“I will stay here until your bands are settled on the reservation,” vowed Cut-Off Arm sternly.
Ollokot, Joseph’s younger brother, stood at his right elbow. While Joseph was a civil chief, Ollokot was a war leader. He was every bit as striking, tall, and imposing as his older brother.
“Know that we will think for ourselves, soldier chief,” he warned the army officer. His name meant “Frog,” affectionately given him back when this handsome, athletic man had been an exuberant child. “For many summers now we have shown respect to your people, but the white man treats me like a dog. There must be one law for all of us. If I commit a murder, then I should be hung from a tree by a rope. But if I do right, I should not be punished and have what is mine taken from me—my cattle, my horses … and not the land of my grandfathers.”
“This has been decided by those above us,” Cut-Off Arm repeated with growing exasperation.
The muscular Ollokot sternly replied, “Our friends among the White Bird people will be here by tomorrow. At that time I will tell them what I think of giving you what you cannot have.”
“We are under the same government,” Cut-Off Arm declared, turning to gaze at Joseph, his one hand imploring for understanding. “What our government commands us to do, we must do. Your people must first come to the reservation; then your agent will give you the privileges of hunting and fishing in the Imnaha country. But if your people hesitate in coming, then our government has directed me to use my soldiers to bring you here. Now, Joseph … both you and your brother know that I am a friend to your people. And you know that if you comply, there will be no trouble.”
Toohoolhoolzote grumbled something to the other old men gathered close by, words that alarmed the even-tempered Joseph.
“What did he say?” the soldier chief demanded of James Reuben, his voice grown shrill with alarm.
The interpreter’s eyes darted nervously as he stammered, “Some-something about there not being enough soldiers to … to—”
“To what?” Cut-Off Arm railed, his cheeks grown red, his neck crimson above the stiff collar of his soldier tunic.
“Enough s-soldiers to make him do what his heart tells him is wrong.”
The soldier chief slowly turned toward the Non-Treaty leaders arrayed before him. He took a step closer to the delegation, then briefly let his eyes touch them all before fixing his gaze on Joseph and Ollokot.
“You must give good advice to your people, and White Bird’s people, too, when they arrive. If you do not convince them that they must comply and come to the reservation, I shall be forced to come for you. I will arrest you and put you in the guardhouse.”
Then Cut-Off Arm turned slightly and stepped right up before the old Dreamer, Toohoolhoolzote. In an even tone he said, “If you continue in making these insults to me, I will arrest you, and send you to Indian Territory. It would be wise for you to remember what happened to Skamiah at the Vancouver post.”
Just as the tewat was about to snap in reply about that uncooperative Indian chief who had been arrested and sent far away, Joseph laid his hand on the old man’s elbow and squeezed. He nodded to the soldier chief as he answered, “When White Bird has arrived, we will meet again tomorrow.”
So it was that their second council convened beneath the canvas tent erected with its long ridgepole and the sides tied out so that it made a large awning where the soldiers, other white men, and the Nee-Me-Poo sat, joined by Peopeo, the one called White Bird, along with the smaller band of Palouse under their chief Huishuish Kute, who was known as Shorn, or Bald, Head.
From the moment he greeted that sunny dawn, Joseph remained hopeful that the sun itself was not setting on the ways of his grandfathers. But almost from the moment the white man’s prayer was made by the half-breed called Alpowa Jim, followed by Cut-Off Arm repeating the government’s orders for all bands to move onto the reservation, Joseph realized matters were steadily deteriorating. There was no discussion and compromise, no room for disagreement. Decisions affecting the lives and futures of the Nee-Me-Poo had already been made without them.
Peopeo was a short, heavy-set man of some fifty winters whose name was variously interpreted as White, White Goose, White Crane, even White Pelican—any variation of a large white bird. He stood when Joseph introduced him to the soldier chief, the agent, and the missionary. White Bird politely shook hands with them all, then settled once more upon the ground, again positioning his large eagle-feather fan across the bottom half of his face so that it hid everything below his eyes.
