Last week several websites actually attributed my cab driving story to me. For those of you who don’t know, it is a story that I use in my book, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace, to illustrate the line in St. Francis’ famous prayer, “And where there is sadness, joy.” The entire book is a series of ruminations/meditations on Francis’ beautiful prayer that begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.”

I wrote the book about a decade ago as a kind of spiritual meditation. I took each line of the prayer and tried to find some exemplification of it in my own or other people’s lives. My thinking was simple: St. Francis, of all the religious figures of the past, is perhaps the most universally beloved. He is beyond sectarianism, beyond doctrine. And though he was thoroughly Christian — some would say, too Christian for the church of which he was a part — something in his deep humanity has resonated down the centuries and transcended theological differences. I felt that I could do myself some spiritual good by engaging in an extended meditation on the prayer that may be the most universally beloved on the planet.

It was, and remains, an uneasy book for me, because it is in no way Christocentric, which Francis most assuredly was. But he was also the most embracing of the Christian spiritual thinkers. I figured that if he met me, he’d probably find a way to enfold my spiritual strugglings into his faith, so why not work backwards, and use that faith to illuminate my spiritual strugglings? It proved to be a good choice: writing the book was one of the most clarifying experiences I have ever had as an author.

But, back to the cab story. In the book I tell the story of when I was driving a cab in Minneapolis and picked up a woman who was going to a hospice. We drove around all night at her request in what was very likely her last real journey through the outside world she was preparing to leave. It was one of those “blue moments,” as I call them, when some kind of spiritual light shines through the ordinary affairs of everyday life. As most of you know, this is one of the primary themes of my work as a writer.

Well, this cab driver story, in various iterations, has moved virally around the internet for years. It got changed, detached from the Francis book, and attributed to any number of anonymous and not so anonymous sources. It frustrated me, but I tried to listen to my better angels and take satisfaction in the fact that at least it was being read.

Then, last week, something happened. Several websites, primarily zenmoments.org, reddit.com, and something called, I believe, dooce.com picked it up. Within hours my website was being hit like it seldom has before. On the third day after the initial publication I had almost 49,000 hits. This has not happened since my postings on the Red Lake shootings a number of years ago.

What was interesting to me was the comments that people made in response to the story. There seemed to be two fundamental threads: “This is a beautiful story; I’m glad there are people like this in the world,” and “What a bunch of sappy, probably fictional, crap.” Well, though strange and improbable, it is not fictional. Anyone who’s ever driven a cab knows that things happen that are beyond belief.

But that’s neither here nor there.

What is important to me is that in this dichotomy of responses lies the human struggle that so many of us live on a daily basis. We want to be the good person who picks up the old woman, drives her around, and refuses payment for giving her the last ride of her life. And yet we are also the caustic, cynical, folks who pick at the world and carp about things that irritate us or upset us. As Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” Or, to put it in St. Paul’s terms, “That which I would, I do not. That which I do, I would not.” We are simply complex creatures that contain both dark and light in us in varying degrees.

What I wanted to do in the Francis book was to bring out the light. I did not want to claim that I was light, or that I always lived in the light. Those who make such claims are either saints, or deluded, or disingenuous. And there are precious few saints among us.

The constant presence, and overwhelmingly positive response to the cab driver story tells me that there is, in almost all of us, a yearning for the light. We want to be the good person, the one who does the good thing, the one who makes the proper response to the situation. Yet, sadly, and far too often, we do not. That I did so in that moment in the cab back in the mid 1980’s does not make me a good person. It makes me a person who, for one moment, did something that was good. As a dear friend of mine once said, “Most people just slog through the world trying to be kind.” That’s what I was doing on that unexceptional August morning when an exceptional moment broke through the ordinariness of an ordinary day.

If I wrote a book about all the times I failed to do the right thing, or actually did something mean spirited or jerky, it would be far longer than the book of my better moments. But you don’t need to hear about those. You have your own mean spirited and jerky moments, and the world is full of folks who celebrate those moments by indulging their cynicism and skepticism. The cab drive story was a reminder to me, that I passed on to you, that we do have our better angels, and that we should assert them when we can. That the overwhelming majority of you appreciated the story is simply proof that we all feel better on those occasions when we do let our better angels have their voice.

In this time when dominance is praised as strength, where skepticism is often more prudent than trust, where disengagement is safer than engagement, we need to be reminded that the kind gesture that makes us vulnerable and serves no practical end is often the best gesture of all. The cab ride, for me, was one of those gestures.

I am pleased that so many people have found it. I only hope that they will follow it backward to the source. Forget the word, “Lord.” Replace it with whatever term you use for your understanding of the Creator or spiritual force that animates this universe. But don’t forget the next phrase: “Make me an instrument of your peace.” That’s what the world needs now. That’s what I was trying to be on that cab ride. That’s what I’ll try to be today.

I hope you will do the same.

