23. Anderson, “Indian Peace-Talkers,” pp. 238–39.
24. The negotiations are well treated in ibid., pp. 239–54; in Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk, pp. 237–46; and Olson, pp. 230–38. See also Crook’s annual report in SW, Annual Report (1877), pp. 84–86.
25. The surrender scene as described by the New York Herald is printed in Army and Navy Journal, 14 (May 12, 1877), 637. See also Olson, p. 239.
26. For this expedition, see SW, Annual Report (1877), pp. 497–98, 524–26; John F. McBlain, “The Last Fight of the Sioux War of 1876–77,” Journal of the United States Cavalry Association, 10 (1897), 122–27; Army and Navy Journal, 14 (June 16, 1877), 723; Miles, chap. 19; Johnson, pp. 173–76; and Grinnell, pp. 387–97.
27. SW, Annual Report (1877), pp. 55–56, 542–45, 574–75
28. Ibid., p. 545. Generals Sheridan and Crook, with their staffs and Insp. Gen. Delos B. Sackett, visited the post on July 24. Ibid.
29. CIA, Annual Report (1877), p. 19. As Grinnell (p. 400) describes it, the Cheyennes, confused and uncertain, were half persuaded, half forced to go south. The story of these people is told in Mari Sandoz, Cheyenne Autumn (New York, 1953). See also Verne Dusenberry, The Northern Cheyenne (Helena, Mont., 1955). This eighteen-page brochure is an excellent source of information about the Northern Cheyennes.
30. CIA, Annual Report (1878), pp. 36–38. Olson, pp. 235–46. Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk, pp. 248–53. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, pp. 294–98.
31. Bradley’s report quoted by Olson, p. 245. In addition to sources cited in note 30 above, see first-hand accounts in E. A. Brininstool, Crazy Horse (Los Angeles, 1949). See also Sandoz, Crazy Horse.
32. See the two books by Hyde cited above plus a third: A Sioux Chronicle (Norman, Okla., 1956), chap. 1. See also Olson, chap. 13.
33. Sandoz, Cheyenne Autumn. Dusenberry. Grinnell, chaps. 29 and 30. Powell, Sweet Medicine, 1, chaps. 15–17. Official reports are in SW, Annual Report (1878), pp. 39–50; (1879), pp. 77–78; CIA, Annual Report (1878), pp. xxii-xxiv, 56–57; (1879), pp. xvi-xvii, 58–59. Indian Bureau reports persuasively counter the stories that the Northern Cheyennes were starving in Indian Territory. The people who went with Dull Knife numbered 124 (40 men, 47 women, 37 children); those who followed Little Wolf 149 (46 men, 61 women, 42 children).
34. The son of the Henry W. Wessells who relieved Colonel Carrington after the Fetterman disaster.
35. According to Grinnell (p. 426), sixty-four were killed, twenty were sent south to face trial for depredations in Kansas, fifty-eight went to Pine Ridge, and eight or ten were missing and presumed dead. Wessells probably misjudged the depth of the Indians’ feeling, but having resorted to extreme measures felt he could not relent. General Crook excused Wessells, blaming instead the orders from Washington that prompted his course of action. SW, Annual Report (1879), p. 77. A board of officers convened by Crook mildly censured Wessells but concluded that the tragedy was unavoidable and that no blame attached to anyone in the military service. Army and Navy Journal, 16 (March 15, 1879), 571.
36. Little Chief’s Northern Cheyennes had been sent to Indian Territory in the autumn of 1878, just as Dull Knife and Little Wolf were fleeing northward. Discontented here, this band was allowed to return to Pine Ridge in 1881. Not until 1891, however, in the aftermath of the Ghost Dance disturbance at Pine Ridge (see Chapter 21), were these people allowed to go to Tongue River. Appropriately, this move was engineered, over the opposition of the Indian Bureau, by Maj. Gen. Nelson A. Miles.
37. An excellent account of the Sioux in Canada is Turner, The North-West Mounted Police, 1, chaps. 6–11. For location of various bands, see also Army and Navy Journal, 16 (Aug. 24, 1878), 43.
38. Turner, 1, 357–73. For the report of the Terry commission, see House Ex. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 1, Part 5, Vol. 8, pp. 719–28.
39. Miles to Sherman, Jan. 8, 1878, vol. 47; Sherman to Miles, Feb. 9, 1878, vol. 90, pp. 518–19. Sherman Papers, LC. SW, Annual Report (1878), p. 66. Sherman favored a command structure tailored to the number of line generals, which meant there should be one less department instead of one more. “If we make Depts for Colonels,” he wrote Sheridan, “there will be no peace or harmony.” Nov. 4, 1878, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, vol. 2, Sheridan Papers, LC.
