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

winds. I journeyed across the emptiness of the Dakotas, where the wounded and defeated captives were marched on their way to exile in the distant Indian Territory of Oklahoma. I walked the river bottoms of Kansas and the cruel flatlands of Oklahoma, where the pitiful survivors were detained and resettled like prisoners in our great, free, American land. By the end, there was not a foot of this journey that I had not traveled or at least shadowed.
    In the course of that time I became intimate, as only a solitary traveler can, with the people who made that journey. White Bird, the seventy-year-old chief who would not trust white promises and continued the flight into Canada while Joseph surrendered; Sees Koo Mee, who in his youth had lost both feet and a hand to frostbite but still made the journey and fought by rolling and dragging himself into position; Noise of Running Feet, Joseph’s twelve-year-old daughter, who was sent off alone across the snowy Montana plains in a desperate run to escape capture; Chief Looking Glass, the complex man of compassion and arrogance whose motives for leading the people slowly in the face of danger were never completely clear; and, of course, Joseph himself, the quiet leader and man of peace who allowed himself to be elevated to a cultural icon after the surrender in order to keep the nation’s attention focused on the tragic plight of his beleaguered people.
    As much as I could, through research and sympathy, I lived their life, knowing well that what I experienced was only a pallid and distant reflection of the searing emotional truth that was theirs and theirs alone. But I gave myself to the journey with all that was in my heart and mind.
    And what I found was something far greater than I had ever imagined. I found a humbling, ennobling, tragic story that is almost unmatched in the annals of the American experience. I found a story of grandparents, too weary or wounded to continue the flight, who were given blankets and pitiful portions of food, then left behind by tearful family members to die on the side of the trail. I found a story of a young mother forced to kill her baby in order to stop the incessant crying, which would give away the fleeing people’s location to the pursuing soldiers. I found a story of Nez Perce women giving water to terrified young American soldiers who lay wounded on the battlefield. And, yes, I found the story of Joseph, a man whose true greatness for more than a hundred years has been obscured by myth and shrouded in legend.
    It is my hope that in this book I can give you, the reader, some feel for the sweep and scope of this little-known American story. It is a truly American saga, as much a part of who we are as any pioneer journey or grand exploration. To understand it is to understand better who we are as a people and at what cost we have made ourselves the nation that we have become today. We owe it to ourselves, and to those we have mythologized and silenced, to make sure that this story is heard.

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“We Thought They Might Be Descended from Dogs”
    T HE NEZ PERCE first encountered the European world, and the Europeans first encountered theirs, in a wide, pine-rimmed meadow in the foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains on a sunlit day in the autumn of 1805. There, in a flower-covered field called the Weippe Prairie, in the state we now call Idaho, three young Nez Perce boys were lazily playing with sticks and bows while their mothers and grandmothers dug camas roots on the far side of the clearing. It was the autumn gathering time, and the roots they dug would be dried and pulverized and made into meal for bread. A good harvest meant a good winter, and this year the harvest was good.
    Smoke rose from fires near the buffalo-skin teepees, which were set in the same places they had been set for as long as anyone could remember. Each family had its own spot, each band its own area. The gathering had the gentle grace of a yearly ritual, when