I am thrilled when my ordinary life offers up an extraordinary moment that brings some solace or insight or enjoyment to others, and such has been the good fortune of that moment in the late 1980’s when I was driving the “dog shift” in Minneapolis, Minnesota. What is noteworthy about that moment, beyond it’s poignancy, is that I did not create it; I merely experienced it and let it unfold.

Life gives us all such moments — I call them “Blue Moments” (See Letters to My Son for an explanation) — where a brilliant light shines through the ordinary moments in our ordinary days. They come unsolicited and unannounced, and provide us the gift of significance and, if we are lucky, the opportunity to serve.

What it is important is to remember that these ARE gifts, and that we cannot receive them if we are not open to them. We need to listen closely, watch closely, and take care not to rush past or through them when they arrive. They are the fabric of our lives, and they will weave themselves with complexity and beauty if we give them time to do so.

I bring this up because I’d like to make you two offers — one big and one small. The small one first: If any of you would like to read the original piece, unmodified and in the context in which it was written, I would like to offer you the opportunity to buy a signed copy of Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Living in the Spirit of the Prayer of St. Francis. It is one of my lesser known books, but one of my favorites. In it, I tried to write an extended meditation on each of the lines of Francis’ famous prayer and to illuminate them with stories from my life and the lives of others. The cab ride story is one of those.

The second offer — the big one — is made to all of you, but especially you readers in the U.K. I will be in the U.K. next spring. The exact dates are not yet set, but they will likely occur in April and early May. If you would like to have me come to speak to any group of yours, please contact me and we can try to make the arrangements. The same holds true for any group anywhere in America. I enjoy going out to speak because it allows me to meet my readers. It also allows me to share some of the stories and insights that my journey through life’s “blue moments” has offered.

So, thank you again for your continued interest in my work. I will keep trying to earn your trust by doing my best in everything I write. It is the least I can do to honor the faith you have shown in me.

They will be visiting the headstone manufacturer this week. Then I will be able to update you further. They have also said they will write a letter that I can post on the website. Of course, there will be photos when the headstone is installed.

So, bear with us on this. It is coming to pass, due entirely to the generosity and good hearts of you people.

On other fronts, I continue to labor on the Joseph book. My deadline is June first. Someone of you once asked about my writing habits/ritual. Well, here it is:

I get up at about five, brew myself a cappuccino, and wander out to my little writing cabin in my heavy, ragged bathrobe. Sadie, our yellow lab, follows dutifully and scrooges herself under a corner of the desk, where she wheezes and blubbers and has dog dreams while I pull up the previous day’s work on the computer screen.

I lift my as-yet untouched cappuccino in a quiet prayer/salute to the day, then take my first sip and begin reading. If the gods have been with me, what I read engages me. If they haven’t, it seems disconnected and soulless.

On a good day, my mind and imagination immediately inhabit the previous day’s writing, and I come to the end of it as if it were my own current thoughts and voice. If that’s the case, I just pick up and move forward — the literary equivalent of a relay runner receiving the baton in seamless stride.

On a bad day, I either cannot find the voice of the previous day, or the writing seems forced and arch. I go back and begin fiddling and tweaking, knowing that I am not improving what was there, but not having the confidence to throw it away and start over. I try to wedge new facts in; I try to improve phrases; I add sentences or paragraphs that I am convinced are needed, but, upon later reading, prove only to break the rhythm of the narrative voice and the flow of the manuscript.

After about two hours, Sadie and I wander back into the house to make sure that the family is up. I pet the cats, talk to Louise and Nik while they get ready for work and school, then send them off and return to my cabin. By now the day has taken shape. If I’m on, I enter into the writing like a person enters into the reading of a novel. Sentences are not crafted so much as discovered. Thoughts and images cascade, and the whole experience becomes one of excited discovery. I am wandering through a new and unexplored garden, fraught with possibilities and surprising twists and turns.

I ride this wave as long as I can — usually until about noon. Then I stop, have something for lunch, check the emails, and fall asleep in a chair to reclaim the hour of sleep I gave away by getting up at 4:30 or 5. Then I either go back to work or blow off the day. Sometimes I will read — right now it is usually histories or articles on the Nez Perce. But when nothing is on my mind it will usually be Harpers, Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times book review, or something I pull up on the internet.

If my writing has captured me, I will wander in and out of the cabin, adding sentences, goofing with phrasing, maybe sitting down for another hour or two if the work calls out to me. This continues on and off until bed time, though it is rare when I can get much of consequence done in the evening. Between family conversations, irritation at political realities, television droning, or the flat, informational prose of the daily newspapers, I have lost the capacity for flight. I accept this with equanimity. Morning is my time, when the mind, the imagination, the heart, and the day, are fresh.

I happily embrace the ordinary and leave my writing for the following day, when it will once again either become a vehicle of magical transport or a stone that I carry up a hill that I seem unable to climb.

