Another Gold Rush
American Documents: The Nez Perce Surrender
2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, the Indian Removal Act, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club rules, Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech, the Emancipation Proclamation, Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address, the Appomattox Surrender Letters, the Homestead Act, the Gettysburg Address, the Alaska Purchase, the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, and Susan B. Anthony’s Speech on Women’s Suffrage.
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In my American Documents book, I thought the inclusion of this piece was an odd choice. Was it meant to reflect a final surrender of the Indians to the Army? Because the last tribe to formally surrender was an Apache band under Goyathlay (Geronimo.) Why was this incident given priority?
After doing some research on it, I think it’s for two reasons: the heartbreak reflected in the words of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, and the confluence of historical factors that could only have resulted in this outcome.
The Nez Perce
The name comes from the French words for “pierced nose.” It’s a misnomer because the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) didn’t actually practice nose piercings, but the Chinooks did, and the French who named them in the 18th century didn’t know the difference. (Many such cases.) They lived in the greater PNW area around the time of European (French) exploration into the region.
As colonial powers expanded into the area and traded ownership of the land, eventually the Nez Perce found themselves under American control and soon the Westward Expansion brought them into regular contact with English-speaking Americans.
In the early 1800s their total population was around 6,000, but that diminished for the usual slate of reasons: disease, changing environmental conditions due to co-occupation by different farming methods, and higher mortality rate from nomadic lifestyles. After the Mexican-American War, a great deal of the territory they lived in became part of the U.S., and the government under the principles of Manifest Destiny started to exert its influence over the region.
As a result, the Nez Perce were moved into reservations and signed treaties with the government. They were living in modern-day Clearwater, Idaho around 1855. In 1860, someone found gold in that region, and that brought a flood of problems.
The Gold Rush
With the 1849 San Francisco Gold Rush still in recent memory, and the desire of so many Americans to become rich overnight, thousands of miners—professionals and amateurs alike—dashed into the Nez Perce lands. When I say thousands, I mean 5-6 times the population of the Indians who lived there. Conflicts naturally arose and what came next was, at the most base level, a logistics problem.
Yes, there was a cultural and philosophical clash between the Indians who wanted to live there peacefully and the miners who wanted to turn the whole place upside-down for gold, but that wouldn’t have been an issue if the ratios were inverted; two hundred miners couldn’t have pushed out ten thousand Nez Perce. But eighteen thousand miners made life for three or four thousand Nez Perce extremely difficult.
Clashes ensued and soon the Army came in, and the Fed got involved. With the Civil War underway back east, the U.S. Government understandably didn’t want to deal with a protracted conflict in its backyard, so the solution was a forced treaty that got the Nez Perce booted from Clearwater.
Again, it’s a matter of logistics: the government had to know it was pointless to send soldiers to tell eighteen thousand miners to leave. They would just ignore the soldiers and keep trying to get rich. It was easier—and in keeping with U.S. expansionist philosophy—to move the Indians again and avoid a martial conflict to the extent possible.
It gets dicey here because while there was a chief among the Nez Perce, the tribe was divided into bands, and not every band wanted to deal with the Army (acting as proxy for the government.) Those who did were forced to agree to a treaty in 1863 that the Nez Perce still refer to as a treaty of theft, and defensibly so; however I will once again iterate that the logistics can’t be removed from the assessment of this episode.
What came next was a series of moving skirmishes as a few bands of Nez Perce refused orders from the Army and tried to flee rather than be controlled by the Army or the Fed. (Based.)
The Pursuit and Surrender
The Nez Perce didn’t have numbers on their side. The Army sent roughly two thousand troops while the Indians had about two hundred, and those two hundred also had to care for women and children. They fled across the mountain west and into the Pacific Northwest, with some heading for Canada to meet up with Sioux neighbors. The total path of their flight was almost twelve hundred miles, just about all on foot.
They made contact with the Army a few times in the summer of 1877 and racked up kills as they stood their ground. Still, it was a doomed effort, and by early October the Nez Perce were rounded up and forced to surrender. Chief Joseph’s speech, brief as it was, described the condition of his people at the end of the conflict.
Chief Joseph’s Speech
Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have in my heart.
I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes and no. He who led on the young men is dead.
It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death.
I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.
Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.
The tragedy speaks for itself. After reading up on it, I find it to be a necessary inclusion in the full tapestry of American history. As much as I celebrate the mythos and beauty of it, it wasn’t born without pain from numerous corners.
For that reason the context of it all deserves to be remembered; to say that it was purely “racism” or “logistics” that resulted in the Nez Perce displacement would be disingenuous in the friendliest of terms. We in the 21st Century stand at the pinnacle of a nation that was built on several intersections of choices that we personally never had to make, and I daresay we would struggle in the moment to make the choice we think we would.
Overall, the words of Chief Joseph are worth hearing and contemplating. There are applicable lessons in all of this.
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