Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  Smarting with humiliation, Sturgis informed Howard of his desire to try by a forced march to overhaul the Nez Percé. Howard assented, and next morning the Seventh Cavalry, its horses fresh in comparison with Sanford’s, trotted down Clark Fork Valley toward the Yellowstone. The Nez Percé slowed, meanwhile, as parties of warriors raided settlements and killed a scattering of whites. On September 13, after tearing up the village of Coulson—now Billings—they waylaid a stagecoach and were playfully cavorting about on it when Sturgis’ column, having forded the Yellowstone, deployed to attack. The Indians ascended Canyon Creek, which here cuts a gap in the rimrock bordering the north side of the Yellowstone. Warriors fell back and skillfully fought off the cavalry while their families got away. Sturgis tried several maneuvers, all of which failed, and the Battle of Canyon Creek ended, once again, in the escape of the Nez Percé. Sturgis lost three men killed and eleven (including one officer) wounded. In addition, he suffered wide criticism for the timid—some intimated cowardly—way in which he managed the battle.15

  As the Seventh Cavalry splashed across the Yellowstone to engage the Nez Percé at Canyon Creek, a courier veered to the east. He bore a dispatch from Howard to Colonel Miles. Explaining how the Nez Percé had slipped around Sturgis and were now headed north, toward the Musselshell River, it asked if Miles could try to intercept or overtake them. For a month and a half Miles had closely watched the unfolding epic of the Nez Percé, hesitant to move against them because of uncertainty over the intentions of Sitting Bull, now in Canada. Howard’s dispatch, reaching Tongue River Cantonment on the evening of September 17, gave the energetic colonel all the invitation he needed. Before daybreak next morning he had ferried all his available force, five companies of infantry and two troops of cavalry, to the north bank of the Yellowstone.

  Miles’ column moved swiftly to the northwest, en route overtaking and absorbing four troops of cavalry under orders to meet and escort General Terry to Canada for conferences with Sitting Bull (see p. 285). The command now consisted of a battalion of four companies of the Fifth Infantry mounted on Indian ponies seized at the Battle of Muddy Creek (see p. 280), Capt. Simon Snyder commanding; a squadron of three troops of the Second Cavalry under Capt. George H. Tyler; a squadron of three troops of the Seventh Cavalry under Capt. Owen Hale; and about thirty Sioux and Cheyenne scouts. A breech-loading Hotchkiss gun, a Napoleon gun, and a supply train of two strings of pack mules and forty wagons guarded by another company of the Fifth Infantry completed the column, which numbered between 350 and 400 men. At the mouth of the Musselshell on September 25 Miles received word that the Nez Percé had crossed the Missouri upstream, at Cow Island, two days earlier. After attacking a lightly held military supply dump, they had moved on northward. Commandeering a passing steamer, Miles ferried his troops across the Missouri and raced to cut off the fugitives before they could reach the Canadian boundary.

  The Nez Percé had slackened their pace. Once more, as on the eve of the Big Hole, Looking Glass argued that the people needed rest and that the soldiers had been left far enough in the rear to permit a less rigorous pace. In fact, Howard had deliberately fallen behind in hopes of slowing the Indians and giving Miles time to get in front of them.16 Again Looking Glass prevailed. For five days, after crossing the Missouri, the Nez Percé halted early each afternoon. On September 29, having passed between the Bear Paw and Little Rocky Mountains, they laid out their camp in the valley of Snake Creek, a tributary of Milk River on the northern flank of the Bear Paws, about forty miles from the international border. A cold rain fell intermittently and clouds hung low on the barren prairie. They helped to conceal Miles’ soldiers as they emerged from behind the Little Rockies and marched across the open gap separating them from the Bear Paws.

  September 30 opened clear and cold, with ice on the streams. Moving west, the column cut the trail of the Nez Percé and turned north on it. Shortly afterward the Indian scouts found the village. About midmorning the tepees came into view. At Miles’ direction, the two cavalry squadrons moved left front into line and broke into a gallop. Hale’s squadron of the Seventh charged directly at the camp, while Tyler’s squadron of the Second, accompanied by the Sioux and Cheyenne allies, veered to the left and made for the pony herd pastured on the benchland west of the valley. Synders’ mounted infantry followed the Seventh as reserve.