And so it goes. I could go on at length, but that is a good thumbnail. It is also enough for a single blog. I’ll write more soon. With luck, it will be an update on the headstone enterprise as it moves toward a happy conclusion.

But we’re coming along. I’ve decided to post my rough-out of the introduction so you can get a sense of what will be coming when the book is finally completed. I hope you find it interesting.

Searching for Joseph

Introduction

Books, like children, do not always turn out like you expect.

Several years ago, I set out to write a book chronicling a journey I intended to take with my twelve year old son. The way I envisioned it, he and I would travel the route followed by Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce as they made their tragic fifteen hundred mile flight from eastern Oregon to the snow-covered plains of northern Montana. There, only forty miles from the Canadian border and freedom, Joseph realized that his women and children and elderly were too weary to travel further. Giving up his own dreams of personal freedom, he walked out onto the windswept foothills of the Bear’s Paw mountains, handed his gun to the commander of the pursuing army, and spoke the now famous words, “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever.” It was, to my mind, an act of selfless nobility and incredible personal honor. It represented every value I wanted to inculcate in my son as he made his way forward in search of a worthy manhood.

My publisher seemed positively disposed to the idea. But somehow, in an editorial meeting held far from me and my life, the journey of a father and son morphed and transmogrified into a biography of Chief Joseph.

It was not a mutation with which I was entirely comfortable. As I saw it, the story of Joseph had been too often told, and too often by white chroniclers, distanced forever by culture and race (not to mention, historical methodology) from an inner understanding of the man and his people.

Or, at least, this is what I had been taught by my Indian friends. And I am not one to argue this point. I have worked among Indian people, lived among Indian people, taught Indian students, sat with Indian elders, and heard the bitterness and outright anger at what they consider the cultural and spiritual appropriation of all things Indian by our dominant and endlessly avaricious white culture. “White people should not write books about Indians,” is the common mantra, and I accept it. If they don’t want books on Indians done by white people, I don’t want to do them. End of story. It’s a simple matter of respect.

So, suddenly, I was face to face with the prospect of writing a book that was going to violate a basic moral premise in which I believed very strongly. A book that had been intended to be about the journey of a boy and his father, with a man set before them as a common guide and beacon, had become a book about the beacon itself. The buffer that was going to allow Joseph to be reflected, not appropriated, was yanked away, and I was left staring into the eyes of a man whose very being had, for over a hundred years, been twisted and manipulated by American culture for fun and profit. Now I was being asked to become the latest participant in this worthy tradition.

I did not know what to do. I had already spent a great deal of time on the proposal. I did, indeed, have the greatest respect and admiration for the man. And, in all fairness, I have, over the years, been able to do about as well as a white man can do in explicating Indian issues to a non-Indian audience. Plus, I needed the contract.

So, against all better judgment, and maybe, against some forces that operate in realms I don’t understand, I agreed to the project. I armed myself with every book ever written on the subject, every monograph that could be extracted from every library I could find, every newspaper account I could dredge up from every publisher’s morgue, and began to inter myself beneath the material, hoping to read my way to the surface with some kind of understanding and potential shape to the task.

But I’m not an historian. I’m not an academic. I got my degrees because I was capable of doing so, because I like to learn, and because that was the thing to do. I’m a person of the streets, a person of the casual conversation, a “hanger arounder,” a seeker of tales. It soon became apparent to me that if this book was to have any legitimacy and authenticity, the documentary resources I was poring over were going to have to be nothing more than background and context. I needed to go to the places. I needed to meet the people. I needed to find the story, not create the story.

And so it was that I found myself several thousand miles from home, wandering through some of the most beautiful, frightening, and awe-inspiring country I had ever confronted, in search of a man I was not sure how I intended to find. It was a daunting and humbling task.

The land through which I was traveling – the land where the Nez Perce live, and Joseph was born and raised — is known as the Columbia Plateau. Now, as when the Nez Perce were first confronted by Lewis and Clark, this great broad continental shoulder between the Cascades and the first outcroppings of the Rockies is almost unknown to the general population. It is “fly over” country, a blank spot on the map, a transition zone meant to be shot through or over or across in the fastest, most expeditious means possible. A few names might strike a momentary shiver into the hearts of people familiar with the west – Selway-Bitterroot wilderness, Hells Canyon, River of No Return, even northern Idaho itself. But to anyone other than smoke jumpers, this essentially roadless wilderness area is a dark and wooly terra incognita where small engine planes disappear in small poofs against inaccessible mountain sides and forest fires sweep across expanses as vast as the state of Rhode Island.

Wandering through this, I did not find those characterizations far wrong. This was, indeed, the land where Lewis and Clark had stumbled out, half starved, from the unforgiving mountains that had almost taken their lives and the lives of their men. It was, indeed, the land where a single road viable modern road was not completed across the mountains between Idaho and Montana until 1962.

