Legends of the Old West - ENCORE: NEZ PERCÉ WAR Ep. 1 | “50 Years of Peace”

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

For about 50 years, there was relative peace in the U.S. and the Nez Percé. There were outbreaks of violence, like the Whitman Massacre, but not the continual warfare that existed between the U.S. army and other tribes. Tensions rose dramatically in the 1850s and 1860s when the U.S. proposed treaties that were designed to take nearly all Nez Percé land. By 1863, five bands of the Nez Percé were rebelling against the treaties and set the stage for the Nez Percé War.   Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.    On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Northern states were divided from southern states in a very literal way. The Civil War was in its second full year and it showed no signs of stopping or even slowing down. It had been tearing apart the southern states where most of the fighting happened. But that summer, the summer of 1863, the war was creeping north. Just one month from now, the largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere would rage across fields, ridges, and hills outside a small town in southern Pennsylvania called Gettysburg. Two thousand miles west of Gettysburg, there was a different type of division. East and West were divided in a more figurative cultural sense.

The war dominated all aspects of life from about the state of Kansas to the East Coast. But west of Kansas, fighting was minimal and sporadic. Americans were focused on farming or digging for gold. They were more worried about traversing the seemingly endless miles of wide open space of the Great Plains region. And that migration westward, whether it was for farming or gold or religious reasons, brought white settlers into direct conflict with Native American tribes

whose names are now legendary. Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, Arapaho, Shoshone, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, and Nez Perce. Of the biggest tribes in the west, the Nez Perce were the most isolated. Their homeland was almost completely encircled by mountains. There were no railroads in the Nez Perce lands. There were no good wagon roads, and the gold strikes in the area were small when compared to those in California, Colorado, and Montana. But eventually, the inevitable happened.

The Nez Perce faced the same decision that all the other tribes faced, fight the overwhelming size and strength of America, or submit to life on a reservation. Here in the first week of June 1863, several groups of Nez Perce made their final decision. They would never submit to life on a reservation. One of the loudest voices came from a man whom the white settlers and soldiers knew as Old Joseph. He, like most Nez Perce, was initially friendly toward the white settlers and travelers. But now, one month before the biggest battle in a war that the Nez Perce knew virtually nothing about, Old Joseph was enraged. US Army soldiers were telling him that he had

to give up all his lands and move to a small patch of ground with all the other groups in the area. He had to give up his language, his traditions, and his religion. And old Joseph was further enraged by the fact that he was being forced to do those things because of a treaty he had never signed. This was the second treaty in just eight years that was proposed by some mysterious authority in the East, the white representatives called the Great Father. The first treaty had been unsettling, but possibly tolerable. The second was an outrage.

In June of 1863, Old Joseph vowed he would never surrender his homeland. When the final breaking point eventually arrived, Old Joseph was gone, and he had passed his leadership to his son, young Joseph. Young Joseph would be known around the world as Chief Joseph and he along with a handful of other leaders would guide the Nez Perce on the journey of a lifetime. The flight of the Nez Perce, commonly called the Nez Perce War, was unique in American history. The Nez Perce traveled 1500 miles, fought five battles and a series of skirmishes, and out-foxed three American history. The Nez Perce traveled 1,500 miles, fought five battles and a series of

skirmishes and outfoxed three American armies. And it almost worked. Almost. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the story of the Nez Perce people and their epic fight to remain free. This is The Nez Perce War, Episode 1, 50 Years of Peace. Three boys hurried toward a Nez Perce village that was situated in a wide prairie in what is now northern Idaho. The boys carried ribbons that were gifts from a group of weary, half-starved travelers. Most of those travelers were white, and they were the first white men to visit the Nez

Perce homeland. The group would achieve almost mythical status in American history. They were the core of discovery, led by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. It was September 20, 1805, and the group had just crossed the Bitterroot Mountains and come down into the prairie through Lolo Pass. Seventy years in the future, the Nez Perce would hurry up that same mountain pass in the opposite direction as they fled their lands. But for now, they hesitantly greeted these scraggly strangers who had nearly died in

an early winter snowstorm in the mountains. The Nez Perce knew they were coming. They had heard from other tribes about the group that was traveling from civilizations in the east all the way across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. The first meeting between Lewis and Clark and the Nez Perce was cordial, though guarded, and also brief. But the second was longer, and it set the stage for the next 70 years of relations between America and the Nez Perce.

