Closed Captions

Allen Pinkham (Nez Perce/Nimíipuu) discusses Nez Perce history, prophecies, and encounters with the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He covers pre-contact trade networks extending to the Great Lakes, cultural misunderstandings during the expedition, the role of interpreters and sign language, and the Nez Perce decision to aid rather than harm the Corps. Pinkham also shares oral traditions from his father and tribal elders about predictions of white contact and technological change.

Transcript

0:01 Gentlemen, welcome to the Tent of Many Voices. This tent is part of a traveling exhibit that has been following the Lewis and Clark trail in about the same time frame as Lewis and Clark did 200 years ago while you're here. Please take time to see the rest of our exhibit. We have our kid size keel boat. We have a Plains Indian tepee and you can see the tools that
0:23 the Native Americans of the Plains were using when Lewis and Clark came through the, we also have our exhibit tent next door where you can go through with a written text or listen to a 35 minute audio tour. This Tent of Many Voices is the tent that we showcase all of the stories of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
0:46 Now that being said, this is a huge story. It is a story of Lewis and Clark to be sure it is also a story of the young woman who went with them and carried her small child. And it's also a story of the peoples that they met along the way. They met many people from diverse backgrounds with different lifestyles and different cultures. And at this time,
1:10 it gives me great pleasure to introduce Rob Collier who works here at Travelers Rest as the Native American program coordinator. And at this time I'll turn it over to him.
1:23 Thank you very much and welcome everyone this, this beautiful afternoon. I tell people that I'm one of the luckiest people in the world because I've got probably one of the best jobs that there is to coordinate programs with wonderful, wonderful minds and to tell the the Native story through the mouths
1:48 and through the hearts of the Native people. It, it's just wonderful to, to work with elders on a daily basis and, and have them tell their stories and tell their, their life story of, of what it was like to grow up here in the Bitteroot what it was like to grow up on the Lolo trail, what it was like to grow up here in the Northwest.
2:13 So I'm very, very fortunate to have that, that wonderful position that I get to work with these, these wonderful people. Today. I have a very special guest, Mr Allen Pinkham, he's from the Nez Perce tribe and he's gonna give a little bit of the Nez Perce perspective on Lewis and Clark. Please make him feel very welcome and thank you very much.
2:39 Thank you.
2:44 Thank you, appreciate the introduction. Uh I am a Nez Perce. Uh We also call ourselves Nimiipuu which means the people or the real people or human beings.
3:00 But you know, we gave this the name that we were given that we are known so widely by happened to it's, it's a French term nez percé but it's been corrupted to Nez Perce and it's not pronounced. We don't say Nes Pierce, we say Nez Perce because that's the way we learned it. And uh that's our way of saying that nez percé
3:25 So and of course, the English influence on us was why we come up with this terminology. But our real name is Nimiipuu
3:36 but we also called ourselves [speaks in Nimipuutímt] Children of the Coyote. And also we are known by the name [speaks in Nimipuutímt] those people that come out of the mountains. So those are the terms that were known by way before Lewis and Clark came here. And some of the things that
3:59 I would like to discuss or let you know about is, is a great deal of misunderstanding that occurred when Lewis and Clark came through here. You know, they had a certain way of looking at us and viewing and interpreting what we were saying. And a lot of times those things are vastly misunderstood because they didn't know what we were talking about. They attempted to,
4:26 you know, we asked the question when we first seen Lewis and Clark is the Earth, the mother, the son, the father.
4:34 And then they got to talking about, well, we know about that. We, we know about the Godly things. And so they were telling us their impression of what creation was.
4:49 And we were, we were asking about, do they understand the mother is the earth and the son the father?
4:57 Because that's our spirituality. But they didn't seem to understand that.
5:04 So later later on, we were inundated by missionaries and I'll get to this later. But uh one of the things I wanna point out here
5:15 is this
5:19 formation here.
5:22 I don't know whether my light works here. Yeah. Here, here, you know that you, you recognize that that's the Big Dipper
5:33 to us that [speaks in Nimipuutímt] that's what we call this.
