by John Waugh
Eastern Washington had been generally peaceful up to then. Indians and whites had lived together in relative calm. The Spokanes and Coeur d’Alenes boasted that they had never shed the blood of a white man. But there were always tribes that could easily become angry and make trouble. The Palouses were that kind.
Two white men had been killed near the Palouse River on the road to Colville recently, and forty white settlers there, believing their lives and property in danger, had petitioned the army to send troops. Only a few nights before, a party of Palouses had raided the Walla Walla Valley and carried off livestock, including thirteen head of army beef cattle. The Palouses were on a tear and the territory was uneasy.
Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. Steptoe, commanding at Fort Walla Walla, was concerned. He wrote the department’s commanding officer in San Francisco that he would ride out and take a look. If possible he would bring the murderers of the two men to justice.
Steptoe led the column out of Fort Walla Walla on May 6, and Taylor waved his last good-bye to his little family. Their line of march would take them northeast toward Red Wolf’s crossing on the Snake River. The detachment numbered 158 horsemen in all—mainly three companies of dragoons under the command of Captain Taylor—and a few Nez Perce Indian guides. The troopers were armed with musketoons, revolvers, ten Sharps rifles, a light supply of ammunition—about forty rounds per man—and two mountain howitzers. A detachment of twenty-five mounted infantrymen under Lieutenant Charles S. Winder rode along to serve the guns.2
Reports reaching the advancing column from north of the river were mildly disturbing. Palouses were said to be gathered in force near the crossing at the mouth of the Alpowa Creek. However, when the troopers reached the crossing they were nowhere to be seen. As friendly Nez Perces ferried the column across the river in their fleet of canoes, swimming its horses after, the Palouses fled northward into Coeur d’Alene and Spokane country to try to incite those peaceable tribes against the approaching soldiers. They would succeed.
By Friday morning, May 14, eight days out of Fort Walla Walla, the column was camped on the banks of the Palouse River. As his soldiers swung into their saddles that morning, Steptoe was told that the Spokanes intended to resist his entry into their country. That was odd; the Spokanes had never been hostile before. Steptoe had heard there was some bad feeling, but he didn’t seriously expect them to oppose his march. He had no grievance against them. He shrugged it off and set his column in motion.
Soon he began to see them—only scattered parties of Indians at first, in the distance. They grew in numbers that day and the next, some of them entering his lines to speak with the horse soldiers. Reports of the command’s progress, equipment, size, and manner of march and discipline began flying northward to other war parties now moving toward the column.
Saturday night, May 15, passed quietly. But as the troopers mounted next morning there was another disturbing report. Hostile Spokanes were ahead of them in force. Steptoe shrugged again, but pulled his ranks in tighter than usual for the morning’s march—just in case. There was no sign of trouble until about 11:00 in the morning, when suddenly the surrounding hills came alive with Indians: Spokanes, Palouses, Coeur d’Alenes, Yakimas, and a scattering from other tribes. Steptoe counted more than a thousand braves—“all armed, painted, and defiant.”3
He halted his column about a hundred yards from the bristling line of warriors and signaled them that he wished to talk. Several Spokanes rode forward. Why were they opposing his advance? Steptoe asked. They heard the soldiers had come to annihilate them, the Spokanes answered. If that was so, they would fight. Steptoe, who was ready to believe the last part of this argument, vigorously denied the first part. He was merely passing through, he protested, on his way to Colville to mediate the trouble between the whites and the Indians there. His passing through Spokane country was peaceful.
After a while the Indians appeared mollified, but not enough to permit him to proceed. He could have no canoes to cross the Spokane River, and without canoes there would be no crossing. Steptoe looked beyond the Indian spokesmen to the angry, milling line of painted braves. He might be making some uncertain headway with the former, he thought, but he was apparently making no impression at all on the latter. They were seething with excitement. The Indian leaders broke off the conference, and Steptoe turned to his officers. Be ready to fight, he told them.
The column began moving with deliberate speed toward a stronger position, word passing quietly down the line from the officers to the men to expect an attack. As the Indians swarmed angrily at their rear and flanks, the soldiers assessed their situation. The prospect was not promising. Not only did the Indians outnumber them at least six to one, but they were better armed and better mounted. They carried rifles and they rode cayuses, tough, wiry little ponies capable of great endurance in battle.
The column of soldiers moved on deliberately, hectored by taunts and jeers, to the edge of a small lake. There Steptoe ordered a stop, but told his troopers to stay in their saddles.
