—
No more Arms to be Sold to
the Indians.
—
MONTANA.
—
Latest from the Indian War.
HELENA, August 7.—Advices from Missoula, up to August 6, say General Gibbon, with 200 regulars*—infantry, in wagons—left Missoula post to follow the hostiles at 1 p.m. Saturday. He designed making thirty-five miles a day. The hostiles were at Doolittle’s ranch on [Sunday] night, seventy-five miles from Missoula and within ten miles of the trail to Ross Hole. Charlos declined to lend his warriors to General Gibbon, but will find the Nez Perces on his own account. The hostiles were moving with more celerity Friday. Stevensville had advices Saturday that 100 or 150 men were coming from Bannock to intercept the Indians. Howard has not heard from Lent, the courier. He had not returned on Sunday and anxiety was felt for him, as two Nez Perces had come over the trail. A considerable number of Missoula county volunteers are prepared to advance, but are independent of the regulars.
“I respectfully request the honor of leading this scout, sir,”’ asked Lieutenant James H. Bradley, the officer who moments ago had suggested just such a reconnaissance to catch up to the hostile village.
“It is yours to lead, without question,” Colonel John Gibbon replied that twilight of 7 August. “Mounted, of course. Take Lieutenant Jacobs with you, along with sixty picked men—soldiers and volunteers both—and do your best to overhaul the Nez Perce before dawn.”
“Once we’ve made contact, what are your orders?” Bradley inquired.
“Send word back as quickly as possible.” “Am I to engage the Nez Perce, Colonel?” “By all means. Stampede their horses. Impede their escape.” Gibbon ground a fist into an open palm. “Immobilize their village and hinder their retreat until I can come up with the rest of the outfit.”
Everything they had seen and heard as they hurried up the Bitterroot valley confirmed that the Nez Perce could boast somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 fighting men.* In addition, Gibbon’s men had come to realize the village was moving slowly, unconcerned and perhaps completely unaware that the army was on their back trail … and closing fast. The distance from campsite to campsite was extremely short, indicating the village was making only brief migrations each day—perhaps only to find new forage for their horse herd. Gibbon and his officers determined that they could cover twice as much ground as the Nez Perce were each day—perhaps three times more. In that way, the Seventh Infantry and those few Second Cavalry troopers along would catch up to and surprise the enemy in less than half a week.
In fact, right now it appeared the hostiles were no more than a day and a half away! Perhaps as little as one long day’s march to bring them to battle.
So now was clearly the time to go in search of the enemy. To account for Joseph’s position and his strengths. To determine how best to attack the Non-Treaty stronghold—and send back word to Gibbon once contact had been made.
One thing was for sure as Bradley and First Lieutenant Joshua W. Jacobs led their sixty men into the dim light of dusk, clambering over a maze of downed timber for that two miles up to the summit: the Nez Perce hadn’t turned aside with designs on doubling back for Idaho and their old haunts in the Salmon River country. They had clearly bypassed the route they would have taken if they had intended to return to their homeland.* It was abundantly clear that Joseph’s warriors and their families had no intention of reclaiming their ancient homes. If Gibbon didn’t stop them here and now, the Nez Perce could well be free to scatter, roaming and pillaging at will across Montana Territory—igniting a much farther-reaching war than General O. O. Howard had failed to put out back in Idaho.
Through the night of the seventh and into dawn’s earliest light on the eighth of August, Bradley and Jacobs struggled ahead on horseback, a little quicker now that their scouting force could begin to see just where it was going. From the summit of the divide the trail angled down a gentle incline for about a mile, where it finally reached the headwaters of Trail Creek. From there trail guide Blodgett led them through some increasingly rough country, staying with the banks of that stream, forced to slog through boggy mires where Trail Creek meandered and cross from bank to bank more than fifty times in their descent.
Down, down, down now, accompanied by the first telltale indication of a coming sunrise—descending toward that high mountain valley a few of the Bitterroot civilians along were calling the Big Hole. Still no sign of the village. Not a sound or a smell, much less a sighting of fire smoke or smudge of trail dust rising from the plain below.
