Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce Read Online Free

been compiling the book of native voices for my students on the Red Lake Reservation.
    â€œWhat people don’t realize,” he said, “is that in the flight—the only thing that any white person knows or cares about us—Joseph was a bit player. He just took charge at the end because the other chiefs were gone. He didn’t even want to go. But you look at the history books, it’s all ‘Joseph’s journey,’ ‘Joseph’s retreat.’ Many of our people even see him as a coward and a traitor for surrendering. But without him no one pays any attention to us.”
    He gestured vaguely in the direction of the Bitterroot Mountains, which begin their ragged ascent just a few miles to the east of the restaurant where we were sitting. “Right now the National Park Service is up there widening the traditional trail our people used to travel to buffalo country—the same one we used to escape from the soldiers. But they’re not doing it to commemorate us, they’re doing it to commemorate Lewis and Clark.”
    He put his fork down and looked out the window in the direction of the mountains. “We made that trail. We’d been traveling across it for centuries. Lewis and Clark just used it. If that trail hadn’t been there, they would never have made it across. There wouldn’t have been any Lewis and Clark to celebrate. But no one cares about that. We’re just a footnote, a curio, like we’ve always been. If it wasn’t for Joseph we wouldn’t even be on the historical radar. We’d just be roadkill on the Lewis and Clark superhighway.”
    Suddenly, the whole picture began to fall into place. In the great shadow of the national orgy of self-congratulation over the journey of Lewis and Clark, the Nez Perce people had undertaken another journey, one far more difficult, far more taxing, far more tragic, and every bit as much a part of the American experience as that of the two celebrated explorers. But their journey was almost unknown, almost ignored. The only reason it was kept alive at all was because of a man who, until the last moments, had been a “bit player.”
    Far from being the “Red Napoleon” or a towering figure of central leadership, Joseph had been a simple camp chief who had achieved his legendary status as much for being “the last man standing” as for anything he did during the journey. And he had done nothing to debunk the myth that built up around him in the subsequent years. Yet it was by letting that myth be built that he had kept the Nez Perce people alive in the national historical consciousness.
    Small wonder, then, that the Nez Perce held conflicting views about the man. And small wonder that they looked with a jaundiced eye on writers like me who wanted to tell his story. We kept the flickering light of their cultural presence alive, but we did it by perpetuating a myth that distorted their history while ignoring a story that was every bit as worthy of being told.
    At that moment, I knew what my literary task would be. I would try to unravel that myth, to put the story of Joseph in its proper perspective, to tell the story the way that it needed to be told.
    This book is the result of a four-year effort to accomplish that task. It is also the endpoint of a profound personal journey. In those four years I traveled and retraveled the route of the great Nez Perce exodus, being awed by the distances, intimidated by the mountain passes and impassable terrain, astonished at the rock slides the men, women, and children navigated as they were chased first by one army, then another, in their desperate run for freedom.
    I spent days and nights on the bleak Bear’s Paw surrender site, wandering the hillocks and creek beds, shivering with cold on the edge of the shelter pits that the women dug with frying pans to protect their families from soldiers’ bullets and the snow-driven high-plains Montana