The Longest Trail: Writings on American Indian History, Culture, and Politics - Softcover

Introduction

Why an anthology of Josephy writings on American Indians now, a decade after his death and three, four, and five decades after most of the material was written? The answer is wrapped in his multiple writing personae and in his early conversion to Indian advocacy. In his 2001 memoir, A Walk Toward Oregon, he says that by 1959, well into research on the Nez Perce but before his first book on Indians was published, he and his wife, Betty, had become advocates for American Indians.

It all began with a chance assignment from Henry Luce himself to Alvin, then a Time staff writer, to do a story on Idaho. The assignment—ironically from a man widely known for his antipathy to Indians—brought this New York–bred east­erner together with a number of Indians who “influenced and changed” the rest of his life. It inspired a twelve-year investiga­tion of the Nez Perce tribe and the historical context of the Nez Perce War, a subject of little interest to historians at the time. The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the North­west, published in 1965, quickly established itself as a seminal work and the cornerstone of Josephy’s accomplishments as a historian of the American West and of the American Indian.

From his initial focus on the Nez Perce, interaction with Indi­ans of other tribes in the Northwest and then throughout the hemisphere led to a flurry of research and writing. Books and articles about Indians past and present began to flow, beginning with The Patriot Chiefs in 1961 (he had interrupted work on the Nez Perce history to write this book), continuing with the classic Indian Heritage of America, a National Book Award finalist, and ending with the elaborately illustrated 500 Nations: A History of North American Indians. Articles appeared in Life, American Heritage, Audubon, and many other publications, both academic and those meant for the general public.
'
Alvin Josephy was a friend and mentor to the editors of this volume for over thirty years. And in that time we learned much about the intensity and commitment that lay behind an exte­rior of quiet reserve. In 2001, in Olympia, Washington, while on a tour with Alvin in connection with the publication of his memoir, we learned that he had discovered the extraordinary Gustavus Sohon drawings of Northwest Indians, stuffed away in state archives, as he researched his book on the Nez Perce tribe. These are some of the only images of important tribal leaders of the mid-nineteenth century, and are now widely published. In Lewiston, Idaho, Nez Perce Indians—friends and the sons and daughters of friends—came to say hello and thank him for his work and friendship.

Also on that book tour across Oregon, Idaho, and Wash­ington veterans of World War II in the Pacific came to say that they too had been at Guadalcanal, Guam, or Iwo Jima. Some had read his first book, The Long and the Short and the Tall: The Story of a Marine Combat Unit in the Pacific, published in 1946, shortly after war’s end. Others had already picked up the new memoir and read the chapter that was the signal event in their own lives. Almost sixty years on, they quietly mouthed the names of beaches and battles, which sometimes brought them to tears. Alvin listened and responded, nodding and trading a few words, and signed their books—perhaps with a “Semper Fi,” the Marine Corps motto. (Once, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in dark Indian days, a Marine Corps emblem on a humble shack led to conversation and friendship—Alvin, like many of his Indian friends, was for­ever a Marine.)

It is important to an understanding of Josephy’s writing career that he came to Indian affairs less than a decade after his time in the Pacific. He had covered the war from foxholes, and wrote hundreds of stories about the troops in the front lines. He trusted the interview method and the stories that fol­lowed. When a young Nez Perce Indian told him some raw truths about his heritage, Josephy saw a “great American epic” that had been largely omitted from the narrative of “American” history. When he found first-person accounts of Indian life recorded by an eccentric Washington rancher named Lucullus McWhorter, published by a small press in Idaho, he decided that he would tell the Nez Perce story as part of the broader history of the Pacific Northwest.

Alvin had told us on publication of his first book on Indians, The Patriot Chiefs, that he found it most often under “Natural History” on bookstore shelves, and that he had determined then to begin his personal campaign to move Indians into American history on bookshelves and in American minds. He knew that the full, authentic story of Indian Country must be told from the Indian point of view, as well as from documents and narratives from a white world. On the tour for his memoir he still found some of his books misplaced under “Insects and Dinosaurs,” thus The Longest Trail is one more effort for Alvin to help “get it right.”

Other ideas that inform this book are here as well. The title The Patriot Chiefs was, Indians told Josephy over the years, the first time anyone had called their ancestors, who had fought for their lands, families, and cultures, “patriots.” Indians did not “vanish,” as has been often predicted—and sometimes proclaimed as government policy—but are part of America still, living on reservations and in towns and cities across the country. The fact of their survival as Indians and members of named Indian tribes is a kind of miracle. And their participation in American life today, in accordance with trea­ties signed by their ancestors and white governments thirsty for settlement land and “peace” with tribes, is a matter of fact and consequence to all of us, especially as Indian lands and treaties involve the nation’s waters, forests, and fish—our nat­ural resources.

