The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance

Introduction: After the End of Nez Perce History

[41] Introduction After the End of Nez Perce History Presbyterian missionary George L. Deffenbaugh found the celebration held on 4 July 1885 at the Nez Perce Agency in Lapwai, Idaho, to be a notable one. In his annual report to the commissioner of Indian affairs, Deffenbaugh remarked on “the absence of the usual drunkenness and horse-racing” that had characterized celebrations in past years, and reported that the occasion had been distinguished by a week-long Presbyterian “camp meeting” attended by nearly a thousand people from the area and from “adjacent tribes.” He continued , “In the midst of the week’s meetings they suspended their usual daily services to celebrate the natal day of our country and theirs, and I suppose that the day was not any more patriotically observed anywhere by the citizens of the nation. There were processions , speeches, dinner, plays, and in the evening fireworks; and with it all the best of order and the most hearty good-will.” Enhancing the holiday atmosphere was the presence of a large group of exiled tribal members who had, until recently, been interned in prison camps in Kansas and in the Indian Territory since the conclusion of the 1877 war. As a part of the Fourth of July celebration, Deffenbaugh noted, eighty of “the returned Nez Percés” were “received . . . to the membership of the reservation churches.”1 This auspicious occasion has figured centrally in accounts concerned with allotment on the Nez Perce Reservation. Deffenbaugh’s [42] beginnings phrase “[T]he natal day of our country and theirs” suggests a moment of new beginning for the Nez Perces. For example, according to Frederick E. Hoxie and Joan T. Mark, “In 1885 the exiled Nez Perces from the war of 1877 arrived home from Indian Territory on July 4 and were welcomed at the Lapwai camp meeting in a restrained but moving ceremony. . . . Thereafter the Fourth of July was a symbol both of the white Christian nation the missionaries represented and of the return from exile of those who had resisted the white man.”2 Several years later, in her biography of Alice Fletcher, Mark expanded on the connection, claiming, “[F]uture celebrations of the holiday . . . came to symbolize the unity of the Nez Perces, their pride in their past, and their resistance to the white people” (SNL, 189). For these scholars, the return and the rapprochement it seemed to represent signaled an era of amicable unity on the Nez Perce Reservation. Armed conflict over disputed lands was at an end, amity in the churches prevailed, and Nez Perces who had been divided were reunited. Beginnings, however, are rarely as tidy as fictional or historical narratives would seem to promise. The return of the internees, for example, might as easily be read as an ending—to their unjust incarceration . Beginnings are an artifice of narrative, establishing the necessary conditions from which the story that follows will commence . In seeing the Fourth of July of 1885 as a beginning of a new period in Nez Perce history, Hoxie and Mark overlook several important details. First, “the exiled Nez Perces” who “were welcomed at the Lapwai camp meeting” were, in fact, fewer than half of the group who had returned. Moreover, they had not arrived on July 4 but about a month earlier. These are not minor points but contribute to the interpretation of allotment these scholars use to introduce With the Nez Perces and pursued and elaborated by Mark in A Stranger in Her Native Land. In both cases, these books presume that after 4 July 1885, the Nez Perces were once again a polity united by their Presbyterian affiliation. The implications are that a unity of tribal opinion is desirable, and that Presbyterian church interests were a major ally to Alice C. Fletcher as she sought to begin the work of allotment on the Nez Perce Reservation. [43] introduction Other modes of telling, however, can yield different stories. I argue that Nez Perces, not always in perfect agreement with one another , nevertheless effected an end to the internment. The two occasions of return, both occurring after the putative end of Nez Perce history in 1877, prefigure other ways of beginning the story of allotment , in which Nez Perces actively determine when and under what conditions Fletcher might begin her work. To call the holiday celebration of 1885 a symbol of the unity of the Nez...