Lecture 15 – Reservations

Quiz 6 (due by the end of the day, Tuesday, 10/19):

1. What was the most significant factor accounting for the decline of the Knights of Labor?
2. Who gave the speech entitled “I Will Fight No More Forever?”
3. How did Sitting Bull die?
4. The myth-metaphor of the melting pot was an effort to explain what development?
5. Identify two other –isms that Social Darwinism was used to justify.

Outline:
1. Introduction
a. American attitude towards Indians
b. Migrations into Lakota and Dakota lands
c. 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty (broken)
d. War 1854-1877
e. “Massacres”
f. 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty
g. gold in Black Hills
h. Custer’s charge
2. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse
a. Sitting Bull’s status
b. Battle of Rosebud (1876)
c. Battle of the Little Bighorn
d. Treatment of Custer’s body
e. Sitting Bull to Canada
f. Murder of Sitting Bull
3. Oliver Howard
4. Joseph and Nez Perce
a. names and ancestry
b. “Dreamers”
c. Howard seeks to force Nez Perce onto reservation
d. Joseph’s arguments
e. Nez Perce odyssey
f. Joseph’s surrender and speech
g. Joseph’s end
5. General Miles criticizes Howard and treatment of Nez Perce
6. Lieutenant Charles Wood’s criticisms
7. Howard’s efforts at self-justification and further failures
8. Little Wolf and Lucullus McWhorter preserve memory of Nez Perce
9. Nez Perce and Lakota today

White American attitude towards Indians never wavered. “We come to the great law of right. The
white race stood upon this undeveloped continent ready and willing to execute the Divine injunction, to
replenish the earth and to subdue it. . . The Indian races were in the wrongful possession of a continent
required by the superior right of the white man.” So wrote Charles Bryant in his 1864 work, History of
the Great Massacre by the Sioux Indians.
 Prior to the mid-1840s, the Sioux (a designation despised by the people called by that name,
preferring to identify themselves as belonging to one of their three federations—Lakota, Dakota, or
Nakota—and, more specifically, by thirteen tribal designations (including the Hunkpapa, Oglala,
Blackfeet, Brulé, Minneconjou, and others) ignored the migrants passing through their traditional hunting
lands. Matters changed swiftly thereafter. The five thousand migrants who passed through their lands
in1845 skyrocketed to 55,000 in 1850. The migrants drove off the buffalo, cut wood, trampled grass, and
spread epidemic diseases. The US government then became involved, arranging treaties with 139 tribes in
1851. Nine major tribes, including longstanding enemies, met at Fort Laramie that year to sign a treaty
that set boundaries for their hunting areas and that permitted the US government to construct roads and
forts in their territories in exchange for annuities for the next 50 years, which the US Senate reduced to 10
years without informing the Native participants in the negotiations. Recall that forts have always
foreshadowed empire!
Hostilities broke out in 1854 and would continue for the next 23 years. By August 1862, the
Dakota, who had ceded 24 million acres of traditional hunting grounds for $1.6 million and the promise
of cash annuities, were awaiting their overdue annuity and starving even though the Indian agency
warehouses were full. One insensitive storekeeper suggested the Dakotas could eat grass or their own
feces if they were hungry. The Dakotas rose up in the first of a series of large-scale, organized wars of
resistance against both the never-ending white incursions into their traditional homelands and the
degradations suffered on reservations. The Dakotas killed 800 whites during this so-called Minnesota, or
Great, Massacre; among the dead was the storekeeper, found with grass stuffed in his mouth. Even
though the Civil War was raging, the US army devoted significant resources to punish the Dakotas. The
general in charge of the campaign stated, “It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux. They are to
be treated as maniacs or wild beasts.” He captured 2000 and hanged 38 Dakotas. President Lincoln
commuted the death sentences of all the captives except those proven guilty of rape and murder;
otherwise, the number of executions would have been 307.
One “massacre” deserves another. In November 1864, a cavalry unit attacked a village of peaceful
Cheyenne. The troops slaughtered 150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children, and later paraded through
the streets of Denver, displaying Cheyenne body parts. That Sand Creek Massacre led the Sioux and
Cheyenne to take up arms in what came to be called the Powder River Campaign. Led by Red Cloud and
a young warrior named Crazy Horse, the Powder River Campaign was the only war with the United
States that western Indians would win, but the victory was brief, as a new Fort Laramie Treaty was
signed in 1868, under whose terms Red Cloud led his people to a newly created reservation. Shortly after
the treaty was signed, the army announced that any Sioux found outside the reservation would be
considered as “hostiles.”
Rumors of gold triggered the next, and major, round of fighting. When Lieutenant Colonel
George Armstrong Custer investigated the rumors in 1874 and informed a reporter that the Black Hills
of the Dakota Territory would rival the richest fields of Colorado, he stimulated the wildest gold rush
since 1849. The Black Hills, Paha Sapa (“Hills that Are Black”) in Lakota, were the Lakotas’ most
sacred lands, bound to the Lakotas by tradition and the 1868 treaty. Washington summoned Red Cloud
and Spotted Tail, the two most prominent peace chiefs, to structure a new treaty for the Black Hills.
They refused, but Washington then sent a commission west to arrange a lease of the hills. 5000 Lakotas
met with the commissioners in September 1875. The non-treaty Lakotas, led by Crazy Horse and
Sitting Bull, refused to attend and warned that they would defend the Black Hills to the death. When
the negotiations collapsed, the government urged the army to instigate a war. The army issued an
ultimatum that all “hostiles” had to settle on the Great Sioux Reservation by January 31, 1876, or suffer
the consequences.
 Custer, even though he had expressed his opposition to “exterminating the Indian,” prepared his
Seventh Cavalry to give the Sioux “a sound drubbing,” while Sitting Bull readied himself and his
people to face the US Army. Born around 1831 into an important Hunkpapa family, Sitting Bull early
established his credentials as a brave warrior. Before he was 25 years old, he headed the Strong Hearts,
an elite military society. Eventually, the Hunkpapas realized that he was not simply an outstanding
warrior but a special individual who demonstrated the Lakotas’ cardinal virtues: bravery, generosity,
wisdom, fortitude, and dignity. He was also a Wichasha Wakan, a holy man, who received prophetic
dreams. By the age of thirty, Sitting Bull was war chief of the Hunkpapa; seven years later, in 1868, he
became supreme war chief of the entire Sioux nation. He led the “hostiles” against the US government,
declined to meet with government representatives, condemned all treaties, and absolutely refused to
settle on a reservation.