5:43 And there's a story that goes with this.
5:49 Old coyote. He was sitting down and looking up
5:55 and he was looking at these formations and coyote comes along and says, what are you looking at? He says, oh, I'm looking at two of them, don't you see them? This one. And this one, don't you see them?
6:11 And coyote says, yes, I see them. What are they? They're grizzly bears says, Old Wolf.
6:18 So he's kept saying, uh Old Wolf kept saying, well, I sure wish I could go up there and see these two grizzly bears. In the meantime,
6:28 Old Wolf's four other brothers came along and asked the same question. What are you looking at? Oh we're looking at the two grizzly bears up there, don't you see them right here?
6:42 And then, Old Wolf he kept persisting. I wanna go up there and see these two grizzly bears.
6:49 So, Coyote says, I'll show you how to go up there. So, Coyote, he makes five bundles of arrows and a bow
6:57 and he shoots the first arrow and it stays up there and he shoots the second one and it sticks to the first one and a third to the second and so forth until it comes all the way down to the ground.
7:11 And then coyote says, now you can go up there and see these two grizzly bears.
7:17 But the next oldest wolf brother says, well, I want to go up first with my next two youngest brothers.
7:25 Old Wolf agrees. Ok, you go up there and look at the two grizzly bears. So they go up the arrow way and they go up and they sit down here here and here.
7:39 That's the three next oldest brothers. And then Old Wolf says, well, I want to go up next, but I'll take my little dog with me and my youngest brother. So here's Old Wolf and there's his little dog and his youngest brother.
7:58 So this is why we call this [speaks in Nimipuutímt] the two Grizzly bears. Ok. Now,
8:06 what does this constellation rotate around
8:14 the north star. Ok. So now because it lines up with the north star, you know where north is. And as you hear this story as a child, and you grow up and you look at this formation, then you know where north is
8:35 and south is opposite of that. And of course, east and west is easy to figure out because the sun rises in the east, sets in the west. So now as a child, you know how to recognize these directions.
8:49 And so coming through Selway and Lochsa
8:54 and over here by the Magruder corridor, what do you need for directions?
8:59 The North Star, right? Well, there it is right there.
9:06 So now of course, other people call it the Big Dipper but we don't, we call it [speaks in Nimipuutímt] So there's a difference here, but yet it tells the same thing, it tells the four directions. And so as a young person, you learn these stories and you know how to travel, there's traveling stories among the Nez Perce
9:31 We didn't just stay in the Lochsa and the Selway and the Salmon and the Snake river drainages on the Columbia Plateau. We came all across these mountains and we went as far east as the five Great Lakes routinely way before Lewis and Clark shows up.
9:52 We were probably traveling a greater amount of uh trips because we had acquired the horse about 1700.
10:06 Some people say we acquired a horse about 1730 but it's much earlier, I believe because the trade route between tribes was very fast. Now, that could be substantiated by the epidemics that we had suffered. We had suffered at least two epidemics. Prior to Lewis and Clark.
10:30 And there are stories of villages disappearing along the Snake River because of these epidemics. So it had already suffered some losses
10:41 and to substantiate that we call the eastern tribes, those east of the Mississippi With Sores people because they suffered smallpox before we did.
10:54 So, people had suffered smallpox at least twice before 1805. Then that means we would have traveled or traded that kind of distance 2250 miles away. And a very practical way to look at this is if you, even if you walk or ride a horse or even by canoe,
11:19 you can average about 20 miles per day. So in 100 days, you're 2000 miles away.
11:27 So traveling wasn't that big of a deal with us. Now, you hear these stories of tribal conflicts between tribes. Oh, yes, there is. We had difficulty with the Shoshone people and Bannock people with the uh Cheyenne and the Blackfeet.
11:49 And we usually had difficulties with these people when we came out this direction, but not all the time.
11:55 One of the things that has occurred is that we needed to negotiate our way through other tribal territories.
