The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story by Elliot West

Abstract

 Reviews Significantly, few studies exist of camp life during the Civilian Public Service period. Kovac’s work helps fill this gap by documenting the leisure,work,and community-oriented activities of the conscientious objectors assigned to this remote corner of the World War II home front as well as the deeply held moral and religious convictions that put them on the margins of American society.(A regrettable editing error in the book’s documentation , however, is the omission of all endnote citations for chapter 5.) The Cascade Locks setting, though mostly out of the public eye, drew unusual press attention for several reasons, and Kovac tells these stories well. In 1942, for example, the Hollywood film star Lew Ayres (well-known for his roles in All Quiet on the Western Front and other movies) came to Cascade Locks as a conscientious objector before transferring and becoming an army medic. Also early in the camp’s history, George Yamada, a young Japanese-American conscientious objector, arrived at Cascade Locks prior to receiving an order for transfer to an internment camp under the War Relocation Authority. The Cascade Locks men’s protestations about the pending forced removal of Yamada from their midst demonstrated their concern for justice and willingnesstoconfrontgovernmentalauthority in extraordinary times. The author, Jeffrey Kovac — who himself took a conscientious objector position during the Vietnam War — writes from a strongly sympathetic perspective. His purpose is to “tell the story of those who chose peace, to honor their memory and to inspire future generations to make that same choice” (p. 22). This highly readable book will appeal to an audience of scholars and students interested in peace and religious history, in World War II home front history, in the history of Oregon and the Northwest,and inAmerican social and political thought. Rachel Waltner Goossen Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story by Elliott West Oxford University Press, New York, 2009. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. 432 pages. $27.95 cloth. College students occasionally ask why the second half of the introductory U.S. history course generally starts in 1877. What is so magical about that date that it dictates how historians structure their textbooks and classes? The conventional answer highlights the end of Reconstruction in the South — certainly a major watershed — but 1877 was significant in other ways as well, including the dramatic events Elliott West recounts in The Last Indian War. Many readers will already know the basic outlines of the story, for the Nez Perce War is perhaps the most thoroughly chronicled subject in Native American history after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Some scholars may even wonder (as I did initially) why we need another book on the non-treaty Nez Perces and their heroic running battle against the U.S. Army. West has an answer for them, too. Placing the war in the context of broader changes sweeping the nation, he presents it as “a chance to rethink how America was remade in the middle of the nineteenth century” (p. xviii). Between 1845 and 1877, West argues, the United States underwent a “Greater Reconstruction ”during whichAmericans confronted fundamental questions about the nature of the union, the extent of federal power, and the boundaries of national citizenship (p.xx).The Trans-Mississippi West and its Native peoples, as much as the South and its slave society,were drawn into these debates and transformed by their violent resolution. If the Nez Perce conflict was not technically the “Last Indian War,” it nevertheless heralded a new national order and thus “has much to say about its time and about how that time helped make the America we know” (p. xxiii). West divides his narrative into three parts. The first sketches the aboriginal homeland  OHQ vol. 111, no. 2 and culture of the Nimiipuu (‘Real People’); their early encounters with Euro-American explorers, fur traders, and missionaries; and the treaties of 1855 and 1863 that left the nontreaty bands outside reservation boundaries . Despite many provocations during this period, even those groups remained peaceful until Euro-American settlers and the government demanded their removal in 1877. Part 2 describes the outbreak of the war and the Nez Perces...