Lasting Questions from the Last Indian War

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – In The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story, University of Arkansas historian Elliott West offers a revealing analysis of a time in which the American nation was transformed. The Nez Perce war of 1877 was a pivotal moment in a period West calls the Greater Reconstruction.

“America was reborn in the mid-19^th century, and the last Indian war was the culminating moment of the Greater Reconstruction. The Nez Perce war was fought against people who were our most loyal allies and were not a threat. All they asked was to be left alone. It raises uncomfortable questions about the making of our nation,” West said.

Between 1845 and 1877, America expanded to the Pacific Ocean and fought the Civil War to hold the expanded country together. The Civil War and the full conquest of the Western frontier “raised and pressed questions that, at the bottom, were much the same…. Who were the Americans, and what obligations would bind them together,” West wrote.

When Lewis and Clark met them in September 1805, the Nez Perces lived in a collection of villages at the nexus of what are now the states of Idaho, Washington and Oregon. They were protected by steep mountain ranges and sustained by abundant salmon, game and plant life. The Corps of Discovery stayed with them for a month in 1806 on the return trip and left with a pledge of friendship and goodwill from the Nez Perces.

Fur traders quickly followed the Lewis and Clark visit, and 30 years later, the first Christian missionaries arrived. Despite treaties that delineated the Nez Perce reservation, the discovery of gold in 1860 brought a flood of white immigrants into Nez Perce lands.

In the years following the Civil War, the federal government focused on consolidating the union, and “its efforts out West simply had no developed option that would leave room for people like the Nez Perces – historically friendly and utterly unthreatening but living by ways well outside the national mainstream – to live as they wanted while still being part of that new union,” West wrote.

The resulting war of 1877 ended in the defeat of the Nez Perces. For nearly four months in 1877, the Nez Perces fled their homeland on a journey of 1,500 miles. Their warriors held off the American military, besting them in every encounter until the last battle. The Nez Perces were less than two days’ ride from Canada when they were defeated at the battle and siege of Bear’s Paw Mountains in Montana. The Nez Perces were relocated to a difficult life in Indian Territory in Oklahoma. It was nearly a decade before most Nez Perces were permitted to return to their home area in Idaho or to a reservation in Washington State.

“One of the most intriguing and one of the oddest things about this war was that while the Nez Perces were vilified in the press at the beginning, during the war they became something like heroes to the American public. And soon after the war was over they began to become mythic figures in American culture,” West said.

While Joseph was not a great war leader, West said, he showed his brilliance in representing his people during defeat and exile. Joseph did not speak English and had had little contact with American culture – when the war began, he had never seen a telegraph. Yet, “he seems to have understood almost immediately how the public was seeing him and his people. He played the public and the press for his people’s purposes,” West wrote.

While the Nez Perces were exiled in Indian Territory, Joseph challenged the federal government to acknowledge the full citizenship of his people. He admitted that the Nez Perces had been defeated and agreed that they would now be American citizens and live by American laws. And, he continued, they should have all the rights of citizens “to come and go when we please and be governed all alike” rather than to have their freedom as citizens restricted “as you keep prisoners, in a corral.”

Joseph’s last words in the official record were “The way is as big as the land.”

“He meant it both geographically and metaphorically,” West said. “He was calling on the United States to live up to its promise in the broadest sense – its promise to the Nez Perces that they could go home and the nation’s promise to itself to treat all its people alike, to give them common rights and a common respect.” 

In the epilogue to The Last Indian War, West looked at the “invitation and threat” inherent in the ideal of E pluribus unum:

“As a pivotal moment, that war offers the chance to look back on the muddy lessons of nation-making and ahead with questions about an America that continues to enrich its human mix – whether its room for toleration might grow to match the expanse of the land itself. These questions might begin in conversation with the Nez Perce story and those who lived it.”

The Last Indian War was published by Oxford University Press as part of the series Pivotal Moments in American History. In a pre-publication review, Publishers Weekly called the book the “definitive analysis of the United States’ 1877 war with the Nez Perce” and concluded that “West tells it brilliantly.” Kirkus Reviews described it as “gripping” and went on to say, “Skilled storytelling drives an astute examination of a sad, complicated episode.”

West is the Alumni Distinguished Professor of American History in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. He was recently named a finalist for Baylor University’s prestigious Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching. A previous book, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (1998), received five awards including the Francis Parkman Prize and PEN Center Award.