It is a land of hillsides so vertical that a man must climb them on all fours, of the deepest gorge on the north American continent, where a man standing on the top looks down over a mile to a tiny silver ribbon of water that, in fact, is a cataract roiling over boulders the size of a house. It is a land of sudden precipices, of high mountain meadows and cobalt blue lakes, of bald, dun brown hills that roll like rumpled carpet until they disappear into a hazy, purple horizon.

Everywhere I went I was overwhelmed with the presence of the forces that created this landscape. The dry rivercourses with cataracts larger than Niagara, now only echoes of water that once roared over them making a vast inland sea. Mountains shoved up on impossible angles, a tectonic wreckage stretching for miles and covered now with endless expanses of dark green forest. Dried lava flows. Deep, impassable river gorges that cut like knife wounds into the flesh of the land. Rolling, grass-covered former sea beds.

I drove through these misted valleys, high mountain meadows, and dizzying gorges with something approaching awe. I could not help but feel a hint of what the white soldiers of the 1850’s and 60’s – fresh recruits from somewhere back east or foreign-born young boys trying to make their way in the new country – must have felt in the presence of this country. It was a sensation bordering on terror – a terror of scale, of vastness, of indifference. Of knowing that you could be swallowed up in this land and disappear without a trace. These were spaces of such greatness and emptiness that a wrong turn and an hour of walking could get you so lost, and so far from rescue, that your loudest cries for help could go unheard by another human being, your signal fires and gunshots to draw attention could be washed into silence by the rustling of the trees and the great, empty howlings of the wind. There was no doubt in my mind that the bones of many soldiers and trappers and miners lay unburied on these forbidding hillsides, and will remain there undiscovered forever. And the thought that settlers dragged their wives into this country, and told them to set up households in rude shacks and rough-hewn cabins made me shudder with a kind of shapeless dread.

Yet this was the land the Nez Perce called home. It was the place where they developed the most dominant culture in the native northwest, ranging out from their home villages on the plateau as far as the Pacific ocean to the west and the pipestone quarries of Minnesota to the east. It was on their trails that Lewis and Clark fumbled their way across the mountains from buffalo country; in their canoes and with their guarantee of safe passage that the Corps of Discovery made its way down the Columbia toward the great western sea.

These were the people who felt such confidence in their life and ways that they opened their hearts and minds to anything brought in from the outside. They were the people who figured out how to make the strongest and most accurate bows of any native people by reinforcing the wood with softened ram horn attached to the wood with a glue made from salmon oil; who learned how to geld horses using sharpened rocks, and could do so with such precision, that Lewis and Clark said their facility at the task exceeded that of white men with their metal tools. They were the people that would make a cradle board with a hundred thousand beads on it, who would swim across the ice-laden Salmon River every day all winter to keep their bodies strong. They were the people whose men often stood well over six feet while the American soldiers of the same era were averaging five feet six or five feet seven inches in height, whose women owned the lodges and food sources of the tribe, and were empowered to sell them for their own profit, while white women of the time were told to subjugate themselves to the will of their husbands and submit to them in all things under the control of God and man.

I was in a land of giants, and, like every white interloper since the time of Lewis and Clark and the fur traders, I had to either grow to meet the experience or shrivel to my quivering, domestic scale, and turn tail and run. In spite of strong inclinations to the contrary, I decided to grow into the task. I would traverse this landscape, meet the people, take the chances at rejection and downright hostility, speak the truth, show my heart, and see what emerged.

Now, this is the twenty first century. I did not expect to find bronzed men towering over me on horseback or women running onto battlefields to attack advancing warriors with hatchets. But I did expect to find men and women who shared some of the basic characteristics of their ancestors. And I was not wrong. From my first contact, I sensed that these people were different from the other native people I have known. They did not seem wounded by the dominant American culture so much as masters of it. And I don’t mean that they had become the proverbial “apples” – red on the outside and white on the inside. Rather, they had figured out what American culture offered, and had accepted it with a kind of contemptuous indifference, as if, though it had emerged victorious, it was not quite a worthy enough adversary to merit the expenditure of any emotional or spiritual energy. To put it a different way, they seemed bigger than the cultural battle they had lost.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this. The reservation at Spalding outside of Lewiston, Idaho – the primary Nez Perce reservation that sits on aboriginal Nez Perce land and contains the Nez Perce national historic park and museum — was the usual tragic assemblage of shacks and decaying houses with abandoned cars propped up on cement blocks. It was unemployed men hanging around a gritty cinder block supermarket, too many government vehicles and workers driving on too-dirty streets, kids wandering around in oversized jackets, too many of them smoking, too many of them too young to be doing so. But there was something else going on – something I couldn’t put my finger on – and I confronted it every time I stopped in a store or on a corner or to pick up a hitchhiker. It had to do with a willingness to meet me eye to eye – a “who are you?” that had an honest openness to the possibility that I might be a good man – not withstanding my whiteness – and that my skin color and auslander status would not necessarily be held against me. Conversations did not get shut down with one-word answers. Requests for directions did not get shunted aside with muffled “I don’t knows” followed by hurried exits. The people met me as I hoped to be met: with a cautious skepticism and a willingness to listen. In some strange fashion, I felt like I had begun to embark upon the trail of Joseph.