  After a sharp fight Tyler succeeded in gathering up most of the pony herd. Hale, however, promptly ran into trouble. Remnants of ancient streambanks, cut by deep coulees, rose steeply from the valley on the south and east of the village. Upon discovering the approach of the soldiers, warriors had rushed up the cutbank and taken well-covered positions on the crest. At a range of 200 yards they opened on the charging troopers with the deadly fire for which they had become so noted. The cavalry faltered, then dismounted and barely held their own until Snyder’s battalion of the Fifth came up and helped secure the crest. The Nez Percé fell back to new positions closer to the village.

  The attack on the village cost Miles heavily, especially in the Seventh Cavalry. He had lost twenty-two enlisted men killed and thirty-eight wounded. Shrewdly, the Indian marksmen had concentrated on officers and noncommissioned officers. Their fire had felled Captains Hale, Myles Moylan, and Edward S. Godfrey, and Lt. Jonathan W. Biddle of the Seventh, Lt. Henry Romeyn of the Fifth, and Miles’ adjutant, Lt. George W. Baird. Hale and Biddle were dead, the others severely wounded. In the Seventh, only one officer remained unhit. Seven sergeants of the Seventh, including all three first sergeants, were dead, while three sergeants and two corporals had been wounded. Unhappily but prudently, Miles decided to suspend the assault and place the Nez Percé camp under siege.17

  “Excepting the fieldpiece that occasionally mouthed a shell into that seemingly deserted hollow,” recalled Scout “Yellowstone” Kelly, “the battle had degenerated into a duel between sharpshooters on either side.”18 Well protected among hills and ravines bordering the village, the Indians easily held the troops at a respectable distance. Even the Napoleon gun, converted into a howitzer by digging in its trail, failed to blast them from their shelters. But their prospects gave no cause for optimism. Several dozen more people lay dead or wounded. Among the dead were Toohoolhoolzote, Ollokot, and Poker Joe, the last a mixed blood who had served as guide ever since the Bitterroot Valley and whose influence had grown steadily. Surrounded, their ponies gone, their misery worsened by a storm that dumped five inches of snow, they clung to one bleak hope—that messengers who had slipped out under cover of night would find Sitting Bull in Canada and persuade him to come to their relief.

  This possibility worried Miles, too, as did the prospect of General Howard’s arrival to assume command and with it a share of the credit for the capture of the Nez Percé. On October 1, therefore, Miles displayed a white flag and invited a parley. White Bird and Looking Glass wanted no part of negotiations, but Joseph went forth to meet Miles. The talks were unproductive, and Miles, violating his own truce flag, refused to let Joseph return to his people. At the same time, however, Lt. Lovell H. Jerome, apparently believing the Indians were about to surrender, strayed into their lines and was likewise seized. Furious that Jerome had cancelled his advantage, Miles released Joseph the next day, and the Nez Percé in turn released Jerome.

  For five days, October 1 to 5, the siege continued as both sides exchanged desultory fire and suffered increasingly from the damp cold and snow. Howard and his aides arrived with a small escort on the fourth. To Miles’ joy, the general generously declined to take command until after the Indians had surrendered. To the Nez Percé, Howard’s appearance signaled the approach of more soldiers. Help from the Sioux seemed remote, as in fact it was. On October 5 the chiefs again argued over whether to reopen talks, Joseph favoring this course and Looking Glass and White Bird opposing it. The debate ended with Joseph preparing to meet Miles and the other two determined to lead their people in a desperate flight toward the Canadian sanctuary. Immediately after this council a bullet struck
Looking Glass in the forehead, killing him instantly. Joseph met with Miles and Howard. If the Nez Percé gave up, Miles promised, they could spend the winter at his post on the Yellowstone, then in the spring go back to the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho. Joseph returned to the village. His mind made up, in the afternoon he enacted the final ceremony. Confronting Miles as Howard looked on, Joseph uttered the moving, often quoted words that ended: “Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