40. Exchange of letters between Sherman and Miles, March 9 and 10, 1879, in vol. 91, pp. 119–22, Sherman Papers, LC. Sherman to Sheridan, March 9, 1879, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, Sheridan Papers, LC. Besides frustrating Miles’ campaign for a department, Sherman posted the Eighteenth Infantry to Montana. Its colonel, Thomas H. Ruger, ranked Miles. With Hazen and Gibbon, this made three colonels in the Department of Dakota who were Miles’ senior. He wrote Sherman that this was “the severest injury that has been done me by any official or friend.”
41. SW, Annual Report (1879) pp. 59–61. Sherman to Sheridan, July 19, 1879, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, vol. 2, Sheridan Papers, LC. Sheridan to Sherman, July 21, 1879, Sherman Papers, vol. 50, LC.
42. Miles’ report, Sept. 1879, in SW, Annual Report (1879), pp. 61–64. See also pp. 4–5, 43. Turner, I, 461–74. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, Part 2, chaps. 1–10. Johnson, pp. 217–21. Miles, pp. 306–10. Army and Navy Journal, 16 (Aug. 2, 1879), 954.
43. Turner, 1, chaps. 9–10. CIA, Annual Report (1880), pp. xxvii-xxix, 113, 116; SW, Annual Report (1881), pp. 92–107. Vestal, chaps. 29–30.
44. At the expense of the forcible retirement of General Ord. See p. 356.
45. Finerty, p. 249.
46. Dec. 13, 1877, House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, p. 237. For further discussion of this question, see p. 49.
47. See under appropriate headings in Prucha, Military Posts of the United States; and Frazer, Forts of the West.
48. SW, Annual Report (1880), p. 4.
Nez Percé Bid for Freedom, 1877
IN SEPTEMBER 1874 Brig. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard arrived in Portland, Oregon, to take command of the Department of the Columbia. Aside from a sleeve emptied at Seven Pines in 1862, he was widely noted for two conspicuous characteristics—an all-pervading religion and a well-developed social consciousness. During the Civil War, in which he rose to command the Army of the Tennessee under Sherman, the nation knew him as “the Christian general.” After the war he devoted himself to the elevation of the former slaves as head of the Freedmen’s Bureau of the War Department and as p. founder and president of Howard University for blacks in Washington, D.C. The assignment to make peace with the Apaches in 1872 afforded him an opportunity to apply his humanitarian instincts to Indians (see Chapter Twelve).1
Sherman frowned on his lieutenant’s somewhat ostentatiously displayed social and religious activities. He believed that soldiers should stick to soldiering and leave “education, charity, and religion” to civilian philanthropists. When unworthy subordinates and the vicious cross-currents of Reconstruction politics plunged Howard’s administration of the Freedman’s Bureau into scandal, he was glad enough to heed his chiefs advice. Sherman expressed satisfaction “that you have come to the manly conclusion to assume your appropriate place among the officers of our army,” and recommended him for the post vacated by Canby’s assassination, held in the interim by Col. Jefferson C. Davis.2
Lavishing his humanitarianism on the Indians of the Northwest, Howard viewed himself as their true friend and convinced himself that they viewed him in the same light. Actually, his powerful brand of religion, clouding his understanding of the equally strong and pervasive spiritual motivation of the Indians, inhibited genuine communication. A cultural gulf, the more dangerous because unrecognized, separated him from the chiefs with whom he dealt. Against this background, he thrust himself into the festering problem of the “nontreaty” Nez Percés.