Lewis and Clark followed the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean and camped for the winter in what is now the state of Oregon. On their way back to the East Coast in the spring of 1806, they spent a month with the Nez Perce. Lewis and Clark made a pledge of friendship with the Nez Perce, and the Nez Perce seemed to have taken it more seriously than did the American explorers. After the Corps of Discovery departed in June 1806 to complete its mission to report to President Thomas Jefferson that it was possible to cross the continent using mostly rivers, the Nez Perce didn't see another white person for six years. Their lands were almost completely enclosed by mountains, and they roamed a series of

valleys that crossed central Idaho, eastern Washington, and eastern Oregon. The next big arrivals to Nez Perce lands were America's first fur traders. They were from the American Fur Company, which was run by a man who became America's first millionaire, John Jacob Astor. French and British trappers and traders had been traversing the Pacific Northwest for years, but they hadn't ranged into Nez Perce territory. Now in 1812, with the arrival of the first American trappers, it was the dawn of the

Mountain Man era of American history. Mountain Man Jedidiah Smith organized the first rendezvous in 1827. It was the first of the annual gatherings that happened for the next 13 years. Trappers and traders from all over the region assembled to buy, sell, and trade, and the Nez Perce were frequent participants. The top two items on their wish list were guns and horses. They already had sizeable horse herds, but their neighbors, both friends and enemies, had more firearms, and the Nez Perce needed to keep pace.

Because the Nez Perce were so isolated in their mountain stronghold, their access to guns was severely restricted. So the yearly gatherings provided a great chance to stock up. And for a few years, the annual trade fairs were peaceful and beneficial. But the 1830s brought the first major wave of change, and not just to the lands and peoples of the West. 1831 to 1838 was the forced migration of the tribes from the East to the area that was known as Indian Territory. The U.S. government bought, basically at gunpoint, the lands of the tribes in what is today the

Southeastern United States. The tribes were forced to march hundreds of miles to their new designated home in what is now the state of Oklahoma. At the same time that was happening in the east, the first Christian missionaries were arriving in the west, and that was when the real trouble started. The situation didn't explode right away, but over the next 10 years, cracks started to form within groups of the Nez Perce, and between the Nez Perce and the Americans who arrived with increasing frequency and volume. And then it did explode into infamous bloody violence.

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Their work seems to have started reasonably well, but then the first inevitable cracks started to show. The Nez Perce listened to the teachings and found some of them intriguing. The things they liked, they incorporated into their own beliefs. The things they didn't, they simply ignored. But that kind of half-in, half-out approach didn't work for the missionaries. They demanded total and complete conversion to Christianity and the lifestyle of white civilization in the East. The Nez Perce were supposed to give up their language

and their traditions. They were supposed to settle into permanent log homes and learn how to farm. They were supposed to cut their hair, change their clothes, and of course, give up all their old religious beliefs. Some Nez Perce actually started to make the transition. Others accepted some of the religious practices, but rejected all of the changes to their way of life. And still others rejected all of it completely. The missionaries didn't arrive on their own. They came with groups of settlers, and the settlements around the crewed missions grew over time. As they did, conflicts began

between the settlers and the Nez Perce. The groups of native peoples who lived in the region were pretty small, and as white settlers continued to arrive, the buildup was alarming. Add to that the growing pressure to abandon their way of life and there was tension between the societies. And on top of that, there was the worst addition, disease. Smallpox had hit the Nez Perce in 1780 and 1800. The Nez Perce had no idea what it was or how it spread. Many groups in the region had never seen a European and yet they were dying from a disease that had been brought to North America from Europe.

Now in the late 1830s and early 1840s, white settlers brought two new diseases, dysentery and measles. Both were awful, but measles was especially bad. Europeans had been dealing with measles for hundreds of years and they had built up some immunities. The Nez Perce had none. Measles killed quickly and painfully and spread with lethal speed, especially to children. In the first six years since the arrival of the Whitmans and the Spauldings, hundreds of Nez Perce died. The groups who were closest to the missions started threatening the Whitmans and Spauldings.

