A Few Thoughts ... on Memorial Day weekend

Memorial Day weekend has passed. Soggy campers weathered the weather, and cemeteries sprouted flags and flowers in remembrance of loved ones.

Twenty-eight years ago last Sunday, I traveled to Nespelem in the sagebrush hills of the Colville Reservation to seek out the grave of one of my heroes: Hinmatoowyalahtqít, Thunder-Rolling-In-The-Mountains, Joseph of the Nez Perce. If you wish to know how Joseph became one of my heroes, the story is outlined in Side Trips From Cowboy, published in 2009.

If you wish to know why Joseph is my hero, it’s because he was a man who kept his word in the face of systemic racism, greed-fueled violence, broken promises and institutional betrayal. He was a leader who put his people’s needs before his own wants and did what he promised he would do. Those are rare qualities in leadership today — and many other days as well.

Joseph died in 1904 of what the attending doctor called a broken heart. He was about 63 years old. He is buried many miles from the home of his heart. He grew up in the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon, where he lived until he was about 36 before being forced to start for the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. By circumstances beyond his control, he never lived there. And he never returned to the Wallowa, though he wished to fiercely.

Many books are written about the diaspora of the non-treaty Nez Perce bands. In my library are several, including Yellow Wolf: His Own Story. Yellow Wolf is buried just downhill from Joseph. He is also one of my heroes. As a young man in 1877, he fought alongside other Nez Perce warriors, men and women both, from White Bird Canyon to Snake Creek. He recounted those experiences to Luculus McWhorter, who helped him produce his book. The two of them also helped preserve the history of the War of 1877 by traveling the route followed by the Nez Perce bands and pursuing soldiers across the West and marking out important battle sites, at White Bird in central Idaho, the Big Hole in southwestern Montana and Snake Creek on the north slope of the Bears Paw Mountains in north central Montana.

These are lonely and lovely places. Thanks to Yellow Wolf, McWhorter and the preservation efforts of the National Park Service, you can walk through them and learn how the battles unfolded. With imagination, you might conjure up the war scenes. Thanks to Hollywood, we are all familiar enough with dramatized warfare to visualize some version of the fighting. If you have read about the battles in Yellow Wolf’s book and others — there were many witnesses from both sides who lived well into the twentieth century — it’s almost possible to hear the crack of rifles, the whisper and whine of passing bullets, the shouts of warriors and their leaders on both sides, the bugles, the running horses, the screams of the wounded and cries of children and old people, and the dying begging for water.

If you sit and be still on McCarthy’s Redoubt at Whitebird, along the crystal-clear and quiet river at the Big Hole, or near Ollocot’s Rock — where Joseph’s brother died — at Snake Creek, you might hear these things. Out of the corner of your eye, you might see — or feel — some inexplicable movement, perhaps a restless resident spirit of a place sanctified by blood and profaned by treachery and broken promises, as any of these sites might be. Perhaps what they have to say is this: This is not done. This is not healed. This is only buried under layers of time.

On that first trip to Nespelem — there have been many since — I was directed to the wrong cemetery, a Catholic burial ground north of town. Upon arrival, I knew Joseph wasn’t buried there — it was partly because of his refusal to embrace Christianity that he came to Nespelem instead of Idaho. But, there I met Marguerite, an old lady who came to honor her parents. In exchange for help doing that, she and her husband led me to the Nez Perce cemetery. There are other warriors and leaders buried in that cemetery, as there are in most. This week, it has surely sprouted flags and flowers and other gifts for the dead, just as others have.

The fortuitous serendipity of meeting Marguerite in Nespelem 28 years ago is not lost on me. Once we arrived at the Nez Perce cemetery, she took me by the arm and led me to the marble obelisk that marks Joseph’s grave. She was of mixed blood, and she told me his name in Nez Perce. “This is Hinmatoowyalahtqí,” she said. “Many things they say he did, he didn’t do.”

I have learned that. But, the things he said he would do, he did.

Side Trips From Cowboy is one of many books published by Blue Creek Press. Visit the page at http://www.bluecreekpress.com/books.