“They aren’t where we figured we’d discover them,” Bradley grumbled in dismay as he threw up his arm and ordered a halt to those soldiers and Catlin’s civilians following the two of them.
“We’ve got to press on till we find them,” Jacobs suggested.
“There never was any question of that!” Bradley replied peevishly, then instantly felt bad for snapping. “I figured we’d spot their camp right down there, where you can see the head of that valley. But,” and he sighed, “their trail leads around the brow of these heights, angling left instead of dropping directly onto the valley floor. Damn, Jacobs—if we don’t find that village soon, it’s going to take even longer than we calculated for the rest of Colonel Gibbon’s forces to catch up.”
Jacobs spoke softly, “Do you think we should give the mounts a brief rest here?”
“No,” and Bradley shook his head emphatically. “They’ll have plenty of time to rest after we’ve caught up to the village and run off their horses—”
“L-Lieutenant! Lieutenant Bradley!”
He whirled on his heels, finding John B. Catlin, Joe Blodgett, and a handful of Bitterroot volunteers weaving their horses through the timber in their direction. Bradley brought up his long Springfield rifle, half-expecting there to be bullets accompanying the harried civilians, what with the dire expressions on their flushed and mottled faces.
“The hostiles?” he asked Catlin, lunging out to grab the bridle on the leader’s horse.
Catlin gulped breathlessly, “We saw ’em.”
A lump of apprehension rose in Bradley’s throat. “They see you?”
“Don’t think so,” Catlin said too quickly. Then his eyes flicked away. “I … I dunno. Maybeso.”
Letting go of Catlin’s bridle, Bradley asked, “You were shot at?”
“No.”
“They follow you?”
With a shake of his head, the civilian again answered, “No. If they saw us, they let us go ’thout any trouble.”
“How far are they?”
“Not far at all, Lieutenant,” Catlin replied with a swallow. Then the Civil War veteran said, “On round the gentle side of this hill, you’ll hear voices, laughing, too. And the sound of chopping wood.”
“Sergeant Wilson, you and Mr. Catlin see the men have their breakfast now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Then Bradley looked at Jacobs and Corporal Socrates Drummond. “The two of you, come with me on foot. We’ll go see for ourselves.”
When they reached the last of the thick timber, the lieutenant halted the pair. Quickly his eyes searched the trees at the edge of the grassy slope.
“Wait right here with our horses and guns, Corporal. The lieutenant and I are going for a climb.”
Stripping off his blue wool tunic, the lieutenant then rebuckled his gun belt around his waist, and they started up the tree, hand and foot, slowly working this way and that around the thick trunk until their heads popped above the uppermost branches. It provided a perfect view, placing them atop the emerald evergreen canopy—giving the lieutenants a chance to gaze unimpeded over the entire vista as the narrow valley of the Big Hole stretched away from them some ten miles to the east.
“Jesus,” Jacobs whispered.
Not only did the telltale sounds of chopping and women’s voices drift up to him from below and far to the left, but he could also see the smudge of smoke from their many fires, the du
st from the hooves of the ponies the young men were racing on the flat beyond the village, along with hearing the chatter of those small boys he spotted chasing one another through the horse-high willow growing along the creek that gurgled at the base of the slope right below him. Other youngsters sat atop their ponies, watching over the horse herd. More than a hundred warriors lazed about in the sunny camp. Women pitched tepees here or there; others dragged poles across the creek or prepared a midday meal over their fires.
His mind quickly turning like a steam-driven flywheel, Bradley began calculating the distance he had covered since separating from Gibbon, working over the hours it would take those foot soldiers in their wagons, pulled by the weary teams laboring up the divide, to reach the headwaters of Trail Creek before they could ever begin to work their way down to this spot. Only if those foot soldiers left the wagons behind …
“Come on,” he whispered to Jacobs.
They scrambled down the limbs like a pair of schoolboys, exuberantly leaping the last five feet to the ground before trudging uphill to Drummond, waving for him to remount and follow rather than chancing any more words on the hillside. Surprise was of the utmost concern now. Surprise—that most fragile of military commodities.
