Anticolonial Mapping and the 1877 Nez Perce War

Abstract

In 1927, historian Lucullus V. McWhorter traveled with veterans of the 1877 Nez Perce War to key sites from the conflict. Part of the research material generated from the trip included several maps co-created by Nez Perce War veterans, today housed in Washington State University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections Library as part of the Lucullus V. McWhorter Collection. These maps, many drawn in the tradition of American Indian ledger art, provided spatial details of key battle sites and visual representations of specific incidents that occurred throughout the Nez Perce War. In this paper, I argue that these maps constitute examples of Indigenous anticolonial mapping and that they enabled McWhorter to communicate the veterans’ version of events that transpired throughout the war. This, in contrast to other accounts of the period which tended to disregard the white settler theft of lands that prompted Nez Perce resistance and to justify the colonial violence of the U.S. settler state.

 

1927年, 历史学家Lucullus V. McWhorter与1877年美国内兹珀斯战争的老兵一起, 访问了冲突的主要地点。这次旅行产生的部分研究资料, 包括了内兹珀斯战争老兵共同绘制的几张地图。作为Lucullus V. McWhorter收藏的一部分, 这些地图被存放于华盛顿州立大学手稿、档案和特别收藏图书馆。其中的许多地图, 采用了印第安传统的“账簿艺术”绘制, 提供了主要战斗地点的空间细节以及内兹珀斯战争某些事件的视觉表达。我认为, 这些地图是土著反殖民制图的实例, 使得McWhorter能够传递老兵对战争中各个事件的看法。这与该时期的其它报道形成了鲜明对比, 这些报道无视引发内兹珀斯人抵抗的白人定居者盗窃土地行为, 为美国定居者国家的殖民暴力辩护。

 

En 1927, el historiador Lucullus V. McWhorter viajó con los veteranos de la Guerra Nez Perce de 1877 a lugares clave del conflicto. Una parte del material de investigación generado en el viaje incluyó varios mapas creados conjuntamente por los veteranos de aquella guerra, ahora conservados en la Biblioteca de Manuscritos, Archivos y Colecciones Especiales de la Universidad Estatal de Washington, como parte de la Colección de Lucullus V. McWhorter. Estos mapas, muchos de ellos dibujados de acuerdo con la tradición del arte de los indios norteamericanos, suministraron los detalles espaciales sobre los campos de batalla más importantes, lo mismo que representaciones visuales de incidentes específicos que ocurrieron durante la Guerra Nez Perce. En este escrito, considero que estos mapas constituyen ejemplos de la cartografía anticolonial indígena y que tales piezas le permitieron a McWhorter comunicar la versión de los eventos que ocurrieron durante esa guerra. Esto contrasta con otros recuentos de esa época que tendieron a ignorar el robo de tierras por los colonos blancos, que desencadenaron la resistencia Nez Perce, y a justificar la violencia colonial del estado colonial americano.

Keywords:

• anticolonial mapping
• historical geography
• Indigenous geographies
• Indian wars
• U.S. West.

 :

• 反殖民制图
• 历史地理
• 土著地理
• 印第安战争
• 美国西部

 :

• cartografía anticolonial
• geografía histórica
• geografías indígenas
• guerras de los indios
• Oeste de los EE.UU

INTRODUCTION

The Indian Wars occurred from the 17^th through the 20^th centuries in today’s United States between sovereign Indigenous nations and various European powers, white settlers, and the U.S. government.¹ From the standpoint of the U.S. state, the Indian Wars were a crucial piece in the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny. American Indian groups throughout the U.S. resisted the colonial takeover of their lands and responded to the militarized violence of the settler state. As one treaty after another was broken, white settlement pushed further west, and Indigenous territories were increasingly restricted, many American Indian nations on the U.S. frontier fought to prevent continued harm to their lands and communities.

The Nez Perce² War took place in 1877, in what is now Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. In the years after the signing of the original 1855 Walla Walla Treaty (U.S. Department of the Interior 1855), the Nez Perce endured multiple broken promises from the U.S. government, the most egregious of which was a second treaty in 1863 (U.S. Department of the Interior 1863) signed under coercive conditions after the 1860 discovery of gold. This second treaty resulted in a dramatically reduced reservation, shrinking the 7 million acres agreed upon in 1855 to just 750,000 acres. Many Nez Perce refused to recognize the new treaty as legitimate and continued living within the lands of the original 7.5 million acre reservation. As tensions mounted between those Nez Perce who refused the second treaty and the settlers in their lands, the U.S. government ordered all tribal members onto the reduced reservation. Hundreds refused, sparking a war that would ultimately result in significant casualties for both the Nez Perce and U.S. military personnel. In historical sources, this group is referred to as the non-treaty Nez Perce.

