On the way home from work saturday I happened to catch
This American Life. It was the independence day
episode with the Vowell sisters on the trail of tears.
I got to thinking. this story is pretty similar to every other story in the great collection of stories that make up the attempted genocide of the entire sum of native north american races. Everyone gets taught the "trail of tears" in school here. It has all the classic elements; greedy white people, malfeasance of the federal government, long forced march to a place unsuitable for them to continue their lifestyle, lots of them dying, buried on the way.
I know a story similar to this.
when I was young My mom bought a horse for us. It was a beautiful horse, slightly crazy, very inbred, fast and incredibly agile. It was an appaloosa. There was an important rule at the appaloosa horse club.
You must never ever ever breed one of these horses with a draft horse. If you do we will throw you out of the club, never allow you to register another horse and eventually come to your house and murder you in your sleep and leave parts of your sorry family's corpses all over the town as a warning
Well maybe it didn't say exactly that but the tone was there. As a ten year old kid, the story of how that rule came to be, left quite an impression on me.
For me the story begins right near the end of the actual story. In the late 1870's the US Army takes possesion of all the horses from the Nez Perce tribe(a name that particularly irks them, because in the generations since the obnoxious frenchies gave them the name nasal piercing has gone back out of fasion for them). The US Army hates these horses, because for much of the last few months and 1700 or so miles it has been getting its ass kicked by fierce men on these even fiercer horses. This has just recently changed because you've recently gathered a much greater number of the US Army and had some astoudingly bad weather in your favor. Unlike virtually every other group of natives on the continent these nose piercing "Dreamers" have been selectively and scientifically breeding horses to do just the sort of things the Army wishes its cavalry horses would do. The problem is these horses just won't do the same things for them. The US Army takes the other route and breeds every damn one of them with draft horses to make their progeny slow and not very agile at all.
Fast Forward to nearly two decades ago. I had been doing some barrel racing with my Shetland pony.(which happens to be a very poor choice of breeds for that sort of thing, as they are a miniature draft horse, but I was ten and it was the pony I had, and I was quite fond of her so just shut the hell up, ok?) I was competing in these gymkhana events with the real gamers, who all had appaloosas. While there are other horse breeds that excel in gymkhana like cloverleaf barrels or keyhole, The kids who did the game series in the summer played polo in the winter.(It might be worth noting at this point the kids I am refering to were between six and eight years older and not what some of you might have come to mind when you think polo player. These kids were all white trash from the outlying towns and drove beat up camaros and hauled the stock trailers around to events with their dad's farm truck. For good or ill, at that time of my life, I idolized them.) They had appaloosas because that was just the horse you wanted to be on when you had to charge into a crowd of other people on horses and armed with nothing but a very long hammer steal their ball and run it down to the goal. The game is essentially similar hockey or lacrosse, but on horseback played by marginalized adolescents it achieves a level of hostility that makes those sports seem tame.
They have these horses because a group of very dedicated white people have spent most of a century trying to breed the draft back out of those horses from the tribe in the Palouse hills. They are fine beautiful horses if a little inbred. That is why they are so particular about the draft horse thing. The club has a version of the tribes story they tell to explain the tradition. It goes something like this:
In 1877 the Nez Perce Indians, led by Chief Joseph, were told to leave their lands for an already crowded reservation in Idaho. The tribe refused, whereupon the Army showed up and commenced to chase the indians all the hell over the West until trapping them on a mountain almost in sight of the Canadian border. Chief Joseph then surrendered and while his people were figuratively bent over and nailed by a draft horse their horses literally were.
Again I have taken some liberties quoting here but that is pretty much the way I remember it.
Like all stories involving two or more people there are a few versions of it and the above version seems to have left out some facts. As it turns out four fifths of the tribe (those led by other chiefs) signed the treaty and moved without much incident onto the Lapwai reservation.(These folks don't seem to make much noise about Chief Joseph. They do however have an interesting program in which they are trying to get their kids into breeding and using horses. When I was in college I was involved in a program where we taught "at-risk" kids of the local reservation to build canoes. It wasn't ironic, it was just sad.) The appearance of the Army to roust them off their land wasn't a sudden surprise although it was hastened by the rash act of a few young braves. When they did finally surrender, their trail of tears wasn't over. They were marched from Montana all the way to Leavenworth, where they dropped like flies. From there, they were sent to Oklahoma. If they converted to christianity they were allowed to go to the Lapwai reservation from there. Joseph and the others who wouldn't convert eventually were sent to a reservation in Washington.
If you prefer you can read the whole story from the perspective of Chief Joseph. It has a little intro from some missionary at the time. You could also read the version from the general that Joseph mostly faced in this whole deal. I'd recommend that you read Joseph's account first as General Howard's version is mainly written as a rebuttal. They are both found on the web courtesy of someone who has done an exhaustive amount of research on the topic for a book.
All in all a sad story but really not an unusual one. Whether you you look at the example of the jews in Germany or the natives in North America, or the neighboring tribes to the Incas, the moral to the story is always the same. You have much more to fear from governments and similar large organizations than just about anything else. In spite of all our squawking to the contrary our government is no exception to this. But never forget that greed plays a huge role in this too.