Custer Sitting Bull

In anticipation of the forthcoming campaign, Sitting Bull prescribed a Sun Dance, the most
sacred religious ritual of the Lakotas in which older members of the tribe sought to induce visions
through physical pain. As warriors danced around him, Sitting Bull’s brother used an awl to tear fifty
small pieces of flesh from each of his arms. Then the supreme chief danced for several hours, after
which he described his vision of a great Indian victory over horse soldiers. Sitting Bull’s prophecy
included two victories: the Battle of the Rosebud (June 17, 1876) and the more famous Battle of the
Little Bighorn (June 25 and 26, 1876).
General George Crook led a contingent of 1000 soldiers, over 100 civilians, plus 175 Crow and
85 Shoshone warriors against a force of 1000 Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, led by Crazy Horse. Had
the Crow and Shoshone not warned Crook of, and temporarily warded off, a Lakota attack, the Battle of
the Rosebud would have proved disastrous for Crook. The most famous incident of this battle occurred
when a Cheyenne leader named Comes in Sight fell to the ground when his horse was shot. A Cheyenne
rider braved the soldiers’ rifles to rescue the fallen fighter. Since Comes in Sight’s rescuer was his sister,
Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Cheyenne afterwards identified the battle as “The Battle Where the Girl
Saved Her Brother.” Crook (crookedly) claimed victory, but his troops were in such bad shape that he
had to retreat and was therefore unable, as he had earlier been ordered, to meet up with Custer for the
next battle.
Crook’s advance was part of three-pronged approach, bringing three army units from forts
hundreds of miles apart, which were supposed to converge on the Sioux-Cheyenne confederacy at the
same time. The plan never materialized. Besides problems of communication, lack of information

