The Dying Grass, page 148
1867
President Johnson ratifies the Lapwai Treaty of 1863.
1868
Young Joseph visits the Buffalo Country with his father. Meanwhile, Nelson Miles, Joseph’s future antagonist at Bear’s Paw, weds Sherman’s niece Mary.
1868
Nimiipu land treaty of 1863 signed in Idaho and ratified. Lawyer goes to Washington to amend it but evidently ignores the concerns of Joseph, White Bird and the other “non-treaties.”
1868
In Chicago, the Peace Commission (controlled by General Sherman et al.) advises Congress to stop treating with Indians as “sovereign dependent nations” and make them subject to U.S. law.
1869
Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads meet at Promontory Point, Utah, completing the transcontinental route and thereby dividing the bison into northern and southern herds.
1869
Sherman placed in command of the U.S. Army.
1869
President Grant puts Bannocks on Fort Hall reservation. His well-intentioned “peace policy” takes authority over reservations away from the Army and gives it to missionaries, with the hope that promises to the Indians will thereby be better kept. John B. Monteith, Presbyterian, becomes Indian agent for the Nimiipu. Henry Spalding goes back to Lapwai to be the school superintendent.
1869–73
Howard co-founds Howard University and becomes its first president.
1870
“The 1870 census, for the first time in American history, counted American farmers as a minority work force . . .”
1871
One out of four horses in the U.S. dies of pestilence.
1871
Congress ceases making treaties with Indian tribes.
1871
Spalding baptizes Lawyer.
1871
President Grant signs order to remove Flatheads and other Indians from the Bitterroot Valley of Montana (the site of “Fort Fizzle” in the approaching Nez Perce War) because it “has proved, in the judgment of the President, not to be better adapted to the wants of the Flatheads than the general reservation . . .”
1871
White settlers arrive in Wallowa.
1871(?)
Death of Old Chief Joseph Tuekalas. This might have been in 1870.
1871–79
Southern bison herds exterminated.
1872
Howard persuades the Chiricahua Apache chief Cochise to come onto a reservation. This result, perhaps the greatest success of Howard’s Indian career, comes quickly undone following the death of Cochise two years later. When the U.S. decides to relocate the Chiricahuas to a reservation not of their choosing, war breaks out. Howard later writes his former aide-de-camp: “Every promise you and I made those Apaches . . . was afterwards broken by agents of our Government.”
1872
Malheur reservation created in Oregon.
1872
Whites begin to settle illegally in Wallowa. Joseph orders them out. Agent John Monteith and T. B. Ondeneal, Indian superintendent of Oregon, are appointed to arbitrate the land question between non-treaty Nimiipu and settlers.
1872–73
Modoc Indian War in California. Among others mentioned in this book, Capt. David Perry, Capt. Joel Trimble, and Lt. Edward Theller, who together will lose the Battle of White Bird Canyon during the Nez Perce War, take part in the Modoc campaign. (Maj. E. C. Mason, another Nez Perce campaigner, is Perry’s superior during the Modoc War.) “The conditions existing in the Lava Beds that made [Captain] Jack,” the Modoc chief, “fight were identical with those in the Wallowa Valley . . .”
1872–74
American and Canadian survey parties mark the “Medicine Line,” the boundary between their nations, moving westward from Minnesota to the Pacific.
1873
President Grant issues an executive order creating a “Wallowa Reserve for Roaming Nez Perce.”
1873
Idaho Territory established.
1873
After a falling-out with Monteith, Spalding removes to Kamiah, exchanging his title of school superintendent for a missionary’s proselytizing crown.
1873
Jay Cooke of the Northern Pacific Railroad goes bankrupt, precipitating the Panic of ’73; one result of this is that Congress reduces Army appropriations. In 1866 the Army mustered about 54,000 men. After 1873 the Army consists of only 25,000 men.
1873
“Beginning with the depression of 1873, agricultural prices began a quarter- century-long slide . . .”
