Children of Grace

I only just tripped over Bruce Hampton's frontier history tome Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877 (1994) at my grandparents' house over the Christmas holidays.  After flipping through a few pages, I decided it was irresistible and appropriated it for a few evenings' reading.  It turned out to be rather depressing, which didn't really surprise me -- white men vs. Native Americans on the American frontier is generally not a recipe for joy and good fellowship.

After the Nez Perce were jerked around in predictable ways by the encroaching white settlers and the treaty-breaking Federal government, a few renegade Nez Perce youths massacred a dozen or so whites.  This triggered a larger clash at White Bird Canyon (which the Nez Perce won) and a flight by a loose confederation of Nez Perce bands from Oregon through Idaho and Montana.  After several weeks and more than a thousand miles, not to mention some brutal battles in which fully half of the original 800 or so fleeing Nez Perce were killed, the flight ended only a few miles from the Canadian border. While the original pursuing troops were semi-competently led by Oliver Otis Howard, formerly of the Reconstruction-era Freedmen's Bureau and the man for whom Howard University is named and would never have caught the Nez Perce, a second company of soldiers under the more efficient command of Nelson Miles was able to move into position to intercept them.

A hundred or so Nez Perce escaped to Canada; the rest of the survivors were forced to surrender.  The speech supposedly made by Chief Joseph at the surrender included the memorable "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."  Joseph was not actually the war chief or any sort of supreme leader, but most of the war chiefs did not survive.  The Nez Perce were promised a return to their homeland, or at least to the reservation there.  Instead, they were deported to Oklahoma.  Joseph died in 1904, never having seen his homeland again.

What initially gripped me about the book were the early chapters, which covered both the murders of the settlers and a great deal of background information about the wealthy and peaceful Nez Perce and their lifestyle -- a nice combination of sociology and suspense with all the relevant detail of exploration and treaties nicely filled in as background.

Once the chase really gets started, however, the story bogs down in the endless details of the soldiers' months-long journey, in which they rarely caught up with their fast-moving quarry.  While it's nice from a historian's perspective to have such meticulous day-by-day detail, it's not all that much fun to read.  After a hundred or so pages of this I started skimming the endless pages of marching, camping, etc. and skipping to the more interesting bits about the Nez Perce.  Unfortunately, the details of their flight are much more vague -- presumably, they were less well documented.

I can't quite recommend this book on a pure storytelling basis, but it's certainly an impressive work of frontier and military history and thus presumably very attractive to anyone studying the period or generally interested in those subjects.  The beginning and end are the most appealing to the non-expert.

And if anyone were somehow unaware of exactly how badly white settlers and the United States government treated Native Americans in the interest of Manifest Destiny, well, this book would help make them better-informed.

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Comments

[Serge]

I'm not sure that Canada treated American-Indians much better. They and the Mounties certainly didn't get along too well.