But none of my growing confidence and understanding prepared me for the response I would get when I mentioned the man himself. Eyes darkened. Body language changed. People glanced around as if worried that they were being observed. Some of this was, “Uh-oh, another white guy doing a book on Joseph.” But there was something deeper here, something more personal. Joseph touched a chord that resonated far below my hearing, and it was not some bright, sunlit major key harmonic.

All through the reservation I confronted this. In the National Park center at Lapwai, in the reservation headquarters town of Spalding, in the small village of Kamiah, where the strange mound of land called the Heart of the Monster marks the spot where coyote is said to have created the Nez Perce from drops of a monster’s blood. Everywhere I went, the openness and friendliness became a hooded ambivalence and reticence when the name of Joseph came up.

Confused and troubled, I drove the one hundred miles back across the Snake river Canyon and through the high, forested wilderness to Joseph, Oregon, in the Wallowa Valley where Joseph’s band once lived. Far outside any current reservation borders, Joseph is now a western single main street tourist town lined with log restaurants and massive post and beam hotels, and a plethora of boutique bronze casting foundries and their attendant galleries. Large, representational bronze sculptures lined the streets – high quality, high dollar, Charles M. Russell kinds of works, all depicting cowboy and Indian themes. The town was awash in romanticized Americana, all focused on frontier themes, all directly or indirectly related to Chief Joseph or his time. The Chieftain Visitors guide. The Chief Joseph Days Rodeo. Cowboy bronzes, Indian Jewelry. It was “the town that Joseph built,” right in the middle of the beautiful, isolated, Switzerland-like ancestral homeland of Joseph’s band. Here Joseph was not an historical figure, but a cultural icon, a brand, a hood ornament on the vehicle of American tourist enterprise. Joseph the man, and the Nez Perce tribe from which he came, were banished from this place of rafting expeditions and upscale wild west trinketry more fully than the Navajo have been banished from Santa Fe. I began to appreciate more fully some of the hooded glances that were cast at me as I had wandered through the Lapwai stating that I was setting out to do research on a book on Chief Joseph.

But it was in Colville, two hundred miles away in northeastern Washington that the issue started to become clear. Here, on the isolated, rolling hills of the Colville Reservation of the Confederated Tribes – the place where Joseph’s and the other non-Christian bands were ultimately forced to settle, I started to see into the cultural animosities and hurt that the Joseph saga had created.

While the white person’s “designer Joseph” is at Joseph and the surrounding Wallowa Valley, and the Nez Perce central cultural headquarters and historical center are at Lapwai and Spalding, here, at Nespelem, on lands shoehorned away from other tribes, the remnants of Joseph’s actual band has carved out an existence and an uneasy peace with eleven other tribes, several hundred miles from the epicenter of Joseph adulation, fame, and financial benefit. Here, also, are the bearers of the oral historical record of Joseph and his people, and many of his direct descendants. Though they feel the wounds of the historical distortion that has taken place, and the sting of the financial slight that has resulted from the appropriation of Joseph by the Lapwai branch of the Nez Perce tribe, they are not anxious to become part of the Joseph circus. But neither are they about to give away their knowledge for free.

A few stops at gas stations, and a few increasingly more circumspect inquiries later, and I was directed to some of the people in charge of the Nez Perce legacy in Nespelem, the main town on the Colville reservation. In short order I was measured, parsed, and dismissed, along with ominously coded messages about seeking contact with people without tribal approval. As if to emphasize the point, I was given a multi-page legal document that I was supposed to fill out and submit to the tribal council for consideration. It asked my purpose, my publication intentions, the names of people I intended to interview, and many other things that I don’t remember. What I do remember is that it gave the power of editorial review to the tribal council, and the ownership of copyright for anything I wrote to the tribe – both of which are impossible within the parameters of contemporary publishing. But it was classic Nez Perce – contemptuously benign, exceedingly competent, and utilizing the best of American laws and culture to achieve Nez Perce cultural ends. I was in awe of its sophistication and its capacity to block my efforts while appearing to facilitate them. Once out of sight, I crumpled it up and threw it in the wastebasket, as they knew I would. I drove out of Nespelem with my literary tail between my legs, convinced that I was involved in a hopeless, unnecessary, and fundamentally impossible venture.

But in the course of these widely separated stops and visits at these various towns and outposts in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, something had begun to happen. My naivete, openness, and immediate willingness to apologize for my task, had begun to be met with quiet sympathy by various individuals. I’ve always liked Indian people – probably better than I like most white people – and, as I am fond of saying, those who don’t like my skin color should take it up with my mother and the milk man. I didn’t choose my skin and I didn’t choose my time and place. But I did choose the way I incline my heart. A few copies of my books as gifts, a few honest expressions of confusion and vulnerability about the task at hand, and people had begun/began to open up.

