Chief Joseph had a radical idea in August 1875. At issue that summer was the Wallowa Valley, a high-elevation basin in northeastern Oregon where Joseph’s band of the Nez Perce tribe spent its summers. Far as the United States government was concerned, the Wallowa Valley was fair game for settlers — the Nez Perce had ceded 90 percent of their land, the Wallowa included, a dozen years prior. But Joseph’s band never signed that 1863 treaty. So, as settlers began arriving in the 1870s, Joseph took it upon himself to preserve the Wallowa’s status as Nez Perce territory.
For a little while, it appeared he would be successful. In 1873, President Ulysses Grant issued an executive order guaranteeing part of the Wallowa Valley to Joseph’s band, but walked it back in 1875 amid pressure from settlers and Oregon lawmakers. Expecting the Nez Perce to retaliate over Grant’s reversal, about 100 U.S. soldiers amassed in the Wallowa Valley. No battle took place, though. Joseph instead approached Army Captain Stephen Whipple with a compromise: let white settlers and his band share the valley.
“Joseph envisioned two sovereignties coexisting in the same space,” Vanderbilt University historian Daniel Sharfstein wrote in Thunder in the Mountains, his exhaustive account of the Nez Perce War. It was an unheard-of proposal in the 19th century West, one that “required a new understanding of equality, perhaps a new definition of citizenship.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking Joseph’s timing was propitious. The United States was a decade removed from a civil war fought to end slavery. His pitch adhered to the logic of Reconstruction, in which any American — theoretically — was entitled to land and equality. And Whipple’s boss, General Oliver Otis Howard, previously led the bureau that secured housing, jobs, and legal protection for freed slaves. (Howard University, alma mater of Stokely Carmichael, Toni Morrison, and Kamala Harris, is named for him.) Howard found Joseph’s logic compelling, and suggested in a report to President Grant that the entire Wallowa be returned to the Nez Perce.
But Joseph’s vision of equality never materialized. Just two years after arguing the Nez Perce deserved the Wallowa, Howard and his troops pursued more than 700 members of the “nontreaty” bands that refused to move to a reservation. Over four months, the Nez Perces would flee more than 1,100 miles across the West. More than 100 of them, many women and children, were killed.
It’s tempting to look back at moments like Joseph’s egalitarian plea and wonder what could have been. The violence, sickness, and inequality that defined 2020 have many Americans appraising our nation’s structural racism. Society is reconsidering the outcomes of the Civil War and Reconstruction period, but that examination often ends, geographically, at the 100th Meridian. We must look farther west, though. To grasp why people of color today face inequities — of health, of safety, of wealth, of education — we must understand how the Civil War, Reconstruction, and related events like the Nez Perce flight shaped our region. Though it ended chattel slavery, the war and its associted policies also established a racial hierarchy that persists to this day, especially in the West.
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In 1862, Congress passed legislation that would forever shape the region. The Homestead Act ignited westward settlement by granting households up to 160 acres of surveyed land in exchange only for a minimal fee and proof of “improvements” like planting crops or building a home. Not two months later, the Pacific Railway Act subsidized the construction of the transcontinental railroad by the Union Pacific and Central Pacific companies.
All told, the two bills would authorize the federal government to distribute some 440 million acres to settlers and railroads, but that terrain wasn’t empty. “That land comes from the public domain, and where does the public domain come from? Indian removal,” said Megan Kate Nelson, a historian and author of The Three-Cornered War, a book about the Civil War in the Southwest.
New Mexico Territory, which encompassed modern-day New Mexico and Arizona, was coveted during the Civil War. Control of New Mexico meant access to the West’s major gold and silver mines, as well as the ports of Southern California. Confederate President Jefferson Davis envisioned a transcontinental rail line running through New Mexico, which could also serve as a springboard for international relations with — or an invasion into — Mexico.
The Southwest had a long history of enslavement. For centuries, tribes — Apache, Navajo, Pueblo, and Ute among them — operated an economy that vacillated between peaceful trading and hostile raids, a trend that accelerated when the Spanish colonized the region. In Native and Hispano communities alike, Nelson wrote, “sheep and slaves created wealth, and required territorial conquest. They also fueled a cycle of violence in the southwestern tablelands.”
“Black slavery failed in New Mexico,” Quintard Taylor wrote in his history of African Americans in the West, In Search of the Racial Frontier, “because the landholding aristocracy had other sources of coerced labor: Mexican American peons and Indian slaves” — bondage systems, Taylor noted, that persisted decades after the Civil War.
The Confederates claimed Arizona Territory — the southern half of New Mexico and Arizona — in 1861, and Brigadier General Henry Sibley launched a Confederate incursion into northern New Mexico in February, 1862. His offensive was short-lived. Logistics did him in — Sibley’s troops were ill-prepared for operations in the high desert. Fittingly, the destruction of a wagon train in the Battle of Glorieta Pass forced Sibley to retreat to Mesilla, the capital of Confederate Arizona. The entire Confederate territorial government fled for Texas in the summer of 1862.
