After Birch Creek the hostiles went south. Howard suspected that they intended to cross into the Nez Percé country of Idaho. Capt. Evan Miles and a large infantry force were moving north from the John Day while Major Sanford and another command held positions on the Grande Ronde. Ordering these officers to try to spoil the Indian plans, Howard took Bernard’s cavalry and headed for Idaho by way of Fort Walla Walla.
With Howard and the cavalry leaving the vicinity, the Bannocks and Piautes suddenly turned north again and descended on the Umatilla Reservation. Throughout, the attitude and intentions of the Umatillas had been ambiguous. When Captain Miles arrived at the agency on July 12, however, they gathered under a white flag to watch the action. Miles had a large force—seven companies of the Twenty-first Infantry, two of the Fourth Artillery, and a troop of cavalry. On the morning of July 13 he deployed these units in a sweeping arc to inclose the agency buildings. For about six hours a large warrior force probed cautiously at Miles’ lines and kept up a desultory long-range fire. Finally, in mid-afternoon, Miles ordered a general advance and drove the Indians eastward into the mountains.7
Two days later a party of Umatillas caught up with the Bannocks and Paiutes. By pretending to join the hostiles, they lured Chief Egan, already suffering from wounds sustained at Silver Creek, away from his warriors and killed him. His bloody scalp, presented to Captain Miles, failed to establish positive identification, but doubt vanished when the surgeon went out—“on an errand for the Medical Museum,” as he wrote his wife—and obtained Egan’s head.8
On July 14, the day after Captain Miles’ fight, Colonel Wheaton arrived at the Umatilla Agency. With him were Bernard’s six cavalry troops, whose march to Idaho had been stopped at Fort Walla Walla. James W. Forsyth, newly promoted to lieutenant colonel of the First Cavalry, had assumed command from Bernard. Wheaton launched Forsyth on the trial of the hostiles. On July 20 his advance skirmished briefly with a rear-guard party, but the rugged wilderness surrounding the head of the John Day’s north fork thwarted effective pursuit. Howard, meanwhile, had left Wheaton to patrol the stage road up the Snake to Boise and had hurried up the Grande Ronde with Major Sanford’s squadron to join Forsyth. The general caught up on the twenty-third, and four days later the column limped into the Malheur Agency.
By now, as Howard divined, the Bannock-Paiute coalition had dissolved, the Paiutes scattering in small bands over southeastern Oregon and the Bannocks working their way back toward Idaho. Dividing his army into battalion-size components, Howard advanced on a broad front, probing the deserts and valleys south into Nevada and east into Idaho. Although the fight had gone out of the Paiutes, the Bannocks left a trail of bloodshed and destruction. One band, emulating the Nez Percés, attempted to gain the buffalo plains and seek a haven with Sitting Bull in Canada. Troops from General Sheridan’s division, however, notably a small command under Col. Nelson A. Miles, cut them off in the mountains east of Yellowstone National Park and in several skirmishes drove them back to their home country.9
The war had ended in Oregon, the Paiutes now giving up in large numbers at Malheur Agency and Fort McDermit, Nevada. The surrender on August 12 of Oytes, the principal Paiute leader after Egan’s death, signified the collapse of Paiute resistance. As Bannock operations shifted eastward, Howard turned over field command to Colonel Forsyth and started back to his headquarters at Fort Vancouver, Washington. An engagement in Wyoming on September 12 with Bannocks brought the war to a close.
Altogether 131 Bannocks surrendered to or were captured by troops as the hostilities petered out. Held as prisoners through the winter at Camp Brown and Forts Keogh and Hall, they were released the following summer to return to their reservation. The Paiute prisoners, about 600 in number, were placed under guard at Camp Harney and ultimately moved to the Yakima Reservation in Washington. The Malheur Reservation was officially closed.