“I have talked with you, Cut-Off Arm, and you, Agent Monteith, many times in past summers,” Joseph declared. “But this is the first time White Bird has seen either of you. I have told him what you said to the rest of us.”
Cut-Off Arm glanced at the older chief, then brought his eyes back to Joseph, asking, “Does White Bird understand his people must come to live upon this reservation?”
But at the moment Joseph opened his mouth to answer, Toohoolhoolzote leaped to his feet and warned dourly, “What the soldier chief wants … I cannot do! Wherever Tamalait, my creator, has put me, that is there I am to stay. No earthly man—not any Nee-Me-Poo, and certainly not any Shadow—can command me to go anyplace but where Tamalait saw fit for me to live!”
“This is true, what Toohoolhoolzote says,” Joseph defended. “The Creator made no marks or lines of division on the bosom of the earth.”
“It is too late to argue over this now,” Cut-Off Arm grumbled impatiently as he glared at the old shaman.
“Don’t you see that it is the white man who argues over the Creator?” Joseph instructed the soldier chief. “Your missionaries teach us to quarrel about God. See the fighting between your Catholics and Protestants on the reservation! We do not want to learn any fighting over God. We may sometimes quarrel with men about the things of this earth, but we never quarrel about God.”
Cut-Off Arm listened to the entire translation before he countered, “I’m afraid your people do not understand anything more than a primitive concept of the Almighty.”
At which point Toohoolhoolzote declared, “Perhaps I should tell the soldier chief how my people were started in long-ago days, and how the Shadows were started, so you will understand why you cannot come move us where the Creator did not intend for us to be.”
Joseph saw how the old man’s intransigence quickly irritated the soldier chief, how those words about Tamalait made the agent, himself the son of a Christian preacher, squirm in his ladder-back chair.
“My people were like a tree the Creator planted in this land a long time ago,” Toohoolhoolzote pressed on, not dismayed by the anger apparent on the faces of the white men. “And the Creator planted your people like a tree in a place far, far away to the east. For a long time now these two trees have grown side by side, both becoming large, their branches spreading until their limbs met and eventually intermingled. That is how we have grown as two peoples, and as long as the limbs of our two trees cling together we will be at peace as one people.”
Coming from the hard-bitten old chief, these profound words surprised Joseph. It was almost as if, instead of telling the Shadows that fighting was inevitable, the old tewat was instructing the soldier chief and others that there remained some tangible hope of averting bloodshed if each side would listen to the other.
“That is all I have to say to you, Cut-Off Arm,” Toohoolhoolzote continued. “I say these things so that you will know what we believe. You must see that there are two parties to a disagreement. And the party that is in the right will always prevail in the end, no matter what wrongs are done against them by those who are not in the right.”
For a moment the soldier chief remained thoughtful, studying the old tewat’s face before he spoke. “Your story is all fine and well, but you must understand that we are all subjects to those who are not here, those above us. You must accept that we are all children of a common government and must obey what that govern—”
Toohoolhoolzote did not
wait for any more of the translation. Arching forward suddenly, he interrupted James Reuben the instant the translator interpreted the word children. “I am only one man’s child! Surely I am no white man’s child!”
Cut-Off Arm jerked back in surprise at the suddenness of the tewat’s scathing reproach, looking as if he was on the verge of sputtering a response when Toohoolhoolzote pressed on.
“I have heard much of the bargain struck between you white men and the Treaty bands who gave away our land for all of us. But I want you to know that my father’s bones are buried in this country and I cannot give it to you. Remember that I am no longer a child. I came from this land. Therefore the land does not belong to me. I belong to it—”
“Those of your people who did not sign the treaty are in the minority,” Cut-Off Arm interrupted the old chief’s argument with an impatient wave of his one hand. “Those who did sign live peaceably on the reservation. Only your few bands are making for the trouble we now find ourselves in. Because the majority signed the treaty, your people are bound by that agreement too.”
