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rown, the Indian Agent, suspected that the people who had reported the body were responsible for the death and advised against paying the
reward. Brown didn’t want to set a precedent of paying rewards for dead Native delegates, but he also did not want to accuse his suspects without evidence. So the reward was paid. The investigation ended quickly. Suicide remains the official cause of death. Scarlet Crow’s son, Sam Crow, petitioned Congress for a head- stone in 1912. Congress finally placed a marker on his grave in 1916 – 49 years after his death. The second mystery concerns Ut-Sin-
Malikan of the Nez Perce Nation. His aged marker is chipped and sunken deep into the marshy hallowed ground. His name is barely legible, eroded away over time, and many of the details of his story have also been lost. Ut- Sin-Malikan signed treaties with the U.S. in 1855 and 1863. In 1868 he was one of four Nez Perce delegates to travel to D.C. for the nego- tiation of a new treaty that would divide their homeland and also to petition for payment of annuities from previous treaties that had not been paid for years. The other delegates were Chief Tamason or Timothy, Chief Lawyer and Chief Kalkalshuatash, also known as Jason. The delegation traveled by ship from Port-
land to New York City, a four-and-a-half week journey. According to family history and the book Hear Me My Chiefs, Ut-Sin-Malikan was against the further division of Nez Perce land when he arrived in Washington in 1868. He became ill, and the official cause of death is typhoid fever. Most published works that in- clude his name simply state that he died from an illness. But the book Hear My Chiefs and family tradition maintains that he was shoved to his death from his hotel window. A Quaker who attended the funeral noted
the “Chiefs chanted what appeared to be a hymn, mournfully and very slowly. Then each Chief shook the hand of the (deceased) for some time, as bidding (him) a long farewell.” We may never know the details of his story but he is not forgotten by his family or his people. They still know where he is buried. He is hon- ored when the tribe visits Washington, D.C. Native Nations have a long political re-
lationship with the U.S. government. It is appropriate that evidence of this history re- sides in one of the oldest cemeteries in Wash- ington, D.C.X
Rachael Cassidy (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) is a cultural interpreter at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
44 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER 2013
Idyllwild • California
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