The Indian leaders wanted to talk again. Why, if his mission was peaceful, they demanded, was he hauling two howitzers? Why, if he was bound for Colville, had he come so far east of a direct course from Fort Walla Walla? Not only would the soldiers not be permitted to cross the Spokane, they said, but the Indians threatened to seize the Nez Perce canoes on the Snake as well, cutting off their line of retreat.
The afternoon wore on. The air was thick with tension and threats, and the soldiers continued to sit in their saddles. At length the Indians said that since it was Sunday, they would not fight that day; but they would give battle tomorrow. The soldiers looked at one another. It was going to be another one of those Mondays.
For three hours they sat on their horses, not moving, not daring to dismount, taking an unrelenting stream of verbal threats and abuse, and saying nothing. But now the sun was setting, and the Indians were withdrawing toward the east. By dark they had vanished, and the soldiers dismounted at last, to pass the uneasy night sleeping on their guns.
Steptoe mulled his alternatives. They were all too few. He was fatally outnumbered if it came to a fight. His ammunition supply was marginal—the soldiers were wishing now they had brought more, but they hadn’t expected this kind of trouble. The Indians were armed, painted, defiant, and promising a battle in the morning. Wisdom told him to get out of there without delay, avoiding a fight if possible. He would backtrack to the Snake River ninety miles to the rear, and try to get safely across.
Before daylight the next morning, the seventeenth, he sent one of the Nez Perce scouts out in the night to try to get through to the garrison at Fort Walla Walla. The message he carried was for a reinforcing column from the fort to meet them at the Snake crossing. Steptoe followed almost immediately with his entire command—riding into what? None of them knew.
The Indians began to appear again on the hills and in angry clusters at the rear of the column. Galloping out of their ranks toward the soldiers was the last thing any of them expected to see—a Catholic priest. Father Joset, missionary to the Coeur d’Alenes, had ridden all night from ninety miles north, summoned by Chief Vincent to intercede with the horse soldiers. Steptoe greeted the priest warmly; anybody was more welcome at that moment than an unhappy Indian. Father Joset’s news was not comforting, but neither was it really news. He told Steptoe that Indian opposition to an advance in force by the soldiers to the north of the Snake River was growing, and that an attack by the Indians was imminent. Steptoe already knew that.
The priest urged him to meet again with the chiefs in a final effort to avert a fight. He would be pleased to do so, Steptoe said, but his packhorses were too badly spooked to risk stopping. Father Joset suggested he talk to them as he rode; the priest himself would round up the chiefs. Steptoe agreed, and Father Joset galloped away, returning with Vincent, the only chief he could find.
Steptoe told Vincent as they rode along that he was calling off his trip to Colville and returning to
Fort Walla Walla. Vincent listened intently and sympathetically. He didn’t like what was happening any better than Steptoe did. Confrontation was not the Coeur d’Alene way. His hands had never been tainted with the white man’s blood and he didn’t wish it to be so now.
At a critical moment in the discussion one of Steptoe’s Nez Perce scouts, who had no compunction against tainting his hands with Coeur d’Alene blood, angrily accused Chief Vincent of speaking with a “forked tongue.”
“Proud man,” the Nez Perce shouted, “why do you not fire?” and struck Vincent across the shoulders with his whip.4
The Coeur D’Alene chief reeled in his saddle and was nearly unhorsed, but he ignored his attacker and continued to hear Steptoe out. He appeared satisfied that the colonel’s intentions were honorable and was about to say so when another Coeur D’Alene galloped up and told him that the Palouses were preparing to open fire. Vincent wheeled and galloped away. It was all getting out of hand.
As the column crossed a small stream and headed for higher ground, a rifle shot rang out and a bullet whistled through the column’s rear guard. The soldiers ignored it. The Indians weaving back and forth in the rear of the column started up an irregular pattern of rifle fire. When the soldiers still did not respond in kind, the emboldened Indians began to ride recklessly along the flanks toward the head of the column, firing steadily and rapidly.
No soldier had yet fired a shot and nobody had been hit. But all hope of avoiding a fight now seemed lost, and there began a frantic two-mile rush by both sides for what high ground there was in the broken, uneven terrain. Seeing the Indians making for a hill in front of him, from which a devastating fire could be poured down on the passing column, Steptoe ordered Lieutenant David McM. Gregg to cut them off. In a breakneck race, Gregg and his dragoons reached the hill first, and the Indians immediately veered off toward another even more advantageous position nearby, which Gregg also quickly preempted.
