Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce by Robert Penn Warren (review)

Reviews 371 And more than I asked he did for me. A mixture he made that was like white clay. With it on my breast he marked me; On my back he marked me; On my shoulder tops, both sides, he marked me. Then most perfectly did he purify me, So that nowhere do I take any hurt, Wherever I go. Thus should you, too, do and think, All you my kinsmen. Unless the translator has violently touched up the original, giving us more ver­ bal echoes of Hiawatha than Papago justifies, these salt pilgrimage “speeches” reveal that the qualities of good poetry certainly lie in tribal tradition. It would be romantic to ask that a social and religious past be recovered to produce poetry that rises beyond conventional lyric expression. But the further development of imaginative Papago literature can only suffer if it leans too heavily on western literary conventions which themselves often produce flat, conventional poetry. ROBLEY EVANS, Connecticut College Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. By Robert Penn Warren. (New York: Ran­ dom House, 1983. 65 pages, $5.95.) Robert Penn Warren has finally written a book about the American Indian. The first hint he might do so came when he wrote the epic poem Brother to Dragons (there are two versions), the story about the brutal murder of a slave by Lilburn and Isham Lewis, nephews of Thomas Jefferson. In Dragons Warren suggested that Meriwether Lewis committed suicide, that Meriwether had been taken in and betrayed by his uncle Thomas Jefferson’s notion of the innate goodness of man. In Chief Joseph Warren presents the tragedy of the Nez Perce of Mon­ tana and Idaho. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, while on their historic expedition into the Old Far West, were the first white men to come upon the Nez Perce. At that time the Nez Perce were a peaceful people, handsome and vigorous, making their living by long hunts, salmon fishing, and the digging of various roots. They were good to Lewis and Clark and their party. Later, after the gold rush of 1860, the white man coveted the Nez Perce land, and in the 1863 treaty the federal government proposed to take most of their lands away from them and restrict them to a small reservation. Chief Joseph’s band was ordered to live on the reservation. They set out to do so in the worst time of the year, winter, but violence broke out between the whites and the Nez Perce, a violence in which Joseph’s band took no part, 372 Western American Literature and in the end Chief Joseph and his fellow chiefs decided to escape to Canada. Joseph fought a rearguard action for three months against superior white forces, almost making it to Canada. But weather and provisions, not general­ ship, finally helped defeat him. It was then that Chief Joseph uttered the haunting words: “Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired. Heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” The eloquent narrative is full of vivid detail: “Boys plunge into water, gay as The otter at gambol, with flat hands slap water Like beavertails slapping to warn, then dive ...” “Into a dark place my father has gone. You know how the hunter at dawn, waits, String notched, where the buck comes to drink. Waits, While first light brightens highest spruce bough, eyes slitted Like knife wounds, breath with no motion. My father Waits thus in his dark place.” “Death came with the whispering slynessof arrows.” “The unhived lead hums happily homeward.” “His sick, his old, his young are now driven Like wraiths in Joseph’siron dream.” The poetry, sometimes stark, sometimes lively, brings to an old American tragedy a depth and a force not found in any other historical account. Warren writes with the power of a Homer. The older Warren gets, the better he is as a poet — the true mark of a genius. FREDERICK MANFRED Luverne, Minnesota Requiem. By Sam Hamill. (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1983. Unpaginated, no price listed.) The dominant voice of American poetry in the last twenty years has been an informal one...