Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  As soon as he learned of the White Bird fiasco, Howard ordered still more troops to the front and asked General McDowell to obtain reinforcements from other departments. On June 22, five days after Perry’s defeat, Howard had assembled enough troops to march from Fort Lapwai to the scene of hostilities. On June 29, at the mouth of White Bird Canyon, another contingent joined. Howard now had more than 400 men in four troops of the First Cavalry (including Perry’s decimated squadron), six companies of the Twenty-first Infantry, and five companies of the Fourth Artillery serving as infantry. (Part of the Fourth, ending the military occupation of Alaska, had come directly to the seat of war.) Other units, rendezvousing at Fort Boise, were to maneuver so as to prevent the Nez Percés from escaping to the south.

  The Nez Percés crossed the Salmon River and plunged into the narrow belt of mountains separating it from the Snake. As Howard made preparations to follow, some of the local citizens convinced him that Looking Glass, whose village lay forty miles to the northeast, near the forks of the Clearwater, planned to join the hostiles. Actually, Looking Glass urged neutrality on his people, but on June 29 Howard sent Capt. Stephen G. Whipple with two cavalry troops and two Gatling guns to “surprise and capture this chief and all that belonged to him.” Accompanied by a contingent of Mount Idaho volunteers, Whipple reached the Nez Percé village on the morning of July 1. He intended to parley with Looking Glass, but weakly he let the civilians control the preliminaries and provoke a conflict. The Indians, some forty men with their families, fled as the whites sprayed the village with bullets, then destroyed it. Furious, Looking Glass abandoned his neutral stance and threw in with the hostiles.8

  Howard had no sooner gotten his men to the west side of the Salmon than his quarry, on July 2, slipped back to the east side at a ford beyond the mountains and some fifty miles downstream. Moving eastward across Camas Prairie, the Indians skirmished with Whipple’s cavalry and roughly handled several contingents of citizen volunteers. On July 3 warriors fell on a reconnoitering detachment of ten troopers under Lt. Sevier M. Rains and wiped out the entire party. On the south fork of the Clearwater, these Indians united with Looking Glass and set up camp on the west side at the mouth of Cottonwood Creek. They now numbered about 300 fighting men and 500 women and children. Scouts kept on the alert for the soldiers’ next move.

  On July 5 Howard had reached the ford by which the Nez Percés had returned to the east bank of the Salmon. In vain he tried to cross his column, disconsolately turned it back on the mountainous trial to the White Bird Crossing. Not until July 10, at last free of the twisted Salmon country, did he succeed in uniting all his command, including the cavalry from Camas Prairie, on the south fork of the Clearwater. For two days, July 9 and 10, a force of volunteers had been under siege on a hilltop west of the Clearwater that they dubbed Mount Misery. Howard hoped they would continue to distract the Nez Percés while he slipped up on their village from the south. Although this engagement ended on the tenth, it did indeed preoccupy the Indians while Howard closed on their rear.

  The route on march on July 11 lay northward across an open plateau east of and about 1,000 feet above the narrow valley of the Clearwater. Steep, timbered bluffs, cut deeply by a succession of ravines choked with trees and boulders, rose precipitously from the valley. To head the ravines, the troops kept so far from the edge of the bluffs that they could not see into the valley. The column therefore passed the unsuspecting village before discovering it shortly after noon. Then Howard announced his presence by firing the howitzers from too great a range to do any damage. While he reversed his march to attack the village, warriors swarmed into blocking positions. Posted at the edge of the bluffs and in two ravines, they ringed Howard on three sides and forced him to deploy on the open prairie in an elliptical perimeter defense some two and one-half miles in circumference, with the pack train in the center. For the next seven hours, until nightfall, the howitzers and Gatlings raked the Nez Percé positions, the two sides exchanged desultory small-arms fire, and parties of warriors thrust at the army lines probing for weak points and trying to silence the artillery. Both Indians and soldiers fought with a sustained desperation uncommon in Indian combat.