Accounts of the Nez Perce War from the period side heavily with the U.S. government (Gibbon 1895a and 1895b; Howard 1881 and 1907; Monteith and Wood, 1876). For many years, the most widely circulated sources of information available about the Nez Perce War were from the standpoint of agents of the state, such as members of the military or officials within the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This began to shift in the early 20^th century, in part due to the efforts of Lucullus Virgil McWhorter and his Nez Perce collaborators. McWhorter, a white man, was a self-taught historian and an advocate for American Indian rights. He maintained relationships for decades with Nez Perce tribal members, many who were veterans of the 1877 Nez Perce War. In the 1920s and 1930s, McWhorter traveled with Piyopyóot’alikt³, ‘Iléxni ‘Éewteesin’⁴, Hímiin Maqsmáqs’⁵, and other veterans of the war to battle sites in today’s Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.⁶ Ultimately, this research resulted in two books written by McWhorter from the perspective of the non-treaty Nez Perce, Yellow Wolf: His Own Story (2015 [1940]) and Hear Me, My Chiefs! (1992 [1952]).

As a part of the research process, drawings were created showing moments of significance from the war. While not explicitly called “maps” by their creators, these drawings nonetheless are spatial representations. Woodward and Lewis point out that calling non-Western spatial representations “maps” is Eurocentric, preferring the term “traditional cartographies” (1998), while Hunt and Stevenson explain that the “language of mapping may itself perpetuate a kind of colonial incursion into particular Indigenous conceptions of place or space” (Hunt and Stevenson 2017, 377). Recently, Indigenous scholars have written that such spatial representations should be considered forms of mapping in their own right. The maps discussed in this paper are part of a phenomenon that has been variously termed Indigenous countermapping (Hunt and Stevenson 2017; Rose-Redwood et al. 2020), alternative cartographies (Uluocha 2010), and anticolonial mapping (Lucchesi 2018). As Lucchesi writes, histories of Indigenous mapping have largely been “erased, forgotten, and willfully ignored, arguably due to the persistent racism and imperial attitudes within the fields of geography and cartography” (Lucchesi 2018, 12). In addition, because spatial representations created by Indigenous peoples may not correspond to modern renderings of cartesian space, Indigenous maps are often instead relegated to the realm of artistic expression, minimizing the important spatial knowledge being shared.

This paper consists of four major sections. First, I review relevant recent literatures with a particular focus on Indigenous cartographies. Second, I provide a historical overview of the Nez Perce War and third, I explain the research process used by McWhorter and his collaborators. Finally, I discuss maps created on a 1927 trip to the site of the Battle of Big Hole and show how this was an anticolonial mapping effort to tell the non-treaty Nez Perce’s side of the story, a process facilitated by the co-creation of maps that are today housed with the Lucullus V. McWhorter Collection at Washington State University Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections library (WSU MASC).

Indigenous Cartographies

There is considerable scholarship on the history of mapping, and the ways that we determine what constitutes a map (Crampton 2009; Dobbs and Louis 2015; Kitchin and Dodge 2007; Warhus 1997; Woodward and Lewis 1998). Embedded within the larger conversation are discussions about the connections between cartographic praxis and power, and the ways this reflects larger societal processes that highlight the knowledge of some while marginalizing others (Elwood 2006; Goeman 2013; Vermeylen, Davies, and van der Horst 2012). There are also important threads within cartographic literatures emphasizing the ways maps function as tools of resistance (Hunt and Stevenson 2017; Iralu 2021; Lucchesi 2018; Wilson 2021). Here, I discuss literatures on Indigenous mapping, looking to scholarship in Indigenous Geographies and related fields.

Indigenous cartographies often challenge dominant Western views of what constitutes a map. Consider, for example, Micronesian Stick Charts (“Micronesian Stick Charts” 2015), Australian Aboriginal bark paintings (National Museum of Australia 2013), Inuit carved wooden coastlines (“Inuit Cartography” 2016), or the Shoshoni Map Rock (Lucchesi 2018). Such “alternative cartographies” represent space on “walls, tree barks, wood, cloth, [or] rocks” and can relate to embodied forms of spatial communication, such as “oral narratives, songs, folklores, stories, rituals, proverbs, chants, dances, drama, bodily gesticulations, [or] scarification” (Uluocha 2010, 164–165).

Spatial information can be conveyed through things that do not adhere to modern scientific mapping practices (Lucchesi 2018; Rose-Redwood et al. 2020; Uluocha 2010; Warhus 1997; Woodward and Lewis 1998). For pre-contact Indigenous peoples of the United States, there were multiple ways space was represented. Louis explains how Native Hawaiians use different cartographic strategies for navigation as well as in story-telling, and how spatial knowledge is embodied through dance (Louis 2017). Barnd shows the ways that contemporary tribal communities maintain spatial knowledge of their traditional lands through using Indigenous place names, “reflecting the diverse and nuanced senses of identity and history that have shaped each community” (Barnd 2017, 15–16).

As Rose-Redwood et al write, “There is a deep and rich history of Indigenous mapping involving ancestral, anticolonial, and decolonial Indigenous cartographic traditions” (Rose-Redwood et al. 2020, 152). Lucchesi (2018) explains the distinction between ancestral, anticolonial, and decolonial Indigenous mapping. Ancestral mapping refers to representations of space that predate colonization, such as the practices Uluocha describes above. Anticolonial mapping are those cartographic practices undertaken by Indigenous peoples as a defense against colonization, a way to represent “their homelands and peoples while they were constantly being violated, stolen, and destroyed” (Lucchesi 2018, 16). Decolonial mapping refers to cartographic works “created by and for Indigenous people” to tell their stories “in the ways that we want them to be shared” (Lucchesi 2018, 22). Many of the tools used today in anticolonial and decolonial mapping, however, come with issues of their own, as Hunt and Stevenson (2017) show, reminding us that technologies are not neutral. Despite subversive decolonial intentions behind a digital map, for example, it is still subject to the “technocratic language” of html/kml coding.

