Читать книгу Selling Your Father’s Bones: The Epic Fate of the American West - Brian Schofield - Страница 10

‘I never thought I’d see the day when you went to the store for a bottle of water. Water?’

HORACE AXTELL, spiritual leader, Nez Perce tribe

‘Did you ever see a real rose?’

‘Nope, but maybe some day, if they ever dam the river, we’ll have lots of water and all kinds of flowers’

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, directed by JOHN FORD, 1962

GENERAL OLIVER HOWARD had earned his spurs — but lost his right arm — in the Civil War, before going on to secure a reputation as a redoubtable Indian fighter pursuing the Apaches across the southern deserts. His widely admired career received another garland in 1874 when he was appointed Commander for the Department of Columbia, with responsibility for patrolling and pacifying America’s most north-westerly corner. He actually met young Joseph very early in his tenure, a chance encounter when both men were visiting the Umatilla reservation. Joseph asked Howard if he brought news from Washington of the Wallowa Valley’s legal status; the general replied that he did not, the men shook hands, and parted.

General Oliver Otis Howard, the Commander of the Department of Columbia.

Howard, a devout Presbyterian who enjoyed his press nickname ‘The Christian General’ and who fancied himself as a sympathetic student of the red men’s plight, read plenty into the exchange: ‘I think Joseph and I then became quite good friends.’ In the winter of 1875 Howard proclaimed himself a champion of the Wallowa band’s property rights, writing to Washington that ‘it is a great mistake to take from Joseph and his band of Indians that valley…possibly Congress can be induced to let these really peaceable Indians have this poor valley for their own.’ A military colleague, George Crook, recalled that Howard had ordained himself to a mission of mercy: ‘He told me he thought the Creator had placed him on earth to be the Moses of the Negro. Having accomplished that mission, he felt satisfied his next mission was with the Indian.’

In early 1876 Howard instructed his right-hand man, Major Henry Clay Wood, to undertake a legal study of the status of the Wallowa Valley. Wood returned from the treaties and textbooks unequivocal — the Indians still owned the land, their title had not been extinguished by the Thief Treaty, and the government needed to choose between purchasing the valley properly or paying off the settlers to leave. His report to Howard also revealed an understanding of what was at stake that, though unable fully to escape the ethnocentricity of the age, probably represents the clearest insight from any government figure during the whole Nez Perce tragedy:

I cannot refrain from adding a word to express my convictions of the real cause of the dissatisfaction existing among the Nez Perce with the treaty of ‘63. Nature has implanted in the human heart a strong and undying love of home — the home, with its scenes and attachments, of childhood. This sentiment pervades the heart of the child of the forest and plain — the rude child of nature — no less, perhaps with a more fervent glow, than the breast of the native of the city, the pampered child of enlightened and luxurious civilisation.

To the parties to the treaty, it brought no loss, no change; to the non-treaties it revealed new homes, new scenes; it left behind deserted firesides; homes abandoned and desolate; casting a shadow upon their wounded and sorrowing hearts …

In this God-given sentiment — the love of home — is to be found the true cause of the Nez Perce division.

Howard began to bandy about the idea of a commission of wise Washington men that would judge the case of the Nez Perce bands which had not signed in ‘63 — and, once the Wilhautyah murder and Bighorn rout had focused their minds, the politicians agreed. In October 1876, Howard hand-picked three estimable easterners whom a Lapwai local would later describe as ‘excellent men…all kings of finance, but with not a speck of Indian sense, experience, or knowledge’ and set off back for Idaho. The dissident Nez Perce bands converged to meet the commission at the Indian Agency in Lapwai in hopeful spirits — knowing that their self-proclaimed friends, General Howard and Henry Clay Wood, would be the fourth and fifth wise men.

The commission performed quite startlingly badly. Stark falsehoods were accepted as fact — for example, that Tuekakas had been bound by the treaty of 1863 (Howard would claim his was the third signature on the paper), while some statements from the Washington magi, for example that the Wallowa was too cold for Indians to live in, bordered on the infantile. The Dreamer movement was endlessly referred to as a cross between a blood-drinking cult and a pan-American guerrilla network, and Joseph’s patient, placatory descriptions of the legal reality and moral rightness of the tribes’ demands were cut short and discounted. His now famous analysis of the US government’s negotiating tactics — that they took your horses, but paid your neighbour for them — cut no ice.