Surreptitiously, I began to be told stories. People slipped me documents. I was offered the chance to hold objects that had been owned by Chief Joseph, or had been kept in families since the great exodus of 1877. I was shown special places, private sites of deep personal significance. As much as tradition would allow, I was told stories of the Seven Drums way of belief. I was allowed to hear family histories and family versions of historical events that had been carried in memory for generations, many of which were at odds with traditional white historical accounts. People were pouring something out to me, something that lay deep within them, dormant, wounded, hungry for expression.

I took this information like one takes the most precious of gifts – almost unhappy that I now possessed it, feeling the weight of a responsibility far too great to be easily born. Most of all, I was carrying the burden of conflicting stories, conflicting truths, and conflicting dreams, and was slowly being entrusted with the task of making sense of them and presenting them to the public in a way that did honor to the material, yet did not violate the heart and spirit with which they had been given.

It was everything I had hoped, and everything I had feared. People had opened up to me. People from the Lapwai, people from the Colville; people who were Christians, people who were seven drum long house people; people from Joseph’s band, people from other Nez Perce bands; people who were “government” smooth, and people who sold salmon out of the back of rusted pickup trucks.

On porches with broken boards, in cheap restaurants over Denver omelettes, in gas stations next to stacks of Pepsi, in neat and tidy houses over cups of coffee, on street corners where men met to drink Thunderbird wine at 11 in the morning — all throughout Nez Perce country a story was being given me – a story that did not contradict all the reading and research I had been doing so much as one that leavened it with a human heartbeat.

And through it all, one thing was becoming clear. The story of Joseph as I had been led to understand it was false. Not only was the standard image of Joseph as “the Red Napoleon,” the great military leader who had masterminded and overseen the great retreat, patently inaccurate – something anyone who examined the historical record already knew — but the man himself was much more complex, problematic, and shadowy than our history books had led us to believe. The Joseph of the popular imagination was no more real, and no less constructed, than the Joseph on the signage and chamber of commerce literature from Joseph, Oregon.

The real man was, in turns, elusive, self-aware, manipulative, strong willed, and supremely honorable. He was both affable and distant. He was not a fighter but he was willing to fight. He was not a vascillator but he was willing to listen and change. He was either very vain or very quick to see the American penchant for a cult of personality and to use it to his advantage. But, above all else, he was a man of his people, and was willing to do whatever was necessary to protect them from the indignities and injustices that were being visited upon them by the government of the country that had come into their land and completely changed the world in which they lived.

All of this had resulted in a great respect and deep ambivalence toward Joseph in the hearts of the Nez Perce people. He had become bigger than their tribe in the public imagination – a violation of a deeply held Indian belief that the group is more important than the individual – and he had contributed to this, even fostered it, by his willingness to become the repository of a misplaced and ill founded adulation of all things Indian. But he had done so for the good of his people, even though his band and the others who had stood against the American government, did not represent the totality, or maybe even the majority, of the Nez Perce people. Truly, he was a conundrum to the Nez Perce. To the outside world, Joseph was the Nez Perce, and it was because of him that the national government and the American public paid any attention to them at all. But to the insider, he was a prime participant in, and maybe contributor to, the physical fragmentation and internal division of the tribe that exists up until today. He had used the American penchant for celebrity to draw attention to himself, and whether or not he intended that attention to be transferred to his people, it ended up keeping the spotlight on him rather than on the complex and tragic history that the Nez Perce had endured.

To the Nez Perce on the street, the Nez Perce sitting in the tribal council, nothing was more predictable when they saw me coming than that I was one more overly eager, slavishly solicitous white chronicler come to the reservation to do honor to the great and redoubtable Joseph. I was just one in an endless parade of white sycophants, no more insightful than the next, no more worthy than the last. That they gave me any time at all is a testament to the goodness and forebearance in their character. By rights I should have been given the back of the hand and a one way ticket out of Dodge.

Yet this is not what I got, at least not from everybody. Whatever I had come with had opened some doors. Some people had decided to trust me. Maybe they had done so because they had axes to grind. Maybe their information was apocryphal and wrong, but they believed it and were intent upon getting it heard. Maybe they were simply flattered that someone who was writing something actually wanted to talk to them. But maybe it was because they wanted someone to try again. Maybe they were hoping that this was the white man who could get it a little closer to right. Whatever the reasons, all that mattered to me was that some Nez Perce were putting their faith in me, and were willing to trust me. It was not a trust that I was willing to betray.