about the exact location and size of the Native force would determine the outcome. General Terry assigned
Custer, based on his (underserved) reputation as the army’s most “successful” Indian fighter, the
responsibility of leading the 7th Cavalry’s 660 men. As he neared the Indian encampment, Custer’s Crow
scouts issued two warnings: there were far too many Indians for Custer to confront and under no
circumstance should he split his men. Custer’s response was “You do the scouting. I’ll do the fighting.”
Custer split his 660 men into three units, and he himself led the charge against the much larger Sioux-
Cheyenne army led by Crazy Horse. (Sitting Bull was too old to fight but served as the spiritual leader.)
Custer’s impetuous nature got all 262 of the men under his direct command killed. Custer took one bullet to
his chest and another to his head. After the battle, known as “Custer’s Last Stand,” Custer was found
stripped naked, his right thigh slashed (a sign of Sioux conquest), with an arrow stuck in his penis. “Long
Hair,” as the Sioux referred to Custer, was not scalped because he had recently cut his hair, and his body
was not further mutilated when some Cheyenne women, whose families owed a debt to Custer, protected his
corpse from any further disfigurement.
The Cheyenne women could not save his reputation, though, for almost immediately his
superiors launched a character assassination against him in the face of the most shocking news to
grip the nation since Lincoln’s actual assassination. Custer definitely made mistakes, but his were
not as serious as those of other officers involved, but they were alive, and he was dead, unable to
defend himself. Meanwhile, the Sioux split up immediately after the confrontation, Crazy Horse
leading one large group into the Black Hills while Sitting Bull headed to Canada. The army
regrouped, and Crazy Horse’s Oglala warriors and their Cheyenne allies led the army on a pursuit
over a wide expanse of territory, but the constant movement took its toll on the Sioux, and in May
of 1877, Crazy Horse and his Oglala followers surrendered. Other Indian leaders, jealous of his
stature, spread false rumors about his intentions, and a soldier guarding him bayoneted him to
death for “resisting arrest.”
On July 19, 1881, with the fewer than 200 remaining, destitute Hunkpapas who still followed
him, Sitting Bull surrendered, “I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to
surrender my rifle.” Sitting Bull was sent to the Standing Rock agency in the Dakota Territory, where he
still fought, this time a losing battle to prevent the US government from further eradicating the Sioux’s
traditional way of life. He strenuously opposed the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 and the ensuing Sioux
Act of 1888 that reduced the Great Sioux Reservation by 50 percent (9 million acres).
In 1890, faced with yet another crop failure, loss of their land, inadequate rations, and the
deplorable conditions on the reservation, the Sioux welcomed news of a messiah, named Wovoka, who
preached a new religion called the Ghost Dance, a combination of Christian and Sioux ideas. Even though
he was highly skeptical of the religious movement, Sitting Bull refused the army’s demands that he stop
the dances. On one occasion he visited the Ghost Dance leaders at the Pine Ridge agency, where a detail
of 44 Indian policemen tried to arrest him. They ended up shooting Sitting Bull in the chest and the head,
the very spots where Custer had been hit. Some days later, at the Pine Ridge agency, a battalion of the 7th
Cavalry came upon a group of Sioux, who had been encouraged by a medicine man that the Ghost Shirts
they wore would repel the soldiers’ bullets. A “battle” ensued. As one army participant claimed, “It was a
war of extermination. There was only one common impulse—to kill wherever an Indian could be seen.”
The Battle of Wounded Knee took the lives of around 200 individuals—a small number of warriors and a
much larger number of old men, women, and children. Some 26 children under the age of thirteen died,
four of them babies whose heads were crushed. Also crushed forever were any hopes to preserve the
traditional Sioux way of life.