As the confrontations grew more scary, the missionaries asked Elijah White for help. White holds the distinction of being the first Indian agent in the West. At the time, the U.S. government called him a sub-agent, but that position evolved into the job title of Indian agent that was so common in the Old West era. White had established his small agency in the settlement where the Spauldings lived, and now he overstepped whatever limited authority he might have had. In his mind, he thought he was trying to help the settlers, but his next action eventually

led to disaster. In response to the threats against the settlers and the missionaries, he wrote a set of 11 laws and demanded the Nez Perce obey them. He had no authority to make laws or to try to enforce them, but he was trying to keep the situation from totally unraveling. The laws laid out specific crimes and specific punishments, but they were entirely one-sided. If the Nez Perce committed crimes on the list, their leaders should punish the offenders accordingly. But if a white person committed a crime, the Nez Perce were supposed to bring the case

to Elijah White, and then he would eventually decide on the proper punishment. There were minor problems in the beginning, but over a five-year period, the tension built up to the worst-case scenario. Elijah White presented his laws in 1842. The next year, the Nez Perce received a serious wake-up call. The first wagon train of white settlers rolled through parts of Nez Perce land in 1843. That first procession had somewhere between 800 and a thousand people in it. Those people settled on the western edge of Nez Perce lands.

Elliot West, in his book The Last Indian War, wrote a great analogy about the size of the wagon train. If 800 to 1,000 settlers moved onto land that was right outside the Nez Perce homeland, that would be the equivalent of 28,000 Native Americans marching through the streets of Boston and announcing their intention to live on Cape Cod. If 28,000 Native Americans paraded through Boston and then said, We live here now, the people of Boston would have lost their minds. That was what had just happened to the Nez Perce. And then the next year, Elijah White and his laws received the test that broke the fragile peace between the Nez

Perce and the White missionaries. A small group from the Walla Walla Band traveled to California to do some trading. In California, one of the group was shot and killed by a White man. When the group returned to its home in the greater Nez Perce region, the father of the young man who had been killed took his case to Elijah White. The father was a prominent member of the band, and he followed White's laws. A crime had been committed by a white man, and the father wanted Elijah White to handle it. Except Elijah White said he couldn't. He said he didn't have authority in California. In reality, he didn't have authority anywhere.

He was just making all this up as he went along. And now, when a serious crime had been committed, and when the father had done exactly what he had been told to do, White did nothing. And obviously, the father was mad. He led a war party back to California to get revenge, but they couldn't find the killer, and the raid didn't result in justice for the father. When they returned to their village, they brought home something far worse than dissatisfaction. They brought back measles.

30 members of the party died from it. The disease ravaged their village and raced through the region. Native peoples died at appalling rates. White settlers around the missions got sick too, but virtually all survived. Native people begged the missionaries for help. Mr. Whitman was also a doctor, but his medicines made no difference against the disease. And this wasn't the first time that Marcus Whitman, who was a literal medicine man, had failed in his attempts to help people who were sick. The Nez Perce began to doubt

his physical medicines and his spiritual medicine. And as more people died, the survivors started to wonder if the Whitmans were responsible for the disease. Maybe they had intentionally caused it. The fear among the people escalated. Their communities were being devastated, again, by something they didn't understand. The conflict and resentment built up. All the demands to change their way of life, the wagonloads of uninvited settlers, the laws and the injustice, the disease and the death, all of it built up until it exploded. On November 29, 1847, several men from the Caius band went to the Whitman's house. They shot Marcus Whitman and bludgeoned him to death with a tomahawk.

They dragged Narcissa Whitman outside and shot her several times. Some accounts say the Caius decapitated both Whitmans, and the rampage continued from there. The warriors killed 11 men and burned several buildings to the ground. They captured 47 prisoners and held them for a month before ransoming them for some valuable supplies. The other missionary, Henry Spalding, narrowly avoided the event that was called the Whitman Massacre. He had been at the Whitman's mission a few days earlier but was traveling back to his own mission when the attack happened.

Word of the massacre spread quickly and nearly all white settlers in the area fled, including the Spaldings. The Whitman's and the Spldings were in the region for 11 years, but that was the last time missionaries entered the area. The demand to adopt Christianity and conform to the customs of white society didn't stop, but over the next 30 years, it was increasingly pushed by a new group that arrived from the East, U.S. Army soldiers. And now the demands were written in the form of something new called a treaty.