I worried about this issue for months. I traveled the fifteen hundred incredible miles of the retreat, taking in the wonder and difficulty of the landscape, stopping at the battle sites, giving myself over to the journey as best I could. I spent days and nights on the bleak Bear’s Paw surrender site, wandering the barren hillocks and creek beds, shivering with cold on the edge of the shelter pits that the women had dug with frying pans to protect their families from soldiers’ bullets and the snow-driven high plains Montana winds. I journeyed across the emptiness of the Dakotas where the wounded and beaten captives had been marched on their way to exile in the distant Indian territory of Oklahoma. I walked the sweltering river bottoms of Kansas and the cruel flatlands of Oklahoma where the pitiful survivors were detained and resettled like prisoners in our great, free, American land. By the end, there was not a foot of this journey that I had not traveled, or, at least shadowed, and all I knew for certain was that this was a story of a people, not the story of a man, and that, to the best of my ability, it was a story I had to tell.

I became a man obsessed. I wrote ceaselessly, thought ceaselessly, cajoled and bargained with the literary gods. But nothing worked. Effort after effort ended up in the waste basket. My publishers threw up their hands. My family gave me up for dead – at least emotionally and in terms of human presence. All I saw, all I knew, all I cared about were huddled figures walking through a historical haze. Chief White Bird, a man of seventy years, but still willing to fight. Seeskoomkee. who in his youth had lost both feet and a hand to frostbite, but who still made the journey, and fought by rolling and crawling into position. Noise of Running Feet, Joseph’s twelve year old daughter who was sent off across the snowy Montana plains without her family to escape capture. Chief Looking Glass, the complex man of compassion and arrogance whose motives for going slowly in the face of danger were never completely clear. And Joseph himself, the reluctant leader and unlikely hero, lionized and feted by the white press after the surrender, and elevated to a cultural icon while his heart broke for his lost daughter and for the hundreds who were left behind in anonymous graves. These and so many others haunted me. They became my comrades and my friends. They were not Indians to me – any more than my friends on the Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota or the Nez Perce who had spoken to me in Idaho and Washington were Indians. They were people – people who had suffered and died in one of the most tragic and unjust flights ever forced upon one people by another.

A mother who is made to kill her infant because its crying will reveal their hiding place to the soldiers has no race. She is merely a mother, and no mother who ever lived can fail to feel the heartbreak that she must have felt in the face of this horrifying decision. A family that wraps their exhausted grandfather in a blanket and sits him gently under a tree, then rides away, because they have to escape before the soldiers come, has no color. Nor does a young girl who pulls away from her mother and runs back through bullets to get her favorite doll. Or a young boy, clinging for dear life to his brother on the back of a galloping horse, while flying bullets cut off one of the braids on the side of his head.

These were the stories I knew, the people who inhabited my heart, the faces, obscured through the mists of history, who became my constant companions. That their race had been the cause of their suffering, and that their suffering separated me from them, was undeniable. But the suffering and hardship also separated me from the frightened young immigrant boys of seventeen, mustered into the army because they had no other way to get ahead in this strange, amazing country to which their families had emigrated. And the little white girl of six who lay in the bushes with a broken arm after watching her mother be raped and murdered by drunken young Nez Perce warriors.

This had gone far beyond a racial story to me, though it was that. It had become a human story, and it haunted me and would not give me rest.

Yes, I needed to tell this story, and I needed to tell it in a way that did honor to the trust that had been placed in me by so many. But I needed to tell it my own way.

I could not presume to speak as an Indian, though it was with the Nez Perce that my sympathies lay. I could not speak as an historian, because I could not bring myself to objectify events and treat them with the bloodless accuracy that a solid historical account demanded. I was too close; I cared too much; I had made too many promises to myself and others.

Yes, I was aware of the dark symmetry, where one people, hopeful, moving west to find land and freedom drove another, heartbroken, to the east away from their land into bondage. I was aware of the historical injustice of our current orgy of celebration for Lewis and Clark, while the very trail that was given their name and being prepared to take hordes of tourists was, in fact, the traditional Nez Perce trail that had been known and used for generations. I knew that the Nez Perce exodus, one of the great tragic flights in human history, had been unjustly relegated to the status of a footnote in the historical drama of the expansion of America into the west. And I knew that Joseph had been distorted, elevated, and repositioned in the American consciousness to fit the needs of a public hungry for Native American icons and noble, tragic heroes.

I knew all of this, and I knew that all of these were worthy stories to tell.

But they were not my story. They were context and perspective, and though I would do my best to make them known, they were for others to tell. For me, the journey of the Nez Perce and the struggles of Joseph would forever remain a story of human struggle, incredible in its dimension, staggering in its nobility and tragedy, played out by mostly nameless and faceless people, from whom one had risen in the minds of the white public, hungry for heroes and insistent on putting a face on historical events.

This was the story I needed to tell. I could not do otherwise. It was what the quiet Nez Perce who had shared their stories with me wanted, and this is the hope that they had placed in me.

I might not be worthy of it. I might not be capable of it. But I would attempt it. We, as a people, need to see the humanity at the core of our national experience, whether that humanity is wearing powdered wigs and coonskin caps or beaded dresses and moccasins, and I must do what I can to help bring this to pass.

