Nine Lives

THE PATRIOT CHIEFS (364 pp.)--Alvin M. Josephy Jr.--Viking ($6).

In the cold, snowy mountains of Montana, just 30 miles south of the Canadian border, a weary Indian leader of the Nez Perce tribe slowly rode up a hill where U.S. cavalry soldiers waited. Dismounting, Chief Joseph handed Colonel Nelson Miles his rifle and spoke: "I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed . . . The old men are all dead . . . The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food; I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs: I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

Good & Brave. With the surrender of Chief Joseph on Oct. 5, 1877, the last major Indian resistance to the advancing white man was broken. But Author Alvin Josephy Jr., a onetime associate editor of TIME and now an editor of American Heritage* is not concerned with the white man's inevitable victory but with the red man's valor in inevitable defeat. To the white pioneers, his "patriot chiefs" were hostile "bad Indians." To Josephy, they seem nine "good and brave men,'' whose profound sense of human dignity and love for their own people make them national heroes in the impartial eyes of history. Some of them were warriors, some statesmen; all, says Josephy, who knows his Indians, were tragic figures, "as much a part of our heritage as any of our other heroes and they belong to all Americans now, not just to the Indians."

Earliest was the 16th century's Hiawatha, who was not a Chippewa (as Longfellow's poem has it) but a member of one of the five Iroquoian tribes (either a Mohawk or an Onondagan). A cannibal like all Iroquois at that time, he became a mystic and prophet who united the five tribes into a single confederation. Then there was the Wampanoags' King Philip, who fought the Puritan colonists in the 1600s while his warriors defected or died around him, and who himself was killed defending his lands. The obscure Pueblo medicine man Pope led an uprising against the Spanish (and the church) in the Southwest in 1680, reconquered the New Mexico territory and held it for twelve years. The savage Ottawa chief Pontiac successfully took all but two British posts in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region; the Shawnees' great Tecumseh envisioned a united Indian nation that would sweep all white men into the seas and died leading his men against General William Henry Harrison near Lake Erie.

A Day to Die. One by one, Josephy ticks off his heroes like minutes in the slow countdown of history: Osceola, who fought to save Florida for the Seminoles; Black Hawk, who tried to save Illinois for the Sauks and Foxes; the magnificent Sioux Crazy Horse, who massacred Custer and whose war cry was "Come on, allies! It's a good day to die!"

Josephy tells his nine lives not with a bloodcurdling whoop but with a cool-blooded historian's perspective, sorrowing for both white man and red. The tone is summed up in his description of Osceola's death in 1838. Held a prisoner at Fort Moultrie, S.C., Osceola lay dying of malaria. He called for the post officers, the Seminole chiefs, and his two children and two wives. Rising from his bed, he put on his war regalia, carefully painted himself red, then shook hands all around. Then he grasped his scalping knife, laid his hands on his breast, smiled, and died. Soon afterward, the post surgeon, Dr. Frederick Weedon, cut off Osceola's head and took it home. Whenever he wanted to punish his two small sons, he hung the Indian's head on their bedstead.

* Where he compiled the newly published American Heritage Book of Indians ($13.95).

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