Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1885

The commissioner of Indian Affairs delayed any action [on returning the exiles] because he was concerned that the whites in Idaho would not peaceably accept the return of Joseph and his Wallowa band, whom the Camas Prairie and Salmon River settlers still erroneously held accountable for the killings that had started the war. Finally he decided to send the remaining Wallowa Nez Perces to the Colville reservation in northeastern Washington and permit the rest of the exiles to settle on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho. At last, on May 22, 1885, 268 Nez Perces, the remainder of all who had surrendered almost eight years before or who had been captured after the war, entrained at Arkansas City. At Wallula, Washington, they were separated. Joseph and 149 others were sent on to the Colville reservation, while 118 continued to Lapwai. . . .

Joseph and his people continued to suffer an unhappy fate. The Colville reservation had been created in 1872 for a number of Salish and other tribes of eastern Washington, some of whom had not been friendly to the Nez Perces. They now objected to having the Nez Perce non-treaties in their midst, and troops had to be called from Fort Spokane before the Wallowa band could be settled along Nespelem Creek on the reservation. Joseph, too, was not pleased, and until 1900 he clung to the hope that this was only another stopping place. Again and again during the rest of his life, he pleaded in vain to be allowed to return to the Wallowa. In 1889, when the allotment of land began on the Lapwai reservation, he and his people could have moved there and received allotments, but he refused. In 1897, he went again to Washington, D.C., to press his appeal. The Indian Bureau said it would investigate the possibility of the Indians returning to their Oregon homeland, but the Indian officials knew the Wallowa settlers would never permit it. Joseph himself made two visits to the valley of his youth, in 1899 and 1900, and though he received a courteous hearing from the whites who had driven him out more than 20 years before, he was told bluntly that he could not come back. Joseph returned sadly to Nespelem and died there on September 21, 1904, while sitting before his tipi fire. The agency doctor reported that he had died of a broken heart. Joseph was buried at Nespelem, and his grave is still there.

Through the years, antagonisms gradually disappeared between the Nez Perces and the older-settled tribes on the Colville reservation. Some descendants of the Wallowa band eventually moved to Lapwai or married members of other tribes, including the Umatillas and Yakimas, and went to live on their reservation. . . .

The exile who returned to Lapwai were greeted with warmth and sympathy be relatives and friends, and, without serious opposition by the whites in Idaho, settled among the treaty Nez Perces. . . .

To counteract the Indians’ annual Fourth of July celebration at Lapwai the McBeths in 1884 instituted a church-run July outing near Kamiah. The agent at the time was Charles Monteith, John’s brother. The next year, Monteith appointed one of the newly returned exiles, Tom Hill, Jr., chief of the agency police. While the McBeths’ picnic was underway that July, Hill and his police arrived to arrest a participant. A fight occurred, an Indian was fatally wounded, and the picnic was broken up. Hill was indicted for murder, but he was defended by Monteith and eventually was acquitted with a verdict of justifiable homicide. The episode caused great unrest between the Presbyterians and non-Christians on the reservation, as well as bitterness between Monteith and the McBeths. The agent finally ordered Sue McBeth off the reservation, and she was forced to move to Mount Idaho. At the same time, the Presbyterians directed Kate McBeth to leave Kamiah and join another missionary at Lapwai. The uproar did not end there. Many of the Christian Nez Perces turned against Monteith, word of the conflict reached Washington, and after several investigations, Monteith was relieved as agent, though he was reappointed briefly in 1888. . . . (pp. 156-157, 161)