The Bannock-Paiute uprising invites comparison with the Nez Percé bid for freedom. Approximately the same number of Indians led their pursuers in a long-distance chase through exceedingly difficult country and at last, worn out and decimated, succumbed to superior force. The distance of the chase was less by about half and there were considerably fewer casualties on both sides—nine soldiers killed and fifteen wounded, thirty-one citizens slain, and seventy-eight Indians reported dead. More than 1,000 soldiers were pitted against the Bannocks and Paiutes—slightly less than those against the Nez Percés if the commands of Gibbon, Sturgis, and Miles are reckoned along with Howard’s. The army achieved battlefield successes in 1878 that eluded it in 1877. In some ways, however, the campaign against the Bannocks and Paiutes raised greater challenges than the Nez Percé operations. The lava-strewn deserts of southeastern Oregon, almost bereft of grass and water, rapidly used up both men and animals and immensely complicated the supply problem. So, too, did the jumble of mountains and canyons farther north. Summer heat aggravated the demands of rugged terrain. Rightly did General Howard conclude: “The campaign has been a hard, long, and expensive one. Many of the troops have marched greater distances than during the Nez Percé war, and in all the services I have been called upon to render the government I have never known officers and soldiers to encounter and overcome greater obstacles.”10
Howard himself turned in a better performance in 1878 than in 1877. That the Bannocks and Paiutes did not equal the Nez Percés in military skills detracts only slightly from Howard’s record of tenacious pursuit and effective maneuver of supporting and blocking elements. Captain Bernard shares considerable credit for the tenacity; he could get more out of horses and horsemen than the other senior officers of the First Cavalry. But Howard almost alone deserves praise for the manipulation of many commands over a large and rugged expanse of territory in such manner as to box the quarry and leave no alternative but to fight or scatter. Walled in when they reached the Umatilla country, the hostiles fought twice, then scattered. The mop-up operation, too, was organized in a comprehensive fashion that, except for the Canada-bound Bannocks, led to the prompt surrender of most of the fugitives. Thus did the Bannock-Paiute War enable the one-armed “praying general” to gloss over the stains left on his reputation by the Nez Percé War.
Some of the Bannocks Howard chased back to Idaho took refuge in the Salmon River Mountains, which give rise to the middle and south forks of the Salmon River. A scattering of Sheepeaters—Indians whose origins are obscure but who were locally regarded as “renegade” Bannocks and Shoshonis—had led a marginal existence in these mountains for years. Although sometimes mildly troublesome, usually they did not bother the handful of whites in the area. With them the Bannocks spent the winter of 1878—79. Early in May 1879 word reached General Howard from the Lemhi agent that in February Indians had killed five Chinese prospectors on Loon Creek, a tributary of the Salmon’s middle fork. Howard at once issued instructions for Captain Bernard to lead his troop of the First Cavalry from Boise Barracks to search out the murderers, and for an equal force, about fifty mounted Second Infantrymen under Lt. Henry Catley, to strike southwest from Camp Howard, a temporary post near Grangeville, Idaho. Later, the general dispatched a force of twenty Indian scouts enlisted at the Umatilla Agency by Lts. Edward S. Farrow and William C. Brown. Whether Bannocks or Sheepeaters committed the Loon Creek murders, the operations of 1879 have become known as the Sheep-eater War.11
It was a war less against Indians—they probably mustered no more than thirty fighting men—than against one of the most rugged wildernesses in North America. Towering mountains loom over canyons so deep and narrow that the sun lights the bottom only at midday. Winter comes early and lingers late. Although Bernard and Catley took the field in June, not until mid-July did snowpacks melt enough to open a way to the heart of the Sheepeater domain. Fallen timber obstructed the march through the mountains, and cliffs and boulders made streams almost impossible to follow. Stock gave out by the dozen. Bernard wrote of “pack-mules being carried down-stream, rolling down mountains, causing the loss of many rati
ons and other supplies.” “The country is no doubt as rough as any in the United States,” he reported on July 15, “and to get at the Indians will be a work of great difficulty.”12
Bernard failed to find the Indians, but they found Lieutenant Catley. In late July he picked up an Indian trail leading down the canyon of Big Creek, a stream flowing east into the middle fork of the Salmon. Ambushed by about fifteen warriors on July 29, Catley retreated to his pack train. The next day he tried to climb out of the canyon. The Indians, however, surrounded him on an eminence called Vinegar Hill and attempted to burn him out. Backfires barely averted disaster. Abandoning most of their baggage, Catley and his fifty men slipped out of the trap during the night and headed for home. Learning of this reverse. Colonel Wheaton, at Fort Lapwai, dispatched an officer to face Catley back toward the Indians and ordered Capt. Albert G. Forse, with twenty-five First Cavalrymen, to take over Catley’s command. The lieutenant’s “precipitate retreat before inferior numbers is astounding,” stormed General Howard.13 A court-martial later convicted him of misconduct, but the President set aside the sentence of dismissal from the service.