Realizing they were facing a stitch-up, the non-treaty bands walked out, leaving the commission to draft its recommendations alone — the non-treaty Nez Perce were to be moved out of their homelands and onto the Christian reservation under the threat of force, where each family would receive a twenty-acre plot of the worst available land; the leaders of the Dreamer ‘fanaticism’ were to be banished to Indian Territory in distant Oklahoma to end their pernicious influence on the Northwest; and, finally, the army was requested to occupy the Wallowa Valley immediately to usher Joseph’s band permanently over the mountains and away.

To his considerable historical credit, Henry Clay Wood refused to sign the report. Howard, by contrast, had all but written it, dominating the commission from start to finish. His conversion, in less than a year, from Nez Perce advocate to their oppressor in chief is as instructive as it is disconcerting.

Firstly, he was demonstrating the extent to which events at the Little Big Horn had changed everything. Howard knew that, just four months after banner headlines of massacres and scalpings, his elected paymasters were in no mood to negotiate with renegades.

Traditionalist, or ‘Dreamer’ Nez Perce in 1876. Timlpusman, second from right, is the great-grandfather of the Nez Perce spiritual leader Horace Axtell.

Secondly, his Christianity had been challenged. In the days prior to the commission, the non-treaty bands’ implacable foes (including the federal Indian Agent who was supposed to represent them, and a handful of Christian Nez Perce leaders) had bombarded Howard with testimony regarding the heathen Dreamers, persuading him that Joseph had fallen under the mind control of the hunchback sorcerer Smohalla. It was a gross misrepresentation of the Wallowa band’s independent commitment to their traditional faith, but it worked: the commission reported to Washington that ‘a kind of wizard’ was now Joseph’s spiritual string-puller, ‘who is understood to have great power over him and the whole band’. Under such circumstances, the Christian General felt that legal niceties should be shelved, and the non-treaty bands needed hastily corralling as close to a pastor as possible.

Finally, after two years in the Northwest, Howard had clearly learned the realities of settler politics. Helping the Nez Perce would have been profoundly unpopular, and almost certainly impermanent. To understand why, one needs to turn to Lewiston.

The last few years had not been kind to the tent city at the confluence of the Snake and the Clearwater. None of the local gold strikes had lasted much longer than Pierce’s, the estimated $50 million that had been dug from the surrounding hills in a decade had generated little permanent wealth, locally at least, and catering for the new wave of farming settlers offered steady, but certainly not spectacular, business. By 1876 many of Lewiston’s traders had, in the ceaselessly mobile fortune-hunting style of the early white West, simply drifted away. The town’s status as territorial capital of Idaho had also been stolen — literally, the governor making a daring overnight escape with the Territorial Seal, in response to a better offer from the city of Boise. Lewiston’s sole growth industries were now prostitution and corruption — the arrival of the libidinous US Army and the supposed flow of funds to the Christian Nez Perce offering easy pickings — and the town’s population had fallen well below the boom-time peak of ten thousand souls.

One reason for leaving Lewiston must have been that it was a profoundly challenging place to love. Situated at the entrance to a canyon, this was the lowest point in Idaho, a suntrap capable of sustaining fearsome summer temperatures, with little hope of the blessed intervention of rain — local lore has it that drenching thunderclouds often roll down the Clearwater Valley, divide to leave Lewiston bone dry, then re-form as they head towards the Wallowa. Nez Perce legend recalls that when this land was young, Símíínekem, the place where two rivers meet, was considered unfit for human habitation, ‘because it was far too hot’ (a conclusion with which this author can sympathize: in the heatwave of August 2006 the downtown temperature reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit — no time to be living in a camper van in the parking lot of the Lewiston Wal-Mart).