The “nontreaty” Nez Percés acquired this label by refusing to subscribe to the Treaty of 1863. This treaty, forced on the Nez Percés when parts of their mountain homeland were found to contain rich gold deposits, greatly contracted the reservation originally set aside
for them in 1855. Most of the tribe settled within the new boundaries, mainly along Idaho’s Clearwater River. But the non-treaties did not. Among them were bands of White Bird and Too-hoolhoolzote, on the lower Salmon River to the south. Across the Snake River to the west, in Oregon, another band resided in the Wallowa Valley, shadowed on the south and west by the Wallowa and Blue Mountains and bounded on the north by the Grande Ronde River. These Nez Percés followed the venerated Chief Joseph—Old Joseph. When he died in 1871, his mantle passed to his son, Young Joseph, who swiftly displayed the statesmanlike characteristics for which his father was noted.3
As the Grande Ronde country began to attract settlers in the early 1870s, pressure mounted for the removal of Joseph and his band to the reservation in Idaho. The Nez Percés argued eloquently that Old Joseph had refused to sign the Treaty of 1863 and thus had never sold the Wallowa. Acknowledging the truth of this stand, the government in 1873 caused part of the Wallowa Valley to be set aside, by executive order of President Grant, as a reservation for Joseph’s band. But the vociferous protest of Oregon citizens and officials led to a reconsideration of the matter, and in 1875 the order was rescinded and the Wallowa officially opened to settlement. This breach of faith infuriated all the nontreaties. Eagle from the Light, White Bird, Looking Glass, Toohoolhoolzote, and other chiefs conferred with Joseph and, after heated debate over whether to take up arms, decided to try to live in amity with the whites. Despite the best intentions, however, coexistence was bound to be shattered sooner or later by an aggressive settler or any angry young Indian.
General Howard began to concern himself with the Wallowa problem in 1875. His sympathies, shaped by reports from officers at Forts Lapwai and Walla Walla, lay with Joseph. An investigation in 1876 by his own adjutant general, Maj. H. Clay Wood, strengthened his conviction that the Nez Percés had been wronged. His solution, however, was not to confirm them in the possession of their homeland but to compensate them fully for it and persuade them—if necessary, force them—to go to the reservation in Idaho. Although the issue remained primarily the responsibility of the Indian Bureau, Howard took the initiative in promoting this solution. The murder of an Indian by a settler in the Wallowa Valley helped him win the creation of a commission to settle the matter. In October 1876, the Secretary of the Interior appointed Howard one of five commissioners to treat with the Nez Percés. Also named to the commission were Major Wood and three easterners who knew nothing about the Nez Percés or their problem. Although not titular chairman of the commission, Howard led and the others followed.
The two-day council with Chief Joseph and other nontreaty leaders began on November 13, 1876, in the church at the Lapwai Agency, headquarters of the Nez Percé Reservation. The resolve of the Wallowa people not to part with their land at any price quickly became apparent. The commissioners were impressed with the sincerity and conviction of the Indians but also increasingly irritated by their stubborn refusal to bow to the wishes of the Great Father. The religious character of the ties that bound the Nez Percés to their homeland escaped Howard. Joseph’s repeated allusion to the earth as his mother struck the general as nonsense. Moreover, he tended to confuse Joseph’s spiritual attachment to the land of his father with the unsettling “Dreamer” cult sweeping the Columbia River tribes. This religion, the creation of a prophet named Smohalla, was understood to call for the destruction of all white people and was consequently causing government authorities serious concern. Joseph became the victim of a growing tendency of the whites to equate any form of Indian dissent with this incendiary new doctrine. The Lapwai conference ended in stalemate. The commission—i.e., Howard—recommended that, if further persuasion failed to move Joseph to the Lapwai Reservation “within a reasonable time,” force should then be used. The commission’s report won quick approval in Washington.4
Force, of course, meant the army. Indeed, the commission had also recommended that troops be stationed temporarily in the Wallowa Valley, and on March 7, 1877, the Interior Department requested their help in effecting Joseph’s removal. Secretary of War Cameron, General Sherman, and Howard’s immediate superior in San Francisco, General McDowell, all took great pains to stress that the role of the army in general, and of these troops in particular, was simply to aid the Indian Bureau. As with the Sioux a year earlier, the Indian Bureau, not the army, must stand responsible to the public if war broke out with the Nez Percés. Hence, McDowell cautioned Howard, “the paramount importance that none of the responsibility of any step which may lead to hostilities shall be initiated by the military authorities.”5
Howard’s leading part in the dispute with Chief Joseph had already in some degree compromised this objective. Even so, despite McDowell’s warnings, he continued to figure prominently in the affair. Agent J. B. Montieth’s efforts to persuade Joseph to move gave little hope of succeeding, and again, early in May 1877, Howard met with Joseph at Lapwai. This time the council took place in a tent on the parade ground of the fort instead of at the agency. Other nontreaty leaders appeared in support of Joseph, among them White Bird and Toohoolhoolzote from Salmon River and Looking Glass from the south fork of the Clearwater. In three days of often fiery debate, Howard rejected the Indians’ explanations and arguments and insisted that they move within the reservation boundaries. His intransigence, coupled with news that cavalry from Fort Walla Walla had occupied the Wallowa Valley, convinced the chiefs that no course remained to them but acquiescence or war. They acquiesced.6
Howard gave the nontreaties thirty days to move. Joseph’s people hurriedly gathered their stock and began the journey, enduring great hardship and property loss in crossing the rushing waters of the Snake River during the spring runoff. They joined the Salmon River bands of Toohoolhoolzote and White Bird and, on Camas Prairie south of the reservation boundary, paused to dig camas roots and wait out the time of freedom remaining to them. Grief, resentment, and anger stirred tempers. Again the chiefs debated the question of whether to go to the reservation or take up arms. On June 13 and 14 three young men of White Bird’s band settled this question by deeds instead of words. Fired by whiskey, they killed four whites especially noted for bad treatment of Indians. Ignoring the counsel of Joseph and his brother Ollokot, who wanted to try to explain to General Howard that the raid was unsanctioned by the tribal leadership, the nontreaties made their way south toward White Bird’s Salmon River homeland.