On the south fork of the Salmon, at the mouth of Elk Creek, Bernard united his troop with Farrow’s scouts and Forse’s infantry and cavalry. On August 13 they set forth for the area in which Catley had found the Indians. Six days later, in Big Creek Canyon near the scene of the Vinegar Hill fight, the Umatilla scouts captured a Sheepeater camp with all its contents, including some of Catley’s baggage, but the inhabitants escaped. Next morning the Indians attacked the supply train, which was still forming, under light escort, after the columns had begun the day’s march. Driven off, they scattered through the mountains. With no trail to follow, the troops, badly worn and short on rations, won permission from General Howard to call off the campaign and return to their posts.
Lieutenant Farrow secured Howard’s blessing for one last try at rounding up the enemy. After obtaining fresh supplies, on September 16 he and Brown with their Umatillas once more plunged into the Sheepeaters’ wilderness homeland. Frigid nights warned of winter’s approach. On the twenty-first, the scouts picked up a trail and captured two women, a boy, and an infant. At daybreak next morning, in the Salmon canyon below the mouth of the middle fork, they charged into a Sheepeater camp, only to find that once more the occupants had escaped. But the constant pursuit was wearing them down, and communication established with them through the captured women raised the hope of surrender. For more than a week Farrow patiently worked on the hostiles while his supplies dwindled dangerously and, beginning on the twenty-eighth, a four-day storm drenched the antagonists alternately with rain, snow, and sleet. At last, on October 1 and 2, a total of fifty-one Indians—men, women, and children—straggled into Farrow’s camp and gave up. Most were Sheepeaters. Their Bannock friends, who were largely responsible for getting them into trouble in the first place, had slipped away and doubtless later lost themselves among their brethren on the Lemhi Reservation. After spending the winter at Fort Vancouver, the Sheepeater prisoners were placed on the Fort Hall Reservation.
In the Sheepeater conflict the soldiers of Bernard, Catley, and Forse performed a minor miracle in even surviving through three months of campaigning in the forbidding Salmon River Range. In such country, even an experienced leader like Bernard could not bring to bay a handful of natives well adapted to their alpine environment. As he complained, “Should they discover us before we do them, they can hide in the timbered rocky mountains for a long time and go from point to point much faster than we can, even if we knew where to go.”14 As so often happened, Indian allies furnished the Regulars with the key to success. Bernard, Forse, and Catley helped wear out the Sheepeaters. But Farrow, Brown, and the Umatillas twice seized their camp and finally, after the others had left the field, ran them down and convinced them to surrender. The scouts and their officers, Howard concluded, “deserve special mention for gallantry, energy, and perseverance, resulting in success.”15
Friendly neighbors of the Bannocks and Paiutes, and also linguistically related, the Utes occupied the basin of the upper Colorado River between the Rocky Mountains and the Wasatch Range in Utah and extended south and east across the San Luis Valley into northern New Mexico. A powerful, warlike people, superlative horsemen, skilled huntsmen, they regularly followed the buffalo on the Plains east of the mountains and carried on intermittent warfare with the Plains tribes. Also, like their Navajo enemies to the south, they tended herds of cattle and sheep. The Utes began to associate regularly with whites along the eastern and southern edges of their domain in the 1850s and 1860s. Occasionally they fought with the interlopers—most notably in a war of 1855—but more often joined them as auxiliaries in campaigns against the Navajos and the Plains tribes.16
In 1868 a treaty commission, that included the Utes’ long-time friend and one-time agent Kit Carson, worked out an arrangement with the seven Colorado bands by which they accepted a generous slice of western Colorado as their reservation and relinquished claim to all other territory. Two bands (Yampa and Grand River) affiliated with an agency established on White River, in the remote northern part of the reservation, and the others (Tabeguache, Un-compahgre, Moache, Capote, and Wiminuche) with two agencies in the southern part of the reservation. The affiliation was largely nominal, the Indians continuing to roam much as they always had, but by 1878 the agents reported 800 people enrolled at White River, 2,000 at Los Pinos, and 934 at Southern Ute. The Uintah Valley Agency, in northeastern Utah, claimed another 430 Utes of the Uintah band.17
The most powerful Ute chieftain was Ouray, a wise and articulate statesman with a ready wit and a penetrating ability to expose the pretenses by which white officials sought to mask their acquisitive enterprises. Ouray, an Uncompahgre, lived in the south, was associated with Los Pinos Agency. Principal chiefs at White River were Douglas and Jack. Neither exerted more than local influence.