Incidences of anticolonial mapping have been documented in geographic and related scholarship. Wainwright and Bryan (2009), explain how Indigenous groups in Nicaragua and Belize engage mapping strategies in efforts to protect territories and resources. As they show, Indigenous cartography is too often “viewed as a practice of replacing bad colonial maps with good anti-colonial ones” (Wainwright and Bryan 2009, 154). Of course, things are rarely so simple, and Indigenous mapping can result in increased state or corporate transgressions into their territory, as was the case with the infamous Bowman Expedition (Wainwright 2013). As Simpson (2020, 687) writes, “sovereignty…is shot through with these hidden and not so hidden experiences of force, displacement, and containment.” For Indigenous nations, their sovereignty is not equal to that of the state, and they must navigate the consequences of this power imbalance. Globally, Indigenous groups are often forced to contribute spatial knowledge about their territories in the interest of protecting their ways of life from states that have long sought their elimination (Coulthard 2014).

The Nez Perce War

The Nez Perce War refers to a series of conflicts in 1877 between the non-treaty Nez Perce, white settlers, and the U.S. military. Tensions erupted after decades of lies and betrayal by the U.S. government regarding Nez Perce territory. The original treaty with the Nez Perce was signed in 1855, one of three “Walla Walla Treaties” signed at a large encampment of representatives of the region’s American Indian nations and the U.S. government (U.S. Department of the Interior 1855). Based on the 1855 treaty, the Nez Perce retained 7.5 million acres of their original territory as their reservation. As Williamson-Cloud (2019) explains, Nez Perce leaders involved in the original treaty negotiations made sure that not only would the tribe retain sovereignty over a significant portion of their traditional lands, but that they also had rights to access important cultural sites outside of reservation lands. Tribal leaders hoped, “not only to preserve these activities as a right, but to preserve our ability to be Nimíipu, to be Nez Perce people through this process of interacting with the land and resources” (Williamson-Cloud 2019, np).

Gold was discovered on Nez Perce land in 1860, leading to the U.S. government negotiating a second treaty that took away ninety percent of the lands promised in the 1855 treaty to accommodate white settlers arriving in the ensuing gold rush, despite the fact that the Nez Perce were told that no whites would be allowed on their reservation without tribal permission. As Estes points out, the goal of treaty signing for the U.S. government was “to facilitate land cession and eventual incorporation” (Estes 2019, 208), rather than upholding promises of sovereignty or autonomy. In 1863, the new treaty was signed under questionable circumstances. Today many argue that the signers were not representative of tribal leadership and that the treaty should be considered invalid (Evans 1996; Flanagan 1999; Josephy 2007 [1965]; Nez Perce Tribe n.d.). Federal government representatives relied instead on people who had been heavily influenced by white missionaries, and who were not themselves widely recognized as tribal leaders.

Many tribal members considered the 1863 treaty invalid and refused to move onto the smaller reservation. As more and more whites streamed into the area, tensions increased. In May, 1877, tribal members were given 30 days to move onto the new reservation. The non-treaty bands refused. Eventually, settlers were killed by a group of young Nez Perce men, considered the “first shot” of the Nez Perce War, which would last several months and result in significant numbers of casualties for U.S. soldiers and their allies, as well as among the non-treaty Nez Perce. Chief Joseph, a leader among those who resisted, reflected in a speech in 1879 on the origins of the war:

I know that my young men did a great wrong, but I ask, Who [sic] was the first to blame? They had been insulted a thousand times; their fathers and brothers had been killed; their mothers and wives had been disgraced; they had been driven to madness by whisky sold to them by white men; they had been told by General Howard that all their horses and cattle which they had been unable to drive out of Wallowa⁷ were to fall into the hands of white men; and, added to this, they were homeless and desperate. (Young Joseph and Hare 1879, 424–425)

As Joseph explains, leaders among the non-treaty Nez Perce tried to avert war and to prevent their people from committing violence against settlers. However, people had been pushed to the limits. The larger context of territorial seizure, the influx of whites chasing gold, repeated incidences of Nez Perce women being assaulted, and the myriad other aggressions committed against their community meant that tensions were very high leading up to the outbreak of war.

Through the 1855 and 1863 treaty processes, we catch a glimpse of how quickly land was colonized and commodified in the 19^th century U.S. West. As I have explored elsewhere (Mott 2022 and 2024), the 19^th and early 20^th century U.S. West was in the midst of rapid demographic transition, where areas that had a majority Indigenous population became majority white in a matter of a few decades (or even just a few years in some cases) through a combination of land speculation, federal government policy, and regional power blocs dominated by settlers. The city of Lewiston, Idaho is an excellent example. Located at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers, the site had been in use by Nez Perce people since time immemorial and was well within the 1855 reservation boundaries. Once gold was discovered, however, Lewiston very quickly achieved boomtown status and increasing numbers of whites moved to the area, in complete disregard of the fact that they were on sovereign Nez Perce territory. Government officials concluded that there was nothing they could do to stop this territorial encroachment. After the second treaty was signed in 1863, Lewiston was no longer considered to be on the Nez Perce Reservation.

