AP U.S. History: Period 6 (1865–1898) (Drill 21)

Question 1. Chief Joseph's repeated references to cold, freezing children, and the deaths of leaders most directly serve to

• A) appeal to the honor of General Miles by invoking the rules of warfare that obligated victorious commanders to treat surrendering enemies humanely
• B) document the specific military failures of the Nez Perce campaign so that future generations could understand the tactical reasons for the surrender
• C) convey the complete physical and human exhaustion of the Nez Perce people, establishing that surrender resulted from desperate material circumstances rather than broken will ✓
• D) argue that the United States Army had violated the laws of war by targeting civilians, women, and children rather than limiting combat to armed warriors

Explanation: Choice C is correct. Chief Joseph's enumeration of suffering, dead leaders, freezing children, no blankets, no food, is not a military report but a testimony of human devastation. The speech establishes that surrender comes not from a failure of courage or commitment but from the impossibility of continuing to fight while children freeze and the elderly lie dead. The famous closing line 'I will fight no more forever' carries weight precisely because of this catalogue of irreversible loss. Choice A is incorrect. While Chief Joseph acknowledges General Howard's word ('I have it in my heart'), the speech is not primarily an appeal to rules of warfare or conventions of military honor. It is a human statement of exhaustion and grief. Choice B is incorrect. The speech is not a military after-action analysis. Chief Joseph names fallen leaders but not as a tactical explanation; he names them as beloved individuals whose deaths contribute to the impossibility of continuing. Choice D is incorrect. Chief Joseph does not accuse the Army of war crimes or violations of the laws of war. His speech is a dignified statement of surrender, not a legal indictment of Army conduct.

Question 2. The Nez Perce flight of 1877, which ended with Chief Joseph's surrender, was most directly a response to

• A) the federal government's attempt to force the non-treaty Nez Perce bands onto a reservation and relinquish their traditional homeland in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon ✓
• B) the discovery of gold on Nez Perce lands in Idaho, which drew thousands of prospectors and generated federal pressure to extinguish Indigenous land claims during the years under discussion
• C) the completion of the transcontinental railroad through Nez Perce territory, which brought settlers and federal authority into previously remote areas
• D) the collapse of the Nez Perce's traditional buffalo-hunting economy due to the mass slaughter of the great herds by commercial hunters in the 1870s

Explanation: Choice A is correct. The immediate cause of the Nez Perce War of 1877 was the federal government's demand that Chief Joseph's band and other non-treaty Nez Perce abandon their homeland in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon and relocate to a smaller reservation in Idaho. When violence erupted during the forced removal, Chief Joseph led approximately 800 people, including women, children, and the elderly, on a 1,100-mile flight toward Canada before being intercepted 40 miles from the border. Choice B is incorrect. While gold discoveries did generate pressure on Indigenous lands in many regions, the specific trigger for the Nez Perce War was the forced removal to a reservation, not gold discovery on their lands. Choice C is incorrect. The transcontinental railroad's completion in 1869 transformed many western regions, but it was not the direct cause of the Nez Perce War eight years later. The specific conflict arose from the reservation removal policy. Choice D is incorrect. The Nez Perce were primarily a Plateau people whose economy combined fishing, hunting, and horse culture. While buffalo hunting was important to some bands, the collapse of the buffalo herds was a Great Plains phenomenon more directly affecting Plains nations than the Nez Perce of the Pacific Northwest.

Question 3. A historian studying Chief Joseph's surrender speech as a historical source would most likely note that

• A) the speech was delivered orally through an interpreter and subsequently transcribed and translated, raising questions about how accurately it reflects Chief Joseph's original words ✓
• B) because Chief Joseph was a military leader rather than a political spokesman, the speech should be understood as tactical communication rather than a broader statement of Nez Perce values
• C) the speech's emotional appeal to suffering children was a calculated rhetorical strategy designed to generate sympathy from Eastern journalists who were covering the campaign
• D) Chief Joseph's willingness to surrender when others continued fighting suggests that the speech may not represent the consensus view of the Nez Perce people as a whole