With all of New Mexico Territory firmly in Union control after Glorieta Pass, Republicans could advance their vision of a “free soil” West, where slavery was illegal and the federal government incentivized small family farms. “In many ways, the passage of the Homestead and Pacific Railway acts is dependent on Union victory in the West against the Confederates,” Nelson said. “And the execution of those acts is dependent on Union military strength against Native people.”
Three months after the Pacific Railway Act passed, Union Brigadier General James Carleton ordered Kit Carson, the famous mountain man-turned-Army officer, to attack a band of Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico. “All Indian men of that tribe are to be killed whenever and wherever they are found,” Carleton wrote to Carson. “We believe if we kill some of their men in fair open war, they will be apt to remember that it will be better for them to remain in peace.” Carleton’s order, Nelson wrote, “was the first campaign against New Mexico’s Native peoples, and an expression of a new Union Indian policy in the West.”
Violence against Native Americans was nothing new, but the need to secure land for settlers and railroads emboldened the U.S. military and escalated the Indian Wars. While their counterparts battled Confederates in the eastern theater, Union officers around the West subjugated Native Ameircans in the name of free soil. Civilians routinely died in attacks that, contrary to norms back east, often took place in the dead of winter. In January 1863, Union forces killed about 250 Shoshones in the Bear River Massacre in Idaho. The following winter, Kit Carson led a starvation campaign against various Navajo bands, burning an estimated 2 million pounds of grain. And in November 1864, John Chivington — who earlier destroyed Sibley’s wagon train in New Mexico — led the slaughter of hundreds of Arapaho and Cheyenne people in Colorado. Most who died in the Sand Creek Massacre were women, children, and adults too old to fight. Chivington’s troops mutilated their bodies.
At the onset of the Civil War, about 490,000 free Black people lived in the U.S., and a good portion of white people — northerners and southerners alike — felt freedpeople needed to go somewhere else. The very presence of free Blacks was an ideological insult to Southern advocates of slavery, but freedmen were second-class citizens in the north, too. Abolitionist didn’t mean nonracist: northern Blacks lacked the right to vote and were subject to segregation. White folks were concerned about interracial marriage and losing jobs to Black workers.
Thus, a “colonization” movement emerged in which folks pushed for free Blacks to be sent away. The natural choice, in the eyes of many, was Africa (a few northern states actually established colonies there for just such a purpose). Alas, few people born in North America had the desire to emigrate to a continent they’d never seen. “So abolisher, reformer, and defender [of slavery] turned their attentions west,” Yale University historian Greg Grandin wrote in The End of the Myth, an examination of the U.S. evolving frontier philosophy.
Republican and Democratic politicians, influential editors, and many others saw the West as an ideal place for freed slaves. Taylor wrote in Racial Frontier that some Black folks saw potential in the West, too, especially after emancipation. In 1863, Peter Anderson, a founder of the San Francisco publication Pacific Appeal, called on politicians to help freedpeople settle in the West. Two years later, after the war ended, Anderson and other delegates at a California convention of Black leaders reiterated their support for freedpeople to take up homesteading, and pressed for the hiring of 40,000 Blacks to construct the transcontinental railroad.
The railroad jobs never materialized, nor did the wave of homesteaders Anderson envisioned. (Many freedmen, confident in the promises of Reconstruction, remained in the South.) But another major employer did emerge after the war: the U.S. military. From 1866 to 1917, some 25,000 Black folks served in Western infantry and cavalry units. Dubbed the buffalo soldiers, they fought in the Indian Wars and served as protection and law enforcement in frontier towns. “They represented a cross section of black America,” Taylor wrote, and their “motives for joining the army varied as much as their backgrounds”:
Former slave Reuben Waller joined the Tenth Cavalry in 1867 to fight in “the Indian war that was then raging in Kansas and Colorado.” Sergeant Samuel Harris wanted to see the West and believed his military service would help him get a good government job. The possibility of education sparked the interest of others. “I felt I wasn’t learning enough,” recalled Mazique Sanco, “so I joined.”
Few American soldiers — be they Union fighters during the Civil War or buffalo soldiers after it — found the overlapping efforts to suppress Native Americans and end slavery to be counterintuitive. “To them,” Nelson told me, “the symbol of American freedom was the white farmer or rancher with his family, on land that he owned — he can feed himself and raise his family and be independent.” Hidden behind that independence, though, was a reliance on the federal government to provide land, be it through a war with Mexico or one of the many Indian nations of the West. And while northerners and southerners may have disagreed on the human rights possessed by a Black slave, most agreed that a Native American was a lesser being. Even Chief Joseph, who impressed myriad federal officials with his grasp of diplomacy and appeals to citizenship, in the end was viewed by Anglo Americans as just another Indian in need of Christianity and a plow.
After the Civil War concluded in 1865, General Oliver Otis Howard was appointed to run the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. His task was among the most ambitious this nation has ever embarked upon. Four million formerly enslaved people were now emancipated, and it was up to the Freedmen’s Bureau to orchestrate their integration into the economic and social fabric of a nation nearly torn apart.