1874
Howard is finally acquitted of misappropriation of Freedmen’s Bureau funds, then appointed to command the Department of the Columbia.
1874
Spalding dies, to be succeeded by the sisters Sue and Kate McBeth.
1874
Grangeville (Idaho) supplants Mount Idaho. These two settlements will furnish volunteers and victims at the beginning of the Nez Perce War.
1874
Death of the Apache chief Cochise. Geronimo replaces him. War with the U.S. Army resumes.
1874
Wood graduates from West Point.
1874
Rich gold strike in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
1874
Nez Perces and Flatheads reject Sitting Bull’s proposal for a pan-Indian uprising against the whites. Looking-Glass aids the Crows in a great battle against the Sioux.
1874–75
“The Red River campaigns . . . with their endless pursuits, demand for vigilance on the part of the Indians, and numbing cold . . . rendered most of the southern plains peoples destitute,” including the Kiowas, many Cheyennes, and Kotsoteka and Kwahadi Comanches. Col. Nelson Miles takes a prominent part in these operations.
1874–81
Howard commands the Department of the Columbia.
1875
Grant revokes his 1873 order of recognition of the Wallowa Reserve.
1875
Civil Rights Act requires hotels, vehicles, etc., to be made as available to Negroes as to whites; furthermore, whites cannot prevent Negroes from being seated on juries.
1876
“By 1876 the Grant administration had all but collapsed in a shambles of corruption and ineptitude.”
1876
Custer and his troops, together with some Crow scouts, massacred at Little Big Horn (total killed about 260) by Sioux under the leadership of Sitting Bull. The Army’s retaliatory operations fail to prevent Sitting Bull’s escape into Canada.
1876
John and William H. Blurick, whom I have conflated and distorted for my fictional character of Wittfield Blurick, ride the Oregon Trail, in company with a scout named Doc, who promises to shoot the first Indian he sees. “There was plenty of Indians all over the Country.”
1876
Colorado becomes the thirty-eighth state.
1876
Fort Macleod established in present day Alberta, Canada, as Mounted Police headquarters, mostly to interdict American smuggling. Fort Walsh, built soon thereafter, 160 miles to the east, will become the HQ post in 1878. Sitting Bull’s Sioux settle in this latter jurisdiction.
1876
Death of Lawyer.
1877
Miles receives the surrender of many Cheyennes at Tongue River, and causes or facilitates the surrender of Crazy Horse’s band as well as many Sans Arcs and Minneconjous.
1877
Lapwai councils with non-treaty Nez Perce. On May 3, General Howard “shows the rifle” and confines Toohhoolhoolzote in the guardhouse for opposing Nez Perce removal. Aubrey L. Haines: “The council was a mockery.”
1877
Nez Perce War:
White Bird Canyon, June 17.
Skirmish on the Salmon River, June 28.
Attack on Looking-Glass’s camp, July 1.
Skirmish on the Cottonwood, July 3.
Skirmish at Norton’s ranch, July 4.
Misery Hill, July 9.
Clearwater, July 11–12.
Skirmish at the Clearwater ford, Kamiah, July 13.
Skirmish at Weippe, July 17.
Fort Fizzle, July 28.
Big Hole, August 9–10. (Nimiipu casualties, according to Joseph: 18 men and 51 women and children killed. Other estimates are higher.)
Camas Meadows, August 20.
Canyon Creek, September 13.
Cow Island, September 23–24.
(Sitting Bull’s people parley with Miles and then cross over to Canada.)
Bear’s Paw, September 30–October 5. At Bear’s Paw, Montana, some 418 tribespeople surrender with Joseph. About 233 escape to Canada with White Bird, joining Sitting Bull.
“In brief, bands of Nez Perce stockmen were disposed of to make room for white ranchers.”
—MERRILL D. BEAL, 1963
1877
Thanks to the military’s poor showing against Sitting Bull and Joseph (not to mention labor unrest on the railroads), Congress re-expands the army.
