had led a band of 900 men, women and children on a 1300 mile chase to freedom in Canada after escaping from a reservation in 1877, being captured 60 miles short of his goal by a cavalry unit under the command of General Oliver Howard. Howard was the ultimate liberal of his day, having founded the Freedman’s Bureau to assist former slaves and was instrumental in establishing Howard University in Washington D.C. But he was also a career military officer sworn to obey orders, including the pursuit and capture of a man he knew and admired. Howard was not the only one sympathetic to Joseph’s flight. A New York reporter accompanying Howard’s troops told Howard that his editor telegraphed “Our readers are rooting for the Indians.”
Joseph’s actual surrender was made to Howard’s subordinate, General Nelson “Bearcoat” Miles. A lieutenant on Miles’s staff, Erskine Wood, wrote down Joseph’s words when the surrender was signed:
“Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
Joseph and 200 of his followers were incarcerated in federal prisons for 10 years. He returned to the Colville Reservation upon release and led a quiet life until his death in 1904, helping the very people who believed in the Manifest Destiny of taming the west, but often at the cost of their own humanity -- and a lunch of biscuits and venison stew.
Comments?
Thank you, Mike. What a great man he was, unlike those who reside in Washington right now. -- Shannon
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Mike,
A nice piece, and as always, one which makes me think about things in life, and the people who come in and out of it.
I grew up on the Yakima Indian Reservation. From birth to seventeen years old, I lived on a big farm with my father and mother and brother. My father farmed 300 acres of sweet corn, field corn, wheat, alfalfa, sugar beets and spearmint. We raised a lot of black Angus cattle, a few lambs, several pigs, rabbits. chickens. It was a typical farm life.
I went to school in a little Indian town - no, we didn't call it a Native American town - and on the streets it was common to see brown-skinned men and women dressed in traditional fringed, beaded buckskin shirts, vests, dresses, and moccasins. It was not uncommon at all to see long-haired men and women with braids, leather headbands and hair ties. The town was about 4500 people, diverse - whites, Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, and Mexicans. There was no stigma it seemed, being any of these, seemed everyone was treated the same if you behaved yourself.
When I was about seven I would sometimes sit in a little park in a nearby town populated with the same cross-section of people while my crazy mother would spend money in several of the nearby shops. In those days it wasn't unusual to leave your kid somewhere like that, though my father never would do that. Sometimes in the park a few older Indian men would be sitting on benches on warm days. I'd sometimes sit down next to one, feeling pretty safe, stranger though he might be.
One day I sat down next to an old man with buckskins on and he had two feathers in his headdress, hanging down in the back. We sat without words for several minutes, and then very quietly he asked me if I wanted some buffalo jerky that his mother had sent him from Montana. I took a piece and thanked him. It was thicker than the beef jerky one could buy in a store, and it was smoky and rich. I sat there tearing little strips of it off and eating them, and he asked me if I lived in town. I said no, that I lived on a farm.
He asked me if my father had taught me about nature. I looked at him, not answering because I wasn't really sure what he meant. I said "About trees and stuff?" He said yes, about trees and animals and the earth and the people who live on it. I told him that my father took me on walks in our fields and tell me how things grew, and he'd take me in the forest when we'd go camping and tell me what kind of trees we saw, and what kind of rocks and wild flowers and he'd talk to me about how bad he felt when loggers would cut all the trees off a side of a mountain.
The old man smiled. He stared up at the blue sky and asked me if my father or any of my people thought of what Spirit watched over the forest. I thought he was going to start telling me to go to church like my father's mother always did - a religious fanatic of the first order I thought even then - and I almost got up and moved to another bench. Then he said Mother Earth watched over the forest and that my father must be one of Mother Earth's messengers, one of her teachers. I still wasn't sure what he meant, but I thought it was really cool that my father must be somebody important and that I hadn't known until that moment what a special guy my daddy must be. For all I knew he was a Chief who was schooling me in important matters rather than just an old man in buckskins reminiscing through my childhood about matters of his own heart.
I moved with my family off the reservation in 1968. It took me a while to stop missing the big farm and my trips to the park where old men in buckskins sat. I learned in school about the lives and plight of many Native Americans in history. I don't know to this day all I might about their lives and the lives of the Indians in my life in the fifties and sixties. I got all wrapped up in the hippie life and other beads and trips of a different kind that didn't surround me in evergreens.
All of my thoughts these days are wandering around in a bigger field of whys - why people of any color treat each other like they do, why Mother Earth gets short-changed at the will of the Immediate Man. I am sad sometimes when I think of all the potential we have for good, and torn when I wonder why we all don't seem to have a tolerance and ability to do better.
I wonder what the old man in the park would say to me today? -- Zoey
Well, he’d probably ask if you wanted some jerky. -- MB