12:05 And how do you do that? Well, you form alliances,
12:10 you form alliances with these other people, whoever they are,
12:16 sometimes it lasts quite a while. Sometimes it doesn't.
12:21 One of these is one of the things that at the Lewis and Clark time is that we were very closely affiliated with the Salish people here in this valley. And the affiliation was that one of our leaders called [speaks in Nimipuutímt] And that's interpreted as Red Bear, red Grizzly Bear.
12:44 One of his wives was a Salish wife and the other wife was a Nez Perce wife. And so out of this union, then we became uh this became an alliance mechanism between the Salish people and the Nez Perce
13:00 and the descendants of that union then became the mechanism for this alliance. So that's why we were able to do these things and set up these alliances by the descendants of these unions. And even
13:21 so, so we set up these alliances. Now we did now with the Blackfeet, we had a lot of difficulty also. But then within the Blackfeet, we set up an alliance with the little row Blackfeet
13:32 so we could get through their territory. Now, probably depended on the people that set up these alliances that were able to do this. A different group of Nez Perce may not be able to do the same thing, but we did that.
13:46 And one of the illustrations of this is that Lewis and Clark when they came to Weippe and uh along the Clearwater and a little further down, we already had six muzzle loaders, but we didn't have powder and ball for those weapons. Well, where did we acquire these weapons?
14:08 Russians were coming down from the North from Alaska. In that area, the Spanish were coming north of California coast, but the Canadians were in Canada and then the other fur traders were around the Great Lakes.
14:27 So we could acquire these weapons in all four directions.
14:34 But more than likely where we acquired these weapons were at the Great Lakes area
14:40 because this is one of the trading centers for both the Canadians and also the Americans.
14:49 We are one of the first people that came out to our country. We call them Bostons because that's where they came from
14:59 and referred to him as Bostons. So those are the kinds of things that occurred.
15:06 And so there was a big network already in existence when Lewis and Clark came here,
15:13 we were coming out onto the plain. We're going as far as the Great Lakes. And even further, there was another story that probably occurred about 1820 maybe a little bit earlier, 1810, maybe. And we, we had horses at this time, there was a Nez Perce man. He says, I want to go see where the uh the sun comes up.
15:35 So he gathers the people. He tells the people I want to go see where the sun comes up. He loads these horses with whatever he thinks he needs. And away he goes, he comes across the trail here through Lolo, goes out on the plains, goes down to Missouri sees all kinds of strange Indian people along the way. He meets them all. He goes through their territory, stays in the Kotas for a year or two.
16:01 And he learns about these new kinds of people.
16:06 And so he says, well, I want to go see where these people are. So he goes to a place called Cincinnati. Now Cincinnati was established about 1795.
16:19 So Cincinnati had already been established when he went there and he spent three or four years in Cincinnati just to find out what's going on. And then he decides I'm going to go down the Great River. So he goes south along the Mississippi. He doesn't find too much along the Mississippi because those tribes had been inundated by smallpox about this time.
16:45 He doesn't find too much. Then he says, well, I think I'll go west. So he goes west to a country that's hot all year long. This is the way he described it. So as had to be in uh southern Arizona, maybe southern California, maybe well into Mexico,
17:04 he stays there several years. Then he decides I'm going to go north. So he comes north, he sees the mountains on the Columbia plateau, the Columbia river, the Snake river, he comes up those rivers, goes to the Clearwater River and he's home. That journey took him 20 years.
17:24 So we're traveling, people, other tribes traveled as well. So it's not just Nez Perce, other tribal people did this. Also
17:33 west coast Indians, went to the east coast, east coast Indians came to the west coast
17:42 way before Lewis and Clark show up. So there's already this network of trade and an exploration and getting acquainted, setting up alliances with other tribes and we're finding out what's going on,
17:57 what's occurring.
18:00 Eastern tribes are suffering, suffering from a smallpox. There's new kinds of people to the east
18:08 now, prior to Lewis and Clark, prior to 1805, 300 years prior to that, how could we not know about another kind of human being on this continent?
