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.Joseph himself showed an omi-nous change of heart when he announced that since white men tried Indi-ans who committed crimes, it was only right that Indians should try whitemen who committed crimes, and he demanded that the killers be turnedover.Tensions were escalating quickly.One of the young braggarts amongthe white settlers announced to some Indian women that he and hisfriends had taken about all they could tolerate and were going to kill andscalp all the Indians.He announced that he, personally, intended to killJoseph and wear his scalp on his bridle.For their part, the Nez Perce war-riors set up targets near the home of one of the men involved in the initialshooting and began engaging in very public displays of target practice.Itwas a strained situation.The wrong move, the wrong signal, and the entirevalley would be engulfed in a bloody war.Neither Joseph nor Howard wanted this.But Joseph s patience waswearing thin, and Howard was hundreds of miles away in Fort Vancouver.Finally, on September 2, Joseph and his people issued an ultimatum.It hadbeen almost three months since the murder, and no white man had beenarrested.The time had come for the settlers to turn over McNall andFindley, the two men the Nez Perce held responsible for the killing, thenleave the Wallowa Valley.If this was not done by the following Sunday,Joseph s men would ride through the valley and burn down all the settlershomes.Some of the settlers left; others barricaded themselves in cabins.TheIndians again stripped for war and stationed themselves on promontories.It seemed that an armed confrontation was inevitable.But Joseph still did not want armed conflict.When some of the morereasonable settlers convinced him that all the threats to the Indians werecoming from well-known hotheads and troublemakers, he again prevailedupon his warriors to harness their anger.Eventually, a small force of sol-diers arrived from Fort Walla Walla.Their leader, who had been convincedby Howard that Joseph was a reasonable man, assured Joseph that themurderers would be turned over for trial and asked Joseph to stay on oneside of the valley except to come to town for supplies.Joseph agreed and, We Will Not Give Up the Land 73to show good faith, made all his warriors dump their bullets on the groundas a symbol of their willingness to keep the peace.Eventually the two men were turned over and tried, but because noIndian was willing to swear an oath in the white man s fashion, no wit-nesses were heard who contradicted the men s claims of self-defense.McNall and Findley were exonerated based on their own testimony.But it was not this injustice that ultimately set the course of trouble forJoseph and his people; it was a promise made by General Howard duringthe time of escalating tensions.He had determined that a commission ofreasonable men, sitting together, could come to a reasonable resolution tothe problem of ownership and settlement of the Wallowa Valley, and hehad sent word of this idea to Joseph.Joseph, as always, was willing to seek a peaceful solution to problemsthat might lead other men to war, and he had used the promise of thiscommission to keep his young warriors in check.Now that the problem ofthe killing of Wind Blowing had been put to an uneasy rest, it was time toseek this peaceful solution.But Howard s idea of a peaceful solution was far different fromJoseph s.He acknowledged that the Indians and the white settlers couldnot share the Wallowa without constant trouble.But rather than removethe whites or establish hard boundaries between the two, his solution wasto remove the Indians.He believed that since there was already a place setaside for the Nez Perce down by Lapwai, and since it was inevitable that theNez Perce would accept the ways of progress and civilization, the only rea-sonable solution was for Joseph and his people to abandon the Wallowaand make their permanent residence on the distant Lapwai reservationamong the settled, short-haired, Christian, farming Nez Perce.His com-mission of reasonable men was really just a forum in which he could de-liver his preconceived  reasonable solution to Joseph and the Nez Perce.Howard s council did not prove successful.Three of the five men repre-senting the government came from Washington, D.C., and they neitherunderstood nor felt sympathy for the Indian situation in the West.Theyarrived in Idaho on November 7 and soon found themselves sitting in thelonely and isolated confines of the Lapwai while Joseph made his way at aleisurely pace from his home in the distant Wallowa Valley [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]