As Simpson (2020) shows, Indigenous peoples were seen as obstacles to settler conceptions of progress, which required ever-increasing amounts of territory:

Settlers, after all, came for souls. They came for land. They came for themselves. And Indigenous peoples were in the way. In whatever negotiated, subtle, harsh form that took, they were in the way. And the project of getting us out of the way, off our own land, out of ourselves, away from our families, the project of removing people from land, family, and culture in order to alienate them, is dispossession, which is the ongoing project of settler colonialism. (Simpson 2020, 690)

The Nez Perce War is one of many examples validating Simpson’s words here. Refusals to submit to the settler state’s fraudulent system were met with violence. From the standpoint of the state, such resistance could not be tolerated. It had just taken ninety percent of Nez Perce territory and there was a gold rush underway that brought settlers flooding in. Meanwhile, the non-treaty Nez Perce had refused to move onto the reduced reservation, and there had been conflicts between settlers and Nez Perce tribal members. War, under these circumstances, was considered inevitable and justified.

Accounts of the Nez Perce War written in the late 19^th and early 20^th century portray the non-treaty Nez Perce as having brought the onslaught of violence against themselves. The situation was framed as the result of their own actions in refusing to accept the 1863 treaty and quietly move onto the much smaller reservation. As Barker shows (2021), Indigenous peoples have been discursively framed as terrorists by settler states. By doing so, counterterrorist measures become possible that will serve the colonial goals of the state, such as forcibly removing people, punishing dissenters through violence, or waging military campaigns against groups seen as problematic (Barker 2021). In the 19th century U.S. West, American Indian ways of life were seen as posing a threat to the viability of the state and to white settlers. A common thread throughout the Indian Wars was the pitting of Indigenous territorial claims and relationships to land against settler ideals of private property ownership, the commodification of nature, and white supremacy.

General O.O. Howard led the overall U.S. response to the non-treaty Nez Perce. In his written accounts, Howard positions them as a group who “caused terror to the people of the Pacific Northwest” (Howard 1907:232), describing what he believed was their culpability in causing “a reign of terror among the white people, followed by great expense to the general government” (Howard 1907:235). In Howard’s view, the U.S. government had no choice but to go to war against the non-treaty Nez Perce because they would not accept U.S. government authority. He writes, “[t]he non-treaty Indians denied the jurisdiction which the United States claimed over them. Everything that they might want was offered and extended to them if they would submit to governmental authority which the United States agents exercised.” (Howard 1907, 243).

Accounts like Howard’s comprised the bulk of more widely circulated information about the Nez Perce War. Consequently, the dominant narrative of the war for many years legitimized state violence and territorial theft and was heavily influenced by discourses of the non-treaty Nez Perce as terrorists. In the next section, I investigate the collaboration between Piyopyóot’alikt, ‘Iléxni ‘Éewteesin’, Hímiin Maqsmáqs’, and McWhorter, and their efforts to accurately represent the Nez Perce view of the conflict, in part through mapping historic battle sites.

The McWhorter Collection

Much of the historical information for this paper has come through the author’s ongoing engagement with the Lucullus V. McWhorter archival collection, housed at WSU MASC. McWhorter was a well-known white man who was heavily involved in advocating for American Indian rights and who was known to have a collaborative research process with members of the Yakama, Nez Perce, and other Indigenous nations. As such, he was someone whose materials were sought after so that they could be preserved for future researchers. Plans to archive his notes, correspondence, and other documentation with Washington State University were underway prior to his death (Evans 1996).

In 1907, Hímiin Maqsmáqs brought a wounded horse to McWhorter’s ranch in Yakima, Washington and McWhorter agreed to care for it for awhile. Ten months later, Hímiin Maqsmáqs reappeared with some friends, ready to take back his horse. After spending several days on McWhorter’s ranch, a relationship was established that would continue for decades. McWhorter was a self-taught historian with an interest in American Indian history and Hímiin Maqsmáqs had been a warrior in the 1877 Nez Perce War. Despite the fact he had only attended school up to the third grade, McWhorter spent much of his adult life researching the Nez Perce War, as well as other issues related to other American Indian groups in the area (for example, see McWhorter 1913).

Archival collections replicate larger power structures at play in society, often reifying racialized, gendered, and classed biases regarding whose materials are worth preserving. In trying to research Indigenous perspectives on settler colonialism in the 19^th and early 20^th century Pacific Northwest, one encounters many archival silences. There is a lot of information about American Indians, written primarily by white men who occupied privileged social positions. There is, however, very little that is actually by Indigenous people in archival repositories. The McWhorter Collection is a bit different in that regard. As is common with archival collections, McWhorter was not the sole creator of all the materials included. Within the collection are many letters from people that he corresponded with, particularly Yakama and Nez Perce tribal members. Consequently, there is a significant presence within the McWhorter collection, including a large number of letters written by Nez Perce and Yakama people who considered McWhorter an ally, and so shared their experiences with—and criticisms of—the regional settler colonial project.