In 1873 a sterling remedy to Lewiston’s permanently parched state was proposed, and work began on a ditch that would run precious water out of the Clearwater and into the Snake, via the centre of town. The project was blighted and ultimately bankrupted by the legal wrangling that would soon come to dominate the West -deciding who owned the water — but the ditch finally opened in 1874, conferring upon Lewiston the joys of orchards, rose gardens and the town’s very own defining characteristic: a dreadful smell. The ditch immediately became the local sewer, garbage dump, pet cemetery and livestock trough, noxious at the best of times, overwhelming during the frequent water cut-offs for repairs. One reporter (actually writing in 1889, by when the town had been forced to put a lid over the open pit) described a flow of ‘iron pots, oil cans, fruit cans, vegetable cuttings of all kinds, dead hens, dead cats and dogs…the stench which arises from some portions of the covered ditch must be very offensive. There must be dead carcasses or other putrid matter lodged along its margin.’

As the ditch also served as Lewiston’s main source of drinking water, the municipal baths and the best place to leave a rowdy drunk, public health was far from robust — a local doctor estimated in the mid-1870s that two-thirds of the town was sick at any one time. Those who drank from the ditch may have been the lucky ones -many of Lewiston’s inhabitants sourced their water from a spring that percolated through the town’s hilltop cemetery.

In the relentless, rootless search for the riches of the new West -land, gold, timber, salmon — death always walked too close to leave room for sentiment. If an enterprise wasn’t raising a profit, you got out, and if a town was dying, you packed up, and it promptly died. In 1876, Lewiston’s very survival remained uncertain. The craving for the lifeblood of immigration was palpable — as the Lewiston Teller stated in an editorial, the only future for the town lay with attracting ‘the great number of robust and healthy people entirely destitute of remunerative employment’ on the eastern seaboard ‘to our fertile and healthy soil’. For Lewiston’s press boosters, Indian uprisings such as Captain Jack’s war and the Sioux and Cheyenne rebellions were an unthinkable prospect in their back yard, as ‘report of it abroad would greatly check immigration to our borders’. Not surprisingly, petitions were regularly drawn up demanding the prompt subjugation of the dissident Nez Perce and (in a consistent request across the frontier West) the generous reinforcement of the local military presence.

When Henry Clay Wood’s legal opinion was published, suggesting a magnanimous response to the Wallowa controversy, Lewiston laughed in his face, proclaiming him a Washington meddler who should leave such matters to the locals, ‘who comprehend the situation’, and suggesting, in what may be one of the earliest printed instances of the Mountain West’s distaste for the nation’s crucible of woolly liberal-mindedness, that Wood might be better employed ‘on a fishing excursion somewhere in California’. The town was as steeped in the public commonplaces of self-reliance, independence and local volunteerism as the rest of the pioneer West, and the advice of a bookish top-down bureaucrat like Wood would never be welcome. Howard’s commission was similarly derided — the Teller called it ‘a farce’ that the US government that ‘has once bought this land and paid the purchase money’ was renegotiating, simply, in their estimation, to appease an outlaw.

For young Joseph, viewed through the prism of Sitting Bull and Captain Jack, had been transformed into something of a hate figure in edgy Lewiston (and, indeed, across the Northwest), a violent rebel-in-waiting whose dignity and intellect, in a suitable phrase for a town densely populated with Deep Southerners, made him ‘uppity’. He was characterized in the local press as ‘haughty, insolent and defiant’, of ‘wanton and independent spirit’, a man who ‘manifested a degree of dignity and reserve importing more with the character of the chief of some great nation than that of a leader of a small band of outlaws’. Crowds would gather in towns that Joseph passed through, the locals fascinated by their local warrior king and possible bloody nemesis (ironically, they were often actually looking at Ollokot, who was a prodigious fighter, and a fearsome sight). There were even slanderous conspiracy theories that Joseph had already taken a house and salary from the government, or that the Wallowa in fact belonged to another band. So when Howard chose to call the commission rather than summarily put Joseph in his place — on the reservation — it was argued that he only increased the renegade’s insolence, and thus the likelihood of a fatal conflagration. Howard’s patriotism, and by extension his masculinity, were volubly called into question — one Oregon paper proclaimed that the Nez Perce felt nothing but love for the Christian General: ‘just as they love their squ-s* for their inherent willingness to submit to all things the buck commands’. Successfully baited as being ‘soft on defence’, whatever charitable ambitions Howard had brought with him to the Northwest rapidly evaporated, the fix was in, and the Nez Perce’s last chance for justice passed. The man from the government had done his worst.