18:22 You had to find out way before 1805 because we had been there, we went there, we learned about these people,
18:32 when you have predictions or prophecies coming out of these contacts.
18:39 One of the prophecies is
18:43 one day, there will be a white faced creature behind a white faced animal about the size of a deer that will come through Lapwai Valley.
18:54 And that occurred when these new kinds of strange people come, they're going to draw lines across the earth and they are going to say this is yours. This is mine. Your name will go into a book, but you will not know when your name goes into this book.
19:14 What does that mean? An allotment book, a census book, a Bible. These are our predictions.
19:25 We do not know when our name goes into a book.
19:30 And so these are the kinds of predictions that we are making way before Lewis and Clark came.
19:37 And the only way we could have come up with these kinds of predictions or prophecies is that we had to have gone somewhere to learn a little bit about what is really going on this island.
19:51 We call this whole continent, an island
19:55 because we knew that this island, there was water to the west, water, to the east, there's a great lake to the north and there's water to the south. It's an island. This whole continent is an island.
20:10 How did we know that?
20:12 More than likely we went there. We went so far south
20:17 that we see in an animal we never seen before. We've seen this animal and we called it [speaks in Nimipuutímt]
20:26 in Nez Perce means imitator. An imitator is the monkey. So that's how far south we went. So these are the kinds of things that I think we need to put things in perspective of 200 years ago. And that perspective is that we knew more about Lewis and Clark than they knew about us
20:50 because we said they're coming.
20:53 We are [speaks in Nimipuutímt]
20:56 we are [speaks in Nimipuutímt]. [speaks in Nimipuutímt] means the white man is coming.
21:02 So these are always things we already knew.
21:06 And we also knew that the early description
21:11 of these strange people were,
21:16 they're going to speak a language we never heard before. They're going to bring good things and bad things to us.
21:24 Some of them will have their faces on upside down and they'll have eyes, like fish
21:32 eyes like fish is a gray, blue, or green eyes. The face upside down is beards and mustaches and bald on top
21:43 and you know who you are.
21:47 So, so these are things that we already knew. So,
21:53 and uh there's so many things here, there's, you know, I've been doing some research among my own people. I've talked to some of our elders and, and some of my peers, I'm not an elder, I'm just a guy that has gray hair just like some of you. So, and I've talked with that and also I heard some stories from my father.
22:15 My father died in 1975. His name is Alex Pinkham and he was born in 1895. And when he was a young boy, he would listen to three old men.
22:29 The names of these three old men were [speaks in Nimipuutímt]
22:33 and [speaks in Nimipuutímt] These are the names of these three old men. They're up in their sixties and seventies and he would listen to them. This would be about the year 1903, 1904. He was about seven or eight years old
22:48 and he got so engrossed listening to these old men tell him about 100 years prior to 1903 that he would listen. And this much of what I'm telling you comes from my father through these three old men.
23:04 Otherwise, if, if my father had not told me I would probably not have known a great deal of this. So this is what my father would tell me, you know, the, the predictions you know, of, of the lines across the earth. And uh also there's another one, our uh world will be turned over,
23:25 the earth will be turned over. What that means is, the white man will bring the plow and he'll turn the earth over. So he's turning our earth over as well as our culture and our society and our way of lives. That's what this really means is our lives are being turned over at the same time that the white man is plowing the ground.
23:51 That's what that really means. So that's the kind of prediction that, uh, he would hear from these three old men
24:02 and either they would also talk about other things they would talk about. Not only the present, one of the present things that these three old men would talk about, they would say the prophecies are coming true
24:14 and what they would talk about, they would tell when these people come, they will make things that go through the air, it will make things that crawl upon the ground,
24:25 that's an automobile and the airplane.
24:29 So they already knew some of these things. This is what they were saying because of the ingenuity and the technology that these people will bring, they will also do these other things, making the airplane and an automobile. So these these,
24:47 well I guess in 1903, there were, the automobiles are already made and some of the airplanes were starting to be developed. But then these all three old men were saying it's coming true what they are doing. And the three old men would talk about these people have something that we don't have.