Toohoolhoolzote shook his head violently, flecks of spittle crusted at the side of his mouth as he said, “You have no right to treat me as a child, trying to order me to come here or go there. Tamalait made the world as it is, just as He wanted it—without your people coming to change things for everyone else. The Creator made a small part of the world for us a long time ago, and so we have lived here ever since. Neither your government nor all your soldiers have any authority to declare that my people shall not live where the Creator placed us in the beginning of time.”
The soldier chief was flexing his one hand into a fist, his jaw jutted, neck flushing red again as he lunged a step toward Toohoolhoolzote—then brought himself up short. The rest of the chiefs clambered to their feet, immediately causing the soldiers and the other Shadows to stand. Behind their leaders, the warriors grew restless and the women murmured anxiously—
“It would be better for us to talk another day,” Joseph suggested, worried that the next foolish words would be the spark that could set off this explosive situation.
When Cut-Off Arm turned to him, the soldier chief’s eyes were filled with the closest thing to appreciation Joseph had seen on the face of a Shadow.
“Yes, I agree, Joseph,” Cut-Off Arm said. “It is Friday. We will adjourn until Monday. These next two days will give your people time to reflect upon the grave choices they face. Two days to deliberate with careful thought on the welfare of your families, on their future.”
Chapter 3
May 4–6, 1877
But forty-six-year-old Brigadier General Oliver Otis Howard found himself far too worried by the bellicose display of that ugly old heathen to sit on his thumbs doing nothing while he awaited the resumption of peace talks come Monday, the seventh day of May.
After dark that Friday night, the fourth, this commander of the Military Department of the Columbia, headquartered at Portland, dispatched a courier to Fort Walla Walla with his orders for two companies of cavalry to embark for the Wallowa, where they would be in position when and if trouble erupted.
So if this old Civil War brigade commander, this veteran of the Apache wars in Arizona, knew anything … he knew trouble was on its way.
Everything that had gone before in his life had prepared Howard for this critical trial. If Otis, as he had been called since childhood, ever believed God was testing him before … then surely the Almighty had been doing nothing less than preparing him for this opportunity of a lifetime. The winding, bumpy road that had carried him here to this moment had been a journey that clearly prepared him for this day of redemption.
* * *
Born in the tiny farming village of Leeds along the Androscoggin River in the south of Maine on the eighth of November 1830—the same day his maternal grandfather turned sixty-two—Oliver Otis had been dutifully named by his mother for her father. Throughout his life he often spoke proudly of how his Howard ancestors reached Massachusetts from England in 1643, not migrating north to Leeds until 1802.
When he was five, his father returned from a trip down to the Hudson River Valley of New York State with a young Negro boy not much older than Otis. Over the next four years they became fast companions—working the farm and playing together—until it came time that his father returned Howard’s young friend to that New York farm far away. Still, their fast friendship would indelibly inscribe Howard’s future years.
There was winter schooling while the snows lay deep, a little more schooling when the fields were fallow. Every week on the Sabbath there was Scripture class and sermons, most family evenings spent reading by the lamp or listening to his father play the flute, as well as a grandfather with a strong and guiding hand who regaled Otis and his brothers with tales of the Revolutionary War. When Otis was ten his father died and Grandpa moved away to live with another son. The following year his mother remarried a man who would treat his stepsons with such kindness that Howard recalled those years as “a blessing to us all.”
After persevering at some of the hardest work of his life while preparing for the daunting entrance exams, he was admitted to the freshman class at Bowdoin College in September of 1846. “I seek not mere money,” he wrote home during his tenure at Bowdoin, “but a cultivated and enlightened mind.” And later, when some of his closest friends had abandoned college to return home for a “more practical life,” Otis would remind his mother that “a general education fits a man for any work.”
