“Death of Wahlitits and His Wife”

Duration:

14.481 seconds

Interview with Allen Pinkham, páax̣at háykatin (Five Rays of Light), Nez Perce

Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD

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“Death of Wahlitits and His Wife,” by Larry Milligan, captures a specific moment early in the battle at Big Hole during the Nez Perce Flight of 1877. When U.S. troops and Bitterroot civilian volunteers surprised the Nez Perce at dawn, the warrior Wahlitits (wá·laytic, Shore Crossing) and his wife ran out from their tipi near the river and found cover in a depression behind a small log. He told his wife to go hide for safety, but she remained by his side. Soon after killing a soldier, Wahlitits was fatally shot. His wife, despite being badly wounded and pregnant, picked up his rifle and shot dead the soldier who had killed her husband before being fatally shot herself.¹

In the painting, the expression on Wahlitits’ wife’s face is difficult to read. Is it surprise, anger, sadness, weariness, pain? They all ring true, not just for the particular moment she found herself in, but also for the larger context her people, the nimípu (the Real People), faced: the relentless dispossession of their homelands at the hands of white settlers and the U.S. government. It was the heartbreak of the Nez Perce plight, and in particular of Wahlitits and his wife, that caught the attention of Larry Milligan. “The incident lives in my mind,” he wrote when he donated the painting to the Big Hole National Battlefield visitor center in 1972.²

Wahlitits’ wife is nameless, as are so many women from the past. However, her story as captured in the painting – a story passed down for generations among nimípu storytellers and tribal historians – gives her a face and voice, if not a name.

Dispossession of a Homeland

Walhatits’ wife was one of 800 Nez Perce who left their homes in central Idaho, northeastern Oregon, and southeastern Washington in the summer of 1877 seeking asylum in Canada. Before the coming of white settlers and the treaty of 1855, the nimípu homeland covered 7.5 million acres of the inland Pacific Northwest.³ After gold was discovered on the Nez Perce reservation, an 1863 treaty, only signed by some tribal leaders, shrunk the reservation to one-tenth of its original size.

When the U.S. government forced non-treaty bands to move onto the small reservation, it led to violence and eventually the start of war. Yellow Wolf, a warrior who decades later provided memories from the war, explained that his people had made no trouble despite being killed by white settlers until “they wanted to put us in one small place, taking from us our home country.”⁴

The group that left included several bands composed of women, children, and elderly alongside warriors. Their flight was extraordinary.

While moving to make a new home is a central and celebrated aspect of the American mythos, for the nimípu, nothing could be more painful than leaving one’s homeland.

Identity and place were inseparable for as far back as collective memory reached.⁵ It was why in the aftermath of the flight both the Nez Perce who had been captured before crossing into Canada and those who reached asylum across the border relentlessly fought to return to their homeland.

• Allen Pinkham Interview - Time Immemorial

  
  

  Interview with Allen Pinkham, páax̣at háykatin (Five Rays of Light), Nez Perce

  Date created:

  01/03/2024

  Audio Transcript

  “This summer, I went up to a place on the Salmon River that was an archeological dig. And the archeologist that did that dig was there and we talked with him. And he told us how he found the age of that site – 16,000 years. And that kind of reminded me of, “Well, how long have we been here? We’ve been here for centuries and centuries.” Not since the Ice Age and the Bering Straight that we came across, you know, 13 or 14,000 years ago. We were here much longer than that.

  So, when you think about it – and I think about it: we were here since time immemorial. I’ve always said that, we’ve always been here since time immemorial. Well, I believe it’s beyond 16,000 years that we’ve been here because our creation, our genesis of us, tells us that we’ve been here since time immemorial.

  So, why should I change that because some archeologist told me, “Well, we can’t find any evidence of you being here.” Well, you haven’t dug deep enough yet. That’s what I tell them.

Nez Perce Women in Flight

Most accounts of Wahlitits’ wife note that she was the only woman known to have fired a weapon in the battle at Big Hole. However, tribal storyteller Allen Pinkham, whose Indian name is páax̣at háykatin (Five Rays of Light), emphasizes that Wahlitits’ wife was not alone. Many nimípu women were invested in the flight and defense of their families.

While women did not generally partake in combat, they played a crucial role throughout the 1,170 miles that the Nez Perce traversed during their flight. They set up and maintained camp life, prepared food, gathered wood, made clothes, and gave birth. They also cared for the wounded and brought men ammunition and water during battles. Allen explains that the women knew how to fire a weapon out of necessity and made unthinkable sacrifices for the survival of their people.⁶

The river at Big Hole, near where Wahlitits and his wife camped. The willow thickets surrounding the river bank played a crucial role, allowing for both concealment and entrapment.

NPS Photo

At Big Hole, U.S. soldiers indiscriminately killed women and children in the initial attack at dawn. Horrific accounts from both surviving Nez Perce and U.S. soldiers tell of women and babies being shot, crushed, and burned. One woman, Penahwenonmi (Helping Another), remembered decades later how she hid in the willow brush with a little girl under her arm. “Bullets cut twigs down on us like rain. The little girl was killed. Killed under my arm.”⁷

Remembering Loss

For many women, the stories from the 1877 flight were too harrowing to recount. Some nimípu, due to the loss of family and what they knew as “home,” chose to leave this painful history behind in the decades after the flight ended.⁸ When asked why it is important to remember the story of the death of Wahlitits and his wife today, Allen explained, “You hear these stories so we won’t repeat it again. That’s what my father always told me…..If you know what your history is, maybe you can guide what occurs to you in a better direction and nobody will die.”⁹

• Allen Pinkham Interview - Why Tell This Story?

  
  

  Interview with Allen Pinkham, páax̣at háykatin (Five Rays of Light), Nez Perce

  Date created:

  01/03/2024

  Audio Transcript

  You hear these stories so we won’t repeat it again. That’s what my father always told me. [He] says, “You listen to these stories because it’s gonna happen again.”

  If you know what your history is, maybe you can guide what occurs to you in a better direction and nobody will die.

For Allen, one central lesson to learn from stories like Wahlitits and his wife is the injustice of the war against the Nez Perce. “There is no just war if you take something that does not belong to you.”¹⁰ Allen’s words echo Yellow Wolf’s own words. Over fifty years after the events of 1877, Yellow Wolf told a friend, “War is made to take something not your own.”¹¹ Just as we will never know Wahlitits’ wife’s name, we will never know what she was thinking in those final moments when she picked up his rifle. What we do know, however, is that the loss of her homeland, and thus her very identity, was at stake.

Home and Homelands Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

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¹ This version of events comes from Allen Pinkham, interview by Nicole Martin, National Park Service, January 3, 2024. Additional details are from multiple accounts in Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, Yellow Wolf: His Own Story (Caldwell: Caxton Press, 1940), 133-136.

² Letter from Larry Milligan to Kermit Edmonds, January 28, 1972.

³ Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), xvii, 5. West cites an even larger area – 25,000 square miles – for the Nez Perce homeland.

⁴ McWhorter, Yellow Wolf, 35.

⁵ West, The Last Indian War, 309.

⁶ Pinkham, interview. See also Kim Briggeman, “Overlooked: Roles of Nez Perce Women and Children in 1877 War Important and Poignant,” Missoulian, August 5, 2017.

⁷ McWhorter, Yellow Wolf, 136.

⁸ Milton Davis, Jr., email to Kristine Leier, Nez Perce National Historical Park, National Park Service, April 8, 2024.

⁹ Pinkham, interview.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ McWhorter, Yellow Wolf, 18.