It’s an irony that cheers few of Lewiston’s modern inhabitants that their home town’s defining characteristic remains its smell. The composition of the air has changed considerably — but it still reeks. The eye-watering miasma that envelops the city daily also serves as unignorable proof that the Western settlers’ folk philosophy of self-reliance, unfettered individual freedom and bitter distaste for external meddling is very much alive, though not, perhaps, alive and well.

The timber boom that enveloped Pierce at the turn of the century also re-energized Lewiston, restoring it as a trade hub for the Clear-water Forest lumber that floated downstream into giant log ponds on the edge of town. The area’s corporate behemoth, Potlatch Forests Inc., opened a large sawmill in town and then, in 1950, a paper mill, efficiently converting Idaho’s woodlands into everything from milk cartons to kitchen roll. Work was plentiful, the city grew fast, but paper production is a burdensome enterprise — it requires the use and fouling of huge quantities of water (the paper mill used three times more water than the entire city) and generates a large quantity of airborne particles that happen to smell of raw cauliflower, possess the capacity to rot paint and metal and can make people very sick. The story goes that Potlatch’s scientists spent a suitably biblical forty days divining the prevailing wind before locating the mill — and for every one of those forty days the wind blew in the opposite direction to its normal path, ensuring the smokestacks were built precisely upwind of the town centre. For the thirty years after the mill opened, as a tiny sample of the news reports from the Lewiston Morning Tribune amply illustrates, Lewiston served as an ailing case study of what happened when Western laissez-faire, a philosophy built around the plucky little farmer, met the equally plucky giant corporate polluter …

‘Potlatch Corporation’s main wastewater pipeline burst twice Sunday, sending more than 1.5 million gallons of effluent into two levee ponds…The coffee-coloured wastewater is the end-product of the pulp and paper process.’

‘A malfunction at Potlatch Corp. pulp mill at Lewiston Monday evening and a minor temperature inversion Tuesday morning reduced visibility in the valley…A Miller Grade resident who said he was “choking to death” called the Tribune Monday evening for information about the pollution.’

‘Failure of an air pollution control device at Potlatch Corp. may cause an increase in visible emissions for several weeks.’

‘A leak of deadly chlorine gas at the Potlatch Corp. pulp mill at Lewiston forced the evacuation of hundreds of workers.’

‘Bits of fuzzy, brownish fluff drifted across the Lewiston Clarkston Valley Wednesday. The culprit was the secondary treatment ponds at Potlatch Corp.’

‘The big noise from the Potlatch Corp. plant will start again this afternoon.’

‘Alice Swan, a Colfax nurse, testified that her doctor advised her to leave the valley. Her symptoms, including nausea and congested chest and sinuses, disappeared when she left.’

Her doctor had a point; in the 1970s Lewiston was labelled a ‘non-attainment area’ for consistently falling below federal healthy air-quality standards. For thirty years the town had well above average rates of allergies, respiratory illnesses and worse — 15 per cent of all lung cancer in the United States is caused by industrial particulates. Perhaps the finest gift from Potlatch to Lewiston came in Christmas 1971 when the plant shut down its effluent disposal pipe for cleaning, and simply dumped all its wastewater directly into the narrow, shallow Clearwater River. A fisherman notified the authorities that the entire river had turned a thick brown. In 1970, unsurprisingly, the Council on Economic Priorities had described Potlatch as a firm with ‘records indicating no concern for environmental protection’.

But this is no cause for an exclusive hatchet job. As one local journalist with more than thirty years’ experience of covering the region put it to me: ‘Potlatch is not a particularly bad company. These are just the rules.’ The founding principles of the West offered considerable leeway to those wishing to pollute the new continent -and this was never more true than in the last corner to be colonized.

The history of this epidemic of fouling begins when the Industrial Revolution crossed the United States at a stupefying speed — national pig iron production rose 1300 per cent in the six years from 1850, oil output rose from just two thousand barrels to 4.25 million in the decade from 1859, and from 1867 to 1897 steel output rose from just 1643 tonnes to over seven million, outstripping the supposed industrial heavyweights of Germany and Britain combined.

