of a small school-book. A great number of the school now read them fluently.”
In the next year's report of the Secretary of War we read that “the Nez Percé tribe have adopted a few simple and plain laws as their code, which will teach them self-restraint, and is the beginning of government on their part.” The Secretary also thinks it “very remarkable that there should so soon be several well supported, well attended, and well conducted schools in Oregon.” (Not at all remarkable, considering that the Congregationalists, the Methodist Episcopalians, and the Roman Catholics have all had missionaries at work there for eight years.)
In 1846, the Nez Percés, with the rest of the Oregon tribes, disappear from the official records of the Indian Bureau. “It will be necessary to make some provision for conducting our relations with the Indian tribes west of the Rocky Mountains,” it is said; but, “the whole subject having been laid before ongress, it was not deemed advisable to continue a service that was circumscribed in its objects, and originally designed to be temporary.” The founder of the whipping-post in Oregon was therefore relieved from his duties, and it is to be hoped his laws speedily fell into disuse. The next year all the Protestant missions in Oregon were abandoned, in consequence of the frightful massacre by the Cayuses of the missionary families living among them.[1] But the Nez Percés, though deprived of their teaching, did not give up the faith and the practice they had taught them. Six years later General Benjamin Alvord bore the following testimony to their religious character:
“In the spring of 1853 a white man, who had passed the previous winter in the country of the Nez Percés, came to the military post at the Dalles, and on being questioned as to the manners and customs of the tribe, he said that he wintered
- ↑ See Appendix, Art. XIII.