  A little more than 400 people surrendered with Joseph—and less than one-fourth of these were warriors. The rest of those in the village escaped either during Miles’ initial assault on September 30 or with White Bird on the night of October 5, after Joseph’s surrender. According to the North-West Mounted Police, 98 warriors and about 200 women and children ultimately reached Sitting Bull’s camp.19

  The Nez Percé War had originated in the resistance of Joseph’s band to the government order to move to the Lapwai Reservation. Understandably, therefore, Howard and Miles had treated with Joseph on the basis of his return to that reservation. Without such a guarantee, he later declared, he would not have surrendered. But Sherman and Sheridan did not want the Nez Percé sent back, and neither did the people of Idaho. Accordingly, in November, over the vociferous protests of Miles, the prisoners were shipped down the Missouri and detained at Fort Leavenworth until they were placed on a small reserve in Kansas the following spring. Here, unacclimated, many sickened and died. A new location in Indian Territory brought no improvement. Tirelessly, Joseph worked for justice. With the powerful aid of Miles and others, he gradually touched the conscience of Americans and at last, in 1884, won permission to go back to the Northwest—but not to Idaho, for he and his immediate band still were held responsible for the Camas Prairie murders that set off the war. In May 1885, with about 150 followers, he was placed on the Colville Reservation in Washington, while the Looking Glass and White Bird people, 118 in number, were admitted to the Lapwai Reservation. Here they joined a scattering of other veterans of the war who had made their way back from the Canadian refuge. Their leader there, White Bird, had died in 1882.

  Joseph refused to give up hope of returning to his beloved Wallowa Valley in Oregon, and for years he agitated the question. In 1897 he journeyed to Washington and urged his cause on President McKinley and the general-in-chief of the army, Nelson A. Miles. Both Miles and Howard helped, and for a time the prospects seemed encouraging. But the whites of the Wallowa refused to part with any land for Indian occupancy. His hopes finally crushed, Joseph died on the Colville Reservation on September 21, 1904.

  The trek of the Nez Percé is one of history’s great epics—and great tragedies. In three months approximately 800 people—men, women, and children—traveled 1,700 miles across some of the most difficult terrain in North America. They outmarched, outwitted, and outfought all that the U. S. Army could throw against them. They left about 120 of their people dead on the trail, almost half of them women and children. They killed about 180 white men, mostly soldiers, and wounded another 150. Their just cause, their unity of purpose and action, their seemingly bottomless reservoirs of courage, endurance, and tenacity, their sheer achievement and final heartbreaking failure when on the very threshold of success, have evoked sympathy and admiration for almost a century.

  Such sentiments gained wide acceptance even before the flight ended at Bear Paw Mountains. Americans especially marveled at the humanity and military proficiency that characterized the retreat. As General Sherman wrote: “The Indians throughout displayed a courage and skill that elicited universal praise; they abstained from scalping, let captive women go free, did not commit indiscriminate murder of peaceful families which is usual, and fought with almost scientific skill, using advance and rear guards, skirmish-lines and field fortifications.”20 And Colonel Miles added: “The Nez Percé are the boldest men and best marksmen of any Indians I have ever encountered, and Chief Joseph is a man of more sagacity and intelligence than any Indian I have ever met; he counseled against the war, and against the usual cruelties practiced by the Indians, and is far more humane than such Indians as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.”21

  In appraisals like this by the men who fought the Nez Percé may be glimpsed the origins of a Chief Joseph legend that, despite the recent works of Alvin Josephy, Mark Brown, and Merrill Beal,22 continues to dominate the literature of the Nez Percé War. As chief of the Wallowa band and spokesman for the nontreaty Nez Percé, Joseph early emerged in the public view as the leader of the nontreaty Nez Percé. Later, when the fugitives repeatedly evaded and fought off their military pursuers, the officers thus humiliated portrayed Joseph as a strategic and tactical genius, a veritable “red Napoleon.” This image made their own failures more plausible, to themselves as well as the public. Howard was the main author of the legend, his prolific pen producing books and articles alike for more than a quarter of a century. Miles contributed, too, for the “red Napoleon” thesis enhanced his victory at Bear Paw. The death or escape of the other chiefs, Joseph’s powerful and widely quoted surrender speech, and his long and highly conspicuous life after the war served to reinforce the legend.

