Cries from the Earth

by Terry C. Johnston

I sensed an undeniably strong presence as I stood before the graves of these two men in that small, out-of-the-way cemetery tucked at a far edge of the tiny community called Mount Idaho, a feeling of standing in the presence of genuine, honest-to-goodness heroes. As I slowly moved from one grave marker or headstone to another in that quiet, shady cemetery, I found many of them memorials to those unfortunates caught in the cross-fire of a conflict that made little sense. With the sunlight slanting through the trees, stirring the remnants of the ground fog left by last night’s rain, I stayed longer than I had intended—just listening.

  Not all the heroes are buried there.

  Delia Theller had been the only officer’s wife still at Fort Lapwai when Perry’s command marched away at dusk that fifteenth day of June. Tragic that Edward Theller should be the only officer killed with his men less than thirty-six hours later.

  Once General Howard led his reinforcements into the bottom of White Bird Canyon and temporarily buried the lieutenant with the other dead, Mrs. Theller penned heart-wrenching letters to the newspaper editors throughout central and northern Idaho. Realizing that the Nez Perce might take in some captured goods to trade off for ammunition, supplies, or whiskey to some storekeeper in the region, she offered to pay a reward for the return of any personal item that had been taken off her husband’s body by the warriors who had killed him, items the lieutenant had carried with him when he kissed her farewell and marched away from Fort Lapwai into history: his watch, rings, cabinet photos, or any papers that might serve as mementos.

  Hers is a part of the story that will bridge over to the second volume of this Nez Perce War tragedy.

  That Irish miner named Patrick Brice had seen enough of war against the Nez Perce. Because of his uncanny release from the warriors, unsubstantiated rumors and various discrepancies would whirl around the man for close to a hundred years. Some of the early writers, Loyal P. Brown included, incorrectly recorded his name as Patrick Price. This mistake was carried over to modern days when writer Mark H. Brown likewise referred to him as Price.

  Even L. V. McWhorter called him Frederick Brice! McWhorter, a great supporter of the Non-Treaty Nez Perce, was one of the first to give credence to the fanciful tale that Brice had saved himself when confronted with the warriors in White Bird Canyon by exposing his chest to show the tattoo of a Catholic crucifix. The rumor had it that the Nez Perce were so awed by the powerful medicine of this tattoo that they immediately gave Brice and Maggie Manuel their freedom. Yet it’s strange that not one of the Indian informants McWhorter used to research his books (including the man who gave the authoritative Nez Perce account of that meeting with Brice, Black Feather himself) remembered anything of any marks on the white man’s breast—no painting, no symbols, no tattoo!

  Why would these members of the Non-Treaty bands, warriors who had rejected the white man’s religion, suddenly give any special significance to the white man’s crucifix?

  Stranger still, Brice himself never mentioned anything of a tattoo in his account, nor does he say anything about the basis of a second, and even more fanciful, rumor popularized by McWhorter and a few others: that Patrick Brice secured his freedom from the warriors by vowing to return to the Indian camp once he had delivered little Maggie to safety.

  In her book, Saga of Chief Joseph, General Howard’s daughter perpetuates this myth regarding the courageous Irishman. It seems that after Brice had reached Mount Idaho with the small girl and rested a day, “… he went back to the Indian camp where he presented himself as a hostage, supposedly to Chief Joseph, who magnanimously sent him on his way unharmed.”

  But this story would not enjoy its real heyday until after the turn of the century, when Charles Stuart Moody wrote an article titled “The Bravest Deed I Ever Knew” for the March 1911 issue of Century Magazine. In it Moody explained how Brice had hammered out a deal with the Nez Perce to return to the White Bird camp after he had taken the child to safety in the settlements. Moody explains that the Irishman offered the warriors to “work their will upon him” when he returned. This ludicrous tale ended with Moody declaring that Brice returned to the valley, just as he had promised Black Feather, and was promptly granted his freedom because the warriors were so deeply impressed with not only his courage but mainly the fact that he had kept his word!

