by David Treuer
In order to have all people understand how much land we owned, my father planted poles around it and said: “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.”
The United States claimed they had bought all the Nez Perces country outside of Lapwai Reservation, from Lawyer and other chiefs, but we continued to live on this land in peace until eight years ago, when white men began to come inside the bounds my father had set. We warned them against this great wrong, but they would not leave our land, and some bad blood was raised.
The white men represented that we were going upon the war-path. They reported many things that were false.
The United States Government again asked for a treaty council.
My father had become blind and feeble. He could no longer speak for his people. It was then that I took my father’s place as chief. In this council I made my first speech to white men. I said to the agent who held the council: “I did not want to come to this council, but I came hoping that we could save blood. The white man has no right to come here and take our country. We have never accepted any presents from the Government. Neither Lawyer nor any other chief had authority to sell this land. It has always belonged to my people. It came unclouded to them from our fathers, and we will defend this land as long as a drop of Indian blood warms the hearts of our men.”
The agent said he had orders, from the Great White Chief at Washington, for us to go upon the Lapwai Reservation, and that if we obeyed he would help us in many ways. “You must move to the agency,” he said. I answered him: “I will not. I do not need your help; we have plenty, and we are contented and happy if the white man will let us alone. The reservation is too small for so many people with all their stock. You can keep your presents; we can go to your towns and pay for all we need; we have plenty of horses and cattle to sell, and we won’t have any help from you; we are free now; we can go where we please. Our fathers were born here. Here they lived, here they died, here are their graves. We will never leave them.” The agent went away, and we had peace for a little while.
Soon after this my father sent for me. I saw he was dying. I took his hand in mine. He said: “My son, my body is returning to my mother earth, and my spirit is going very soon to see the Great Spirit Chief. When I am gone, think of your country. You are the chief of these people. They look to you to guide them. Always remember that your father never sold his country. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few years more, and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.” I pressed my father’s hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life. My father smiled and passed away to the spirit-land.
I buried him in that beautiful valley of winding waters. I love that land more than all the rest of the world. A man who would not love his father’s grave is worse than a wild animal.
For a short time we lived quietly. But this could not last. White men had found gold in the mountains around the land of winding water. They stole a great many horses from us, and we could not get them back because we were Indians. The white men told lies for each other. They drove off a great many of our cattle. Some white men branded our young cattle so they could claim them. We had no friend who would plead our cause before the law councils. It seemed to me that some of the white men in Wallowa were doing these things on purpose to get up a war. They knew that we were not strong enough to fight them. I labored hard to avoid trouble and bloodshed. We gave up some of our country to the white men, thinking that then we could have peace. We were mistaken. The white man would not let us alone. We could have avenged our wrongs many times, but we did not. Whenever the Government has asked us to help them against other Indians, we have never refused. When the white men were few and we were strong we could have killed them all off, but the Nez Perces wished to live at peace.
If we have not done so, we have not been to blame. I believe that the old treaty has never been correctly reported. If we ever owned the land we own it still, for we never sold it. In the treaty councils the commissioners have claimed that our country had been sold to the Government. Suppose a white man should come to me and say, “Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.” I say to him, “No, my horses suit me, I will not sell them.” Then he goes to my neighbor, and says to him: “Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.” My neighbor answers, “Pay me the money, and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.” The white man returns to me, and says, “Joseph, I have bought your horses, and you must let me have them.” If we sold our lands to the Government, this is the way they were bought.
On account of the treaty made by the other bands of the Nez Perces, the white men claimed my lands. We were troubled greatly by white men crowding over the line. Some of these were good men, and we lived on peaceful terms with them, but they were not all good.
Nearly every year the agent came over from Lapwai and ordered us on to the reservation. We always replied that we were satisfied to live in Wallowa. We were careful to refuse the presents or annuities which he offered.
Through all the years since the white men came to Wallowa we have been threatened and taunted by them and the treaty Nez Perces. They have given us no rest. We have had a few good friends among white men, and they have always advised my people to bear these taunts without fighting. Our young men were quick-tempered, and I have had great trouble in keeping them from doing rash things. I have carried a heavy load on my back ever since I was a boy. I learned then that we were but few, while the white men were many, and that we could not hold our own with 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 they did not suit them. . . .
I only ask of the Government to be treated as all other men are treated. If I can not go to my own home, let me have a home in some country where my people will not die so fast. I would like to go to Bitter Root Valley. There my people would be healthy; where they are now they are dying. Three have died since I left my camp to come to Washington.
When I think of our condition my heart is heavy. I see men of my race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals.
I know that my race must change. We can not hold our own with the white men as we are. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. If the Indian breaks the law, punish him by the law. If the white man breaks the law, punish him also.
Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.
Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars. We shall all be alike—brothers of one father and one mother, with one sky above us and one country around us, and one government for all. Then the Great Spirit Chief who rules above will smile upon this land, and send rain to wash out the bloody spots made by brothers’ hands from the face of the earth. For this time the Indian race are waiting and praying. I hope that no more groans of wounded men and women will ever go to the ear of the Great Spirit Chief above, and that all people may be one people.
In-mut-too-yah-lat-lat has spoken for his people.
The speech was covered in its entirety by the North American Review and generated an incredible amount of sympathy for the Nez Perce specifically, and for Indians more generally.
Meanw
hile, another tragic tale was unfolding out west. The Ponca tribe, under Chief Standing Bear, after a series of misfortunes that defy the imagination, had decided to walk from their pitiful home in Indian Territory back to their ancestral lands along the Niobrara River near present-day Ponca, Nebraska, on the South Dakota border. The Ponca, never a terribly big tribe, had numbered around a thousand at first contact, but by the time Lewis and Clark passed through in 1807, their numbers had been reduced to around two hundred by a smallpox epidemic. Nonetheless, the Ponca slowly recovered, growing corn and squash and planting fruit trees near their villages and moved out on the plains seasonally to hunt bison. The hunting put them in conflict with the more numerous Oglala Brulé Lakota, however, and by the mid-1800s they had more or less retreated to their villages to guard against the Lakotas’ punitive raids.
But white settlers had begun to flood the area in the 1850s, and this life, too, proved untenable for the Ponca. Cut off from the bison by the Lakota and from their own range by the settlers, in 1858 they signed a treaty that ceded much of their land, reserving for the tribe a small area near their old home on the Niobrara. As part of the treaty, the government promised feed, grain, schools, and protection from other tribes. None of this was forthcoming, however, and the tribe slowly began to starve to death on their pitiful plot of land. In 1865 they signed a new treaty that seemed to cement a better future: in a reverse of the usual narrative, the new treaty gave them more land and more freedoms in most of their old range. Shortly thereafter, however, the Lakota chief Red Cloud so thoroughly defeated U.S. troops that the American frontier was forced back to Fort Laramie, and the Americans themselves were forced to the treaty table on very unfavorable terms. Unwilling to again anger the Lakota, the United States ceded the Poncas’ land to the Lakota and then moved the Ponca to Indian Territory in 1877. This land proved unsuitable for farming, and in any event the Ponca were moved too late in the year to plant crops. They were moved yet again that summer, 150 miles west to the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River. There they wintered over without supplies and without succor. By spring, a third of the tribe had died of starvation.
Among the dead was Chief Standing Bear’s eldest son, Bear Shield. Standing Bear had promised his son before his death that he would bury him in their ancestral homelands on the Niobrara River. He and a few dozen followers began heading north on foot with the body. En route, desperate for food, they were welcomed warmly by the Omaha in what is now Nebraska. But while they ate and rested, the U.S. government learned of their odyssey, and General George Crook, a notorious Indian fighter, was dispatched to arrest them. The Ponca were imprisoned at Fort Omaha. Then a curious thing happened. Crook, a decorated Civil War veteran who had fought the Paiute in the Snake War, the Yavapai and Apache in the Tonto War, and numerous Lakota during the Great Sioux War, had a change of heart. A lifetime of fighting seems to have helped him to see the true cost of war and the terrible treatment of the Indian combatants. Instead of returning the Ponca to Oklahoma, he let them stay at Fort Omaha and rest. In the meantime, he contacted Thomas Tibbles.
Born in Ohio in 1840, Tibbles was an idealist from an early age. At sixteen, he traveled to Kansas, where he joined John Brown’s band of militant abolitionists. He was captured and sentenced to be hanged but escaped. Later he became a Methodist minister and traveled with (and even fought alongside) the Omaha against the Lakota. (Later still, he would be at Wounded Knee in the days following the massacre.) By the time the Ponca landed in Omaha country, Tibbles had become a journalist and an assistant editor at the Omaha Daily Herald. When Crook asked Tibbles to make some noise on the Poncas’ behalf, Tibbles was happy to comply. One scathing full-page editorial followed another. Soon two local attorneys, John Webster and Andrew Poppleton, offered to represent Standing Bear in court. They filed a writ of habeas corpus in U.S. district court in Omaha, Nebraska. Under the law of habeas corpus, an imprisoned person can sue jailers or captors for unlawful imprisonment. Since Crook was, in fact, in charge of Standing Bear, and the immediate cause of his imprisonment, the case was called United States ex rel. Standing Bear v. Crook. It was an unusual case. Standing Bear’s lawyers argued for two days. Closing arguments lasted nine hours. On the closing day of the trial, Standing Bear was allowed to address the judge, Elmer Scipio Dundy. This was one of the very first times an Indian had the opportunity to address wrongs against him in open court. Thomas Tibbles recorded both the scene and the entirety of Standing Bear’s speech, as delivered by an Omaha translator:
It was late in the afternoon when the trial drew to a close. The excitement had been increasing, but it reached a height not before attained when Judge Dundy announced that Chief Standing Bear would be allowed to make a speech in his own behalf. Not one in the audience besides the army officers and Mr. Tibbles had ever heard an oration by an Indian. All of them had read of the eloquence of Red Jacket and Logan, and they sat there wondering if the mild-looking old man, with the lines of suffering and sorrow on his brow and cheek, dressed in the full robes of an Indian chief, could make a speech at all. It happened that there was a good interpreter present—one who was used to “chief talk.”