25:08 And that's the ability to make things from metal and glass.
25:14 And one of the early things that we try to do
25:21 is that when we learned about this metal and glass, you know, remember that the six muzzle loaders that we possessed in 1805, but no leaden ball, that's the technology of the day.
25:35 So how do we acquire these things? How do we get a hold of this metal and glass? How do we trade for these? Now, Lewis and Clark, my understanding is that they had the latest technology in firearms, the rifle, muzzle loader, the, the glass, the beads and
25:59 metal axes. So we knew about these things as well.
26:06 And so we said, well, how do we acquire these things? We could kill them? All we have to do is kill 33 people.
26:16 Well, the argument was, well, look what they have, look what they can bring to us. If we kill them, maybe we will not be able to get those things. But if we treat them well, maybe we can get these things more readily.
26:32 So there's a big debate, what should we do when these people come among us, we know what they're bringing, they're bringing good things and bad things, but the good things will be more beneficial to us than the bad things. There was a great argument. What should we do? [speaks in Nimipuutímt] an elderly woman of the time of 1805 says don't do them any harm
26:58 because these people helped me when I was a captive on the Great Plains around the Great Lakes area.
27:06 I met these kinds of people, these strange people, they treated me kindly, so don't do them any harm. And it's true [speaks in Nimipuutímt] was tra- uh captured and taken away by her captors to the Great Lakes area. She finally uh secured her freedom by sneaking away or, you know, somehow she had gotten away from her captors.
27:30 She had been traded also to other tribes probably around the Great Lakes area
27:37 and she escaped and she came upon some white people that treated her kindly, took her in, took care of her. She had a young child with her at this time.
27:48 And there was one white man among these people that said, I will take you across the Eastern Bitter Water, come with me. And she said, no, I want to go back to my people.
28:03 So she comes west along the way, her baby dies, she buries it along the way, but she finally gets home
28:12 to the Clearwater country.
28:16 And so when Lewis and Clark came, and this great argument was going on. She convinced everyone, you know, don't do them any harm because look at the things that they, that we could acquire. So,
28:30 so the, the mood shifted,
28:34 you said, how do we bring about a good relationship with these people? We know what they're bringing,
28:42 but they have good things also.
28:45 So how do we do this? Well, you treat them well? Feed them,
28:51 provide guides for them, you know, where they want to go. We'll provide guides
28:57 and we help them build canoes, which we did and we also took care of their horses. So he did all these things for them.
29:06 So they went on down the river.
29:09 Actually, they, they went down in five canoes, but actually there were six canoes made, one canoe came back up river. And it was because the first canoe that they made wasn't very well made. And so some of the guides came back with that six or the first canoe, but the other five canoes were a little bit better made even though Lewis and Clark
29:34 wrecked quite a bit going down to Clearwater and this Snake river in the rapids. Now, I've often wondered how could they get a wreck, you know, a boat wreck along the Clearwater? Because if you ever seen that river today, it's almost smooth. Well, 200 years ago, it wasn't that way. There was rocks and rapids and eddies and,
29:59 and a lot of that was changed because the engineers when uh steamboats came to the area blasted out a lot of these rocks and the railroad took out a lot of the rocks too. So that happened on the Clearwater as well as the Salmon or the Snake river. The Middle Snake River, not on the Salmon River, but it did occur on a Snake and the Clearwater because steamboat traffic was starting to come up the river in about 180-
30:25 1865 or 1870 I believe, I forget which year. But,
30:33 but one of the things that I, um, a little uh concerned about is that some of these canoes over here, they don't look like Nez Perce canoes. Of course, they weren't made by Nez Perce either. But one of the things that you'll notice, they're almost blunt on one end, you know, they're, of course, they're, the chainsaw did a lot of the work, but we didn't make them that way.
30:58 The front end and the aft didn't look that way. There was more of a very smooth and long curve on both ends.
