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August 1976 | Volume 27, Issue 5
An Officer’s Son With Chief Joseph
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
In the decade before the turn of the century Charles Erskine Scott Wood—the army officer who had participated in the subjugation of the Nez Perces and had recorded the speeches of their famed leader, Chief Joseph—sent his young son Erskine to spend two autumns with the chiefs band on the Colville Reservation, near where the Grand Coulee Dam, in the eastern part of the state of Washington, is now situated. The boy, who ordinarily attended private school in Portland, subsequently went on to Harvard and the Oregon School of Law. Today, as he nears his ninety-seventh birthday, he still practices law in Portland on a semiretired basis. At the request of A MERICAN H ERITAGE , Erskine Wood wrote the following memories of his visits with Chief Joseph as a teen-ager:
When you ask me to describe the family life of Joseph and his culture, please remember that I was only a boy thirteen and fourteen years old when I spent the nine months with him, on two separate visits in 1892 and 1893. In this way I participated in the two fall deer hunts of those years when we laid in our supply of venison and smoked it on racks over the tepee fires. Those hunts occurred in November in the mountains whither we moved from the pleasant little Nespelem Valley, where was our main camp. The band would split up into groups of four or five families, hunting in different parts of the mountains, and I, of course, always was with Joseph’s group, where I participated in the arduous work of the hunt along with the men.
We used to get up long before daylight each morning and take a sweat bath to get the human scent off our bodies so the game we were hunting could not smell us. Joseph always took part in these along with the rest of us. I only mention this to show that Joseph mingled freely in all that his men did. Soon after daylight we would be off hunting.
Of course, all the menial housework was left to the squaws. Joseph’s life was occupied in handling any of his band’s affairs with the agency, such as issuing rations, clothing, etc., or any special matters. As I remember it, he had a little grain patch and threshed the grain by spreading it out and walking the horses round and round through it to thresh it out onto the canvas spread beneath their hooves. But there wasn’t too much of that. Of course, he would moderate and settle any possible disputes, of which there were very few.
He kept a calendar. It was a bunch of ten or twelve little white, smooth sticks, each the size of a pencil, and on each stick, for whatever current month or year it was, he would file a little mark for that day, and on Sundays he