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.The four men went back to the government officials with the news, andthe stage was set for a potentially ugly confrontation.But General Howardstill wanted to avoid bloodshed.He had no interest in harming Joseph or 76Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Percehis people.He still believed that more reasonable minds could prevail, andin his heart he knew that Joseph s argument had both moral and legalmerit.But orders were orders, and he was perilously close to having toremove Joseph from the Wallowa by force.Over the next few months he tried talking with the other nontreatybands of the tribes in the Plateau.If he could convince some of them toaccept reservation life, there would be pressure on the others to acquiesce,and the danger of concerted opposition would be minimized.His goal wasto get them all to move onto existing reservations without bloodshed.Thetime was long past for talk of compensation or sharing of the land.Still, Joseph towered head and shoulders above all the other leaders inHoward s thinking.His eloquence was unparalleled among the chiefs, hisquality of mind beyond reproach.He also exuded a forthrightness andclarity that drew others to him.In Howard s mind, he was an oak treeamong reeds and willows.In addition, it was his land that had become the center of the contro-versy.The other nontreaty Nez Perce lived farther to the east in less con-tested areas and amounted to little in terms of opposition.White Bird,Looking Glass, Toohoolhoolzote, and the others were secondary concerns.Likewise, the various Cayuse and Palouse chiefs were once again more nui-sances than adversaries.Their lands were not as highly sought, their oppo-sition not so closely followed in Portland and Washington, D.C., theirpersonal characters not so dynamic.It was Joseph who embodied the prob-lem, and it was in dealing with Joseph that any solution must ultimately lie.Howard understood this, but he consistently undermined his own ef-forts by making error after error in protocol in dealing with the Nez Perce.In one instance, he sent an underling to represent him at a meeting he hadpromised to attend, thus insulting Ollokot, who had gone as the chief rep-resentative of the Wallowa Nez Perce and had no interest in dealing withwhat he called one of General Howard s boys. In other instances, hespoke abruptly, denying the Nez Perce their normal manner of discoursein discussing issues of importance.But in no case did he so underestimateand miscalculate as in the meeting on the grounds of Fort Lapwai in May1877, the meeting that came to be known as the council where GeneralHoward showed the rifle. 6 I Am a Man; You Will Not Tell Me What to Do ort Lapwai was not a fort in the sense of a barricaded en-Fclave.It consisted of a few whitewashed buildings rimming a paradearea, with barracks for men, stables for horses, and the usual storage build-ings, officers quarters, and rooms to serve as jail cells, laundries, and med-ical quarters.It sat lonely and isolated along the side of a creek amid thebarren, bald hills that had so depressed the Reverend Spalding upon firstarriving in the country.The soldiers who manned the fort were mostly ill-trained remnants ofthe post Civil War army immigrants, down-and-outers, and young boyswith no families and no prospects who had joined the military as a way toadvance in a world that offered them few opportunities.Many spoke littleor no English.Those who had any skills at all were more likely to be black-smiths, carpenters, and clerks than men with experience at soldiering.There were a few seasoned officers but little in the way of equipment.The soldiers had few decent weapons and had received almost no training.Howard had not wished to waste his limited budget on bullets for targetpractice, so the troops were poor shots as well as poor riders.It was this crude collection of 120 men that was charged with the re-sponsibility of keeping order in the broad Columbia Plateau, and thesemen now found themselves responsible for keeping the Indians in lineduring the council that Howard had called in order to issue a final ultima-tum to the nontreaty Nez Perce.Howard had invited all the leaders Joseph, White Bird, Looking Glass,Toohoolhoolzote, and any others who chose to come.He was no longer in 78Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Percea mood to compromise or discuss.All that interested him was informingthe recalcitrant Nez Perce, in no uncertain terms, that they would have togive up all claims to their traditional lands and move onto the reservationat Lapwai with the treaty Nez Perce
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