January 2011

As the chanting of his slaves announced the approaching death of Andrew Jackson, on a June day in 1845, the old warrior spent part of his last conscious moments dictating farewell messages to men whose love he had valued—Francis P. Blair, Sam Houston, and Thomas Hart Benton. The appearance of Benton on this list was natural, for he had become the old general’s most devoted partisan; but thirty years earlier it would have caused great surprise, for Benton and Jackson had been the bitterest of enemies and had once tried their level best to kill one another. The strange duel they fought—it took place during the War of 1812—was one of the odd landmarks of American political history.

In June, 1877, just one year after the Custer debacle, a new and unexpected Indian outbreak flared in the West. To an American public wearied and disgusted with a governmental policy, or lack of policy, that seemed to breed Indian wars, this one, an uprising by formerly peaceful Nez Percés of Oregon and Idaho, was dramatized by what appeared to be superb Indian generalship. One army detachment after another, officered by veterans of the Civil War, floundered in battle with the hostiles. Western correspondents telegraphed the progress of a great, 1,300-mile fighting retreat by the Indians, swaying popular imagination in behalf of the valiant Nez Percés and their leader, Chief Joseph, who, as handsome and noble in appearance as a Fenimore Cooper Indian, became something of a combined national hero and military genius. (The tribe was known as the Nez Percés,  which is French for “pierced nose,” because they wore pieces of shell in their noses. The name, whether used in the singular or plural, is pronounced “nez purse.”)