  A few of you might be wondering about the enduring mystery of whatever happened to Jennet Manuel, just where she and her young son disappeared to after daughter Maggie told Brice she watched Chief Joseph stab her mother in the house, where the Irishman was unable to find the bodies later on. When reunited in Mount Idaho, Jennet Manuel’s father, George Popham, told Brice that the house had burned to the ground.…

  No, I think I’ll stop right there. Going to leave that matter until the next volume, when I’ll address the conflicting accounts of her disappearance simply because of the reports that continued to drift in concerning a disheveled blond-haired white woman spotted among the Non-Treaty bands as they pushed south through the Bitterroot Valley, making their way to the Big Hole.

  The high level of confidence the warriors—indeed, every man, woman, and child in the Non-Treaty bands—gained with the army’s debacle at White Bird Canyon would assure that the Nez Perce War would not be a short-lived campaign. The Nee-Me-Poo would go on to fight at Cottonwood and Clearwater, then escape to Montana Territory via the Lolo Pass. Their great victory on the White Bird—just like the victory of the Lakota and Cheyenne on the Greasy Grass the year before—gave the Non-Treaty bands the unmitigated confidence that they would eventually triumph in their struggle, gave them unbridled hope that if they could not return to life as it had been in their own land, then they could not be stopped on their migration to the Old Woman’s Country.

  Their sweet victory at White Bird Canyon would soon grow bitter in their mouths. Time and again over the coming months, fate would tease the Nez Perce, ultimately making fools of them for believing in what they had accomplished against Perry’s soldiers.

  Forlorn Hope, John D. McDermott’s book on the murders and the outbreak, is nothing less than the cornerstone to this historical novel. My story would not have been written were it not for Jack’s trailblazing research. Back when he first encountered the Nez Perce War, the history books dealt with the White Bird fight in no more than a page or two. And when any of the sources mentioned the court of inquiry Perry requested to clear his name, none of the authors dealt with that court’s deliberations or its findings. But Jack does, and the testimony is illuminating—material I was able to incorporate into the narrative of my story.

  If you do further reading from the bibliography that follows, be forewarned. Most of the sources contradicted one another on the murders, raids, and depredations—always conflict in the number of victims, locations, who was involved from the bands, etc. Clearly, someone had to sift through everything available in each of the archives and make sense of all the characters and their individual dramas. That was just the sort of detailed job for a man the likes of Jack McDermott, who loves scratching around in the dark corners of archives for what others have missed!

  Realize that my novel of what really happened in the outbreak of the Nez Perce War could not have been written without Jack’s pioneering work on those opening days of the tragedy. If his monumental efforts in Forlorn Hope prove one thing, it is that the first works by Josephy, Beale, and Mark H. Brown hadn’t exhausted the study of the Nez Perce War. Instead, their efforts were only the opening chapters of a story still being written.

  With what Jack McDermott and Jerry Greene have done to shed light on the shadowy places, bringing more details into focus, we are now able to view what has been an incomplete picture left by the earlier historians. I firmly believe we are close to knowing all that really happened in those early days of what became a tragic struggle to maintain a way of life, what I hope will eventually be seen as a heroic saga on both sides of the conflict.

  To read more about these first days of the war, I recommend you get your
hands on the following volumes:

  An Army Doctor’s Wife on the Frontier—Letters from Alaska and the Far West, 1874–1878, by Emily FitzGerald (edited by Abe Laufe)

  Battle Drums and Geysers, by Orvin H. and Lorraine Bonney

  Chief Joseph Country, by Bill Gulick

  Chief Joseph—The Biography of a Great Indian, by Chester Anders Fee

  Chief Joseph’s Allies, by Clifford E. Trafzer and Richard D. Scheuerman

  Chief Joseph’s Own Story, edited by Donald McRae

  Chief Joseph’s People and Their War, by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.