  The next morning the battle was resumed, although the Nez Percés, beginning to argue over strategy, pressed less energetically. Howard withdrew Capt. Marcus P. Miller’s Fourth Artillery battalion from the line for use as an assault force against the ravine on the south. Before it could be launched, however, another force wandered onto the battlefield from the south. This was Capt. James B. Jackson’s troop of the First Cavalry from Fort Klamath, Oregon, under orders to search out and join Howard. Trailing Jackson was a 120-mule pack train with supplies from Fort Lapwai. Howard dispatched Miller’s battalion to escort the newcomers to the safety of the defenses. On the way in, as he passed the head of the offending ravine, Miller suddenly wheeled by the left flank and charged. This move flushed the ravine of Indians. Instantly the main body of soldiers rushed to the attack. The warriors fell back across the Clearwater to the village, where all the Indians hastily abandoned their lodges and fled to the north. While the troops tumbled down the slope in pursuit, the artillery, advanced to the edge of the bluffs, opened fire and hastened the exodus.

  In the Battle of the Clearwater, army casualties totaled thirteen dead and twenty-seven wounded, two fatally. Howard claimed twenty-three Indians slain, although the Nez Percé later admitted to only four killed and six wounded. Again, as at White Bird Canyon, the Nez Percé had shown a surprising talent for fighting the white soldiers on their own terms. “They fought as well as any troops I ever saw,” marveled Howard. This time, however, they had been driven from the field, and Howard might well have ended the war had he pursued and rounded them up that day. Instead, after crossing the Clearwater to the abandoned village, he tarried until next morning. This enabled the Indians to cross the river near Kamiah and, after an exchange of gunfire with Howard’s advance guard at the ford, to put themselves comfortably beyond his reach.

  On the night of July 15, at a camp on the camas grounds of Weippe Prairie, the Nez Percé leaders discussed the next move. With forceful certitude, Looking Glass advocated a trek across the rugged Bitterroot Mountains to the buffalo plains of Montana. Here, he contended, the Nez Percé would find haven with the Crows or, if that proved illusory, perhaps even with Sitting Bull in Canada. Some day the trouble would blow over and they could return. There is a suggestion that Joseph and his brother Ollokot had grave reservations about this course, but whether they spoke in opposition is not known. White Bird, Toohoolhoolzote, and other headmen could propose no better move, and so it was decided. The next morning the calvalcade began the climb to the tortuous Lolo Trail by which, for generations, their people had surmounted the Bitterroots to reach the buffalo ranges beyond.

  The eastward movement of the Nez Percé, Howard later wrote, “really ended the campaign within the limits of my department.” One suspects that he would have been greatly relieved had responsibility for the Nez Percé passed to General Terry now that they were about to enter his department. But Howard had a command assembled, and Sherman had made it plain that he was to finish the job without regard to department boundaries. Also, newspaper criticism, intensifying ever since White Bird Canyon, was deeply mortifying, the more so when the press reported that the President was being urged to replace Howard with Crook. Even so, Howard delayed two weeks considering various plans of action and awaiting reinforcements with which to bolster the pursuing column and police the Indians in his rear.

  Finally, on July 30, the reorganized command broke camp on the Clearwater and, in a downpour of cold rain, headed for the Lolo Trail. Perry’s cavalry squadron remained behind, now under Maj. John Green, to patrol the Nez Percé Reservation. Replacing it was another squadron of four troops of the First, commanded by Maj. George B. Sanford, which had arrived from Fort Boise. The infantry, augmented by four companies, now consisted of a battalion of six companies of the Twenty-first, one of t
he Eighth, and one of the Twelfth under Capt. Evan Miles and a seven-company battalion of the Fourth Artillery under Captain Miller. The howitzer and Gatling guns, dismantled and packed on mules, were commanded by Lt. H. G. Otis. A 350-mule pack train hauled supplies. In all, Howard had about 200 cavalrymen, 360 infantrymen, 25 Bannock Indian scouts, and 150 packers and other civilians.

  The Indians, meanwhile, had reached the Montana end of the Lolo Trail, slipped easily around a military strongpoint settlers derisively labeled “Fort Fizzle,”9 and headed up the Bitterroot Valley. Citizens traded amicably, if nervously, with the unwelcome travelers. Veering to the southeast, the Nez Percé climbed from the Bitterroot Valley and on August 6 crossed the Continental Divide. The next day they descended to a pleasant camp site in the valley of the Big Hole River. Here, over the protest of the other chiefs, Looking Glass demanded that they pause to rest and cut lodge poles. The people were tired and without proper shelter since the Battle of the Clearwater. Moreover, the friendly attitude of the Bitterroot settlers seemed reassuring.