From 1850 to 1900, America’s population trebled, but its economy multiplied twelvefold — an expansion unknown in human history. With individual corporate kingdoms earning more money than the weakling federal government’s entire budget, the impact of this largely unmanaged, unregulated industrial growth on the country’s air and water was predictable (the easiest crystal ball would have been, of course, a visit to smog-bound industrial Britain). And by the time the economy underwent another startling boom, following the Second World War, the continent’s natural elements were undeniably in a truly parlous state.

As the post-war boom proceeded a series of scandals revealed the toll that the continent’s compromised air and water were taking on America’s human and animal health. In 1959 a group of St Louis physicians discovered worrying levels of the radioactive contaminant strontium-90 (one of the main components of the Chernobyl disaster’s fallout) in local babies’ teeth, and realized that American children were being poisoned by their mothers’ milk. In 1962 a group of fisheries managers were caught pouring poison into more than four hundred miles of Wyoming’s Green River, purposefully exterminating all the local species prior to dropping in scores of rainbow trout, which were more fun to catch. In the same year Rachel Carson revealed that the agricultural industry’s witless use of military-grade pesticides was wiping out everything from freshwater mussels to peregrine falcons, as well as filling Americans’ bodies with yet more carcinogens. Soon after, Lake Erie was declared ‘dead’ by the national press — this wasn’t quite true, but the water was so clogged with phosphates that the fish were, unnervingly, drowning. Finally, in 1969, Time magazine shook the nation with the news (nothing new to the long-suffering locals) that Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, reduced to a combustible soup of industrial waste, was on fire.

Deafened by protests, the federal government acted, and the early 1970s witnessed a raft of environmental laws, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, that remain the legislative foundation of all efforts to clean up America. It seemed that laissez-faire had finally fallen to people power.

The State of Idaho ignored the Clean Water Act for twenty-two years. Irreparably in hock to the logging, farming and mining interests that were soiling their landscapes, and almost congenitally indisposed towards regulating free enterprise, the local legislators declined to perform even the preparatory act of compiling a register of polluted streams. When they were finally prosecuted into action, the tests revealed that at least 962 rivers and streams in the state were unacceptably polluted. Stung into decision, Idaho announced a clean-up programme — but one so woefully funded that it would take 150 years to complete. That, in a nutshell, is the legal — and philosophical — environment Potlatch inhabited. Those were the rules.

More than thirty years after the Clean Air and Water Acts, Americans still subsidize their economy with their health to a degree unique in the developed world. One in every six American women has levels of mercury in her blood that pose a danger to her unborn child; America’s Food and Drug Administration has isolated fifty-three carcinogenic pesticides still at use in the nation’s food industry; in the year 2000 half of all Americans lived in communities where the air quality fell below safe standards at least part of the year; 40 per cent of the country’s rivers and lakes are considered unsafe for fishing or swimming, and forty-one states now warn fishermen to eat no more than one local catch a week; studies suggest more than a quarter of the country’s underground water is also seriously polluted (this should come as no surprise as two-thirds of America’s toxic waste output is injected straight into the continent). A quarter of the American population lives within a few miles of one of the country’s estimated 450,000 unstable toxic waste sites.

And for the army of grassroots anti-pollution campaigners that have coalesced since the late 1960s, by far the greatest barrier to protecting the modern continent, particularly in the battle to cleanse the West, remains the pathological dislike of outside meddlers and imposed rules which has characterized towns like Lewiston since their very foundation. In 1947 the essayist and historian Bernard DeVoto (whose columns for Harper’s Magazine are the most dispiriting companion any writer can take into the West, as they seem to contain every worthwhile insight ever written — only sixty years ago) noted that the West’s public discourse was dominated by the fear that the settler culture of ‘the axe-wielding individualist’ was being corrupted from Washington ‘by a system of paternalism which is collectivist at base and hardly bothers to disguise its intention of delivering the United States over to communism’. Every local editorial page in the West, DeVoto contended, contained a daily ‘ringing demand for the government to get out of business, to stop impeding initiative, to break the shackles of regulation with which it has fettered enterprise’. Thirty years later a former matinee cowboy would build towards an unprecedented electoral sweep of the West (followed by a concerted effort to weaken the clean air and water laws) on the back of a pledge to revive the independent pioneer spirit, encapsulated in one perfectly pitched one-liner: ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”’ Over two elections, just under 70 per cent of Idahoans voted for Ronald Reagan; only Utah posted higher numbers for the great apostle of flimsy government and axe-wielding individualism. The implications for the natural continent were made clear by the leader of Reaganism’s Greek chorus, the eminently quotable and undeniably influential broadcaster and author Rush Limbaugh: ‘The key to fixing the environment is unfettered free enterprise…. We have a right to use the earth to make our lives better.’ Welcome to Idaho — now go home.

