Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,907
By This is the grave of Yellow Wolf.
Born about 1855, Yellow Wolf, or He–Mene Mox Mox grew up in the horrible times when his people, the Nez Perce, were trying to resist the white genocide overtaking the North American continent. There is nothing good to be said about American history around this issue–this is a genocidal nation, a cancer upon the world for existing. There is nothing we can do about the genocide at this point, but we can be honest about the horrors of colonialism, settler or otherwise. It’s just disgusting and every pioneer memorial, every covered wagon in every small eastern Oregon and eastern Washington town is basically putting up a KKK uniform in the middle of your town.
To be honest, we don’t know all that much about Yellow Wolf’s life except what he later said to the white farmer Lucullus Virgil McWhorter. They became friends later in their lives. Yellow Wolf began to tell stories and McWhorter wrote them down. What we do know is that Yellow Wolf became one of the Nez Perce’s chief warriors during the flight from Oregon. Telling these stories brought him a lot of opprobrium from his fellow Nez Perce. who thought telling these stories to a white man was a betrayal of their ways. But he believed it was necessary to tell this history for the future. I have no right to make any judgments on this issue. I can say that without Yellow Wolf, we would know a lot less about the wars the Americans forced upon his people. He was unsparing in the horrors of white violence upon the Nez Perce as they entered their homelands in what is today northeastern Oregon and adjacent parts of Idaho, looking for gold. He completely and accurately blamed the wars on whites, noting how they routinely killed Nez Perce for no reason.
Unsurprisingly, among the things Yellow Wolf stated is that he did not like the name Yellow Wolf, but this is what whites called him by. Now, that was one of his names, which came in a vision quest. But as he stated, “The whites call me Yellow Wolf, but I take that as a nick-name. My true name is different, and is after the Spirit which gave me promise of its power as a warrior. I am Heinmot Hihhih, which means White Thunder (or White Lightning). Yellow Wolf is not my own chosen name.” Still, this is what the world knows him as today, to the extent they do know him. Incidentally, Yellow Wolf was also Chief Joseph’s nephew, though I don’t think that per se gave him extra juice in tribal politics given how interrelated everyone was.
Another thing Yellow Wolf stressed was the divisions within the Nez Perce community in the 1870s on how to deal with the whites. There was a lot of conversion to Christianity by this time and those folks did not want to fight the whites. In fact, the divisions there are largely replicated today, with their descendants largely those who live on the Nez Perce reservation today, while the fighters and resistors forcibly moved and ending up at what is today the Colville reservation, a couple of hundred miles northwest. But the whites just kept coming and they were so insulting. For example, Yellow Wolf specifically called out General O.O. Howard for using threats during conferencing with the Nez Perce, which was specifically alienating to their ways of negotiating. Howard was great as the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau but like a lot of these Republicans, he was completely genocidal when it came to the tribes. The thing about the Army, or whites generally, is that while one can understand how they would not have a lot of cultural understanding of the tribes, they just didn’t care either and to learn effective ways to bargain would get in the way of the ultimate goal of extermination. So insulting the Nez Perce? Whatever. Then Howard had Toohoolhoolzote imprisoned. That was the final call. Toohoolhoolzote was a major warrior and at first was a peace advocate and Christian who was against the war. It was so alienating that Chief Joseph and his supporters, which included Yellow Wolf, decided to make a run for Canada and freedom.
Of course this Army did everything possible to stop this escape. The Nez Perce did a good job of getting a long ways and nearly in fact did make it to Canada, heading across Idaho, through what is today Yellowstone National Park (actually it was then too since that was created in 1872) and up into Montana before their final defeat a few dozen miles from the Alberta border.
After the war, Yellow Wolf ended up on the Colville Reservation with many other Nez Perce. He worked as a migrant hop picker for awhile. He got to know McWhorter because he left his horse with the guy in 1907 while returning from the Yakima Valley and the hops. The horse was sick. McWhorter, who ran sheep, got the horse healthy and returned him the next year. They became friends. For Yellow Wolf, telling these stories was a way to save his people. He stated to McWhorter: “White people…are smothering my Indian rights. The young generation behind me, for them I tell the story. It is for them! I want next generation of whites to know and treat the Indian as themselves.”
By 1910, Yellow Wolf told the U.S. Census that he had nine children, but only two survived to that time. And in fact, only one outlived him. This can happen for many reasons, but happened a lot more on the post-war reservations than in white communities for reasons of poverty and the horrors of genocide. We can’t know what the specifics were for Yellow Wolf’s family, but that’s some sad stuff. The commonality of this contributed to the belief among whites that Native Americans were going extinct, which itself helped spawn the field of anthropology, since whites wanted to collect all these pots and teepees and stories and the like before the Indian went away, as they thought was inevitably happening with their vulgar Darwinism.
It’s really hard to know what people, white or Nez Perce, thought about Yellow Wolf. It’s harder for the Nez Perce side. Because he was one of the only people who would tell stories to whites, most of the material that we have in fact comes from whites. And of course the whites condescended to him. So Yellow Wolf was known as a peacemaker over conflicts on the reservation between whites and Natives (remember that allotment after the Dawes Act led to even more stripping of land from the tribes and that remains a serious issue today since the descendants of those original whites often still farm and ranch on tribal land), but it’s hard to know what that means from white sources.
Yellow Wolf died in 1935, around 80 years old.
Yellow Wolf is buried in Nez Perce Cemetery, Nespelem, Washington. The grave was unquestionably put up by his white friends.
If you would like this series to visit other Native Americans, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Geronimo is in Lawton, Oklahoma, where the Apache were exiled. Black Hawk is in Selma, Iowa. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.