  The delay proved disastrous. Col. John Gibbon, commanding the District of Montana at Fort Shaw, had concentrated elements of his regiment, the Seventh Infantry, at Missoula. On August 4 he set forth up the Bitterroot Valley with six undermanned companies—15 officers and 146 enlisted men—riding in wagons. Later, 45 volunteers joined.

  At dawn on August 9 Gibbon led his men in a surprise attack on the Indian camp. From the very edge of the village they raked the newly erected tepees with rifle fire and, as the startled occupants tumbled from their robes and dashed for safety, exacted a heavy toll. Within twenty minutes he held possession of the village. But White Bird and Looking Glass rallied the warriors. Inflamed by the loss of so many tribesmen, they directed a deadly fire at the soldiers from covered positions on all sides. “At almost every crack of a rifle from the distant hills some member of the command was sure to fall,” recalled Gibbon, who himself caught a bullet in the thigh. So accurate was the Nez Percé marksmanship that Gibbon soon had to abandon the village and fall back to a patch of timber on the slope from which the attack had been launched. For the rest of that day and all the next, the warriors held the troops under close siege while their families resumed the trek to the south and east. By the night of August 10 the Indians had disappeared.

  The Nez Percé left Gibbon’s command badly shot up. Two officers (Capt. William Logan and Lt. James H. Bradley), twenty-two enlisted men, and six civilians had been killed, while five officers, thirty enlisted men, and four civilians had been wounded. One officer (Lt. William L. English) and one enlisted man died later. But the Indians had suffered even more grievously, almost entirely in the opening moments of the fight. Gibbon’s burial details counted eighty-nine bodies, many of women and children, on the battlefield. The Nez Percé had again outfought the army, but they had paid dearly for the victory—and also for Looking Glass’ intransigence in insisting on the halt that turned out so fatally. Thereafter the chief temporarily lost his preeminent position in the Nez Percé leadership.10

  As the Seventh Infantrymen set about burying their dead on the morning of August 11, General Howard and a small advance guard rode into Gibbon’s bivouac. The cavalry arrived the next day. On the thirteenth, as Gibbon headed for Deer Lodge with his battered command, Howard once more took up the pursuit. Already, however, even though burdened by wounded, the Nez Percé had traveled almost 100 miles. Turning west, they had again crossed the Continental Divide to descend to Idaho’s Lemhi River Valley. Frightened settlers gathered in the towns for self-defense, and militia companies formed to combat the invaders. Giving substance to the alarm, Nez Percé warriors killed four whites and seized 250 horses on Montana’s Horse Prairie Creek, and on Birch Creek, in Idaho, they plundered a train of freight wagons and killed another five whites.

  Howard’s Nez Percé guides assured him that the fugitives were following a favored route and would soon turn east, skirt the northern edge of the Snake River Plain, and cross Yellowstone National Park to the plains beyond. Howard saw an opportunity, by taking a shorter route by way of Red Rock River and Henry’s Lake, to intercept them at Targhee Pass, gateway to the Madison River corridor into the park. Having made a sound decision, he then wavered as ignorance of the country raised doubts and volunteer officers urged conflicting advice on him. (These volunteers, swarming about the command in undisciplined confusion, caused a great deal more trouble than they were worth. A newspaper correspondent scored the typical volunteer as “an undoubted fraud, having almost as little pluck as principle and as meagre a conception of discipline as a backwoods schoolmaster.”11) In the end, heeding the appeals of stage company officials whose line to the south was threatened, Howard crossed the Continental Divide at Monida Pass and found himself on the trail of the Indians—now, as predicted, traveling east again—one day’s march in their rear.

