Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1880

In 1879 the government encouraged three young Nez Perce Presbyterian leaders, James Reuben, Mark Williams, and Archie Lawyer, the son of the late head chief, to travel from the reservation to the Indian Territory to teach and preach to the exiles. Williams soon sickened and returned to Idaho, but by February 1880 Lawyer had organized a Presbyterian church among the exiles and Reuben had opened a day school with an average attendance of 80. In time, a frame schoolhouse was built, and some of the abler students were sent on to an industrial school at the Ponca agency or to the Chilocco Indian boarding school in the Indian Territory near Arkansas City, Kansas. . . .

[Back in Idaho], as the agent and the missionary-dominated Presbyterian church officials asserted more authority, the formal governing role of the traditional chiefs lessened, and in 1880, when the 25-year term of the Stevens Treaty of 1855 expired, it finally disintegrated. To determine what the Indians wanted done about the treaty, the agent, Charles B. Warner, called together councils of all adult Nez Perce males in September 1879 and January 1880. At their request, the Federal Government, on July 1, 1880, continued in force the principal provisions of the 1855 and 1863 treaties. The councils themselves were innovations and set precedents for governing in the future by general councils of the adult members of the tribe, rather than by councils of chiefs. But the renewed treaties eliminated payments to a head chief or sub-chiefs, thereby ending government recognition of those positions. Furthermore, the agent, with the approval of the general council, drew up a new code of laws to deal with minor crimes on the reservation (major crimes were handled by Federal courts) and, from the ranks of leading Presbyterian Indians, appointed an agency police force of five Nez Perces to enforce the code and a three-member court of Indian judges with the power to try cases and levy fines as punishments. The police and judges also received salaries, thus further destroying whatever remained of chiefly rule. (pp. 155, 160)