1877
Official U.S. poverty line is $506 per year.
1877
Edison invents the phonograph.
1877–1937
“Government repression in 1877 set the standard for the next sixty years . . . When not using the U.S. Army to maintain complete control of the workplace, American corporations could call on the militia, police, the Pinkerton Agency, or simply hire thugs as needed, free from any government regulation or inquiry.”
1878–80
Most of the Nimiipu refugees in Canada return to the U.S.
1878
Nimiipu prisoners removed to the Indian Territory.
1878
A U.S. commission visits White Bird in Canada, seeking his surrender. He refuses.
1878
Umatilla Indian War in Oregon.
1878
Escape attempt by Northern Cheyenne. Some killed, some returned to the Indian Territory.
1878
Howard takes part in the Bannock Indian War in Oregon (his last active campaign). Like the Nez Perce War, this lasts from May until October. Buffalo Horn fights against the Army and is killed.
1878
“By 1878, all the Native peoples of the American Plains had been forced onto reservations.”
1878
Bodies of Lt. Rains and others slain by the Nimiipu at Cottonwood reburied at Fort Lapwai.
1879
Grace Howard marries Capt. James T. Gray.
1879
President Hayes vetoes the Chinese Exclusion Act.
1879
Robert Williams becomes the first Nimiipu to be ordained.
1879
The U.S. goes to war with seven Ute tribes.
1880
President Hayes reports to Congress: “We are now at peace with all the Indian tribes in our borders.”
1880–83
Northern bison herds essentially exterminated.
1880
Howard appointed to command the Department of West Point.
1881
Sitting Bull surrenders to the U.S. (July 18). He is taken to Fort Randall and imprisoned for two years.
1881
Garfield becomes President; assassinated that same year; Arthur succeeds him. Chinese exclusion passes.
1881
Umatilla tribal police force established.
1881
Lewistown, Montana, begins municipal life as Reedsfort, named after Maj. A. S. Reed whose trading post the non-treaty Nez Perces visited in 1877, en route to Bear’s Paw.
1881
Howard publishes Nez Perce Joseph.
1881–82
Howard is Superintendent of West Point.
1882
Some non-treaty Nimiipu widows and orphans permitted to return to Lapwai.
1882
The Umatilla sell 640 acres to the municipality of Pendleton.
1882–86
Howard commands the Department of the Platte.
1883
“Wild bison were almost eliminated by 1883 . . .”
1883
The Supreme Court rescinds the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
1883
The Indian Bureau promulgates its “List of Indian Offenses,” which, among other things, subjects practicing shamans to prosecution.
1884
Northern Cheyenne assigned a reservation in their traditional homeland near Tongue River.
1884
Fort Lapwai decommissioned.
1884
Guy Howard, aged twenty-nine, marries Miss Jeannie Woolworth.
1885
Joseph and some other non-treaty Nimiipu sent to Colville reservation in eastern Washington.
1885
Congress passes an Umatilla allotment bill.
1885
Arrival of the Statue of Liberty.
1886
Howard promoted to major general and appointed to Military Division of the Pacific in San Francisco.
1886
Geronimo surrenders to General Miles, and with him the Chiricahua Apaches formerly led by Cochise. They are shipped off to Florida and other places, their children acculturated at Carlisle School.
1886
Congress decides that reservation lands may now be allotted (see Dawes Act, 1887) with Indian consent.
1886–87
Blizzards kill off many range cattle in the West; the era of the open range approaches its close.
1886–88
Howard commands the Department of the Pacific.
1887
President Cleveland signs the General Allotment Act (better known as the Dawes Plan or Dawes Act), which seeks to replace reservations with forced integration of Indians into mainstream white culture and society. “Surplus” reservation lands can be sold to non-Indians, and communal lands will be subdivided into individual allotments. Indians receiving allotments automatically become U.S. citizens. By 1934, Indian lands have shrunk from 138 million to 55 acres.
