Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1857

. . . Though Stevens, who went to Washington in 1857 as territorial delegate to Congress, pleaded for the treaties, the Senate did not ratify them until April 1859, four years after the council. . . . In the Northwest, the pro-treaty Indians waited restlessly for their promised payments and services while their anti-treaty opponents scoffed and jeered at them, saying that they would never get them. Meanwhile large number of whites, many of them miners on their way to and from the Colville Valley gold mines, continued to enter the lands of the Yakimas, Palouses, Spokans, Coeur d'Alenes, and other northern tribes. The roughhewn California miners thought nothing of pillaging and killing Indians. The Indians retaliated and, despite the presence of the military, the murders of Indians and whites increased. (pp. 94-95)