This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Performing Archive

List of Large Plates Supplementing Volume Eight

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

Contents of this path:

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.
The subject is clothed in a heavily beaded deerskin dress of the plains type. The throat is encircled by strands of shell beads of native manufacture, heirlooms which were obtained by the original Wishham possessor from the Pacific slope. Pendant on the breast are strands of larger beads of the same kind, as well as of various kinds brought into the country by the traders of the Hudson's Bay Company. An indispensable ornament of the well-born person was the dentalium-shell thrust through a perforation in the nasal septum; occasionally, as in this case, two such shells were connected by means of a bit of wood pushed into the hollow bases. Tied to the hair at each side of the face (see the following plate) is another dentalium-shell ornament, which is in reality an ear pendant transferred from the lobe of the ear (where its weight would be inconvenient) to the hair. The head-dress consists of shells, shell beads, commercial beads, and Chinese coins. The coins made their appearance in the Columbia River region at a comparatively early date. This form of head-dress was worn on special occasions by girls between the age of puberty and their marriage.
Klickitat river flows through what was the territory of the Klickitat, a bold, roving, gypsy-like group of Shahaptian bands. See Volume VII, page 37. The picture, which shows one of a succession of beautiful scenes near the mouth of this stream, accompanies Volume VII for the reason that the land at its junction with the Columbia was formerly Chinookan territory, and in fact it was never altogether given up to the Klickitat.