Meanwhile, on July 4, 1872, in another part of the country, Joseph and his brother Ollokot,
representing the Nez Perce nation, sought to preserve the traditional Nez Perce way of life by
convincing American representatives that they were loyal to the United States and were not considering
hostilities, but also that their father, Tuekakas, had never signed away his right to the Wallowa Valley.
Simultaneously, General Oliver Otis Howard (a distant descendant of James and Mercy Otis) was
convincing the Apache leader Cochise to end his war against the United States and abandon the
traditional Apache way of life for a reservation.
In 1856, at a time of personal crisis, Howard had a religious experience, believing that God had
selected him for a higher purpose. To achieve that purpose, he decided to resign from the army and
become a preacher, but he deemed the outbreak of the Civil War as his opportunity to fulfill God’s
plan. The first part of the plan was to assist in the eradication of slavery; the second was to preserve
the Union; the third was to elevate former slaves into productive citizens. During the war, “the
Christian general,” as he was named, earned low marks for his military expertise. He suffered an
ignominious defeat at Chancellorsville and underperformed at Gettysburg, earning him a new title,
“Uh Oh Howard.” Redemption of a sort came when he led one flank during General Sherman’s
famous March to the Sea, but one soldier who served under him observed, “Howard was a
consummate master of the art of needless defeat.” At the conclusion of the war, Howard received a
chance to meet his third goal when he was appointed the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He
immediately realized that land ownership would be the foundation of productive citizenship, so he
began to distribute to former slaves as much as possible of the one million confiscated acres at his
disposal, only to be stopped almost as soon as he had begun. President Johnson ordered Howard to
take back land he had already distributed and restore it to its former owners. Howard, committed to
duty as much as to justice, did as ordered. Even as he was managing the Freedmen’s Bureau, Howard
founded a university, which still bears his name, in Washington, DC, that would prepare white and
black students for professional careers. Howard’s efforts earned him enemies, particularly Democratic
politicians, who would charge him with financial malfeasance. In the face of these complaints,
President Grant ordered Howard to face charges of corruption before a special Court of Inquiry, which
ultimately acquitted Howard. While legally exonerated, Howard’s image had suffered a terrible blow.
He again sought redemption. That opportunity came when, in July of 1874, he departed for Portland,
Oregon, to assume command of the Department of Columbia, which monitored more than two dozen
native tribes, including the Nez Perce.
They did not call themselves the Nez Perce (“Pierced Nose”), a designation given them by
French fur trappers; they were the Nimi’ipuu, “the real people.” Joseph was not his real name; his
Christian baptismal name was Ephraim, but for some reason he was named after his father, who had
been baptized as Joseph. When Joseph (senior) abandoned Christianity, he reclaimed his traditional
name of Tuekakas, and his son became Hin-Mah-Too-Yah-Lat-Kekht, “Thunder Rolling in the
Mountains,” but whites continued to refer to him as Joseph. The band of Nez Perce led by Tuekakas
had long considered the Wallowa Valley (in the far northeast of Oregon) to be their home. Like other
people without writing, the Nez Perce preserved their history in stories. While most stories focused on
wartime bravery, Joseph’s stories sought to make sense of the interactions of his people with the
whites who had recently “invaded” their land; thus, his stories revolved around law: “Our fathers gave
us many laws, which they learned from their fathers. These laws were good. They told us to treat all
men as they treated us; that we should never be the first to break a bargain; that it was a disgrace to tell
a lie; that we should speak only the truth; that it was a shame for one man to take from another his
wife or his property without paying for it.” The law, as agreed upon in an 1855 treaty, which
established a huge reservation for the Nez Perce and secured the Wallowa Valley to Joseph’s band.
The broken bargain, the lie, and the theft: the 1863 treaty, entered into by a representative of the
Lapwai band, who was able to keep all of his band’s land while transferring every other band’s land,
some 5 million acres, including the Wallowa Valley, to the US government. When Tuekakas heard
about the 1863 treaty, he physically marked the boundaries of his territory so that, as he told his son,
“all people understand how much land we owned. Inside is the home of my people; the white man may
take the land outside. Inside this boundary all our people were born. It circles around the graves of our
fathers, and we will never give up these graves to any man. Always remember that your father never