  Chief Lawyer of the Nez Perce Indians, 1796–1876, by Clifford M. Drury

  Children of Grace—The Nez Perce War of 1877, by Bruce Hampton

  Famous Indian Chiefs I Have Known, by O. O. Howard

  The Flight of the Nez Perce, by Mark H. Brown

  Following the Nez Perce Trail—A Guide to the Nee-Me-Poo National Historic Trail with Eyewitness Accounts, by Cheryl Wilfong

  Forlorn Hope—The Battle of White Bird Canyon and the Beginning of the Nez Perce War, by John D. McDermott

  The Great Escape—The Nez Perce War in Words and Pictures, by Pascal Tchakmakian

  Hawks and Doves in the Nez Perce War of 1877—Personal Recollections of Eugene Tallmadge Wilson, edited by Eugene Edward Wilson

  Hear Me, My Chiefs!, by L. V. McWhorter

  Howard’s Campaign Against the Nez Perce Indians, by Thomas Sutherland

  I Will Fight No More Forever, by Merrill D. Beal

  In Pursuit of the Nez Perce, compiled and edited by Linwood Laughy

  Indian Wars of the Pacific Northwest, by Ray Hoard Grassley

  The Last Stand of the Nez Perce—Destruction of a People, by Harvey Chalmers II

  Let Me Be Free—The Nez Perce Tragedy, by David Lavender

  A Little Bit of Wisdom—Conversations with a Nez Perce Elder, by Horace Axtell and Margo Aragon

  The Long Flight—A History of the Nez Perce War, by Harrison Lane

  Massacres of the Mountains—A History of the Indian Wars of the Far West, by J. P. Dunn

  My Life and Experiences Among Our Hostile Indians, by Oliver O. Howard

  The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.

  Nez Perce Joseph, by Oliver Otis Howard

  The Nez Perce Tribesmen of the Columbia Plateau, by Frances Haines

  Northwestern Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady

  The Patriot Chiefs—A Chronicle of American Indian Leadership, by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.

  Phil Sheridan and His Army, by Paul Andrew Hutton

  Red Eagles of the Northwest, by Frances Haines

  Saga of Chief Joseph, by Helen Addison Howard

  Sword and Olive Branch—Oliver Otis Howard, by John A. Carpenter

  Tales of the Nez Perce, by Donald M. Hines

  Thunder in the Mountains, by Ronald K. Fisher

  The U.S. Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis of 1877: Historic Sites Associated with the Nez Perce War, by Jerome A. Greene

  U.S. Army Uniforms and Equipment, 1889, with foreword by Jerome A. Greene

  War Cries on Horseback—The Story of the Indian Wars of the Great Plains, by Stephen Longstreet

  Yellow Wolf: His Own Story, by L. V. McWhorter

  For those of you who thought you knew the whole story before—much of which was probably a sanitized and politically correct version of history—I’ll wager you should have laid this book down long before now!

  As I draw near to closing, I also want to thank the good folks of the town of Grangeville, which served as my base camp for nearly a week of research, as well as tiny communities up and down the east bank of the Salmon River. Everywhere I turned in my travels, the people I ran across were eager to help me find one site or another in my explorations of the real story of the Nez Perce War.

  Should you ever find yourself in west-central Idaho, you can visit the historical scenes of my story with a little detective work on your part and the maps at the front of this book. But I imagine most folks will be satisfied with taking the self-guided auto tour that descends White Bird Hill down the switchbacks of a narrow two-lane road to the battleground rather than viewing the canyon from the top of the new highway that never makes its way into the valley. Better yet, you can begin your journey into the past right in the little community of White Bird itself, taking the short drive to the battlefield following in the hoofprints of Ollokot’s warriors that Sunday morning as they raced out to confront Theller’s detail and Chapman’s civilians.

  There’s a small spot at the west side of the winding road where there’s room enough for two cars to park, where you can step through a gate and follow a steep, little-used trail up the heights to the soldiers’ position. But let this serve as a warning to all but the hardiest of you: this will be a strenuous hike up from the valley floor. Take your time. Along the way you can stop and enjoy the view in all directions. Your first halt might be once you reach the volunteers’ position. Catch your breath there before continuing on to Theller’s hill, then higher still to Trimble’s ridge. And finally you will be rewarded when you have gasped your way all the way to the top of the battlefield, finally standing where McCarthy’s men held out as long as they deemed they could against overwhelming numbers.

  From this perspective, you’ll witness everything: from the valley floor to the top of the ridge, able to see firsthand how the battle unfolded. You will be standing on ground where the ghosts still walk.

  Not far up the canyon, erected right beside the twisting two-lane blacktop that leads you to the top of White Bird Hill, in fact, you’ll pass by a lone concrete memorial shaft that marks the spot where Sergeant Patrick Gunn of Company F held his private duel with an unnamed Nez Perce warrior. A handful of soldiers in retreat turned around to gaze over their shoulders, watching this gray-headed veteran in the middle of his fourth enlistment as he spilled from his horse, wounded.

