Sunday, March 1, 2015

Looking Glass (Allalimya Takanin) c.1832-1877


Looking Glass was the war chief who, along with Chief Joseph, directed the 1877 Nez Perce retreat from eastern Oregon to Montana and on to the Canadian border.  The son of a prominent Nez Perce chief, Looking Glass was born around 1832 in what is now western Montana.  Although he bitterly resented white encroachment on his tribal lands, he opposed going to war against the United States over it's plans to force the Nez Perce onto a small reservation assigned to them at Lapwai, Idaho.

When the Nez Perce and the US army first clashed at Whitebird Canyon on June 17, 1877, Looking Glass was already living on the reservation at Lapwai, as he had promised to do.  Nevertheless, General Howard believed that Looking Glass would soon join the fighting, and so sent a detachment of troops to arrest him.  As could be foreseen, these plans backfired when Looking Glass escaped arrest and did join the Chief Joseph, as Howard had feared he would do.

For better or worse, the flight of the Nez Perce exhibited the hallmarks of Looking Glass' leadership.  A respected battlefield commander, he convinced the tribe to attempt an escape to Montana, against Joseph's advice.  Looking Glass encouraged the Nez Perce to travel east and seek sanctuary with the Crow nation in Montana.  He had helped the Crow defeat the Dakota Sioux in a battle in 1874 and considered them friends. However, the Crow, fearing retaliation by the U.S. military, refused to grant the Nez Perce sanctuary.  Looking Glass then persuaded the tribe to stop at Big Hole, where he incorrectly thought they would be safe from attack.  After soldiers under the command of Colonel John Gibbon surprised the tribe there and inflicted heavy casualties, Looking Glass lost his prestige as a battlefield commander.

Nearly two months later, when the Nez Perce were exhausted and surrounded by General Nelson Miles and his troops in Montana's Bearpaw Mountains, Looking Glass remained stubbornly opposed to surrender.  At this extremity, however, Chief Joseph had concluded that  surrender was the only viable option, and on October 5th he rode out to Miles to turn over his rifle.  At this same time, Looking Glass set out to Canada to join Sitting Bull's band, but before he could make the border, he was shot and killed by a Cheyenne scout.  He died a free man, and a warrior. 



5 comments:

  1. A man worthy of the highest respect.

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    1. I realized that many indians scouted for USGOV, but I always thought of them as a species of traitor. And when you look at what USGOV did to the Indians and the treaties that were ignored for the sake of expediency, the whole traitor tag becomes a whole lot more clear - though it's also clear that USGOV used Crows against Souix and Cheyenne, etc. in a divide and conquer maneuver which Julius Caesar used a long time before they did. Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. And you'll never read that side of the story in a high school history text book.

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  2. However you choose to view history, the march of the white men across America was inevitable and the demise of the red men was also inevitable. Cut down by disease 100 years before the buffalo hunters and the arrival of the iron horse and a relentless wave of opportunistic settlers, hungry for land, yellow metal and whatever they could take from the land, settled the game.

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