Standing Bear arose. Half facing the audience, he held out his right hand, and stood motionless so long that the stillness of death which had settled down on the audience, became almost unbearable. At last, looking up at the judge, he said:
“That hand is not the color of yours, but if I prick it, the blood will flow, and I shall feel pain. The blood is of the same color as yours. God made me, and I am a man. I never committed any crime. If I had, I would not stand here to make a defense. I would suffer the punishment and make no complaint.”
Still standing half facing the audience, he looked past the judge, out of the window, as if gazing upon something far in the distance, and continued:
“I seem to be standing on a high bank of a great river, with my wife and little girl at my side. I cannot cross the river, and impassable cliffs arise behind me. I hear the noise of great waters; I look, and see a flood coming. The waters rise to our feet, and then to our knees. My little girl stretches her hands toward me and says, ‘Save me.’ I stand where no member of my race ever stood before. There is no tradition to guide me. The chiefs who preceded me knew nothing of the circumstances that surround me. I hear only my little girl say, ‘Save me.’ In despair I look toward the cliffs behind me, and I seem to see a dim trail that may lead to a way of life. But no Indian ever passed over that trail. It looks to be impassable. I make the attempt.
“I take my child by the hand, and my wife follows after me. Our hands and our feet are torn by the sharp rocks, and our trail is marked by our blood. At last I see a rift in the rocks. A little way beyond there are green prairies. The swift-running water, the Niobrara, pours down between the green hills. There are the graves of my fathers. There again we will pitch our teepee and build our fires. I see the light of the world and of liberty just ahead.”
The old chief became silent again, and, after an appreciable pause, he turned toward the judge with such a look of pathos and suffering on his face that none who saw it will forget it, and said:
“But in the center of the path there stands a man. Behind him I see soldiers in number like the leaves of the trees. If that man gives me the permission, I may pass on to life and liberty. If he refuses, I must go back and sink beneath the flood.”
Then, in a lower tone, “You are that man.”
There was silence in the court as the old chief sat down. Tears ran down over the judge’s face. General Crook leaned forward and covered his face with his hands. Some of the ladies sobbed.
All at once that audience, by one common impulse, rose to its feet, and such a shout went up as was never heard in a Nebraska court room. No one heard Judge Dundy say, “Court is dismissed.” There was a rush for Standing Bear. The first to reach him was General Crook. I was second. The ladies flocked around him, and for an hour Standing Bear had a reception.
There is a good chance that Tibbles, like other advocates for Indian rights and journalists who covered such struggles, added his own poetic flair to Standing Bear’s words, powerful though they must have been. Not included in Tibbles’s account—but part of the court record—are the words Standing Bear spoke to the judge on the first day of the trial: “I wanted to go on my own land, land that I had never sold. That’s where I wanted to go. My son asked me when he was dying to take him back and bury him there, and I have his bones in a box with me now. I want to live there the rest of my life and be buried there.”
On May 12, 1879, Judge Dundy came back with a verdict. His decision ran to eleven pages and is notable for both its thoroughness and its passion. “During the fifteen years in which I have been engaged in administering the laws of my country,” it began, “I have never been called upon to hear or decide a case that appealed so strongly to my sympathy as the one now under consideration.” Dundy continued:
On the one side, we have a few of the remnants of a once numerous and powerful, but now weak, insignificant, unlettered, and generally despised race; on the other, we have the representative of one of the most powerful, most enlightened, and most Christianized nations of modern times. On the one side, we have the representatives of this wasted race coming into this national tribunal of ours, asking for justice and liberty to enable them to adopt our boasted civilization, and to pursue the arts of peace, which have made us great and happy as a nation; on the other side, we have this magnificent, if not magnanimous, government, resisting this application with the determination of sending these people back to the country which is to them less desirable than perpetual imprisonment in their own native land. But I think it is creditable to the heart and mind of the brave and distinguished officer who is made respondent herein to say that he has no sort of sympathy in the business in which he is forced by his position to bear a part so conspicuous; and, so far as I am individually concerned, I think it not improper to say that, if the strongest possible sympathy could give the relators title to freedom, they would have been restored to liberty the moment the arguments in their behalf were closed. No examination or further thought would then have been necessary or expedient. But in a country where liberty is regulated by law, something more satisfactory and enduring than mere sympathy must furnish and constitute the rule and basis of judicial action. It follows that this case must be examined and decided on principles of law.