The fact remains, however, that the materials in the McWhorter Collection are themselves a product of the settler colonial order. McWhorter owned a ranch on what had been Yakama land just decades prior. He enjoyed a more privileged financial position than his Nez Perce collaborators, even while he sometimes struggled for the money to keep his research and writing going. He was someone trying to do the right thing, to help the people who’d lived through the atrocities of the Nez Perce War to tell their side of the story. From his archived correspondence, it is evident that he worked very hard to get the story correct, and to represent the views of his Nez Perce collaborators to the best of his ability. The story, however, was ultimately still being funneled through McWhorter. The project was subject to his timeline, was crafted by him and, ultimately, he was named as the sole author of the books produced through this collaborative research, an aspect of what Lucchesi notes is the “institutionalized erasure of Indigenous intellectual property” (Lucchesi 2018, 12). McWhorter thus occupies a complicated position, as both a white settler living on lands taken from the Yakama and benefitting from the privileges of prominent white men, while also opposing the white supremacist settler colonial order.

In 1927, McWhorter traveled the route of the war with veterans Piyopyóot’alikt and Hímiin Maqsmáqs, and translator ‘Iléxni ‘Éewteesin’, himself the son of a veteran (Evans 1996). They spent a significant amount of time on the trip, often camping for several days at each site. While they were there, they would retrace the process of the battles, noting where people were located, the different aspects of the environment that helped or hindered them in the conflict, where people were wounded or died, and all other aspects of battle. As a part of the process, they drew maps of the battle sites, using them as tools to facilitate telling the story of what happened. In the next section, I turn to focus on three of the maps made as a part of this 1927 research trip, co-created by Piyopyóot’alikt, Hímiin Maqsmáqs, ‘Iléxni ‘Éewteesin’, and McWhorter.

Mapping the Battle of Big Hole

Brigadier General John Gibbon led the attack at Big Hole on 9 August 1877. In Gibbon’s account, he describes how soldiers waited out the night across from the Nez Perce camp, watching the fires in tepees die down. He describes hearing babies crying and women talking to each other, and how those sounds quieted as the night went on. The attack itself only took about twenty minutes. The sleeping camp awoke to gunshots and found themselves surrounded by soldiers. In the panic that ensued, many were killed on both sides. Among the dead in the Nez Perce camp were a newborn baby and its mother, elderly people, women, and children. Reflecting on the experience, General Gibbon wrote that “[t]he killing of women and children was, under the circumstances, unavoidable” (Gibbon 1895b, 1236). As Barker points out, Indigenous peoples who practiced traditional social organization and livelihood strategies in their ancestral lands were seen as threats to the state and overall social order (Barker 2021). The fact that the sleeping camp was made up of people who’d refused to accept a fraudulent treaty made them acceptable targets, so great was the threat of their resistance.

The images discussed here were all created through conversation between Nez Perce War veterans and McWhorter. The primary artist on many of the maps created was Piyopyóot’alikt, one of the men that McWhorter worked with for many years. Leroy Seth, Piyopyóot’alikt’s great-grandson, explains that he was a ledger artist, part of “the ledger art that’s shown all over the United States and in archives…” (Seth 2019; see also Williamson-Cloud 2022). As Lucchesi explains, maps like this show Indigenous cartographers’ capacity to experiment with their mapping practice “and develop it in new ways in order for their peoples’ stories to survive,” a crucial aspect in the process of documenting genocide (Lucchesi 2018, 16).

Ledger art was part of the longer-term evolution of pictorial art common among many American Indian groups, having begun with images painted or carved into rock, wood, animal hides, or fabric. In the 19^th century, ledger books were in widespread use so became a suitable surface to continue the longstanding practice of pictorial storytelling (Low and Powers, 2020; Old Elk 2022; Yellowstone Art Center 1985). Speaking of the collections held at the Buffalo Bill Center’s Plains Indian Museum, Hunter Old Elk explains:

[T]hese ledger drawings are highly revered because they are a first-hand account of the experiences that men had prior to when the first Europeans came. Those depictions include times in ceremony, also times in war, honors made in hunting, they also depict…the intimate relationship that men had to the cultural wealth, but also to family and children.” (Old Elk 2022)

The pictorial drawings would be used as a springboard for telling the stories that inspired them and played a part in transmitting oral history. Much of the known ledger art today is housed by archival repositories and museums and tends to focus on themes related to warfare or imprisonment (Meadows and Harragarra 2007). This is likely due somewhat to a selection bias, as the ledger art that has been preserved was originally made by people in prison, or who were otherwise in close contact with state agents. As Lucchesi explains, Indigenous cartographers had to be able to adapt their techniques to new media amid challenging contexts, “in some cases, on items that colonial forces saw as garbage scraps” (Lucchesi 2018, 16).

