Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1873

All this was in marked contrast to the state of the non-treaties, whom the Christian factions referred to as "heathens." The anxieties of the non-treaties, and some other Plateau tribes, had also given rise to various new nativistic cults, most of them stemming again from the earlier Prophet cults. Whites became particularly aware of one of them, which they called the Dreamer religion and which had been spread by a Wanapum Indian shaman named Smohalla, who lived at Priest Rapids on the Columbia. Like the prophets of most cults, Smohalla claimed he had died, had received certain instructions in the afterworld, and had then returned to life to communicate those instructions to the Indians. By abandoning the customs and clothing of the white man and returning to the ways of their ancestors, by following pure and sacred rules of behavior, and by participating in special dances and using prescribed symbolic objects in their rituals, the Indians, he asserted, would be rewarded with a new day of peace when the white man and his works would disappear from their lands.

By the 1870s, male and female shamans were preaching somewhat similar messages to many of the non-treaty bands, including Joseph's. The cults and the degree of their acceptance varied from tribe to tribe and, among the non-treaty Nez Perces, from band to band, but the whites tended to see them all as part of a single conspiracy, preached by Smohalla, with the aim of uniting all of the Northwest Indians in an uprising against the whites. By the early 1870s, many American political and military leaders thought the principal agents of such an uprising would be the non-treaty Nez Perces, who were the most powerful Indians still living off reservations. . . .

Even as Old Joseph was buried, however, the first white settlers were finding a route into the valley from Oregon's Grande Ronde country. More of them came the next year, and the next, building homes, seizing pasturage for their stock, and telling the youthful Joseph, his younger brother Ollokot, who was the hunting and war leader of the young men, and the other members of the band that the government had purchased the area from the tribe in 1863 and the Indians would have to leave. The leaders of the band, which numbered approximately 250 people, argued in a series of councils with the settlers that they had never sold the land. Monteith was summoned from Lapwai, 160 kilometers (100 miles) away, to straighten out the facts and was nonplussed when he realized what had actually happened at the 1863 council. The commissioners had maintained, and the government in Washington had believed, that Lawyer had had the right to sign for every band, selling the lands of bands whose leaders had not signed the treaty. But did Lawyer really have the right to do so?

Seriously questioning whether he could legally oust either the Indians or the settlers from the Wallowa, but deploring the fact that the valley had ever been opened to whites, Monteith wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, telling him of the confusion and stating that "if there is any way by which the Wallowa Valley could be kept for the Indians, I would recommend that it be done." His report persuaded the Department of the Interior that the government's title to Joseph's land was, at best, questionable and led to an administration decision on June 16, 1873, to divide the area into two sections, one for the white settlers and the other as a permanent reservation for Joseph's band. A provision was also made to purchase the improvements of any settler who had to move.

The proposal was seen as an abject surrender to potentially hostile Indians and raised a storm of protest among the whites in the valley, as well as in newspapers throughout the Northwest. Joseph was an unusual man. Born in 1840 in a cave near the mouth of present-day Joseph Creek in the Wallowa country, he was tall, heavily built, and had handsome, noble features and an imposing presence. He had inherited his father's tolerance, compassion, and gentle manner and was a civil, rather than a hunting or military, chief. He carried himself with dignity, could speak with eloquence and logic, and was already known among the non-treaties as a man of wisdom and peace. But white public opinion throughout the Northwest suddenly had a new Indian villain. As a non-treaty who refused to go on the reservation, he was considered a dangerous and scheming "hostile" and a follower of the much-feared Smohalla, who at any moment might start a general uprising. (pp. 113-116)