Potlatch Inc. has at least modified its local act somewhat since the darkest days of the polluted continent. In the mid-1980s it invested in a burner that could capture most of the Lewiston paper mill’s particulates — enough to satisfy the local lawmakers, but not, sadly, enough to eliminate the smell of raw cauliflower. The locals call it ‘the smell of money’, although they’re unfortunately mistaken: as the town’s dilapidated Main Street, pawnshops and bainl bondsmen serve to testify, those parts of the US that allow high pollution don’t get prosperity in return: they actually have higher unemployment and greater poverty levels than the national average.

At least in 1994 the federal government concluded that Lewiston’s air was no longer carcinogenic, a vast improvement considering that in 1990 the levels of chloroform in the air were estimated to increase the cancer risk by forty times. (In 2003, the town still had above average incidence rates for at least nine cancers.) The Snake remains on the government’s list of fouled rivers: Potlatch is permitted to pump in up to forty million gallons of warm water a day, carrying sediment, alien nutrients and some carcinogenic dioxins (again, reduced in recent years, but the dioxins do collect in the local fish, giving them tumours and rendering it unwise to overeat them).

In the late 1980s the company also began to draw down its Lewiston activities, closing the sawmill and cutting staff at the paper mill, citing, in part, the cost of their new-fangled environmental practices. Now, like so many Western company towns, Lewiston waits, like a meek, abused spouse, for divorce: as several locals testified, ‘We all know they’re going to leave town, they’ll be gone someday soon.’ Those, as the people of Pierce would tell them, are also the rules.

The cause of the plucky pioneer had acquired a vigorous convert in Oliver Howard, who affected distaste for what he saw as the uncultured libertarianism of Lewiston’s settlers, while deferring to their every bidding. The findings of his commission were rapidly approved in Washington, troops were prepared to occupy the entrance to the Wallowa prior to a forced evacuation and a delegation of Christian Nez Perce were dispatched to break the distressing news to Joseph and Ollokot. Sensing that the situation was being driven towards a violent conflict they couldn’t hope to win, the two brothers spent the early months of 1877 in a frenzy of last-ditch diplomacy, seeking meetings with Howard, their Indian Agent, other neighbouring Agents, anyone who would listen to their pleas and counter-offers — they suggested the eighty or so Wallowa band members could move west to the traditionalist Umatilla Reservation, they wondered if the Umatilla themselves should be moved east to share the Wallowa, or perhaps the two reservations should be joined? They begged Howard not to deploy his troops, pointing out that they knew full well that any aggression on their part would cost the lives of their wives and children. Howard grew impatient — each time he met one of the brothers the local press ridiculed his indulgence afresh — and he finally drew a line in the sand. The leaders of the dissident bands — Joseph and Ollokot, plus White Bird, Looking Glass, and Toohoolhoolzote from the more easterly bands, and also the leaders of two roaming bands from the Palouse peoples, Husishusis-kute and Hahtalekin, were convened at Lapwai to talk once more, on 3 May 1877. The chiefs believed they’d been granted one last chance to plead their case; in fact, Howard intended to get down to brass tacks. Each band would be forced to choose the reservation land they would move onto, and to agree a deadline to leave their homelands forever.

The Lapwai Council was the last expression of Nez Perce freedom. Once more the bands arrived in full regalia, riding in strict formation and singing their traditional songs, and established their camps surrounding the meeting grounds. In a calculated display of unity, the leaders chose Toohoolhoolzote as their sole spokesman; a strict and militant traditionalist, he could well express the depth of their feeling.

