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October 01, 2005

Bear Paw

Imagine you somewhere in the middle of northern Montana. The autumn chill suggests winter will soon come, with rain, snow, and hard winds. You have been traveling, mostly on foot, for over four months, always pursued, never able to rest for long, without adequate food supplies. There are many in your party--women, children, elders alongside warriors and chiefs. Many are weakened and sick. 100 have already died. You fled your home in the Wallowa hills to avoid capture and detention by an invader who wanted your land for the gold in the hills. Not content to simply let you and your party leave, they have pursued you for months. Your journey has wound nearly 2000 miles through high mountains and the lands of unfamiliar and enemy peoples. On September 29, with only two days journey remaining to the land of the Sioux where you hope to find sanctuary, the chiefs determine to make camp on a tributary of the Milk River near the Bear Paw mountains. The warriors kill some buffalo for food. Buffalo chips make fuel for fires. The chiefs plan to stay only one day - long enough to hunt a little and rest before the final leg of the journey. You are 60 miles from freedom when in the early morning of September 30 you raise your eyes to the hills south of camp to see a Cheyenne scout leading the soldiers of the United States Army. First they scatter your horses...

The year is 1877. You are part of the Nez Perce, and your journey is about to end.

July 10, 2005 ~ Near Chinook, Montana.
Today I encountered the most sorrow-filled placed I have ever been on this earth: Bear Paw Battlefield Nez Perce National Historical Park. Here the Nez Perce met their defeat, miles from home and painfully close to Canada, the camp of Sitting Bull and refuge. It is a sad, sacred site set in the vast stillness that Montana is mythical for. It was so quiet I could distinguish specific sounds among the hum of insects, and a car approaching could be heard miles before it was seen. I imagined this site - not very big at all, really, with a 1.5 mile loop interpretive trail and a somewhat but not vastly wider circumference - filled with the sounds of people, talking, cooking, playing. The stillness seemed surreal. The quiet seemed striking. The tragedy seem palpable. I wept for a people I have never known for a betrayal commited in my name, in the name of a God I claim to worship and the country in which I claim citizenship. It hurts, sometimes, to claim either of these things.

With the discovery of gold, the Nez Perce homeland was reduced in 1863 by nearly 90%. In 1877, General Oliver O. Howard received orders to move all of the Nez Perce to a reservation..."

The reservation was to be in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. No one who has ever been to both the Wallowa and Oklahoma could see this as fair or right. Not surprisingly, the Nez Perce resisted. The Nez War of 1877 began in June. The tribe followed Joseph and the other chiefs through the mountains of Idaho, over what is now the Rockies, to the prairie where they hoped at last to turn north and find Canada. 60 miles. That's all that remained for them after nearly 2000 on the run.

It is not the experience of Manifest Destiny marching west. Instead, it provides a view from the homeland looking out..."
from the sign at the beginning of the trail.

A people invaded and driven out, pursued as if they had been the hostile force. I wonder sometimes if the reason Clark committed suicide was because he knew, somehow, what would eventually happen to the people he and Lewis met on their journey to the Pacific and back.

The army thought they would have a quick battle and a victory. It turned into a seige. For six days, the Nez Perce held on. About 150 members of the tribe fled the camp and did make it to Canada. Only when Sitting Bull met them did he realize the fight was a near as it was. He had heard of the plight of the Nez Perce, but believed them to be much further south along the Missouri river. The refugees made him realize the true location, and he set out with a band or warriors to help. Encountering Chief White Bird and additional refugees at the Medicine Line (the border of Canada), he learns that rescue attempts will only bring more harm. For Chief Joseph and the survivors of the seige, it is too late to help.

During the seige, Nez Perce gave water and blankets to fallen army soldiers, when it was night and safe to do so. Many soldiers died. Many Nez Perce died. Small round markers throughout the site mark the places where chiefs and warriors fell. Such small remembrances, often with offerings placed near them. Small momentos of cloth and wood fading in the hot prairie sun. The remains of soldiers who had been buried in a mass grave at the site were moved in 1912 to the cemetary at Little Big Horn.

The seige lasted six days. On October 5, Chief Jospeh and Chief White Bird met with army officers to discuss terms of "quitting the fight." When Joseph agreed to the surrender, Gen. Nelson Miles promised him safe passage back to the "place you love to stay in". White Bird distrusted the Army and fled with a band of about 30 refugees. They make it to Canada. The rest, betrayed by the Army, are led to Oklahoma. The climate shift killed all the newborn babies and many of the elderly. Many of the tribe were sick throughout the first year.

Now there is an historical trail, a network of sites that tell this sad story. It gives real context and sense to the words I learned as a child in a schoolroom in Washington, where the history of the explorers and the trappers, the traders and the missionaires, the gold and the army are neatly and tidily presented in short snippets in books. Chief Joseph is portrayed as a hero not for his courage and leadership during the long odyssey and ordeal, but for the words of his surrender, the oft-quoted and not much contextualized words "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more." Some learn the whole of his speech that day, taken down and translated as he spoke by an army officer, later published in Harper's Weekly:

Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it 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 led 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--perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe 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.

After he finished speaking, Joseph drew his blanket over his head.

This National Park, a unique entry in the system, is presented from the point of view of the people who lived here first, before "Manifest Destiny" came to claim their home, their land, their way of life, their lives. I lived in Washington for many years, with reservations scattered throughout the places that I routinely traveled. Some are poor. Some are wealthy. All are reminders of the legacy of westward expansion. I learned this history of the Nez Perce as a schoolgirl. But I didn't really "learn" this history until I stood in the middle of that battlefield, being bitten by mosquitos and biting flies in the hot summer sun and heard the sound of sorrow deep in my own ears.


In addition to the battlefield site, the Blaine County Museum in Chinook offers a multimedia presentation about the battle. Additional resources include:
The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. A thoroughly researched history originally published in 1965 and updated in 1997. It is written for the lay reader, unacquainted with Nez Perce history. It is filled with detail and includes an extensive bibliography.

The National Park Service webpage for the site.

A better, more detailed, and more informative site is this one from the Friends of the Nez Perce Battlefields.

Posted by cageyer at 08:59 AM | Comments (1)