Tribe Goes From Outcasts To Asset Nez Perce Being Courted As A Tourist Attraction

They saved Lewis and Clark from starvation, helped many an Oregon Trail straggler find the way west, and outfoxed the U.S. Army in battles that are studied by military historians to this day.

Yet for all their standing in the history books, the Nez Perce Indians have never been able to regain a foothold in the land they were forced from in 1877 - an exile that led to one of the last major Indian wars in North America.

But now, in a turn of history and uncommon fate, the people who live in the valley that was taken from the Nez Perce want the Indians to return and are assembling financing to buy a large patch of real estate for them. They regard the return of the Nez Perce as a way to help replace the dying logging and ranching economy that was created as a justification for removing the Indians in the first place.

“They’re opening the door for the trail home - I never thought I’d see the day,” said Earl (Taz) Conner, one of about 4,000 Nez Perce in North America. Conner is a direct descendant of Old Chief Joseph, for whom this town is named and whose burial site is a prime tourist attraction here in the Wallowa Valley, in northeastern Oregon. “It is really ironic, asking us Indians to return after booting us out of there in 1877.”

These days, the people in the valley see the tribe as a potent economic resource. They hope to set aside land for an interpretative center they believe will be a tourist magnet, as well as a year-round cultural and camping site for the Nez Perce.

A remote, mountainous area, four hours of hard driving from the nearest city of any size, Wallowa County has suffered economically in the last decade as timber mills have closed and cattle prices have plunged. The Nez Perce have long since disappeared, leaving only a little cemetery at the foot of Wallowa Lake.

Tourists from all over the world come to see it and the heart-stopping scenery. In Germany, where the fascination with American Indians knows few bounds, the Wallowa Valley may be as well-known as Cooperstown is to American baseball fans.

Until now, among the ranchers and cowboys here, there has been ambivalence about the Indians who were driven out.

“I wouldn’t call it guilt, but now that some of the oldtimers here have fallen on hard times, they can appreciate a little better what happened to the Nez Perce,” said Paul Henderson, National Park Service coordinator for the Oregon end of the 1,100-mile Nez Perce National Historic Trail, which commemorates the 1877 war.

What has happened here has happened in other Western counties where Indian cultural events have become a big attraction. About 10 years ago, some Nez Perce Indians started to return for the annual rodeo here, setting up a powwow on nearby grounds. Before long, the powwows were attracting more people than the rodeo, which was named Chief Joseph Days.

In all the sorry history of American Indians, the Nez Perce story stands as a singular tale. This year, in Stephen E. Ambrose’s book about Lewis and Clark - “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West” - a new generation of Americans is learning about the tribe that saved the expedition known as the Corps of Discovery from starvation in 1805 and 1806.

For months, the explorers lived among the Nez Perce, marveling at their elaborate economy, their horse-breeding skills, their athleticism, their ability to prosper in the vast reaches of the Columbia River Plateau.

In part because of their good relations with the federal government after that expedition, in 1855 the Nez Perce were given official recognition of the land they lived on, about 13 million acres covering parts of what are now Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Included in that original treaty was the Wallowa Valley, where the Joseph band of the tribe had lived for centuries. But trespassers inevitably came, as part of the gold rushes in the 1860s and 1870s; the treaty was broken; and by the 1870s, the Army ordered the Nez Perce out of the Wallowa region and onto a much smaller reservation in Idaho. Rather than be rounded up, the Wallowa band fled, led by Young Chief Joseph - son of the older chief.

Their 1,600-mile march, with the military in pursuit, over several months was Page One news around the world - with the Indians winning most of the battles.

“On our part, the war was in its origin and motive nothing short of a gigantic blunder and a crime,” The New York Times wrote in 1877.

Finally, just short of the Canadian border in what is now Montana, where the tribe had hoped to be taken in by other Indians, the starving, freezing band of Nez Perce surrendered.

Afterward, the government scattered the Nez Perce all across the continent, from Canada to Oklahoma, but never allowed them to return to this valley. Young Joseph was buried in 1904 in the chalky volcanic soil of eastern Washington. He died, it was said, of a broken heart.

Though the Nez Perce made numerous appeals to the government, and through the courts, to get their Wallowa Valley land back, they were rebuffed.

Conner, whose great-grandfather Ollokot fought in the war, noticed a change in attitude a few years ago, as the Wallowa economy went into a tailspin.

“I was working for the Forest Service, the only Indian walking around there, and I was approached by this economic development guy from the city of Wallowa,” Conner recalled. “He said he thought the Indians could save this county. I had to laugh at that.”

These days, tourists by the busload cannot get enough of the vanquished Joseph band, said Henderson, the Park Service coordinator.

Seeing a chance for economic revitalization, the valley’s community leaders have joined with the Indians to develop a big Nez Perce cultural and interpretive center. They obtained a $250,000 grant from an Oregon historical group, and plan to use the money to buy 160 acres atop a bluff not far from the river where the Nez Perce used to fish for salmon, just outside the town of Wallowa. They intend to begin a major fund-raising effort for the rest of the money to build the center.

But the recent developments have a different meaning for Nez Perce like Soy Redthunder, a descendant of Joseph who lives on the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington state, where Young Joseph is buried.

“The whites may look at it as a economic plus, but we look at it as homecoming,” Redthunder said.

He said the tribe would have to be very careful, given that anti-Indian sentiment still lingers in the valley. “I don’t think we want to rush in there and take over the county,” he said. “But I see a serious effort to return the Nez Perce people to the Wallowa Valley.”