sold his country.” Joseph pledged, “I will protect your grave with my life.”
Shortly after the 1855 agreement, a religious movement spread among the Nez Perce, centered
on a holy man, or prophet, who called himself Smohalla (typically translated as “Dreamer”). Those who
accepted his teaching came to be called Dreamers. His teaching focused on two notion—that the Creator
communicated with humans through dreams or dance-induced trances and, since they were born of the
earth, humans must treat the earth with proper respect:
You ask me to plough the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom?
Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.
You ask me to dig for stone [gold]! Shall I dig under the skin for her bones?
Then when I die I cannot enter her body and be born again.
You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men,
But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair.
Joseph and Ollokot accepted some elements of Smohalla’s teachings but resisted others. They did adopt
the Dreamers’ typical hairstyle, an upswept pompadour (see the depiction of Joseph below). Long hair
represented spiritual commitment. To Christian missionaries, who viewed long hair as a sign of
savagery, such unruly hair had to be “tamed” by being cut short. As one Nez Perce traditionalist
commented, “If hair keeps people out of heaven, God would have created man baldheaded.”
 On three occasions Howard met with Joseph and other Nez Perce leaders in order to convince
them to move to the reservation, adopt Christianity, and become farmers. At the first meeting, Joseph
was able to convince Howard that his band had legal claim to the Wallowa Valley, but a later meeting
with government officials in Washington convinced Howard that his redemption lay not in recognizing
the justice of Joseph’s position but in doing his duty, to both God and country, by persuading the 700
non-treaty Nez Perce to move onto a reservation. At the second meeting, in November 1876, Joseph
presented the case that the Nez Perce were equal to the American settlers and suited for citizenship and
equal treatment, just not in the identical manner of white Americans. His was an appeal for a different
understanding of equality—not uniformity but acceptance of diversity. Howard was in no mood to listen
to Joseph and cut him off in mid-speech. On the final day of the conference, Joseph announced, “As for
the Wallowa Valley, I will settle there in my own way and at my own pleasure,” to which Howard
responded, “If that is your final decision, do not complain if evil happens to you.” The third meeting
took place in May of 1877, where the Nez Perce were again ordered to move to the Lapwai reservation.
Toohoolhoolzote, a Nez Perce elder, again took the position that the 1863 treaty “was not a true law at
all.” Howard would hear no more from such a Dreamer. No “Old Dreamer” would ruin his own dream
—of redemption. He ended the council and ordered a soldier to seize Toohoolhoolzote. The soldier
pushed the old man, who stumbled over some of his assembled people. Howard turned to Joseph, “Will
you come peacefully, or do you want me to put you there by force?” Did Joseph and his followers not
realize that he, Howard, had their best interests as heart, just as he had benevolently sought the elevation
of former slaves? Joseph realized that the end of the Nez Perce way of life had arrived and reluctantly
prepared to move to the reservation rather than go to war. Howard would later have to face the fact that
his actions that day ruined his chances for redemption.
 Matters were taken out of both of their hands, though. A young Nez Perce warrior, stung by
rebukes that he had not avenged the murder of his father by white settlers, decided to save face by
killing a settler. Soon other young warriors joined him. They had initiated a war that Joseph had sought
to avoid. Two other Nez Perce leaders, Looking Glass and White Bird, served as the war leaders, while
Joseph acted as the spiritual leader, in the same vein as had Sitting Bull. The four-month-long war went
badly for Howard. The Nez Perce defeated his troops in eighteen separate engagements, including four
major battles; his subordinates ignored his orders; and he was never able to catch up with the 250
warriors and 500 women and children who constantly managed to elude him on a 1200-mile journey
over treacherous mountains. (See the map on the previous page.) The press ridiculed Howard’s efforts
(as in the following political cartoon); so much for his redemption!
 Believing that they had left Howard far behind, the Nez Perce stopped to rest some 40 miles
south of the Canadian border, where they planned to join Sitting Bull and his Lakota, their once
dreaded enemy whom they called the Cut Throats. Unaware that a second general, Nelson Miles, had
been sent out to compensate for Howard’s failures, the Nez Perce were caught by surprise by Miles’s
soldiers at Bear’s Paw on September 30, 1877. The Nez Perce fought valiantly for five days, but they
saw the futility of further fighting. White Bird and about 200 followers escaped and made their way to