Explanation: Choice A is correct. Historians analyzing this source's limitations would immediately identify the chain of transmission: the speech was spoken in the Nez Perce language, interpreted into English by an Army interpreter, and then transcribed. Each step introduced potential distortion, the interpreter may have simplified or embellished, and the transcription may have imposed literary conventions. The famous closing line may reflect the interpreter's or transcriber's poetic sensibility as much as Chief Joseph's original words. Choice B is incorrect. Chief Joseph was both a military and political leader, the distinction the choice attempts to draw is not historically valid, and it would not be a historian's primary concern in analyzing the speech's reliability as a source. Choice C is incorrect. While Eastern journalists were indeed covering the Nez Perce campaign with considerable sympathy, there is no evidence that Chief Joseph was consciously crafting his surrender message for a media audience. The speech was addressed to General Miles in the immediate circumstances of surrender. Choice D is incorrect. Chief Joseph's surrender does reflect divisions within the Nez Perce leadership, some warriors, including White Bird, did escape to Canada rather than surrender. However, this political division does not undermine the speech's value as a historical source; it adds context to it.

Question 4. Chief Joseph's surrender speech is most significant as a historical document because it

• A) provided the legal basis for subsequent Nez Perce land claims against the federal government that were eventually settled in the twentieth century
• B) demonstrates that Indigenous leaders in the late nineteenth century were sophisticated political actors who used available channels of communication to advocate for their peoples ✓
• C) accurately predicted the broken promises that followed the surrender, as Chief Joseph and his people were not returned to the Pacific Northwest as General Miles had informally suggested
• D) represents one of the few surviving examples of Indigenous oral tradition from the late nineteenth century that was recorded in real time rather than reconstructed from memory

Explanation: Choice B is correct. The speech's historical significance lies partly in what it reveals about Chief Joseph as a political and moral figure: a leader who, in the moment of defeat, articulated the humanity of his people's suffering with dignity and without bitterness. It demonstrates that Indigenous leaders engaged the American political and moral discourse of their era on sophisticated terms, and that their voices, when recorded, offer perspectives on conquest that official military records obscure. Choice A is incorrect. The speech did not provide legal grounds for land claims. Chief Joseph continued to advocate for return to the Wallowa Valley through speeches and meetings with President Hayes and others, but the surrender speech itself was not a legal document that created enforceable rights. Choice C is incorrect. While it is historically true that the promises surrounding the surrender were broken, Chief Joseph and his people were sent to Indian Territory in Oklahoma rather than returned to the Northwest, the speech does not 'predict' this. It is a statement of surrender, not a prophecy. Choice D is incorrect. Many Indigenous oral traditions were recorded in the late nineteenth century by ethnographers, journalists, and government officials. Chief Joseph's speech is not uniquely rare as a contemporaneous recording, though it is exceptionally famous.

Question 5. The federal policy that most directly followed the Nez Perce War and other conflicts of the 1870s–1880s was

• A) the establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs as an independent agency with a mandate to protect Indigenous treaty rights from encroachment by settlers and corporations
• B) the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, which broke up tribal communal land holdings into individual allotments and opened 'surplus' reservation land to white settlement ✓
• C) a series of executive orders by President Arthur expanding reservation boundaries to compensate Indigenous peoples for lands taken during the conflicts of the 1870s
• D) the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted full citizenship rights to all Indigenous peoples as part of a policy of integrating Native Americans into American civic life

Explanation: Choice B is correct. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 was the primary federal policy response to the 'Indian problem' following the conflicts of the 1870s. Rather than protecting tribal lands and sovereignty, the Dawes Act attacked the communal land-holding system by dividing reservation land into individual 160-acre allotments, with 'surplus' land opened to white settlement. The policy destroyed approximately 90 million acres of Indigenous land between 1887 and 1934 and aimed to eliminate tribal cultures through forced assimilation. Choice A is incorrect. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was not established as an independent protective agency; it operated as an instrument of federal assimilationist policy, not a protector of Indigenous rights. Its actual history ran in the opposite direction from protecting treaty rights. Choice C is incorrect. No such executive orders expanding reservation boundaries were issued. The political pressure after conflicts ran strongly toward restricting and reducing Indigenous land holdings, not compensating for losses. Choice D is incorrect. The Indian Citizenship Act was not passed until 1924, nearly four decades after the Nez Perce War, and even then it did not eliminate the barriers to full civic participation that Indigenous people faced.