One of many battles that took place during the Nez Perce war, the Battle of Big Hole began in the early morning of 9 August 1877 at Big Hole, Montana. The non-treaty chiefs had made an agreement with white settlers as they crossed into Montana from Idaho on Lolo Pass and thought they’d left the conflict behind. Hímiin Maqsmáqs explains,

[t]hese were instructions from the chiefs. Strong laws, nor were they broken. The chiefs thought the war ended. To be no fighting in Montana. But not so, the Montana people. They did not regard the peace made with us there at Lolo Pass. Because of that lie-treaty we were trapped. Trapped sleeping, unarmed. (McWhorter, 2015 [1940])

The battle began just before dawn. People woke up to gunshots and found their encampment surrounded by armed soldiers. While historical accounts differ on some of the specifics, all agree that the attack produced terror and panic (Gibbon 1895b; Howard 1907; McWhorter, 2015 [1940] and 1992 [1952]). Warriors struggled to fight off soldiers and to arm themselves as tepees where some still slept were lit on fire. By all accounts, the attack was a complete surprise and was a horrific scene. Nez Perce warriors eventually turned things around, chasing the soldiers out of the camp and putting them on the defensive. By the end of the battle, there were significant casualties and many wounded on both sides, a reported thirty soldiers dead and thirty-nine wounded, with Nez Perce casualty estimates from Big Hole ranging from forty to ninety.

I turn now to discuss three maps produced during the 1927 trip and provide some historical context, interpretation, and analysis of the images shown. Each serves as an example of anticolonial mapping (Lucchesi 2018), a pathway to resist colonizing settler state narratives and amplifying Indigenous relations to land and territory. The maps shown here were created in opposition to dominant narratives of the time, and as such are a crucial window into the war from Nez Perce perspectives. Beyond merely sharing a point of view, these maps are also evidence of the expert knowledge that Piyopyóot’alikt and Hímiin Maqsmáqs contributed to existing historical documentation on the Nez Perce War. Each of the maps discussed here is in some ways a “cartography of refusal,” highlighting a time where Nez Perce people fought back against the theft of their lands and military incursions into their territory, resisting orders to move onto the 1863 reservation (Simpson 2014, 33).

Drawn by Piyopyóot’alikt and labeled by McWhorter, Figure 1 contains three maps layered into one. The top and bottom halves show two different scenes, each can be viewed “right-side-up” by turning the image around. There is also a map drawn in pencil underneath, showing part of the route taken by non-treaty Nez Perce as they fled the U.S. military during the war. As the maps were being created, ‘Iléxni ‘Éewteesin’ translated into English the information provided by the other Nez Perce men as McWhorter took notes. As with any translation, certainly some of the original meaning was lost. However, he was a translator trusted by both McWhorter and his Nez Perce collaborators and McWhorter and ‘Iléxni ‘Éewteesin’ worked together extensively. The top and bottom halves of the image show important aspects of the Battle of Big Hole. The upper left depicts a well-documented incident when Piyopyóot’alikt and others stole a howitzer belonging to the U.S. military as the soldiers fled Big Hole. Hímiin Maqsmáqs explains that the warriors removed

FIGURE 1 'ickum’kiléelixpe (Battle of Little Big Hole)/Nez Perce Camp [1877], 1927, Washington State University Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections: https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/mcwhorter/id/382/rec/563. Better detail can be seen in the online version.

the wheels and rolled them down a steep place to the swamp or creek brush. We could have fought the soldiers with that gun had we known how to use it. I understood Peopeo Tholekt [sic] shallow-buried it, digging with his hunting knife. He came there as the fight ended. (McWhorter 2015 [1940], 151)

The bottom half of Figure 1 shows the arrangement of tepees and the names of those who stayed there. Each is different, showing in some cases an image of the person who the tepee belonged to, such as the face of Chief Joseph in his tepee outlined in blue. In addition, there are representations of paintings on the tepees themselves, which would have helped others in the community identify them. Soldiers are depicted in the upper right wearing blue uniforms and holding identical looking weapons.

Figure 2 was also drawn on the 1927 trip and is similar to Figure 1, in that there are two scenes depicted, one at the top and the other on the bottom of the image. Piyopyóot’alikt was the primary artist, and there are some stylistic similarities between the two maps. The way Piyopyóot’alikt drew himself is very similar, for example, he appears twice in Figure 2. On the bottom of the image, we see him with a long black outer garment, red pants, and blue shirt in another depiction of the incident with the howitzer described above. However, here we have more detail. We see, for example, on the far right, soldiers pointing their guns out of a hole in a hillside, alongside some blue figures lying next to the holes. Piyopyóot’alikt explains that he and two other warriors chased after the soldiers fleeing the battle:

FIGURE 2 c‘aynim 'alikinwaaspa (Bear Paw) combat/Capture of cannon at 'ickum’kiléelixpe (Big Hole) [1877], ca. 1927, Washington State University Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections: https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/mcwhorter/id/381/. Better detail can be seen in the online version.