  Yet the sergeant scrambled to his knees, dragging his pistol from its holster as a single warrior closed in and dismounted his weary war pony.

  Struggling to his feet—so say the survivors who witnessed this duel from the slopes above—Sergeant Gunn fired at his lone adversary. The approaching warrior fired back, darting from one clump of brush to another. For the next few minutes, as the retreating soldiers watched, that lone Nez Perce closed in and the two enemies fought their very private duel … until the soldier ultimately fell beside the bush growing near the present-day marker.

  It was Sergeant Gunn’s body that Patrick Brice and Maggie Manuel found standing nearly upright, suspended in the thorns of the bramble bush, as they hurried across the battlefield and up the heights. Because he stood almost erect against the bush, they initially believed his corpse was a warrior about to attack. In the day to come, that upright positioning of Patrick Gunn’s body would even fool Howard’s troops (come to bury the dead) that the corpse was really an Indian still lurking about to ambush the unsuspecting burial details.

  I choose to believe that the victorious Nez Perce warrior who ultimately killed Gunn in this very personal, very courageous duel consciously decided not to leave the soldier lying on the battlefield. Instead, I believe the warrior sought to honor his worthy opponent by placing the sergeant’s body against the bramble bush. Standing: the way a proven, honorable warrior would confront his enemies.

  Back up there at the high ground within McCarthy’s rocks, I began jotting down my thoughts for this afterword as the rain-laden clouds crept in.

  But it is here, beside this solitary memorial to a lone cavalry sergeant, that I finish my thoughts on this first fight between the army and the Nez Perce.

  Here I stand in awe, once again hoping that in some small way what I have written will honor the last great sacrifice made by those brave souls who still walk this hallowed ground.

  —Terry C. Johnston

  White Bird Battlefield

  THE PLAINSMEN SERIES BY TERRY C. JOHNSTON


  Book I: Sioux Dawn

  Book II: Red Cloud’s Revenge

  Book III: The Stalkers

  Book IV: Black Sun

  Book V: Devil’s Backbone

  Book VI: Shadow Riders

  Book VII: Dying Thunder

  Book VIII: Blood Song

  Book IX: Reap the Whirlwind

  Book X: Trumpet on the Land

  Book XI: A Cold Day in Hell

  Book XII: Wolf Mountain Moon

  Book XIII: Ashes of Heaven

  Book XIV: Cries from the Earth

  Book XV: Lay the Mountains Low

  Book XVI: Turn the Stars Upside Down

  In thinking about American Indian history, it has become essential to follow the policy of cautious street crossers: Remember to look both ways.

  —Patricia Nelson Limerick

  If Colonel Perry had not listened to the [Mount Idaho] volunteers, not a man would have been lost, as Perry was ordered to protect the citizens of Mount Idaho and Grangeville … They urged Perry to hurry before the Indians could escape across the Salmon, for they were “cowardly and would not fight.” When too late we found the reverse to be the true facts.

  —Private John P. Schorr

  F Company, 1st U.S. Cavalry

  Although exhaustion of men and horses afforded some measure of explanation, White Bird Canyon was only the first of several episodes of the Nez Perce War that reinforced the First Cavalry’s reputation for mediocrity.

  —Robert M. Utley

  Frontier Regulars

  Certainly the Nez Perces[’] defeat of Perry’s command the Battle of White Bird Canyon created an inducement for the tribesmen of White Bird, Joseph, and Toohoolhoolzote to continue the fight and perhaps raised false hopes among them as to the eventual outcome stemming from this initial victory. For the army, the battle produced a healthy respect for the fighting abilities of the Nez Perces.

  —Jerome A. Greene

  The U.S. Army and the Nee-Mee-Poo Crisis of 1877

  The Battle of White Bird Canyon was one of the worst defeats suffered by the United States Army during the period 1865 to 1890. Perhaps only the Fetterman disaster in Wyoming in 1866 and the Custer disaster in Montana ten years later rival it in ignominy, [but] in both those cases the Indians outnumbered the military units in great proportion.