The President's Orders

About one year ago, General O. O. Howard, in command of the Department of the Columbia, in his report to the Secretary of War, referred to the discontent of the Nez Perces and the righteousness of Joseph's claim to the Wallowa Valley, and implored the Government to send a commission there to "settle the whole matter before war was even thought of. The Nez Perces," he said, "have never been, up to the present time, hostile to our people." But the Government did not heed General Howard's wise and humane suggestions; and Joseph, who had held back for months from a resort to hostilities, to which he and his band were reluctant to engage in, at length, just before the time fixed for driving him from the home of his fathers, and seeing the soldiers preparing to invade his domain, he plunged into war. The country was startled by the announcement in the newspapers that "a serious Indian outbreak began in Idaho, about the middle of June (1877), when the savages of White Bird's and Joseph's bands murdered a score of settlers fifty miles east of Fort Lapwai. Captain Perry, who was sent against them, was severely repulsed. General O. O. Howard, making a forced march, came upon the Indians at the mouth of the Cottonwood, July 12, and, after an engagement in which eleven of his men were killed and twenty-four were wounded, shelled them from their position and put them to flight. On the 10th of July, Joseph's band had massacred thirty Chinamen on the Clearwater River."

Then followed the usual events that mark the wars of our Government with the Indians--slaughter on both sides, and final defeat of the barbarians, for the odds are generally fearfully against them. The distressing war continued from June until the second month of the autumn of 1877, when, on the 5th of October, Joseph and his band surrendered to the victorious General Nelson A. Miles, at Eagle Creek, Montana Territory. In a speech made at the time of his surrender, equal in pathos to that of Logan, the Mingo chief (see page 747), Joseph said to General Miles: "Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking-Glass is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. May be I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I shall fight no more forever."

This war has embittered the feelings of the friendly Nez Perces against the white people, and planted the fruitful seeds of future troubles. In its origin and purpose, on our part, it was a "gigantic blunder and crime."

We have observed that after the destruction of Custer and his command in the early autumn of 1876, Sitting Bull, the leader of the hostile Sioux, and his followers, fled northward into the British possessions. There he yet remained, when this record was closed (December, 1877), sullen and revengeful. Our Government appointed a commission to confer with him in his retreat, concerning future peaceful relations between us and his tribe. General A. H. Terry was at the head of the commission; and on hearing of the surrender of Joseph, they started for the rendezvous of Sitting Bull, near Fort Walsh. There they met him on the 17th of October. He and his chiefs declined, with scorn, the proposals for a peace made by the commission, and the latter retired; whereupon the British authorities there gave Sitting Bull notice that if he attempted to cross the border with hostile intentions he would not only have the Americans but the British as his enemies.

So it is, that the Indian has appeared conspicuously in our history, at every period, from the time when Europeans first trod the virgin soil of this new-found Western World, until now. His race is fading. Perhaps in another century it may disappear, and become a thing of the buried past.

In future years, the son of a dusky exile, coming from the far-off borders of the Slave Lake, may be gazed at in a city street at the mouth of the Yellowstone with as much wonder as the Oneida woman, with her blue cloth blanket and bead-work merchandise, is now, in the city of New York. Even now these barbarians may chant in sorrow:

Or,