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Performing Archive

Nez Perce

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The name of Chief Joseph is better known than that of any other Northwestern Indian. To him popular opinion has given the credit of conducting a remarkable strategic movement from Idaho to northern Montana in the flight of the Nez Perces in 1877. To what extent this is a misconception has been demonstrated in the historical effort to retain what was rightly their own makes an unparalleled story in the annals of the Indian's resistance to the greed of the whites. That they made this final effort is not surprising. Indeed, it is remarkable that so few tribes rose in a last struggle against such dishonored and relentless objection.
As a member of the family which more than once was responsible for precipitating the Nez Perce outbreak of 1877, Yellow Bull proved a source of much valuable information. His son Walaituts was one of the three men who murdered the first white settlers in this conflict. The war-bonnet of eagle-feathers, with pendant weasel-skins, as well as the otter-fur wrappings of his hair braids, indicates the extent to which the Nez Perces were influenced by the Indians of the prairies, whom they met in their annual pilgrimage to the buffalo country.
Piopio-maksmaks, quoted in Volume VIII, pages 20-21, is the son of the Piopio-maksmaks who as principal chief of the Wallawalla negotiated a treaty with Governor Isaac I. Stevens in the Wallawalla valley in 1855. The father was killed while a captive of the Oregon volunteers, and the son thereafter lived permanently among the Nez Perces, having married a woman of that tribe. Piopio-maksmaks possesses as unusually strong face, and his remarkably piercing eye betokens a man possessing the courage characteristic of his family and tribe.