Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1878

. . . In the fall of 1878, Commissioner of Indian Affairs E.A. Hayt visited the Nez Perces' camp, saw their deplorable living conditions but agreed only to try to get Congress to appropriate money to move them to a different location in the Indian Territory. This was not good enough for Joseph; his people were dying of broken hearts, as well as from their unhealthy situation in flimsy canvas tipis that provided little protection against cold and rain. When he told Hayt of the promise that Howard and Miles had made to him at the Pear Paws to return the Nez Perces to the Northwest, Hayt urged the Secretary of the Interior to see if the government had broken the military leaders' word. Both officers confirmed Joseph's story, though Howard maintained that White Bird's flight to Canada had voided the battlefield agreement. Miles disagreed: "I would have started them west immediately [after the surrender] except for the lateness of the season," he asserted. "From all I can learn, the Nez Perces' trouble was caused by the rascality of their Agent, and the encroachment of the whites, and have regarded their treatment as unusually severe." . . .

In Canada, the Nez Perces who had gained safety with Sitting Bull were homesick. Beginning in 1878, individuals and small groups tried to make their way back across the plains and mountains to the Nez Perce reservation. Some died or were killed along the way, and most of those, including Yellow Wolf, who made it safely to Idaho were rounded up on the reservation and sent off under guard to join the exiles in the Indian Territory. White Bird himself never returned; about 1882, his services as a shaman failed to save the lives of two sick Nez Perce children in Canada, and he, it is believed, was slain by their distraught father. (pp. 153-155)