Who really was Alvin Josephy? When asked how Alvin iden­tified himself, a family member said simply, “He identified him­self as a writer.” And a writer he certainly was—screenwriter, novelist, newspaper, radio, and magazine journalist, historian. Josephy first put pencil, pen, and typewriter to paper as a pro­fessional in his teenage years. Then, after an economy-forced departure from Harvard College during the Depression, it was on to Hollywood, to the New York Herald Tribune (among other journalistic venues), to the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent, to Time, Inc., to American Heritage as an edi­tor of books and magazines—these last at a time when he was writing respected history about Indians and the West (though without benefit of PhD or collegiate lectern). As he moved into the publishing world as a principal editor at American Heritage Publishing Company, there came a different challenge for his devotion to words—and pictures as well. The task called for little writing but entailed commissioning of other writers to put words on paper, suggesting ideas for articles and books, worrying about deadlines and an array of administrative details, and driving for higher book sales and magazine circulation. Alvin clearly was good at his job. He was responsible for the highly successful series of American Heritage book publica­tions, and by the 1970s had become editor-in-chief of American Heritage, as well as supervising all the company’s magazines.

Josephy had become a respected writer and editor on Indian and Western issues, but unlike most other historians and journalists, his activities led to strong personal relation­ships with the people he wrote about, and then to full-throated activism on behalf of American Indian rights and Indian social, political, and economic progress. His first appearance on the national stage was the preparation of a report on Indian affairs at the request of the Nixon administration. That report (which appears in this volume in abbreviated form) has been cred­ited as a key influence in Nixon’s proposal to change the entire direction of federal policy toward the Indians, from Eisenhow­er’s “termination” of Indian reservations and treaties in the 1950s to the concept of self-determination for Indian peoples. The Nixon presidential legacy is shadowed by scandal and res­ignation, but under his administration, urged on by Alvin Jose­phy, Indians began a slow but steady progress never thought possible before that time.

For Josephy, activism was a way of life, and he operated at many levels. At the request of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Josephy joined others in righting a sinking ship at the Heye Museum of the American Indian in New York City, and eventu­ally helped steer its consolidation with the Smithsonian Institu­tion in Washington. Josephy was the founding board chair of the National Museum of the American Indian, which has sites both in New York and on the National Mall in Washington. On a more local and personal level, he often acted as an informal travel guide, for example, writing a four-page letter charting the most historically important views along the route from Boise, Idaho, to Wallowa Lake, Oregon (as well as the best place to stop for pancakes). It was written for the benefit of three New York City visitors to the opening session of a literary event called the Fishtrap Gathering, in 1988. The event and the orga­nization, Fishtrap, which he helped form, continue to this day.

While Josephy’s activism on behalf of American Indians never flagged, from the 1960s to the end of his life, yet another persona developed on a more or less parallel track. In his auto­biography Josephy writes that during his work on a Heritage book about Yellowstone Park, “I became aware of a strange, redemptive change that had come over me.” The impact of the writings of men like Wallace Stegner, Peter Matthiessen, Justice William O. Douglas, and the poet Paul Engle, and the images of the photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, merged with his empathy for the Indian identification with the natural world, as well as his own love for the “unspoiled parts of the West.” Josephy turned his back on the “unrestrained exploita­tion of the earth,” which he had so strenuously promoted as a Time, Inc. journalist. Over time he became a “conservation­ist,” or what is called in early twenty-first-century terminology an “environmentalist.” This new commitment was reflected not only in his writing (three examples of which appear in this volume), but also in practical political involvement as a close advisor to President Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall. In later years, Josephy was known not only to have clashed with forces such as power and coal companies, but also to have been in close relationships with writers such as Edward Abbey (of Monkey Wrench Gang fame); William Kittredge, dean of environmental writers in the West; and the well-known southwestern writer and environmentalist J. R. Loeffler.

There we have him. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.—writer, editor, his­torian, activist, environmentalist. But one still may ask—how did the son of a cultured, upper-middle-class German-Jewish New York family become a devoted citizen and distinguished historian of the American West and defender of a tiny popula­tion of threatened Native Americans? The answer may come from two directions. First, the character of the man. He had a powerful intelligence, wide-ranging curiosity, relentless (some would say insufferable) perseverance, and a surfeit of what a famous sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin, called an “instinct for combinations.” (This last being the ability and desire to bring things together, people of varying types and dispositions or ideas of disparate nature, all toward a positive result.) Second, Alvin Josephy’s innate motivation, perhaps a hundred genera­tions in the making, was to help the world to a better place.

As editors, we learned much about Alvin Josephy and about American Indians in the preparation of this book. In the end, we hope it helps others learn what Indians have thought and done over five hundred years of American history. We all must continue to learn even more about how and why it is important for Indian voices to be heard, for Indians to be involved in national conversations—about resources, religion, and politics—today, and for generations to come.

Marc Jaffe
Williamstown, Massachusetts
Rich Wandschneider
Joseph, Oregon
November 2014