Grace Period, 2: Delegation of 1831

About Grace Period

Introduction:

In the fall of 1831, after a months-long journey, four Nez Perce men from the remote Kamiah Valley of what is now northcentral Idaho reached their destination, St. Louis, Missouri. Entrusted by their communities to acquire important information, the visitors, known to history as the Delegation of 1831, did not survive their mission. Two of the men died in St. Louis, and the other two on their return to Idaho. Yet, their visit had momentous consequences for the Native Peoples of the Rocky Mountains. Even in a city as sophisticated as St. Louis, it was unusual enough that it was recorded in the letters of several non-Native men. In fact, it was the publication of one letter – just one letter – that led directly to the arrival of Protestant missionaries in the Pacific Northwest. That its author bore false witness in describing the men and the purpose of their visit makes its consequences heartbreakingly ironic but no less historic. 

Heart of the monster, a Nez Perce sacred place near East Kamiah,
Nez Perce County, Idaho

Composition:

The men who visited St. Louis in the fall of 1831 were members of a larger assembly of Nez Perce and Salish men who had left the Inland Northwest in June with an American Fur Company brigade led by Lucien Fontenelle and Andrew Drips; the brigade was bound for St. Louis. As the group made its way eastward, some of the Native men fell away, and by the time the caravan reached Council Bluffs, Iowa, only seven of them remained. There, as was the plan, Fontenelle and Drips separated; Fontenelle would go on to St. Louis, while Drips would remain in Council Bluffs where he would re-supply for his return trip to the Rocky Mountains. Of the seven Native men, three of them decided to return to the Rockies with Drips. The remaining four decided to see their mission through and traveled to St. Louis with Fontenelle. 

According to Alvin Josephy in his book The Nez Perce and the Opening of the Northwest, the four Native men who visited St. Louis were:

• Tipyahlanah (Eagle/Black Eagle), a Nez Perce man probably in his 50s from Idaho’s Kamiah Valley
• Ka-ou-pu (Man of the Morning/Speaking Eagle), another “older” Nez Perce man from Idaho’s Kooskia-Stites area whose mother was Salish
• Hi-yuts-to-henin (Rabbit Skin Leggings), a young man about 20 years old whose ancestry was probably Nez Perce and Palouse
• Tawis Geejumnin (No Horns on His Head), also about 20 years old, and Nez Perce

Purpose:

Nez Perce historian Allen Pinkham, a descendant of Tipyahlanah, explained in a 2003 interview with Idaho journalist Tim Woodward that the four men traveled to St. Louis to acquire “the book of Heaven.” He adds that there “are five versions of what that is. My father told me it was the book of knowledge, that they were looking for what went into a book and how you convey knowledge.” Pinkham stresses that the men were not looking for “a new religion. We had our own ways that were a way of life.” (Woodward, “Wallowa County Chieftain”) 

Woodward interviewed Pinkham as the Nez Perce Tribe made plans to honor Tipyahlanah and Ka-ou-pu. The year before, another Nez Perce historian, Crystal White, and National Park Service researcher Robert Moore, had discovered that the two men were buried in “an unmarked mass grave” in St. Louis’s Calvary Cemetery. To memorialize Tipyahlanah and Ka-ou-pu, who were known in English as Black Eagle and Speaking Eagle, the Nez Perce Tribe erected a monument with two large granite eagle feathers in the cemetery. “Black Eagle and Speaking Eagle,” Pinkham said in the interview, were "elderly men, probably in their 50's. They would have had great knowledge and status in the tribe." (Woodward, “Wallowa County Chieftain”) 

Destination:

The answer to the question of why the Delegation of 1831 chose St. Louis as its destination is another question. Where else would they have gone? At the time of the men’s visit, St. Louis was the Washington D.C. of the trans-Mississippi West. As the seat of commerce, government, and religion in the region, it was the logical place to go; besides, the men probably knew the way to St. Louis; certainly, fur trader Lucien Fontenelle would have known, St. Louis having been the base of operations for the fur trade in the western United States for nearly 70 years. 