Those two warriors, with their guns, leaped down the steep hill to meet the soldiers, I with them. Sarpsis Ilppilp made directly for the soldiers, and killed. I saw him shoot, dropping a soldier. Strong Eagle and I dodged off to the left and shot from there. We knew not that right below us the trenches already opened, dug overnight by the soldiers, prepared in case they were driven or overworked. They rushed into these trenches and the battle continued all day long. Indians shot into the trenches from each side, the soldiers returning the fire. (McWhorter, 1992 [1952], 390)

The top of Figure 2 depicts a standoff between Piyopyóot’alikt and a member of the Cheyenne who sided with the U.S. military at Bear Paw, the last battle of the Nez Perce War. Piyopyóot’alikt is shown standing in front of his horse shooting at the Cheyenne, who are on their horses near U.S. soldiers on foot, aiming their guns in Piyopyóot’alikt’s direction.

Figure 3 was drawn by translator ‘Iléxni ‘Éewteesin’, with text written by McWhorter, and shows the relative location of various significant landmarks from the Battle of Big Hole, and their distance from one another. The wide curving blue line depicts the North Fork of the Big Hole River, where the attack took place. Other key points are identified, such as a willow thicket in the bend of the river, where people hid from soldiers. We see also where teepees were located, in a triangular shape within which McWhorter notes, “Nez Perce Big Hole Village,” as well as the length of each side of the camp. Various points of reference are shown, such as “twin pines” near the top of the image, and a bridge that crossed the river at the time of the 1927 visit to Big Hole, but did not yet exist in 1877. Also shown are numbers 1–4, corresponding to noteworthy incidents from the battle, each of which is explained in further detail in McWhorter’s books (2015[1940], 1992[1952]).

FIGURE 3 ‘ickum’kiléelixpe (Big Hole) village sketch map [1877], 1927, Washington State University, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections: https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/mcwhorter/id/380/rec/584. Better detail can be seen in the online version.

The maps discussed above provide a window into the Nez Perce version of events at Big Hole and reveal an aspect of the research processes undertaken by McWhorter, Piyopyóot’alikt, Hímiin Maqsmáqs, and ‘Iléxni ‘Éewteesin’. The maps and the stories told through them are anticolonial in that they exist in direct opposition to narratives upholding the position of the settler state and justifying atrocities committed by the U.S. military through the course of the war. Works by Gibbon, Howard, and others who supported military campaigns in the U.S. West ultimately hide the genocidal foundations of the Indian Wars, emphasizing that the theft of land was acceptable, as was violence against Indigenous communities (Gibbon 1895a, 1895b; Howard 1881, 1907; Shields 1889; Montieth and Wood 1876). McWhorter and his collaborators’ goal was to counter the dominant narrative. As Rose-Redwood and co-authors point out, anticolonial mapping still paradoxically ends up “re-centering the ‘colonial’” (Rose-Redwood et al. 2020, 152, original emphasis). Focusing on the perspective of the non-treaty Nez Perce was a way to counter-map in response to dominant colonial narratives. Consequently, the state, settlers, and the U.S. military still play a prominent role.

State narratives were cartographic as well as textual, and mapping practices played a significant role in the advancement of settler colonialism (Goeman 2013; Hunt and Stevenson 2017; Palmer 2020; Rose-Redwood et al. 2020). A map created in 1877 after the end of the war by Lieutenant Robert H. Fletcher, who served under General Howard, shows the entirety of the Nez Perce War from the military perspective (Fletcher 1877, link to map in references). The map includes information about the physical geography of the area, highlights routes taken during the war, forts, battles fought, and the location of different military encampments. The site of Big Hole includes a note that General Howard arrived on August 10^th “to Gibbon’s relief,” but says nothing else to indicate that a battle took place there (Fletcher 1877). Included on the bottom of the map are several depictions of significant battlefields from the war. The drawing, “Big Hole Battle—Gibbons,” shows the larger environment the battle took place in, with some indication of the location of soldiers’ and Nez Perce fire. A few teepees appear as triangles to show the location of the camp. The aim was to show the field of battle, and what the U.S. military was up against. Consequently, Nez Perce people and their perspective are not included on Fletcher’s map.

The vast majority of historical documentation from the Indian Wars is from the perspective of settlers and state agents. McWhorter’s books, the maps, and other drawings created through his collaborations are a crucial interruption of dominant settler state narratives justifying land theft and genocide. They contribute to existing knowledge on the specifics of the Nez Perce War, but more importantly, show perspectives that are largely absent in historical documentation. The Indian Wars spanned hundreds of years, across colonial and U.S. governments, and were intimately connected to the larger settler colonial project. The maps discussed here offer a window into what the experience was like for the non-treaty Nez Perce during a time when they were being targeted by the U.S. military. In contrast to accounts like Gibbon’s and Howard’s, through the expertise of Piyopyóot’alikt and Hímiin Maqsmáqs we learn something of what it was like to have been in that sleeping camp in the early morning of 9 August 1877, to have endured the horror of what happened there, and to have fought back.