  In reality, Joseph was more a political than a military leader, and anyway, as in most tribal political systems, the important decisions came from a council of chiefs. In the Nez Percé War Joseph shared the leadership with Looking Glass, White Bird, Toohoolhoolzote, and others, including most notably, beginning in the Bitterroot Valley, Poker Joe. Except after the Big Hole, Looking Glass seems to have dominated the council fairly constantly. Joseph, in fact, did not assert significant influence until Bear Paw convinced him of the hopelessness of further resistance. Great and good man that he assuredly was, Joseph was not the principal Nez Percé leader, still less a “red Napoleon.”

  Although Joseph cannot be credited with brilliant generalship, the Nez Percé did display a collective military capability, as distinguished from individual prowess and skill, that amazed the professionals and made them look foolish. For army leaders the Nez Percé War afforded precious little glory. Almost immediately, however, they fell to quarreling over the division of honors. Miles, ignoring Howard’s long pursuit of the Indians and his generosity in letting Miles accept the surrender at Bear Paw, tried to claim all the credit for himself and his command. Howard, reacting to the slight, committed some indiscretions that angered Sheridan. Terry and, later, Gibbon became embroiled in the dispute, too, and at last Sherman had to indicate in emphatic tones that it had gone far enough.

  If the Nez Percé War produced any hero outside the Indian camp, Miles bears the distinction. He reacted instantly to Howard’s appeal for help, marched rapidly to cut off the Nez Percé, and attacked promptly and aggressively once he had discovered them. Although favored in several instances with unusual good luck, he displayed an energy and determination that proved decisive. But for Miles, the Nez Percé would have made good their escape to Canada.

  The bitterness of Howard and his men toward Miles is understandable. His arrogant assumption of full credit ignored three months of exhausting and frustrating campaigning. It also ignored the possibility that the pursuit so slowed the Indians that Miles was able to overtake them and so disheartened them that he was able to defeat them. Or, as expressed in the erroneous attribution to General Sheridan that got Howard into trouble, “General Miles pounced upon and captured a game which had been chased to death by Howard and Sturgis.”23

  Allowing Howard due credit for a long and wearing chase, he still may be charged with faulty generalship on several occasions. His attempt to neutralize Looking Glass, who was already neutral, added strength to the fugitive bands and gave them their most forceful leader; without him, it is doubtful that they would have held out so long or, indeed, even tried to leave Idaho. Howard’s overnight delay in pursuing the Indians after his victory at the Clearwater permitted the Indians to get across the river and regroup, thus losing him his best chance
of ending hostilities. Finally, his long pause on the Clearwater awaiting Major Green’s arrival from Fort Boise gave the Indians a lead in their flight to Montana that Howard never overcame.

  General McDowell, whose aide had arrived on the Clearwater battlefield in the final stages of the action, Percéived these mistakes almost at once. Writing confidentially to General Sherman on July 31, he stated:

  Professionally and playing the easy part of the critic, it seems to me Howard erred in counting on the immediate cooperation of Green’s command from Boise. He does not seem to have known of the time it took for Green to get his orders and for the troops to get to, and from Boise….

  In the second place Howard seems to have made a capital mistake in giving up the direct pursuit of Joseph after defeating him. I understand from my aide-de-camp that he did this on the theory that it was useless to attempt to follow a flying Indian! and that the only effective way was to try to head him off, and for this he laid back and waited for the 2d Infantry and Green’s force to arrive to make his combined movement….24

  Almost from the beginning, newspapers throughout the country scored Howard for the slowness of his march. On several occasions, an extra burst of effort seemed all that was needed to close on the quarry. This was especially true in the third week of August, just before and after the Camas Meadows action, near Henry’s Lake. However, the evidence is persuasive that, once he started up the Lolo Trail, Howard pushed his men to the limits of endurance. Surgeons and unit commanders united in declaring the four-day rest at Henry’s Lake imperative to prevent the command from collapsing altogether. Howard’s troops lacked the drive, stamina, and leadership of, for example, Miles’ troops, who had been fighting the Sioux for more than a year. Even so, it is easy to believe that at one point or another along the trail an energetic thrust would have won for Howard the distinction that finally went to Miles.