  On August 19 Howard pushed forward with as much haste as his tired command could muster and bivouacked at a camp site abandoned that morning by the Nez Percé. It lay on still another camas ground, Camas Meadows, south of Henry’s Lake. During the night some 200 Nez Percé warriors returned to Camas Meadows and precipitated a lively skirmish by trying to run off the stock. The cavalry horses had been picketed, but the Indians escaped with 150 mules. At daybreak Major Sanford and three cavalry troops gave chase. They had succeeded in recovering part of the mules when the warriors counterattacked so vigorously that Sanford ordered a retreat. One of the troops failed to fall back and, surrounded, fought off the Indians until rescued by Howard.12

  In addition to the stolen stock, Camas Meadows cost Howard one killed and seven wounded. Since he declined to press the fight—much to the disgust of the Bannock scouts—it also allowed the Nez Percé to escape once again. Compounding this humiliation, a command sent to block Targhee Pass and hold the Indians until Howard could fall on their rear concluded that they had taken another route and abandoned the position. Three days later, on August 22, the Nez Percé crossed Targhee Pass and entered Yellowstone National Park.

  Howard’s infantry finally caught up with him at Camas Meadows, and on August 22 they moved on to Henry’s Lake, at the western end of Targhee Pass. Here unit commanders and medical officers joined in pronouncing the men unfit to continue the chase. They were exhausted, clothed in rags, plagued with sickness, short on all classes of supplies, and above all discouraged over their continuing failure to overtake the Nez Percé. Most of the officers wanted to call off the campaign. Howard, faced with confessing failure and thus confirming increasingly strident newspaper criticism or pressing pursuit that appeared altogether futile, agonized in indecision. As the Nez Percé crossed Yellowstone National Park, frightening and scattering tourists and killing two, the troops rested four days beside Henry’s Lake, and the general and a few aides rode to Virginia City to buy provisions and communicate by telegraph with higher authority.

  A recent tourist in the national park had been none other than General Sherman, who had left shortly before the Nez Percé arrived. Now in Helena, he received a telegram from Howard, at Virginia City, on August 24. After reporting recent movements and present conditions, Howard stated that, if troops from the east could intercept the Nez Percé, “I think I may stop near where I am, and in a few days work my way back to Fort Boise slowly.” Sherman answered promptly and bluntly: “That force of yours should pursue the Nez Percé to the death, lead where they may…. If you are tired, give the command to some young energetic officer.” From McDowell’s adjutant general came language only slightly less biting: “The general in all kindness asks me to suggest to you to be less dependent on what others at a distance may or may not do, and rely more on your own forces and your own plans.” No other troops were closer to the Nez Percé than Howard’s, and it seemed to the division commander that Howard “will certainly be expected by the General of the Army, the War Department and the country, to use them in carrying on the most active and persistent operations practicable, to the very end.” Stung bu
t also re-energized, Howard fired off a wire to Sherman: “I never flag…. Neither you nor General McDowell can doubt my pluck or energy.” On August 28 his command resumed the pursuit of the Nez Percé.13

  Generals Terry and Crook were in the East, quelling labor riots, but General Sheridan had already taken steps to provide the hoped-for help from his division. It centered, as August gave way to September, on the towering, incredibly tangled Absaroka Range guarding the eastern flank of Yellowstone National Park. Two rivers offered pathways from the summit to the plains below—Clark Fork, flowing northeast to the Yellowstone; and the Stinking Water (now the Shoshone), flowing eastward to the Bighorn River Basin. Col. Samuel D. Sturgis and six troops of the Seventh Cavalry, a detachment from Col. Nelson A. Miles’ command operating against the Sioux from the Tongue River Cantonment, took station on August 31 near the canyon by which Clark Fork issues from the mountains. Two days earlier Sheridan had ordered a concentration of the Fifth Cavalry, under Col. Wesley Merritt, on the lower reaches of the Stinking Water.

  Until Merritt could reach his assigned position, Sturgis had to worry about both outlets. On September 8 a patrol sighted the Nez Percé striking southward, toward the Stinking Water outlet, and Sturgis moved swiftly to cut them off. Two days later, having ascended the Stinking Water expecting momentarily to meet them, he came on trails that disclosed a disheartening truth. Descending Clark Fork with Howard close in their rear, the Nez Percé had discovered cavalry blocking their escape route. Feinting south far enough to deceive Sturgis, they had doubled back to Clark Fork and safely gained the open plains. Not only had the Indians slipped by Sturgis, but so had Howard. On September 11 Sturgis caught up with Howard on Clark Fork east of the mountains.14