Howard opened proceedings briskly, eager to demonstrate the balance of power and to subdue the dissidents with, in his own immodest phrase, his ‘fearless sternness’. Toohoolhoolzote countered with a long and impassioned speech on the simple wrongness of what was occurring: ‘I belong to the land out of which I came. The Earth is my mother. The Great Spirit made the world as it is, and as He wanted it, and He made a part of it for us to live upon. I do not see where you get authority to say that we shall not live where He placed us.’

As the peroration continued, Howard bit his tongue, but the noises of assent from the other Nez Perce grew worryingly loud, thoughts of Captain Jack’s bloody negotiating skills sprang to mind, and the council was hastily adjourned for the weekend. Come Monday morning, though, little had changed. As the warrior Yellow Wolf recalled: ‘Chief Toohoolhoolzote stood up to talk for the Indians. He told how the land always belonged to the Indians, how it came down to us from our fathers. How the earth was a great law, how everything must remain as fixed by the Earth-Chief. How the land must not be sold! That we came from the earth, and our bodies must go back to the earth, our mother.’

Howard had heard enough, and cut in, a considerable breach of council etiquette: ‘I don’t want to offend your religion, but you must talk about practicable things; twenty times over I hear that the earth is your mother and about chieftainship from the earth. I want to hear it no more, but come to business at once.’

The details of the slanging match that followed have been obscured by time and language. It seems that Toohoolhoolzote, a chief whose remote mountain homeland had helped cultivate a generous contempt for white culture, challenged the authority of Washington and the sanity of those who would divide and parcel the earth, while Howard demanded in ever more aggressive terms whether the chief was choosing submission or rebellion. Finally, according to some reports, Toohoolhoolzote dismissed Howard’s conduct as an insult to his manhood, while taking an illustrative grip on his own manhood, a gesture which drove the prudish Christian General over the edge. Incandescent, Howard ordered Toohoolhoolzote arrested and locked in the guardhouse, before bellowing to the remaining chiefs that the time for talk had ended: ‘If you do not mind me, I will take my soldiers and drive you onto the reservation!’ Howard had shown the rifle. The threat of violence in a treaty council was a shattering transgression, an insult and a challenge that breached the very purpose of peaceful dialogue. For many of the young Nez Perce warriors this was the declaration of war they had long hoped for, but the chiefs knew that the satisfaction of slaughtering Howard and his tiny garrison would surely be followed by vengeful annihilation from the East. Prudence won the day, and subjugation was grudgingly accepted. The chiefs agreed to ride out with Howard the next day and choose the reservation land for their new homes.

It’s an indication of the optimism and resilience of the Nez Perce leadership that the five-day search for their reservation patches took place in largely good humour. Despite the theft with menaces they were being subjected to, the chiefs joked with Howard, challenged his cavalrymen to horse races, and declared themselves satisfied with the lands they chose to rehouse their peoples, along the Clearwater and Sweetwater rivers. On his release from the stockade, it even emerged that Toohoolhoolzote had struck up an unlikely friendship with one of his fellow inmates, a gregarious young army bugler called John Jones whose intemperate enjoyment of a good drink had recently offended General Howard’s piety. It seemed the Nez Perce problem was going to be solved amicably, if not fairly.

But Howard had one more insult to hurl. On the final morning of the council he announced the timetable for the Nez Perce to move permanently onto the reservation — they had just thirty days. It was an impossible demand: the bands needed more time than that to gather their horse and cattle herds from their scattered pastures, let alone make the journey, with all their possessions, to their new homes. Worst of all, late spring would mark the high point of the thunderous floods in the great Snake and Salmon rivers, ensuring treacherous crossing for the elderly, the infirm and, in Joseph’s particular case, his heavily pregnant wife, Toma Alwawinmi. The chiefs begged for more time, but Howard was implacable, citing a petition he had just received from the white settlers on White Bird’s tribal lands (a particularly rancorous and prejudiced bunch of pioneers) proclaiming that only the very swiftest eviction would prevent an outbreak of violence. (Some years later, Howard would claim that the chiefs never asked for more time — this was a stark lie, intended to deflect any blame for the rough justice that was about to befall those very same white inhabitants of White Bird’s territory.) Howard let his ‘good friend’ Joseph know that the troops stationed at the entrance to the Wallowa would resort to force if the deadline was missed by a single day.

