What We Can Learn from the Last Indian War About Ourselves

            In 1877 the United States fought its last Indian war against its best friends in the far West, the Nez Perce people of Washington and Idaho.  None of the usual reasons can explain that war.  Its cause was subtler and more disturbing.  It is also resonant to stresses at work in the nation today, stresses born with the nation itself.

            The United States began as an audacious experiment.  It would be a nation based not on deep history or a mythic blood bond but only a commitment to certain rights and political institutions.  From the start, however, there was concern that something more was needed to hold the nation together.  Some possibilities were obvious–a single language, notions of family and property, certain broad religious traditions.  These became the informal requirements for full citizenship.  They were the tickets immigrants had punched in hope of genuine acceptance. 

            Indians, however, posed a problem.  Most were much farther from those norms than any immigrants, and unlike immigrants they had not chosen to come to America.  America had come to them.  Indian policy nonetheless dictated that Pottawatomies, Shawnees,  Choctaws and the rest would be groomed for citizenship on the same terms.  All would be transformed to Anglophone, monogamous Christian farmers.

            Meanwhile the government and the Indians fought, usually over some conflict of material interest.  Settlers and speculators invaded Indian land.  Some tribes seemed implacably hostile, and some had economies incompatible with the new order.

            Far western Indian wars seem case studies of those usual reasons.  Prospectors and farmers pushed at the Cheyennes and Arapahoes until the tension snapped in 1864; Apache raids brought military reprisals in the 1870s; bison-hunting Comanches and Sioux bumped hard against professional hide-hunters, ranchers and gold-seekers on the plains and in the Black Hills, and wars came in 1874 and 1876.

            Then there was the Nez Perce War of 1877.  The Nez Perces, who called themselves the Niimipuu (The Real People), posed not the slightest threat.  They had seen their first whites when a starving Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery stumbled into their midst in September, 1805, and they had kept a pledge of friendship ever since, the equivalent of the time from Franklin Roosevelt’s second inaugural until Barack Obama’s.  They had adapted their traditional gathering, hunting and fishing to the local white economy and acquired large cattle and horse herds that left most of them better off than their white neighbors. 

            They were the northwestern equivalent of another unthreatening and well adapted people, the Cherokees, who were expelled in the 1830s from the opposite corner of the nation, except that unlike the Cherokees nobody much wanted what the Nez Perces had.  The Wallowa valley of far eastern Oregon, home to Chief Joseph’s band, today has fewer than two persons per square mile.  By the famous standard of the 1890 census, it is still a frontier.

            The trigger of war was the government’s demand that Joseph’s band and several others surrender the Wallowa and nearby country for a far smaller reservation.  The government’s claim was that in 1863 the bands had signed a treaty agreeing to move.  Later, however, an army attorney had declared the treaty was an utter fraud, one of many “insults, outrages and political crimes” against these loyal allies.  General Oliver Howard, the region’s commanding officer, had strongly recommended leaving Joseph’s people in the Wallowa: “Let these really peaceable Indians ... have this poor valley for their own.”  Their agent, John Monteith, and Oregon’s Indian superintendent had agreed, and in 1873 President Ulysses Grant had issued an executive to that effect.

            But then Grant reversed his decision and in May of 1877 Howard and Monteith, invoking the treaty earlier called a charade, told the resisting bands to abandon their homes or face the bayonet.  A month later, the day before the deadline for removing, frustrated and enraged warriors killed about eighteen settlers.  In the war that followed the Nez Perces led the army on a fifteen-hundred mile chase before Joseph surrendered just forty miles shy of sanctuary in Canada.

            The high drama and poignant end of this famous episode obscure the puzzle of why it happened in the first place.  None of the usual reasons apply.  History and all previous advice pointed toward a peaceful settlement that would allow the Nez Perces to keep their homelands and retain the essence of who they were.  Nothing stood in the way of this obvious and commonsensical course.  But the government didn’t take it.  Why it didn’t says something about the causes of Indian conflicts generally, and more generally about the limits of national toleration.

            Simply put, Washington did not accommodate its friends because no one had thought much about how to do it.  Serious consideration had never been given to simply leaving alone native peoples who were peaceful, who were willing and able to live congruently with white society and yet, like the Nez Perces, were culturally anomalous and determined to stay that way.  The war’s cause, that is, speaks to the paradox at the heart of the American experiment.  The nation that has welcomed everyone has also pressed everyone to live inside a cultural circumference, and the more who have entered the nation, the stronger the tendency was to press.

            In the middle of the 19th century the nation absorbed more different peoples than at any comparable time in its history.  The Civil War brought in four million former slaves.  Expansion to the Pacific pulled in nearly a hundred thousand former Mexican citizens, soon joined by the polyglot hordes flocking to gold and silver strikes and to new farmlands, and among them all, and most out-of-sync with national norms, were scores of native groups who often differed from each other as much as from white society.  The unprecedented range of new peoples brought unprecedented pressure to toe the cultural line.  The Nez Perces were caught in the middle of that dilemma of citizenship.

            The ironies are obvious.  The bullying behind the war was kin to our loftiest ideal, that of an expanding political community open to any who will embrace its fundamentals.  Coming at the end of Reconstruction, it reminds us that making freedpeople citizens and culturally assaulting Indians were part of the same tension.  As we have made and re-made the nation, we have embraced diversity, yet whenever there has seemed too much of it, we have set loose the dogs.  E pluribus unum has always been both an invitation and a threat.

            The tension remains, part of the package of making America, and in times like ours, when newcomers are once again stretching the cultural spectrum, some historical perspective will help.  Our last Indian war, a culture war in the fullest and bloodiest sense, can help us find it.