“Almost immediately,” Sharfstein wrote in Thunder in the Mountains, “it was clear to Howard that land would be an essential link from freedom to citizenship.” In addition to the millions of acres in the West available to homesteaders, the Freedmen’s Bureau had more than a million acres of confiscated southern farmland to distribute.
“If there ever was a time for the birth of a social republic,” Grandin wrote in End of the Myth, “this was it. The South was under military occupation, its plantations seized and planter class surviving at the sufferance of its vanquishers. But that social republic was not to be.”
President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated a month after the Freedmen’s Bureau was created, and his successor, Andrew Johnson, was a vehement opponent of the organization’s mission. The Democrat immediately began courting the Southern planter class. He pardoned former Confederates en masse, and returned cotton plantations to their former owners faster than Howard’s bureau could distribute them. Sharfstein recounts one particularly wretched instance in which Howard traveled to Edisto Island, South Carolina, to tell freedpeople their property was to be returned to the island’s former slavers. With a parting bit of advice, Howard “urged them to make contracts with their old masters.”
With his bureau kneecapped and allegations of graft swirling (there was a good chunk of unaccounted-for spending under his leadership), Howard was reassigned to active military duty in the West in 1872. Land remained essential to his duties, but instead of distributing it to freed Blacks, he was forcing Indians onto reservations.
It was in this position that Howard found himself crossing paths with Chief Joseph. The two existed within a fluid state of federal oversight. “Alongside the freedpeople in the South,” Sharfstein wrote, “Indian tribes were among the first to experience the contradictions of this new system of American government. Unable to vote in elections and outside the jurisdiction of courts, Indians affiliated with tribes lived entirely in a realm of federal power, where it seemed there was no specific center of authority.”
Joseph was one of many Nez Perce leaders, but he was uniquely skilled at utilizing this amorphous authority. In 1873, he convinced the Interior department to buy out settlers and reserve the Wallowa for the Nez Perce. In an era when the federal government would routinely break treaties — including one with the Nez Perce — to appease mining and agriculture interests, Sharfstein wrote, “Joseph had prompted the government 2,500 miles away to do the impossible: remove land from the public domain and give it back to the Indians.” Just months later, President Ulysses Grant issued his executive order setting aside half the Wallowa Valley for Joseph’s band.
Alas, settlers and Oregon’s elected leaders pushed back, adopting a narrative familiar in the Reconstruction South: they, whites living on land provided by the government, were being treated like slaves. “Pray how has this miserable government of ours treated the people of Oregon?” the editor of a local newspaper wrote. “Much as the poor and down trodden Southerner has been treated.”
Grant reversed his order in 1875, and in November 1876, a five-member commission, including Howard, was sent to the Nez Perce reservation to settle the conflict with the Wallowa and other nontreaty bands. In a church in Lapwai, Idaho, Joseph made his case for remaining in the Wallowa.
“Appealing to sentiment and asserting his equality, Joseph could not have developed an argument that, in theory, was more attuned to General Howard’s sensibility,” Sharfstein wrote of the meeting. “During Reconstruction, no one had been more committed to the idea of equality than Howard.”
Yet, Sharfstein explained, Howard was bent on public redemption in a nation that was moving on from Reconstruction. So when Joseph refused to settle in a permanent reservation, even one in the Wallowa, Howard was incensed.
“If that was his final decision,” Howard responded, “he must not complain if evil happens to him.”
A year later, the Nez Perce situation unraveled. In May 1877, Howard told the nontreaty bands they must move to the reservation, or the military would force them to do so. A month later, a group of young Indians killed settlers living along the Salmon River. Howard’s troops responded in force, and the Nez Perce flight began. On October 5, Joseph surrendered on the northeast flank of the Bear Paw Mountains, in Montana. Howard promised they could return to the Nez Perce reservation, in Idaho. Instead, the nontreaty Nez Perce were shipped to Indian Territory (Oklahoma); William Tecumseh Sherman, commanding general of the Army, wanted to make an example of them. More Nez Perce died in Indian Territory — of cholera, of malaria, of suicide — than during their battles with the Army. About 450 Nez Perce surrendered at Bear Paw; just 268 were left when they were allowed to return to the Northwest in 1885.
COVID-19 has killed Black people, Native Americans, and Latinos at alarming rates. A disproportionate share of the unemployed are people of color, as are those deemed “essential workers” who nonetheless earn meager wages. A majority of workers picking the nation’s fruits and vegetables are ineligible for government benefits and coronavirus relief funds, as America continues to rely on the labor of people who are not deemed citizens.
In these regards, the societal symptoms of the novel coronavirus aren’t novel at all. Enslavement and Indian removal were fundamental to this nation’s creation and expansion, and the ramifications of such human rights abuses don’t evaporate after a few generations. Any cataclysm — be it a pandemic, a market crash, a natural disaster — shakes the racist foundation of this country. Perhaps the coronavirus pandemic will yield a new Reconstruction, one that rebuilds our foundation in a way that benefits every American.
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