In 1763, four decades before the Louisiana Purchase, the French government gave permission to New Orleans fur trader Pierre Laclède-Liguest to build a new fur trading post up the Mississippi River. Accompanied by his foster son, Auguste Chouteau, over two dozen workmen, several enslaved people, and five boats full of supplies, Laclède ventured up the river until he found “a promising spot south of the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers…Instead of building a simple fort, Laclède decided to plan a full-scale colonial settlement, which he named St. Louis, in honor of King Louis IX of France.” After he “made peace with powerful Indian tribes such as the Osages and the Missouria,” St. Louis developed into a fur trading center, and remained so, even as the trade moved west from the Great Plains into the Rocky Mountains. (Historic Missourians, “The Chouteau Brothers”) 

In 1822, the federal government selected St. Louis as the site of its Superintendency of Indian Affairs for the Midwest region, and President James Monroe appointed William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) its Superintendent. Clark’s “duties included the supervision of relations between the tribes and non-Indians, the supervision of the conduct and accounts of agents responsible to them, the communication of instructions from the Commissioner to agents, and the granting of leaves of absence to subordinates. It was also common practice for them to receive contract bids, enter into contracts, and issue annuities to the Indians.” (South Dakota State Historical Society, “St. Louis Superintendency of Indian Affairs”) 

Clark’s most important responsibility, according to Jesuit historian John J. Killoren, was diplomatic. Like an ambassador at an embassy, Clark frequently received visitors, including “Indian delegations from the Upper Missouri and the Far Northwest.” Killoren adds that the path to Clark’s “door was well-known to Natives and non-Natives alike,” and St. Louis, once known as “Chouteau Town” to the Indigenous Peoples of the Midwest, soon became “more widely known among the many tribes of the Upper Missouri as the home of Red-Hair Chief, the Great Father, General William Clark.” (Killoren, 7)  

Another type of paternalism was also present in St. Louis when the Delegation of 1831 visited. Five years earlier, Pope Leo XII had erected the Diocese of St. Louis on July 18, 1826, and appointed Bishop Joseph Rosati as its apostolic administrator. While Rosati may have been the diocese’s first bishop, he was not the first Catholic to set up shop in St. Louis. Three years earlier, a delegation of Jesuits had left the order’s first province, Maryland, and headed west for Missouri. Led by Father Charles Van Quickenborne, the purpose of the delegation was to start a Native boarding school in the Florissant Valley, northwest of St. Louis. Among the dozen missionaries who made the journey was the 23-year-old Pierre-Jean De Smet, who would become the first Superior of the order’s Rocky Mountain Missions 17 years later. 

In St. Louis

Tipyahlanah, Ka-ou-pu, Fontenelle, and some of his men arrived in St. Louis in the early fall, and while the exact course of events is not known, it is certain that Fontenelle took the Nez Perce “to call on General William Clark” at his home in the city. There is no verbatim record of the conversation between Clark and the Nez Perce men because, as historian Bernard DeVoto pointed out in Across the Wide Missouri, his history of the western fur trade, Clark did not understand the men’s languages, nor they, his. In fact, DeVoto claims that Clark conversed with the men in sign language.  (Garraghan, 237) 

After their visit with Clark, Fontenelle took Tipyahlanah and Ka-ou-pu to the cathedral of the Diocese of St. Louis. “The details of the incident,” writes Gilbert J. Garraghan, S.J. in The Jesuits of the Middle United States, “were embodied” by Bishop Joseph Rosati in a letter dated December 31, 1831, which appeared in the Annals of the Association of the Propagation of the Faith. Rosati wrote, “Some three months ago four Indians who live across the Rocky Mountains near the Columbia river [Clark’s Fork of the Columbia] arrived at St. Louis. After visiting General Clark, who, in his celebrated travels, has visited their nation and has been well treated by them, they came to see our church and appeared to be exceedingly well pleased with it.” The bishop noted, too, that there was no one present who understood their language. (Garraghan, 237) 

Rosati’s letter also documents the illnesses of two of the Nez Perce men sometime after their visit to the Cathedral. “Two of our priests,” he writes, “visited them and the poor Indians seemed to be delighted with the visit. They made signs of the cross and other signs which appeared to have relation to baptism. The sacrament was administered to them, they gave expressions of satisfaction.” Tipyahlanah was given the baptismal name of Narcisse, and Ka-ou-pu was christened Paul. Afterwards, both men grew more ill and died. Tipyahlanah died on October 31, and Ka-ou-pu on November 17. Their funerals, wrote the bishop, “were conducted with all the Catholic ceremonies;” he adds that their companions, Hi-yuts-to-henin (Rabbit Skin Leggings) and Tawis Geejumnin (No Horns on His Head), attended the services. (Garraghan, 237) 

When the presiding priests, Fathers Saulnier and Roux, respectively, recorded the deaths and burials of Tipyahlanah and Ka-ou-pu, they unknowingly contributed to the ambiguity of the men’s tribal affiliations. In his entry for Tipyahlanah, Fr. Saulnier recorded that he was a member of the Nez Perce tribe of the Chopoweck Nation known as Flatheads. The word “Chopoweck” was probably a corruption of “Chopunnish,” a term the first white visitors to the Northwest, including Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and David Thompson, used to refer to the Nez Perce People. “Chopunnish” is theorized to be “a corrupted form of a Nez Perce word Tsútpeli, a self-designation.” Father Saulnier used the term “Flathead” correctly because it was commonly used at that time to designate “any tribe inhabiting the mountainous area west of the Rocky Mountains.” (Aoki, p. 14) 