31:09 Now, the reason for that was because when you went down rapids, the upper portion of the, the front end of that canoe would hit the rapid first and you'd be lifted up over the rapids. And these is, I, I think they would go into the rapid more readily. And I think that's why Lewis and Clark had so many wrecks.
31:33 And by the way, we found out that about half of the Corps of Discovery didn't know how to swim. So we, we went out and rescued quite a few of them when they got into [inaudible].
31:44 So, so besides, you know, this misunderstanding, you know, there's a lot of these things that went on and in 18, particularly in 1806, um Lewis and Clark when they came through our country. They, they start buying our dogs
32:04 and uh they ate our dogs that we traded or sold to them. Well, there's one on our return trip in 1806. They are just below Spalding, Idaho.
32:16 It's, it's this side of Lewiston, Idaho about eight or nine miles in our language. We call this place, [speaks in Nimipuutímt]
32:27 and it's my uh mother's place along the Clearwater River and that's where Lewis and Clark and particularly Lewis,
32:37 one young Nez Perce, threw a puppy in his plate or nearly in his plate. And Lewis got up and threw the puppy back and hit the young man in the chest and then picked up a tamahawk and threaten to uh tamahawk this young Nez Perce. Well, of course, the young man, he backed off and he says, well, you can't make jokes with these people but his, his, his,
33:01 he was taking up the cause of a young girl
33:07 that played with a dog that was Lewis was eating.
33:12 So she was upset. Then the mother got upset. So this young man took up their cause threw the puppy in Lewis's plate to make a little joke with him and fun with him because we never ate dog.
33:26 We never ate dog at all. Even in very hard times, we never ate dog. We occasionally would eat horses but we never ate dogs. Other tribal people did eat dogs. But we never, I guess one of the things that we viewed the dog as is why eat your best buddy. You know, he shows us where the game is at, you know, he takes care of camp, you know,
33:50 he's the watchdog. He helps us hunt, you know. So why do this to your little little friend? So that's why we didn't eat dog. But Lewis and Clark and the other members very readily did. And they purchased all most of the dogs in the neighborhood when they came through.
34:09 So, so there's, there's this, this kind of thing that was going on. But then when you read the journals, it just describes this impertinent Nez Perce threw a puppy in my plate and I threatened to kill him.
34:25 So this is the Anglo American view
34:29 of Native peoples of the time.
34:33 And probably other members of the Corps also didn't like maybe Drouillard or Drouillard may have had a different view because Drouillard was, uh my understanding, he was half Shawnee Indian and, and half French. So he knew the sign language and we knew the sign language and, and so
34:57 there was probably a better communication between Drouillard and other Nez Perce than most others in the Corps of Discovery. So how, and this is the good relationship that, that I'm talking about is that it did occur.
35:15 And Drouillard was one of these that, that perpetuated this good relationship because Drouillard, we gave him one of the best horses that we had available. Of course, we gave Lewis a good horse too and, and Clark. Uh but we also recognize that Drouillard was of the, With Sores, people of the eastern tribes and he knew the sign language
35:41 so we could probably communicate with him a little bit more and a little bit better. And then the uh when they came back up, they were at the mouth of Palouse River or rather the uh Potlatch River just above uh Lapwai Creek and east of Lewiston about 10 miles or so
36:01 there. They, this is where the Cut Nose was at. One of our leaders, [speaks in Nimipuutímt] Now, one of the three men that my father listened to was also named [speaks in Nimipuutímt] Or Cut Nose, Cut Nose is my father's uncle. So this is how I'm tied into this Lewis and Clark thing.