Bradley threaded his way in and out of the trees, climbing slightly, following his own back trail to where he had left Blodgett, Catlin, and his sixty men. And as his horse huffed across the grassy hillside, he began to formulate the terse note he would send back to the colonel somewhere far above them this morning—perhaps still on the other side of the pass as the sun came up bold and brassy, striking the western slopes of the Big Hole. His heart sank as he recognized that it was too late for his small detachment to run off the horse herd and harry the village this day. The others were too far in the rear for that.
They would have to wait now, he would write Gibbon. Wait for the general to bring up his entire column before they would jump the enemy.
When that dispatch was written and the courier on his way, the lieutenant decided he would lead his advance detachment down this trail, to the very edge of that stand of timber where he had spied on the Nez Perce camp.
And there they would lie in wait for the arrival of Colonel John Gibbon—who would lead the rest of the Seventh Infantry when he unleashed all bloody thunder on that unsuspecting village.
*In naming this place after a ground squirrel, the Nez Perce more specifically made reference to a smaller animal called a picket pin, due to the fact that when the tiny, thin animal stands at watchful attention beside its burrow, it looked just like the wooden picket pin a man would use to anchor his horse.
**The Non-Treaty bands arrived in the valley of the Big Hole on the afternoon of August 7, and would stay again the night of the eighth—relaxed and celebratory up to the fateful morning of August 9.
*Rawn’s Fort Fizzle in the Lolo Canyon.
*Today’s Trail Creek.
*Today’s Ruby Creek, which, with Trail Creek, forms the North Fork of the Big Hole River.
*Do you remember this figure? It did not come from the actual number of soldiers Gibbon had along. Instead, this was the exact number he had told Father Anthony Ravalli he had with him back on August 5. The priest must have been the source for this news story!
*John Deschamps, a valley volunteer now with Gibbon, had counted 250 guns among the Non-Treaty bands and two-thousand-plus horses in their herd, some of which were fine “American” horses bearing their brands. One of the Nez Perce had tried to interest Deschamps in buying a gold watch with the former owner’s name engraved inside, for the paltry sum of thirty dollars!
*Through present-day Nez Perce Pass, in the extreme southwestern corner of Montana.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
AUGUST 7–8, 1877
AN HOUR BEFORE DAWN ON THE MORNING OF 7 AUGUST, their ninth day since departing Kamiah Crossing, General Oliver O. Howard had asked the tall frontiersman Joe Pardee to guide his aide-de-camp, First Lieutenant Robert H. Fletcher, and correspondent Thomas Sutherland down the Lolo to the valley below, from there to escort them north to Missoula City as quickly as they could ride without endangering their mounts. Fletcher, acting quartermaster for the column, carried writs to purchase what additional supplies were needed to see Howard’s column through to the end of the chase.
At this point, they all had a feeling—admittedly something more than a mere hope—that the campaign was nearing its end.
By 9:00 A.M. when the command reached those log breastworks erected by Captain Charles Rawn’s regulars and volunteers, Howard felt unduly disgusted, believing the Nez Perce War should have bloody well ended right there.*
“Over there, General,” explained Joe Baker, one of the few citizens who rode at the head of the column, “you can see where Joseph’s hostiles turned off to the north and circled around the barricades by going up that ridge.”
“Joseph was too smart for them,” commented Lieutenant C. E. S. Wood.
“Maybe they believed they could trust Looking Glass,” Baker voiced the civilian point of view. “From what I hear, he’s always been a good Indian when he’s in the Bitterroot country.”
Howard squinted beneath the high, intense sunlight, his eyes tracing that narrowing trail as it disappeared up the grassy hillside, looping behind the rounded hills far above Rawn’s fortress, beyond the effective range of an army Springfield. Joseph never should have gotten around them. How in blazes did he do this? the general brooded, ruminating on just how many times the wily chieftain had outwitted him. Surely that Wallowa leader had to be one of the most talented military strategists Oliver Otis Howard had ever confronted on any battlefield.