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And before that war was done, gold was discovered in Northern California. Almost before the ink was dry on the treaty between the US and Mexico, America's first gold rush was on, and people raced westward to the Pacific Coast. So many people flooded into the region that the state of California was added to the Union in 1850, the same year Oregon territory was created. Three years later, the huge Oregon territory was split into two territories, Oregon and Washington. And now, the governor of Washington Territory had a bold new idea.

He wanted to build a railroad from St. Paul, Minnesota to Seattle, Washington. To do that, he needed to move all the Native American tribes along the route off their ancestral lands. He started with some smaller tribes, and by 1855, he was ready to treat with the Nez Perce. The governor was Isaac Ingalls Stevens, and for all intents and purposes, he created the reservation system that is still in use today. He set up a council in the Walla Walla Valley in what is now the southeast corner of Washington State.

All the members of all the biggest Native American groups attended. And when the Nez Perce arrived, they put on a show. They wrote up in one long column that probably stretched for well over a mile. There were about 5,000 people at the council, and about half were Nez Perce. It was May of 1855, almost exactly 50 years since they had met Lewis and Clark, and they had considered themselves friends of the people who called themselves Americans. Yes, there had been conflicts with missionaries and settlers, but the Nez Perce had not been part of the Whitman Massacre. there had been conflicts with missionaries and settlers, but the Nez Perce had not been part of the Whitman Massacre.

That had been the work of the Caius, and in fact the Nez Perce had helped some of the survivors and some of the people who fled the mission. The meeting lasted for 12 days, and it was the first version of a scene that would play out over and over again in the West for the next 50 years. Stevens wanted to move all the people in the region onto two reservations. All the rest of the land would be given to white settlers. The U.S. government would provide the native people with everything they needed – food, clothing, money, tools, and more.

But the U.S. expected them to give up their traditional ways of life and live like white people. Most of the attendees protested loudly and immediately. Some had adopted a few of the Christian traditions and many had been baptized, but that didn't mean they were willing to give up their land and their way of life. They couldn't understand why a mysterious ruler in a far-off land was commanding them to leave their homes. A Nez Perce leader named Looking Glass put it bluntly when he said, I do not go into your country and scatter your children in every direction. In the end, many leaders, including Looking Glass and a man who took the Christian name

Joseph after he was baptized, signed a treaty. There were actually two treaties signed that week, the second week of June 1855, and it's almost impossible that these signatories fully understood either of them. Those treaties were the roots of all the treaties that came after them with tribes of the West. And the misunderstandings that helped fuel the Nez Perce War were the same fundamental misunderstandings that fueled the conflicts with the other tribes in years to come. United States representatives couldn't grasp the concept that Native American societies

had no formal structure. American agents assumed that a treaty with one group was a treaty with all groups. That idea didn't even work with tribes that did have a more understandable structure, like the Sioux or Cheyenne. It was even worse for the native peoples in the valleys of Oregon Territory. There were dozens of groups who lived in the region, and maybe eight or nine of them were closely connected enough to possibly fall under the single name of Nez Perce. But even then, each group considered itself a separate, distinct people.

They had some overlapping languages and traditions, but they were far more disconnected than, for instance, the seven identifiable bands of the Lakota. At most, the name Nez Perce applied to a very loose confederation of relatively small groups who all lived in the same region. We use the name Nez Perce simply to avoid confusion, and it will become more applicable in the future when the war begins. But for now, it's important to understand that these groups viewed themselves as individuals even more than the famous tribes of the northern and southern plains. And so

it should be no surprise that the misunderstandings of 1855 deepened into full divisions eight years later when the U.S. returned to the region with a new treaty. This time, the U.S. wanted to reduce the two large reservations into one tiny reservation that would be the home of all those separate groups. In 1839, missionary Henry Spaulding performed his first two baptisms. One was for the leader of a band of Nez Perce who was given the Christian name Timothy. The One was for the leader of a band of Nez Perce who was given the Christian name Timothy. The other was for the leader of the largest band of Nez Perce. That leader was given the name Joseph. The year after he was baptized, he

had a son who was also baptized and given the name Ephraim. But over the next seven years Joseph's enthusiasm for Christianity fell. By the time of the Whitman Massacre in 1847, he was done with it. White people stopped calling his son Ephraim and started calling him Young Joseph. So then the father became Old Joseph and the son was Young Joseph. But Young Joseph's Nez Perce name was Hinmatuyalatkek, which is commonly translated to probably the best name in history, Thunder Rolling in the Mountains. Young Joseph was 15 years old when the treaties of 1855 were signed, and he was coming of age when the earliest fighting began.