36:23 So at the uh Cut Noses village, which is at the mouth of Potlatch River,
36:29 they, they had uh there was a Shoshone boy
36:34 there that spoke Shoshone, he could speak with Sacajawea. So there was communication between in Shoshone. Then it probably went to Hidatsa because Charbanneau could speak Hidatsa then Charbonneau was French. So it probably went to French, then it went to English. So you went through about four or five different languages,
36:57 you know, Nez Perce is also in it. So there's probably five different languages that if you wanted to try to communicate something to someone, you know, whatever Lewis and Clark, you know, we uh proposing, you know, relationships or, or agreements that it had to go through these five uh languages. So it's very complicated and this is where
37:20 I think a lot of misunderstanding occurred. You know, there's so many names that Lewis and Clark wrote down in their journals that I can't even recognize them because the way you pronounce it, the way they heard it is completely different from what we would say it. One of those is Tetoharsky Yeah, this is the way it's actually written in the journal Tetoharsky
37:46 That's [speaks in Nimipuutímt]
37:52 That's what that is. We finally figured it out. That's what it is [speaks in Nimipuutímt] And what that means is uh looks like brothers. So like you see somebody coming in a distance, you can just see little specs and you don't recognize them and they get closer and closer and then you see who they are there. Oh, [speaks in Nimipuutímt] they look like brothers.
38:16 That's the name of one of, of this man that they were trying to describe. So these are the kinds of things that there were so many things that were misun misunderstood or misinterpreted. And also that, um,
38:33 one of the things that Lewis and Clark talked about is peace and friendship among all people. Well, we knew that because we knew that we were at Fort Mandan a year before. In 1804, there were three Nez Perce there.
38:50 And so those three men came back and said, well, this is what they're talking about. Peace and friendship. Well, there's another big long story. I can't get into that because I only got about another three or four minutes. But this is one of what they Lewis and Clark is bringing, they're bringing this concept of peace and friendship and they're bringing [speaks in Nimipuutímt] medal that says this [speaks in Nimipuutímt]
39:15 So that's what we call coins
39:19 and on it, it says peace and friendship. So this is the message that they're carrying. So when Lewis and Clark talked about these medals and gave them out, Cut Nose, received one Red Bear received one Twisted Hair received one, Tamuutsu [phonetic] received one. There was about seven or eight medals given to Nez Perce leaders of that time.
39:43 And so we said, if you want peace and friendship, then you treat us the same way.
39:49 This is the first treaty we made with the United States government. And we took it to heart
39:59 because we thought so much of what they were saying that this is what we wanted to set up with them as peaceful and friendship and trade and getting and inquiring the technology of the day. This is why we did it
40:16 and we carry that out all the way until 1877 until we went to war with the United States government in 1877. Um I guess before I go any further, is there any questions? We got a few minutes here.
40:36 Go ahead and raise your hand. If there are questions, go ahead and raise your hand. I have a microphone so we can share the questions.
40:45 Couldn't have been that thorough. Mhm.
40:53 Uh One thing, Lewis and Clark actually, William Clark left his son among the Nez Perce.
41:02 We gave that young person the name [speaks in Nimipuutímt] He is the son of William Clark and he went through all the trials and tribulations up until the war of 1877. He actually went on the war trail with Joseph and the other leaders. He survived all the battles. He was about 70 years old at times 71
41:27 in 77 he went through all the battles from Whitebird to Clearwater River to uh Fort Fizzle to Big Hole to Canyon Creek and then to Bears Paw.
41:41 He was captured at Bears. Paw went into exile into Oklahoma and there the son of Clark died,
41:49 we call him [speaks in Nimipuutímt] and Nez Perce means daytime smoker. So this is part of this relationship that we're trying to set up and maintain with the United States.
42:08 [speaks in Nimipuutímt] was the alliance building mechanism, but it didn't work in 1877 because we are fighting the United States government.
42:19 So there's other descendants from the Corps of Discovery, York is also another, he has a descendant among the tribal people. So there's all kinds of stories, but I guess I'm out of time. So thank you very much
42:43 and thank you Mr Allen Pinkham for presenting here in our Tent of Many Voices and our next program here in The Tent of Many-

Tent of Many Voices

Allen Pinkham on Nez Perce perspectives of Lewis and Clark

Allen Pinkham

Nez Perce

42:53

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Allen Pinkham on Nez Perce perspectives of Lewis and Clark

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