Sitting Bull’s camp, but the remaining 450 surrendered. Joseph spoke for them, in words that have
been called the second-greatest short speech of the 19th century, trailing only Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address in reputation:
Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before I have in
my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead.
Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say
yes or no. He who leads the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets.
The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away
to the hills and have no blankets, no food, no one knows where they are—may be
freezing to death. I want time to look for my children and see how many of them
I can find. May be I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired.
 My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.
Whether these were his exact words or represent a later refinement by one of Howard’s lieutenants, they
captured Joseph’s dignity. Both Howard and Miles promised Joseph that his people could return to Nez
Perce country, but they were overruled by General Sherman, who telegraphed, “There should be
extreme severity, else other tribes alike situated may imitate their example.” Dispatched to Fort
Leavenworth in Kansas, where they were forced to dwell in what was essentially a swamp, the Nez
Perce succumbed to malaria and cholera. The survivors were then sent to the Quapaw reservation in
Oklahoma, where a corrupt Indian agent refused to give them medicine or their rations, so they
continued to die of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and starvation—and despair. Joseph would remark, “I
believed General Miles, or I never would have surrendered,” especially after being forced to a land his
people called Eeikish Pah, “The Hot Place,” that is, Hell on Earth, or the Land of Black Evil as the
Cherokee named it.
In May 1885, the 268 surviving Nez Perce exiles returned “home” to the Northwest. The 118
who had converted to Christianity were permitted to settle at the Lapwai Reservation, but Joseph and the
rest of his people were sent farther north to the Colville Reservation, which, after 1887, would be carved
up into allotments, most of which ended up in the possession of whites. Joseph would die at the Colville
Reservation in 1904.
In the interim, Miles had become a strong, but ignored, advocate of permitting Natives to
herd horses and cattle instead of being forced to raise crops on reservations. He also crafted a
stunning rebuke of Howard after Howard published his first account of the campaign: “You
virtually gave up the pursuit of the Nez Perces, turned back your cavalry, left the trail.” Howard
fared no better in his next Indian campaign. Howard never did learn that a person cannot set out to
deliberately contrive his or her own redemption. Howard would later be installed as superintendent
of West Point, where he immediately faced a dilemma. The academy was preparing to expel a cadet
named Johnson Whittaker. Born a slave in South Carolina, Whittaker had endured four years of
abuse and isolation from his classmates. Just before final exams in 1880, Whittaker was found
unconscious and bleeding from razor cuts to his face, with his hands and feet bound to his bed. He
claimed that three classmates had assaulted him, but the school’s administrators accused him of
faking the attack to get revenge on his classmates and bring shame to the academy. Howard ordered
a court-martial, which found Whittaker guilty and ordered his expulsion from the academy.
Howard, the man who earlier sought the elevation of black Americans, became complicit in the
resistance to “racial” equality at West Point, in the same way that he had resisted Joseph’s efforts to
seek equality for his people.
Prior to his departure to the Colville Reservation, Joseph spent some time in the nation’s
capital, where he spoke about the experiences of his people, of the crime of the 1863 treaty that gave
away their Wallowa Valley, of the injustice of Howard’s ultimatum in 1877, of the good faith of the
Nez Perce families seeking to evade the army, of the brutality of the pursuing soldiers and civilians,
of the broken promises of surrender, and of the miseries of exile. He was trying to get his white
listeners, including those in seats of power, to consider his people’s right to a special piece of land
and, even more importantly, to convince the government to extend equality and freedom to all
people, that this nation’s highest values were not the special preserve of a chosen few. Howard, like
most Americans, never grasped that appeal. In his final writings, which he dictated to a teenaged
relative named Frances Perkins, who found his words distasteful, Howard would accept the
humanity of Indians only to the degree that “a portion of them might be made respectable citizens to
attain the blessings of a civilized and Christian life.” Howard made just a single mention of Joseph in
his two-volume autobiography.
 Joseph may have died in September 1904, but as one person remarked, “Joseph is dead, but