“How far to the Bitterroot valley itself?” he asked of those who had joined him during this brief halt at the barricades.
Baker, who had made the crossing between Montana and Idaho territories many times, answered, “Not far, General. A few more miles is all.”
Later that afternoon, when they did reach the mouth of Lolo Creek, Howard called for a halt to rest the men and graze the animals while he composed a short dispatch to Colonel Frank Wheaton, to be carried north to the Mullan Road, thence west, by two civilians from Idaho. He ordered the campaign’s left column to shorten its daily marches until Wheaton would next hear from Howard about the possibility of returning to Lewiston, Idaho, “You may not be obliged to come through to Montana,”* the general wrote.
Because Division Commander McDowell in Portland had ordered Captain Cushing’s and Captain Edward Field’s batteries of the Fourth U. S. Artillery back to their stations days before Howard got around to starting east on the Lolo Trail and since Oliver could no longer justify needing the batteries because he was now behind the action, he separated those two units from his command at this point in the chase, ordering them on to Deer Lodge, from whence they would march south to reach the railhead at Corrine, Utah. From there they would travel in boxcars back to San Francisco. At the moment, however, both batteries were more than two days behind Howard, along with the infantry still negotiating the Lolo Trail.
Before he was finished composing his dispatch, Quartermaster Fletcher and Sutherland showed up at the head of a string of wagons the lieutenant had commandeered in Missoula City. Howard now had the supplies he hoped would allow him to catch Gibbon, who must surely be closing the gap on the Nez Perce.
“AWAKE! Awake! All the People must listen to the contents of my shaking heart!”
At the old warrior’s cry Yellow Wolf sat upright, the single blanket sliding off his bare shoulder in the dim gray light of dawn. He squinted, blinked, then rubbed his gritty eyes with the heels of both hands. Last night, he and other young men and women had stayed up, dancing, singing, talking of sweet things in their future around the fire until well past the setting of the moon. He had been asleep no more than two hours at the most—
“Awake!” Lone Bird’s voice crackled even closer as the old warrior emerged through the nearby lodges, his pony slowly carrying him toward that scatter
ing of blanket bowers where many of the young men slept away from their families now that they were of an age to marry … of the age to become fighters.
Kicking the blanket from his legs, Yellow Wolf stood and darted unsteadily toward the brave warrior. Many others were emerging from their bowers now to listen to the warrior who had first given them warning at the Medicine Tree.
“I am awake, Lone Bird,” Yellow Wolf muttered as he approached the horseman. “What say you now so early on a quiet morning?”
“This quiet will not last, Yellow Wolf!” Lone Bird announced as he eased back on the single buffalo-hair rein tied around his pony’s lower jaw. The animal stopped.
More and more people gathered, still half-asleep, a murmur growing like an autumn brook as they emerged from their blankets and robes into the misty morning air, so damp and chill it penetrated to the bone.
Looking Glass suddenly appeared scurrying around the side of a lodge, looking perturbed. “Lone Bird—”
“My shaking heart tells me something, Chief Looking Glass,” Lone Bird interrupted. “Listen again to my warning, for my words do not come easy.”
“What warning?” demanded Ollokot as he pushed through the forming crowd and laid his hand on the older warrior’s knee.
“Again I have been told, as I was at the Medicine Tree: The eyes in this heart of mine say trouble and death will overtake us if we make no hurry through this land,” Lone Bird pronounced.
Looking Glass snorted a mirthless laugh. “We’ve heard your foolish talk before!”
“My heart does not regard it as foolish!” Lone Bird snapped. “I have never been one to talk of things that never came true.” His eyes turned, glaring into the face of the Wallowa war chief. “You know that, Ollokot.”
“Yes, I trust the eye of your heart, trust what it can see,” Ollokot replied, his hand sliding from Lone Bird’s knee.
“I cannot smother, I cannot hide, what my heart sees!” Lone Bird announced, his deep voice rattling over them all as if by the same thunder of the white man’s throaty cannon. “I am commanded to speak what is revealed to me.”
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