Crestfallen, Joseph and Ollokot returned to their people to organize the gathering of the herds, the collection of their band’s sacred and valuable possessions, and the preparations for the final caravan away from the land of the winding waters. The son would have to break his promise to his dying father, but only to protect the lives of those who were his pastoral responsibility. Some years later, Joseph would admit that the inevitability of this moment had long weighed on his mind:

I have carried a heavy load on my back ever since I was a boy. I learned then that we were but few, but the white men were many, and that we could not hold our own against them. We were like deer. They were like grizzly bears. We had a small country. Their country was large. We were contented to let things remain as the Great Spirit Chief made them. They were not; and would change the rivers and mountains if it did not suit them.

The band congregated at a peaceful valley floor in their winter range, camping by the confluence of the Grande Ronde River and a narrow stream now known as Joseph Creek, where herons gathered to pluck eels from the shallow riffles. The mood was far from placid, though — Joseph and Ollokot were struggling to control their young warriors, whose pride could bear no more scars. As the truth sank in — that much of the band’s carefully raised livestock, its very wealth, would have to be left behind for the white settlers to appropriate -the clamour for action grew, and the arrival of Toohoolhoolzote and his followers only fuelled the rage, the old chief proclaiming his willingness to join the Wallowa’s young men and die defending his homeland. Somehow, the brothers retained control, and the retreat began peacefully, but in gloomy spirits, for ahead lay some of the roughest, least forgiving terrain in the whole Northwest.

With their worldly possessions packed on their backs or loaded on horses, the Nez Perce fought their way down narrow, precipitous gullies to the river bottom of the Inmaha Canyon, driving what was left of their herds ahead of them. Almost impassable in the dry season, in the mud and loose rock of the spring thaw these exhausting descents needed every ounce of the band’s animal sense and wilderness skills. Then, after grazing the herd in the relative ease of the valley bottom, it was up and over once more, slowly climbing then descending a steep flank of land to drop into Hell’s Canyon -the lair of the great Snake River.

This baked, chaotic, barren gorge, the deepest in America, is not a place to tarry. The wrinkles of land fold away for a bewildering distance, obscuring the shining path of the thick, brooding river, while above the earth loses its grip on the valley’s towering slopes, as if exhausted by their relentless gradient, to fall away and reveal crumbling, disorderly cliff faces. Rarely less than broiling hot, the valley floor is thick with rattlesnakes. Nearly one hundred years later, on 8 September 1974, the canyon’s gruelling inhospitability would be forever fixed in America’s national consciousness when Bobby ‘Evel’ Knievel endured one of his trademark near-death experiences during a failed rocket leap across the gorge. And now, in late May 1877, the Nez Perce scrambled down to the banks of the Snake to find that the river, just as predicted, was in full flood.

For the young men this was no challenge. Swimming swollen rivers had long been a means for warriors and hunters to build and prove their strength — indeed, a more dramatic display involved driving a wild horse into a torrent, swimming in after it and riding it out. But the entire band had never attempted such a crossing as this, with the elderly and children included, plus thousands of cattle and horses. Makeshift rafts were built in a well-worn piece of fieldcraft, stretching buffalo hides across a ring of wood, and the elderly clung to horses that the young dragged and drove through the current. Some people were taken by the flood, and only reached the far bank, bedraggled and exhausted, up to a mile downstream. The whole shattering, terrifying effort took two days, and it was astonishing that no lives were lost. Crucial possessions did drift away forever, though: cooking and hunting equipment, robes, hides and blankets, and, most importantly, horses and cattle in their hundreds. Those horses that had been ridden across largely made it, but many of the wider herd drowned or bolted. The cattle fared far worse — the calves stood little chance, nor did the older beasts, whose calm heads were vital for making the herd manageable. Their bloated carcasses washed up and rotted in the shallows downstream.