Just two weeks after the treaties were signed, the Governor of Washington, Isaac Stevens, who had negotiated the deals, published a letter in newspapers across the region that said all the lands that were outside the bounds of the treaty were open for white settlement. That was illegal because the United States Senate had to approve the treaties. It took four years for that to happen, and by then, the damage was well and truly done. Homesteaders and fortune seekers hurried to the area, and the conflicts started immediately. Warriors killed gold miners and an Indian agent. The army sent soldiers into the area and they were initially mauled by larger forces of warriors.

Over the next three years, soldiers fought various native peoples in the region. The tribes had the upper hand in the beginning, but in the end, the firepower of the soldiers won out. At least one prominent native leader was killed during the battles and several more were hanged by the army when it was all over.

Young Joseph's band of Nez Perce was right on the edge of the worst of the fighting, but they were lucky to stay clear of it. And then, as three years of fighting ended, another calamity began. The first serious gold deposit was discovered on the eastern edge of Nez Perce land. The discovery was on the opposite side of the region from Joseph's band, but it was close to the bands of two other prominent leaders, Looking Glass and Whitebird. Their lands would be ground zero for the beginning of the war, but for now they could only watch with astonishment as white settlers and miners rushed into the

area. Some Nez Perce welcomed the newcomers and viewed them as a good source of trade, but many viewed them with anger and resentment. Farmers tore up the prairies, their animals took over the grazing lands, permanent buildings sprang up everywhere, and whiskey made its first appearance in large quantities. This rapid influx of newcomers happened throughout 1861, while the Civil War was beginning in the East.

As tensions continued to rise in the Nez Perce region, an Oregon senator gave a lengthy address to Congress in May of 1862 about the situation in his territory. He said the Nez Perce were a patient and elegant people, they were good and tolerant, and something needed to be done to protect them from the flood of trespassers. The solution to the problem was not to stop the trespassers. It was to force all the bands of the Nez Perce to move to one small reservation, an area that would be easier for the government to protect from white settlers. A year later, in May of 1863, a council was called to discuss a new treaty, and the Nez

Perce were more divided than they had ever been. For 30 years since the arrival of the missionaries, there was growing tension between those who adopted Christian beliefs and those who didn't. The 1855 treaties created more division between those who accepted the concept of reservations and those who didn't. Four major bands of the Nez Perce did not accept the treaties, and three were led by old Joseph, Looking Glass, and Whitebird. Joseph and Looking Glass had signed one of the documents, but they now considered it null and void. The U.S. hadn't lived up to its end of the deal, so they viewed the treaty as worthless. Other leaders had never signed the treaties at all, so they felt the

treaties didn't apply to them. Obviously, the US government took the opposite view. No matter how scattered or disconnected the native groups were, the government viewed them all as one people. If the treaty applied to one group, it applied to all. Now, the government was telling the groups that did not accept the treaties that they had to give up all their land and move to a tiny reservation. Old Joseph, for one, was furious. He vowed to never submit to white authority or give up his homeland. He and many others called the 1863 treaty the Steal Treaty because it intended to steal all their land.

The deal forced the Nez Perce to give up 90% of the total land they had lived on for hundreds of years. In the end, in the first week of June, a month before the Battle of Gettysburg, 52 Nez Perce signed the treaty. All of them already lived within the boundaries of the new proposed reservation, so they gave up nothing. The ones who didn't sign, like old Joseph and Looking Glass, were now viewed as non-treaty renegades. It had been 58 years since the arrival of Lewis and Clark, and now the Nez Perce were fractured

and divided along multiple lines. Whether they fully realized it or not, their society was gradually collapsing. Over the next 14 years, the situation worsened. And then, in June of 1876, at the same time the Battle of the Little Bighorn was happening, the match was set to the slow-burning fuse in Nez Perce country. The metaphorical bomb exploded one year later, and the Nez Perce started the fight for their lives. Next time on Legends of the Old West, the Nez Perce War begins. It starts with a murder, then the push for revenge leads to attacks and chaos, and finally the first battle between soldiers and warriors.

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