Reports of the killings reached Fort Lapwai by courier from Mount Idaho, a village on the eastern edge of Camas Prairie, on the afternoon of June 15. General Howard, desiring to be present when the nontreaties came in, had arrived at the fort the day before. The Fort Lapwai garrison consisted of two troops of the First Cavalry and one company of the Twenty-first Infantry. Ordering a concentration of units from elsewhere in the department, Howard promptly dispatched Capt. David Perry with all the cavalry, slightly more than 100 troopers, to the relief of the Camas Prairie and Salmon River settlers. Perry marched through a rainy night and all the following day. At Grangeville the next evening he learned of more atrocities. (That morning, seventeen warriors had primed themselves with firewater and embarked on a two-day killing spree that took the lives of about fifteen more settlers.) The local citizenry persuaded Perry and his officers to make a night march and try to cut off the Nez Percés before they could cross the Salmon River and lose themselves in the mountains beyond. After a few hours’ rest the cavalry pushed on to Mount Idaho, picked up eleven volunteers, and headed for the Salmon. At daybreak on June 17, exhausted by a ride of seventy miles and the better part of two nights and a day in the saddle, Perry started down White Bird Creek toward the Salmon.
The previous afternoon the Nez Percés had erected their lodges close to the Salmon at the mouth of White Bird Canyon, the gorge by which White Bird Creek dropped almost 3,000 feet to the river. Joseph later testified that they intended to gather their stock and, in an effort to avoid war, journey eastward across the Rocky Mountains to the buffalo plains, a trek Nez Percé hunting
parties had made regularly for generations.7 After dark an Indian picket brought word of Perry’s approach. The chiefs conferred most of the night and at length decided to try to talk peace with the soldiers, but if that failed, to fight. The village contained about 135 fighting men, but many of these, sodden with whisky, could not be roused. Some sixty to seventy warriors took station among the rolling hills and ravines that masked the village from the trail down the steep, grassy slope of White Bird Hill.
The Mount Idaho volunteers and a small advance guard under Lt. Edward R. Theller (an infantry officer on detail) preceded the blue column as it descended White Bird Hill. The Nez Percé truce party, displaying a white flag, appeared in front of the volunteers. They opened fire and the battle was on. Perry brought his command into line to charge. Against the front and both flanks the warriors, on foot, pressed aggressively and with deadly marksmanship. The volunteers, occupying a key knoll on the extreme left, stampeded when hit with a determined attack, thus exposing Perry’s line to enfilading fire. His troopers, many fresh from recruiting stations, gave way. Singly and in clusters, they fled back up the canyon. The officers could only follow, rallying some for organized defense wherever possible. Trapped in a ravine, Lieutenant Theller and eighteen men were wiped out. With about fourteen men, Lt. William R. Parnell fought a disciplined withdrawal to the top of White Bird Hill, where he joined with Perry and a remnant of his troop. Less than thirty strong, this force made a succession of defensive stands all the way back to Mount Idaho. Not until the command was reassembled and the missing accounted for could the price of the defeat be reckoned: one officer and thirty-three enlisted men slain. Three Indians had been wounded, none killed.
White Bird Canyon shook the army badly. The Nez Percés had demonstrated a leadership, discipline, and tactical skill that, added to the fighting qualities of the individual warriors, routed a superior force of regular soldiers. Howard’s commendation of Captain Perry and attempt to rationalize the disaster eased the humiliation no more than it concealed the military deficiencies that had contributed to the defeat—overconfidence, weak leadership, and poor marksmanship, horsemanship, and discipline. Although exhaustion of men and horses afforded some measure of explanation, White Bird Canyon was only the first of several episodes of the Nez Percé War that reinforced the First Cavalry’s reputation for mediocrity.
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