Sunset in the Bear Paws

Our going was with heavy hearts, broken spirits. But we would be free….All lost, we walked silently on into the wintry night.—Wetatonmi, Nez Perce

The low sun tints the foothills of Montana’s Bear Paw Mountains gold. A cold late-day wind kicks in. The winter grasses, dry and pale, quiver as I take to the trail through the camp of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, past the surveyors’ iron stakes that mark, by name, the placement of the tipis of his fallen warriors. The wind rings in my ears like the whinny of horses, as though the herd of 400 Appaloosas that Joseph drove toward Canada still reels with the shock of artillery and the scent of blood. In another gust, the cries of the 600 women and children who traveled with him, the sharp yips of the camp dogs. Forty-two miles from Canada lies this battleground, so close to freedom.

I am alone in these foothills. I hurry on to the ridge. Boulder-mounted plaques tell me the story as I go, a narration on stone of what happened here. Over this crest, the Army thundered, by trick and surprise, ending Joseph’s run, the four-month chase longer than any other that had stymied the American command. Joseph’s strategies and those of his fellow chiefs would soon be taught at West Point.

The blood is gone, sunk into the grasses and the deep ground of time, the horses long scattered. The field of slaughter is empty. To the west, the sky is slashed with orange as I come down again, through the camp of the conquerors, the same iron stakes bearing their names, and into the gap where the last plaque stands.

Weary after a march of 1800 miles and more than 20 skirmishes with the Army, Looking Glass, Joseph’s principal strategist, had called for a rest before the final stretch to the border. Looking Glass was killed in the battle, as was Joseph’s younger brother Ollokot, and Joseph went alone, on a horse he had no doubt borrowed, to give up his gun and surrender. In trade, he was promised a return to his homelands in Washington State for himself and his tribe.

The letters on the last plaque seem to shout his words in the near dark, though he had spoken them softly, almost unheard. Where I am now, he stood, and he spoke: From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

No return was granted, and Chief Joseph died, they say, of a broken heart, after exile in Kansas and then in Oklahoma, where his tribe had been shipped by rail. His death came at Colville Reservation in Washington State, as close to his ancestral lands in the Wallowa country, which had been returned to the public domain, as he was to come.

The grasses here at Bear Paws Battleground are let to grow, a small space where the native prairie grasslands will claim a stand.

The sky is gray now, with the promise of snow. I drive back to Chinook and slip into my room. I toss in the night toward the south, toward the Bear Paws, then turn back to my time, the red glow of the neon MOTEL sign outside my window pulsing, the scream of horses at my back.

Photo of Joseph (Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht , or Rolling Thunder in the Mountain, 1840-1904), by De Lancey Gill, 1900