This opportunity to learn was not an opportunity he would let slip through his fingers. “I am strongly ambitious,” he wrote his mother. So it was that throughout his life, this powerful drive to succeed—an ingredient inscribing the character of those who aspired to leadership—would ultimately come to taint this thoughtful and moral man. While he did not drink, he did enjoy his pipe and tobacco, unsuccessfully trying twice to rid himself of the habit.
More than any thought of national politics of the time, the Mexican War, or the Wilmot Proviso, Otis was interested in Elizabeth Ann Waite, the young but serious fifteen-year-old cousin of his college roommate. It was Otis’s deep love for Lizzie that eventually compelled him to give up his tobacco. By the time he was in his junior year, the two of them agreed to an engagement, planning on marriage after his graduation. But in June of his senior year, his uncle suggested Howard seek an appointment to West Point, although that would delay his marriage to Lizzie for another four years.
In the fall of 1850, Howard began his career in the United State Army as a cadet underclassman. How he missed his Lizzie in those early days, and grew extremely homesick, made “sore by the sharp drilling, and a little angry, from having my pride so often touched.” But by the next spring, when he began to feel more comfortable at the academy, Otis suffered some ostracism and ridicule because of his regular attendance of Bible classes and for his abolitionist views, becoming despised by no less than Custis Lee, the son of Colonel Robert E. Lee, who became superintendent of the academy in 1852. Nonetheless, one of Howard’s fastest friends during his last two years at West Point proved to be Jeb Stuart, soon to become the flower of the Confederate cavalry.
Howard’s friendship with Stuart and other Southerners of that day went far to disproving the contention that Howard was an ardent, if not rabid and uncompromising, abolitionist. In fact, during one of his presentations before the Dialectic Society, a cadet literary and debating forum, Howard eloquently advanced the argument that the Constitution actually sanctioned slavery!
Upon graduation in June of ’54, while Custis Lee was ranked first in the graduating class, Howard was not far behind: proudly standing fourth in a field of forty-six. He was leaving the academy in success. Feeling a powerful esprit de corps, he wrote his mother that “The Professors are without exception my fast friends, and I wish I was half as good a man as I have the reputation of being here.”
At the beginning of those years at the academy, he had little idea just what he wanted to become whe
n he would graduate. But in those four intervening years, Oliver Otis Howard had become a soldier. It was the only profession he would ever know.
Still, there was one thing he wanted even more than a career in the army—Otis wanted Elizabeth Ann Waite. They were married on Valentine’s Day in 1855, and their first child was born on December 16.
* * *
While he had been reading the Scriptures since childhood and attending Bible study at the academy, it was not until two years after the birth of his first child that Howard actually turned his life over to his God. Although he consistently went to church and diligently read his Bible every night in those intervening years, Otis had long been troubled that he hadn’t yet experienced his own emotional conversion. Then, just before the birth of his second child, Howard found what he had been seeking. So it came as little surprise to him now that he spent the long spring evenings of this first weekend in May 1877 striding up and down the long vine-covered porch that graced the front of the Fort Lapwai house where the Perry and FitzGerald families lived as he recited Scripture.
* * *
Autumn of 1857 had found Howard on the faculty of West Point, where he would remain until the outbreak of hostilities with the rebellious Southern states. Shortly after Lincoln’s election, he wrote his mother that he really didn’t care if South Carolina did in fact secede from the Union, figuring it would prove a good lesson for “her people to stand alone for a few years.”
Although December brought secession, that following spring of 1861 found Howard considering a leave of absence to attend the Bangor Theological Seminary. The notion that the North and South should ever go to war over their political squabbles was hardly worth entertaining. Yet April brought the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter.
Oliver Otis Howard stepped forward to do his duty as a professional soldier. But rather than remaining as a lieutenant in the regular army, he instead lobbied for and won a colonelcy of the Third Maine Volunteers. Before the year was out he would win his general’s star, and scarcely a year later he would become a major general.
Cries from the Earth: The Outbreak Of the Nez Perce War and the Battle of White Bird Canyon June 17, 1877 (The Plainsmen Series) Page 4