How Did The Nez Perce Massacre Summary

‘He was afraid that whites would harm them,’ Forse said. Joseph might also have realized that sending witnesses would accomplish nothing.
The next day, Forse sent a corporal to escort the Nez Perce witnesses. He also sent a letter to Brainard, ‘requesting him to see that they were taken care of.’ Less than a week later, however, Brainard dismissed the charges against Findley. The two Nez Perce witnesses had refused to testify. Perhaps they feared reprisal or felt their cause was doomed anyway. Either for personal or diplomatic reasons, Findley requested that his case continue, and he faced a grand jury in October. Once again, the charges were dismissed.
Because of the missing testimony, the Nez Perce version of the events remains obscure. Battle, imprisonment, and disease later killed many in the band. Yet one
Afterwards, Monteith wrote to General Oliver Otis Howard, commander of the U.S. Army’s Department of the Columbia, which had jurisdiction over the Wallowa country. Monteith’s letter called the killing ‘willful, deliberate murder.’ Yet he advised Joseph to let white law determine justice. ‘I told him to keep his people quiet and all would end well.’

Howard, a veteran officer who had lost his right arm in the Civil War, was a religious man who gained the nickname ‘Old Prayer Book’ for his distribution of tracts and Bibles to his troops during the war. He sympathized with the Nez Perce cause and sent Major Henry Clay Wood, his assistant adjutant general, to Lapwai. As a lawyer, Wood had studied the Nez Perce case and concluded that ‘The non treaty Nez Perce cannot in law be regarded as bound by the treaty of 1863.’ He was also critical of President Grant’s revocation of the 1873 Executive Order, saying, ‘If not a crime, it was a