In the 1870s new mineral strikes in Colorado subjected the Utes to severe stress. The silver boom gave rise to mining camps all over the Rockies and spilled prospectors down the western slope toward Ute territory. Silver strikes in the San Juan Mountains led to the San Juan Cession of 1873, by which Ouray, acknowledging the inevitable, yielded four million acres, one-fourth of the reservation, to the miners. Disputes over the boundaries of the cession, and over the eastern boundary of the reservation, kept Ute relations with their white neighbors in constant turmoil. Moreover, the San Juan discoveries inspired visions of similar riches hidden elsewhere on the reservation. Winning statehood and thus voting representation in Congress in 1876, Coloradans mounted a strident campaign to have the tribe removed to Indian Territory and the reservation opened. To bolster the demand, they charged the Utes with almost every unsolved murder and robbery in the state and some, too, that had never happened. The forest fires that raged over the drouth-stricken mountains in the summer of 1879 were also blamed on the Utes. Ouray, weakened by illness soon to prove fatal, with difficulty restrained his people.18
Colorado’s war of nerves against the Utes formed the backdrop for the explosion at White River Agency in the autumn of 1879. But the immediate cause was personalized in the agent who took over at White River in the spring of 1878. This was Nathan C. Meeker, an elderly eccentric who had dabbled in several of the unorthodox intellectual and social movements of the period. His latest project, a utopian colony north of Denver named for his friend and backer, Horace Greeley, had not met expectations. At White River Meeker looked forward not only to reviving his finances but also to indulging his fondness for social experimentation by leading his charges swiftly to a state of civilization and agricultural self-sufficiency. His uncompromising demand that the Utes abandon their customs and instantly become farmers and his persistence in plowing the grassy meadows on which their ponies grazed brought the White River Utes, already upset by years of stormy relations with the whites, to the brink of revolt.19
All that summer Meeker called for military help in restraini
ng his charges and forcing them to do his bidding. In late July he journeyed to Denver and discussed conditions at White River Agency with General Pope, whose department embraced the Ute Reservation. Pope pointed out that he had sent Capt. Francis S. Dodge’s troop of the Ninth Cavalry to Middle Park to investigate the reports of Utes setting forest fires. If needed, Dodge could hasten to Meeker’s aid. The agent also discussed his problem with Maj. Thomas T. Thornburgh, whom he met on the train en route back to Rawlins, Wyoming, rail depot for the White River Agency. Thornburgh commanded Fort Fred Steele, near Rawlins. Although in Crook’s department rather than Pope’s and 175 miles from White River, this was still the post nearest the agency. Thornburgh explained that he could not give much assistance from so great a distance and could not march to the agency without orders from superior authority. Not until Chief Douglas roughed up Meeker on September 10 and prompted him to declare the lives of agency personnel in danger did the army show much interest in his appeals for help. Then, after an exchange of correspondence between Secretaries McCrary and Schurz and Generals Sherman and Sheridan, followed by the misdirection of orders to Pope instead of Crook, Thornburgh received telegraphic instructions on September 16 to lead a relief column to Meeker’s agency.20
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