The images discussed here reveal an alternative representation of the history of the Nez Perce War and show an example of anticolonial mapping. The maps provided a platform to help Hímiin Maqsmáqs, Piyopyóot’alikt, and others tell their side of events and show the ways that particular individuals took part, where exactly friends and family members resisted or were injured or killed, the environmental factors that played into the battle, and the positions taken by soldiers and their allies. These maps “carry data obtained in the midst of incredible loss and determination” (Lucchesi 2018, 16), and were created through the retelling of traumatic experiences. The version of events in McWhorter’s books differs considerably from other historical accounts, lengthy quotations from Hímiin Maqsmáqs and other Nez Perce collaborators were an attempt to center their expertise and knowledge. Today, these maps exist not only as a record of this research process, but also are examples of anticolonial mapping by veterans of the Nez Perce War, who played a critical part of telling the story and representing the non-treaty Nez Perce perspective. They are evidence of these veterans’ extensive knowledge about the conflict and of their role in educating McWhorter.

CONCLUSION

The Indian Wars were critical for bringing into being a settler nation dominated by whites. Today, many people living in the U.S. don’t know the full extent of the Indian Wars, as this history is seldom taught in K-12 schools or publicly acknowledged. Those of us who are the descendants of settlers in the U.S. West don’t always recognize the complicity of our ancestors, or that we inhabit genocidal landscapes. Conflicts like the Nez Perce War signify major turning points in the historical trajectory of a region. Indigenous communities like the Nez Perce held deep relationships with their lands. As Williamson-Cloud points out, when Lewis and Clark arrived in 1804 to Nez Perce territory, they came to “an actively managed landscape” (Williamson-Cloud 2019) where people had very long-term connections to their environment. Less than a century later, the U.S. settler state would pursue the non-treaty Nez Perce for their refusal to abandon that long-standing relationship.

As with the Nez Perce War, many Indian Wars were fought after Indigenous territory was taken by the U.S. government. Impacted communities refused to accept the theft of their lands and settler encroachment. Dominant narratives portray the Indian Wars as a sort of necessary evil, something terrible that had to happen if the region was going to be open to settlement and economic development. For Hímiin Maqsmáqs, Piyopyóot’alikt, ‘Iléxni ‘Éewteesin’, and other Nez Perce, their connection with McWhorter was an opportunity to tell their side of the story, a viewpoint conspicuously absent in other contemporary accounts. The maps discussed here as well as other materials in the McWhorter Collection at WSU MASC show a slow and careful research process that was deeply concerned about accurately representing Indigenous knowledge and experience.

The Indian Wars are a frequently overlooked era of U.S. history but are nonetheless critical for understanding the militarized violence behind white settlement, and the systematic ways that the U.S. federal government approached genocide. As Blackhawk points out, such violence facilitated territorial expansion and the acquisition of natural resources while also setting in motion a new racialized political order: “[v]iolence and American nationhood, in short, progressed hand in hand” (Blackhawk 2020, 9). The maps discussed above offer a window into the non-treaty Nez Perce perspective, a way to counter narratives dominated by military personnel and others who sided with the settler state. The books McWhorter published based on his research with veterans of the Nez Perce War were intended to fulfill this goal, to represent the non-treaty Nez Perce side of the story. However, the information was still filtered through McWhorter who, despite his good intentions, was a white man of some privilege. Nonetheless, the maps and McWhorter’s books still stand as a window into the recollections of Piyopyóot’alikt, Hímiin Maqsmáqs’, and others, and are evidence of their role in the larger research project. Without their input and decades-long collaboration with McWhorter, he could not have completed the work that he did. His Nez Perce collaborators played a critical role in recovering this history and should be recognized for their very significant contributions to existing knowledge on the Nez Perce War.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am thankful for all the people who have shared writing space with me, and who have listened to me talk through these ideas. My sincere gratitude to the Washington State University Manuscripts Archives and Special Collections Library for permissions to use the images included here and for doing the important preservation work that they do. Last but not least, I am grateful to Josh Inwood for his encouragement through this process, and for the thoughtful feedback I received from two anonymous reviewers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carrie Mott

CARRIE MOTT is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geographic and Environmental Sciences at the University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. Among other things, her research interests include the everyday processes associated with a white supremacist settler colonial takeover.

Notes

1 Throughout this article, I’ve named specific tribal affiliations to the best of my ability. When speaking in broad terms, or in places where I couldn’t determine tribal affiliation, I’ve used the terms “Indigenous” or “American Indian.” .

2 “Nez Perce” is the name historically used for the Nimíipuu. In keeping with the historical sources used for this paper and the official name of the Nez Perce Tribe, I’ve retained the term Nez Perce.

3 Bird Alighting, often referred to in historical sources as Peo Peo Tholekt.

4 Many Wounds, also known as Sam Lott.

5 Yellow Wolf.

6 Multiple names and spellings for each of these men appear in the sources used in this article. For continuity, I have relied on the names and spellings used in the Plateau People’s Portal, a collaboration between the Center for Digital Scholarship at Washington State University and several Columbia Plateau tribes, including the Nez Perce. For more information, and to see pictures from the 1927 trip to the Big Hole battlefield, visit https://plateauportal.libraries.wsu.edu/.

7 The Wallowa Valley in eastern Oregon was Joseph’s home territory. The Nez Perce were given 30 days to move during a period when rivers were high and it was dangerous to bring horses and cattle across, many had to be left behind.