his words are not dead; his words will live forever.” Besides Joseph himself, the permanence of his
words is due to three individuals. The words of surrender attributed to Joseph more likely represent
what Lieutenant Charles Wood wanted them to be. If Howard’s awakening came from a vision of
God, Wood’s awakening came from his brief interactions with Joseph, who led the young man to
reassess his preconceptions and actions. In his later years, Wood told audiences, “In my youth as an
army officer, I chased and killed Indians driven to revolt by the oppression of that vague thing called
‘The Government.’ I saw that ‘Nationalism’ and ‘Patriotism’ were used to narrow human sympathy,
inflame the hate—and blind the vision of the people. I left the army and found that the law was not
the servant of justice and protector of liberty but was the protector of property and that there was one
law for the rich and another for the poor.” Wood’s disillusionment with America’s treatment of
Indians led him to challenge America’s late-19th-century pursuit of “benevolent” imperialism, “By
what rule of war or morals have we been compelled to assume sovereignty over the Filipinos against
their will?”—in the same way Howard had sought to impose his “benevolent” will on the Nez Perce
against their will. In his last public efforts, Wood sought to assist Japanese-Americans ordered into
concentration camps during WWII.
Yellow Wolf was a young man when he witnessed Joseph surrender at Bear’s Paw. Thirty years
later, he happened onto the ranch of Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, who befriended him. Yellow Wolf
(depicted on the next page) started telling stories about his past to McWhorter, who realized that Yellow
Wolf’s account differed from the official narratives and from Howard’s reflections. Together, they
challenged the accepted version. Yellow Wolf told McWhorter, “
I am aging. I would like finishing it as truth, not as lie. It is for them.
I want the next generation to know and treat the Indian as themselves.
Nobody to help us tell our side—the whites told only one side, told it
to please themselves. Told much that is not true. Only his own best deeds,
only the worst deeds of the Indians, has the white man told. If people do
not like it, I would tell it anyway. I am telling my story that all may know
why the war we did not want. War is made to take something not your own.
McWhorter published Yellow Wolf’s version of the truth in 1940, and in 1952, a second book of his
was published, posthumously, based on several thousand pages of notes and interviews McWhorter had
assembled for more than forty years. Howard never got his redemption; the Nez Perce, through the voice
of Yellow Wolf, achieved some measure of redemption.
A measure of dignity but very little of their land. After the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887, the
Nez Perce were left with 170,000 acres, less than one quarter of the 1863 reservation, for a total
reduction of 98% of the land promised to them in 1855. In 1895, 600,000 allotted acres went on sale—
to white buyers. Today, the per capital income of the Nez Perce living on the Lapwai Reservation is
about one quarter of the national average. And Joseph’s beloved Wallowa Valley? In 1900, it had
5538 residents; in 2015, its population was 6856, 96% of whom are white, while fewer than 1% are
American Indian. It is among the least densely settled counties in the country. It was taken from
Joseph’s band for this?
 If life is bad for the Nez Perce today, it’s so much worse for the Lakota. The Rosebud Reservation
of the Sicangu Oyate, or Burnt Thigh Nation (also known as the Brulé Sioux), is located in the second
poorest county in the nation, with 58% of the people living in poverty, 29% of them homeless and another
59% living in substandard housing. The Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, second in size only to the
Navaho reservation, has the lowest per capita income in the country, the poorest quality of life, 80%
unemployment, the second lowest life expectancy in the entire Western Hemisphere, 97% living below the
poverty line, diabetes and tuberculosis rates eight times higher than the rest of the US, one-fourth of
infants born with fetal alcohol syndrome, 58% of children raised by grandparents, homes averaging 17
residents, and 33% of those homes lacking electricity and indoor plumbing. Reservation life! Just this
year, the US government took away voting rights from most of the reservation Lakotas based on their lack
of a permanent street address!!!

Sources:

Donovan, James. A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn: The Last Battle of the
American West. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2008

Nugent, Walter. Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2008

Sharfstein, Daniel J. Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez
Perce War. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2017

West, Elliott. The Last Indian War: the Nez Perce Story. New York: Oxford University Press,
2009