Homeward Bound

Hi-yuts-to-henin (Rabbit Skin Leggings) and Tawis Geejumnin (No Horns on His Head), the two members of the Delegation of 1831 who survived St. Louis, left Missouri on March 26, 1832, on board’s Fontenelle’s westward-bound steamboat. Coincidentally, American adventurer and artist George Catlin was also a passenger on the steamboat, and there, he painted portraits of Hi-yuts-to-henin and Tawis Geejumnin. For his portraits of the two Nez Perce men, Catlin dressed them as if they were members of a Sioux tribe. In his 1857 memoir, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the NorthAmerican Indians, Catlin explains that the “beautiful Sioux dresses” had been presented to the Nez Perce “in a talk with the Sioux, who treated them very kindly, while passing through Sioux country.” (Catlin, 189) 

Hi-yuts-to-henin (Rabbit Skin Leggings)

Tawis Geejumnin (No Horns on His Head)

Catlin not only captured Hi-yuts-to-henin and Tawis Geejumnin for posterity but also traveled with them after leaving the steamboat. The trio, according to Catlin’s memoir, traveled “two thousand miles” together “toward their own country.” As had Rosati for Tipyahlanah and Ka-ou-pu , Catlin documented the deaths of Hi-yuts-to-henin and Tawis Geejumnin. Tawis Geejumnin died “near the mouth of the Yellow Stone River on his way home, with disease which he had contracted in the civilized district.” Somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, writes Catlin, Hi-yuts-to-henin “joined a band of his people and told them all that had befallen the four adventurers.” Several months later, however, Hi-yuts-to-henin’s band ran into a group of hostile Blackfoot Indians, traditional enemies of the Nez Perce, near the Salmon River in present Idaho, and in the ensuing battle, he was killed. (Catlin, 190) 

False Witness

Hi-yuts-to-henin died sometime in the middle of March of 1833, just weeks after a false account of his and his companions’ visit in St. Louis was published in the Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald, a newspaper of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In its March 1 edition, the paper published an article titled “The Flat-Head Indians” and based on two letters, one written by William Walker of Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and the other by G.P. Disosway of New York City. That Walker and Disosway’s letters were more fiction than fact makes the consequences of their publication no less momentous. (Josephy, 98) 

William Walker was not Indigenous, but his wife was. Mrs. Walker, whose own name is not known, was a member of the Wyandot tribe of northern Ohio. On behalf of the Wyandot, Walker took a trip to western Missouri in the fall of 1831 “to inspect the lands on which on the government proposed to resettle” the tribe. On his way there, Walker stopped in St. Louis to visit with Superintendent Clark. Nearly two years later, Walker wrote of an account of his visit in a letter, which he sent to his friend G.P. Disosway, a successful businessman who actively supported Methodist missionary work. 

In the letter, Walker claims that during his visit, Clark told him that “three chiefs from the Flat-Head nation were in his house, and were quite sick, and that one (the fourth) had died a few days ago.” Curiosity, Walker reports, “prompted” him to “step into the adjoining room” to see the men. “I was struck with their appearance,” he wrote. “hey differ in appearance from any tribe of Indians I have ever seen: small in size, delicately formed, small limbs, and the most exact symmetry throughout, except the head. I had always supposed from their being called “Flatheads,” that the head was actually flat on top; but this was not the case.” And to illustrate his description, Walker sketched a portrait of an Indian whose head narrowed to a point on top in his letter. (Josephy, 99) 

As Josephy points out in The Nez Perce and the Opening of the West, there is every reason to question the veracity of Walker’s account. “The description of the normally strong and portly Nez Perces as small and delicately formed,” writes Josephy, “and the inclusion of the sketch both cast doubt on whether Walker actually saw the Indians, none of whom certainly would have had flattened heads.” Josephy goes on to suggest that Walker’s drawing was a copy of one that Clark “had made at the mouth of the Columbia River, during the winter of 1805-06, of Chinookan Clatsop Indians, who did flatten their heads,” a practice Inland Northwest Natives did not follow. In addition, Catlin’s portraits of Hi-yuts-to-henin and Tawis Geejumnin, despite the distracting Sioux dress, also cast doubt on the accuracy of Walker’s account. (Josephy, 99) 