So this is the story I bring to you. If, in the effort, I violate some boundaries that my Indian friends might not have me cross, I am sorry. If I fail to give adequate hearing to conflicting historical interpretations of events, I stand accused. But in the end, I take my solace and guidance from Chief Joseph’s own word: “What I have to say will come straight from my heart, and I will speak with a straight tongue. The Great Spirit is looking at me, and will hear me.” If this was the standard he set for himself, who am I to hold myself to less?

“I was up last night at 4 A.M., wandering around, bored out of my skull.”

“You should have just called any of the rest of us. We were all up, too.”

It seems to be a malady/affliction of middle aged men, neither understood nor shared by our happily sleeping wives. I call us the 4 o’clock zombies.

It’s easy to say that we’re the victims of too much caffeine, too much stress, bad diets or bad living. And I’m sure there’s some truth to those diagnoses. But there’s a strangely positive side to these nocturnal wanderings, and it has to do with creativity and problem-solving.

If I’ve had enough sleep — and that means enough to allow me to be fully awake and alert –the early dawn is the most prolific and creative time for me. It’s as if all the dross and complexity of the previous day has disappeared and left me with a wonderfully clear mind. I can entertain a thought in delicious isolation from all other thoughts; address an issue with a singularity of focus that won’t be there later in the day.

This is no great revelation. One of the first lessons in Creativity 101 says to put a problem in your mind and sleep on it, and the solution will often emerge upon waking. But I’m talking about more than problem solving. I’m talking about a fluidity of perception, an openness to the rhythms of language, an ability to catch and ride a thought like a surfer catches a wave.

Thirty years ago, when I was struggling to find some form for my life, I was living alone in a cabin in Oregon, awash in an ocean of angst. I had dreams, but they were so grand that I couldn’t even wrestle them into shape. I remember writing a frenzied note in a journal that said nothing more than “God. Work. Women.” And that was about the best I could do to put form to my struggles and dreams. It wasn’t a road map, but it surely defined the universe through which I was traveling.

But what was so fascinating about this period of inner sturm und drang was the realization that if I went two or three days without talking to anyone — not a difficult task when you’re living alone, without a phone, in a cabin deep in the Oregon woods — I could pick up a book, read for awhile, and begin to write in exactly the cadences and thought structures of the person I was reading. It was both frightening and exhilarating — a kind of literary shamanism that contained an awesome capacity to transform. For by writing in the manner of someone else — with the same rhythms and distances between thoughts — I began to see the world as they saw it. Their language was an externalization of their perception, and by inhabiting their language I was inhabiting their perception. This was not the same as the inhabitation that comes from reading. That kind of transformation of consciousness allows you to see the world that the writer creates through the eyes that the writer offers you. But it is limited to the world inside the book. What I am refering to is a change in perception that extends to your understanding of everything you see and do in the course of your day. It is a transubtantiation of perception, a kind of temporary metanoia, where you become a different person with different eyes, a different intellect, and a different heart. And it only comes from taking on the style of someone else in the actual act of creation.

Of course, with the predictably poor judgment of a young man steeped too deeply in the Great Books and college humanities courses, I gave myself over to Faulkner, Herman Hesse, and a host of other characters who had maturity and insight, not to mention skills of language, that I was far too embryonic to handle or fully understand. I tied myself in creative knots by trying to emulate their styles, thus joining, at least for the moment, the legions of bad Faulkners and Hesses who wander the halls of college literature departments and creative writing programs. But, in the long run, that wasn’t important. What was inportant was that I was gaining a glimmer of their understanding of the world around them, because I was processing my own world through a kind of linguistic/perceptual grid that was born of the world they showed me through their thought and language.

My current four A.M. fluidity of thought is a variation on this same theme — perhaps not as intense, perhaps not as all consuming. After all, there are wives and kids and dogs and cats who will emerge soon enough to break me from any reverie. Louise would not be impressed to find herself sharing her morning coffee with someone who spoke in four page long sentences

But I do remember the transformative power of that state of perceptual and creative openness, and feel in these four A.M. awakenings an echo of that same power. What I do now is use this time to pick up what I have written the night before to see if I can enter into it with the same degree of belief that I possessed when I was doing the writing. If I find myself inside the writing, I trust it and continue from where I left off. If I find myself disengaged, or feel my mind wandering, I can assume that the writing should be crumpled and tossed. This is as close to an absolute assessment of the quality of my work as I am able to get. My four A.M. mind does not lie to me.

I cherish the times when I open my eyes and see sunlight outside the window. It means I slept through the entire night, and, at least for a day, can count myself among the normal people of the world. But when I get the four A.M. zombie call, I no longer try to fight it. I get up and fall in line. It’s not very romantic, and not very poetic, but that four o’clock zombie call is the closest thing to the voice of the muse that I’m likely to hear. The smartest thing I’ve ever done as a writer is to learn not to fight it, but to listen.