Chief Joseph by Bill Dugan

Author:Bill Dugan [Dugan, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062130303
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1992-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Lapwai—December 1842

TENSIONS AMONG THE MISSIONARIES rose and fell like the tides. Asa Smith continued to agitate for the removal of Henry Spalding and, when he tired of the backbiting, implored the Mission Board to send him to Siam or China. Whitman and Spalding maintained an uneasy truce, but it was easily and often broken, more often than not by Spalding’s fits of temper. As much as he believed he was doing the right thing for the Nez Percé, he was unable to appreciate the difference between his view of the world, one steeped in fire and leavened with brimstone, and that of the Nez Percé, which placed a premium on individual integrity.

The friction was not lost on the Cayuse at Waiilatpu or the Nez Percé at Lapwai. Rumors had begun to circulate that the Bostons were no more than shills for a tide of white immigrants that would break over the Columbia and Snake river basins, sweeping all the red men out to sea. Already, wagon trains were coiling through the Snake country with increasing frequency, tens and hundreds each year, and always more the next year and the year after that.

The settlers kept on coming. And the missionaries welcomed the visitors, even those passing through. Every wagonload of whites, no matter how fleeting its passage, relieved the sense of isolation and tempered for a time the siege mentality that kept them on edge. But most of the settlers stopped just long enough to buy supplies from the missionaries and their charges, grain at a dollar a bushel, potatoes at half that price. Ragged cattle and hard-driven horses were exchanged with the Nez Percé and Cayuse herd owners, and the settlers pushed on, leaving the missionaries forlorn once more, and adding more fuel to the fire under the caldron of rumors and resentments that continued to simmer month in and month out.

Some of the rumors were being spread by the mountain men, who had gravitated to the missions to settle and even sometimes to find work. Once the demand for beaver hats petered out entirely, the need being filled now by silk, which was cheaper and more durable, the fur trade was all but dead.

Most of the former trappers had Indian wives, and what ties of family they felt were to the Indians. If anything, they were even more skeptical of the missionaries, and all too familiar with white ways. They had seen what had happened in the east as tribe after tribe had been pushed off its land, shoved westward and southward. And they knew that promises from the government weren’t worth the paper they had been written on, if anyone even bothered to record them.

Dislocated Indians, too, brought their own distaste to the mix. Mostly Delawares and Iroquois, they had lived through one upheaval after another as they were uprooted from their original home along the Delaware River and in New York and Pennsylvania, then pushed to Ohio, and when that wasn’t far enough west, all the way to Missouri.

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