Walker did not limit himself to describing the physical appearance of the “Flat-Heads.” He also claimed to know the reason for the men’s journey to St. Louis. “It appears,” he writes, “that a white man who had visited their country had told the Natives “that the white people away toward the rising of the sun had been put in possession of the true mode of worshipping the great Spirit” and “had a book containing directions how to conduct themselves in order to enjoy his favor and hold converse with him.” The Natives, he continues, had met in council and decided that if their “mode of worshipping be wrong and displeasing to the great Spirit, it is time we had laid it aside,” and they “accordingly deputed four of the chiefs to proceed to St. Louis to see their great father, Gen. Clark, to inquire of him, having no doubt but he would tell them the whole truth about it.” (Josephy, 99-100) 

“Disosway’s letter” to the editors of the Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald, writes Josephy, “was even more imaginative than Walker’s.” In it, Disosway deemed the delegation’s journey, a story without “parallel in history,” and declared a call to action. “Let the Church awake from her slumbers,” he writes, “and go forth in her strength to the salvation of these wandering sons of our native forests.” Reprinted in “other religious periodicals and read from pulpits,” the two letters became the foremost topic of conversation in “church circles” and beyond, according to Josephy. The Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald echoed Disosway’s battle cry in its March 22 issue: “Hear! Hear!,” wrote the editors, “Who will respond to the call from beyond the Rocky mountains? The communication of Brother G.P. Disosway, including one from the Wyandot agent, on the subject of the deputation of the Flathead Indians to General Clark, has excited in many in this section intense interest. And to be short about it, we are for having a mission established there at once…All we want is men. Who will go? Who?” (Josephy, 101) 

Conclusion:

If all the Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald wanted was men, they got what they wanted. Soon, “a spirited race among many different denominations to be the first to send men to the Rockies” began, and by the end of 1833, a missionary party was out-of-the-gate. In the spring of 1834, two Methodist missionaries, Jason Lee and his nephew, Daniel Lee, were on their way west to establish a mission among the “Flatheads.” Lee was the first, but he certainly was not the last, and during the next five years, Protestant missionaries steadily streamed into the Inland Northwest. Catholic missionaries would follow in the next decade. (Josephy, 101)

Grace Period, 3: The Salish Delegations

Content Sources:

Aoki, Haruo. “Nez Perce Grammar,” Dissertation, University of California-Berkeley, Department of Linguistics, 1965, eScholarship.org, last visited March 12, 2021. 

Catlin, George. Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians. Vol. II, Willis P. Hazard, Philadelphia, 1857. Tufts University, Tufts Digital Library, last visited March 12, 2021. 

Cebula, Larry. Plateau Indians and the Quest for Spiritual Power, 1700-1850. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 2003.  

Cebula, Larry. “Religious change and Plateau Indians: 1500-1850” (2000). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects, last visited March 29, 2021. 

DeVoto, Bernard. Across the Wide Missouri, last visited August 24, 2020.

Garraghan, Gilbert J., S.J., The Jesuits of the Middle United States, Loyola University Press, Chicago, 1983. “Virtually Garraghan,” Jesuit Archives and Research Center, last visited March 29, 2021. 

Historic Missourians. “The Chouteau Brothers,” last visited December 12, 2022. 

Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1965. 

Killoren, John J., S.J. “Come, Blackrobe” De Smet and the Indian Tragedy. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman and London, 1994. 

Mountain Men and Life in the Rocky Mountain West / Malachite’s Big Hole. “Lucien Fontenelle,” last visited March 24, 2021. 

South Dakota State Historical Society. St. Louis Superintendency of Indian Affairs, last visited March 24, 2021. 

Palladino, L.B., S.J. Indian and White in the Northwest; or A History of Catholicity in Montana. John Murphy & Company, Baltimore, 1984. 

Wikipedia. “Charles FelixVan Quickenborne,” last visited March 24, 2021. 

Wikipedia. “History ofMissouri,” last visited March 23, 2021.  

Wikipedia. “RomanCatholic Archdiocese of St. Louis,” , last visited March 24, 2021. 

Woodward, Tim. “Two Nez Perce warriors to get St. Louismemorial.” Wallowa County Chieftain, March 5, 2003, last visited March 12, 2021. 

Image Sources:

Wikimedia Commons. File: IDMap-doton-Kamiah.png, , last visited December 10, 2022. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Wikimedia Commons: File: William Clark Signature.svg, last visited December 9, 2022. 

Wikimedia Commons. File: Rabbit’s Skin Leggings.jpg, last visited December 9, 2022. 

Wikimedia Commons. File: George Catlin - H’co-a-h’co-a-h’cotes-min,No Horns on His Head, a Brave – 1985.66.146 – Smithsonian American ArtMuseum.jpg, last visited December 9, 2022.