The soldiers were now fighting back and the battle had become general. The high-pitched war whoops of the Indians rose above the continuous clatter of arms. The packhorses, now thoroughly spooked, tried repeatedly to bolt and were kept in line only with a mighty effort. Taylor’s troopers and another company of dragoons under Lieutenant William Gaston charged the Indian lines, not once, but again and again. Coyote-like, the Indians fled when pursued, but surged back in returning waves as soon as the soldiers gave up the chase. Time and again they swarmed and fled, hit and ran. For the soldiers it was like swatting at an army of hornets, only far more deadly.
The line of march became ragged and irregular. The three companies of dragoons, still separated from one another by some hundreds of yards, were desperately trying to get together. But when Taylor and Gaston attempted to move toward Gregg to higher ground, the Indians pressed in to prevent it, fighting more fiercely and at closer range. At about eleven o’clock in the morning—the fighting had begun at 8:00—Lieutenant Winder reached Gregg’s side with his mountain howitzers and was firing steadily at the galloping Indians, scaring them all, but hitting few.
Gaston reined up and considered his situation. He had pushed about as far toward Gregg as he could. Indians now blocked his way in front and behind. He was locked in from both directions and clearly in trouble. It was apparent what the young lieutenant must now do; he must try to batter his way through. Gregg saw this and readied his own company to charge the moment Gaston began to move. When Gaston’s soldiers broke into a galloping charge, Gregg stormed off the hill to meet them.
The two companies hit the Indians at the same instant, and together they gradually beat their way back up the hill. Two of the three dragoon companies were now united. Only Taylor was still out.
Showing spectacular courage, he also beat his way to higher ground toward noon, and Steptoe’s command was again fully combined. Some distance away the colonel could see the Tohotonimme River flowing in plain view to the south and west. He must get there. His greatest need now was for water, and the river seemed to be his answer.
The Indians, infuriated by the loss of a dozen of their warriors, were in no mood to let the soldiers reach the river. They had been steadily increasing in numbers all morning; signals had been going out all through the early fighting, calling to more tribes, and they had come. The Indians were ready for the decisive attack that would annihilate the horse soldiers.
A little before noon, Steptoe made his move. Throwing Taylor and Gaston out on either flank, the positions of greatest danger, he started for the river. The Indians hurled themselves screaming on the moving column, and the battlefield became pandemonium.
Lieutenant Gaston took a shot through the body and fell dying. The Indians attacked with renewed fury, slamming into his dispirited men, who gave way and began falling back on Winder and Gregg. Gregg swung his dragoons around to meet the charge, and Winder lashed out with his howitzers. Steptoe rode in among Gaston’s leaderless troopers and attempted to rally them. Together they stalled the Indian attack and, for a brief moment, threw it back. On the other flank Taylor was fighting with all of the conspicuous ferocity and fire that he had always shown, and was a constantly inviting target.
It happened about 12:30. The column had moved half a mile toward the river, and Taylor suddenly tumbled from his horse, shot through the neck.
Seeing him fall, the Indians rushed forward to seize his body. Here was a prize they must have, the ultimate coup—the hard-fighting soldier-chief. Several of Taylor’s dragoons leaped from their horses and thrust themselves between the Indians and their fallen captain. There they fought hand to hand, swinging their guns like clubs. The most desperate fighting on the field was now the struggle for possession of Taylor’s body. Private Victor Charles DeMoy, who had been trained in the French army, swung his gun barrel viciously at the heads of the converging Indians, crying “My God, for a saber!”5 He was soon lying by Taylor’s side, himself desperately wounded.
Several soldiers lifted Taylor in their arms and fled away with him to safer ground, and the frustrated Indians seized on the only trophy left to them, Taylor’s streaked and bloody saddle.6
Steptoe led his exhausted troops, two of his commanders now fallen, toward a nearby hill and halted. There he would make a last stand. The Indians converged on them from every direction; they were completely encircled.
Wearily the soldiers dismounted, picketed their horses close together in the center of the circle, placed the wounded in the most shielded spot, and threw themselves to the ground under cover of the rank growth of grass. Taylor lay among the wounded, plainly dying.
The Indians showered the circle of soldiers with bullets and arrows. Several braves, attempting to crawl closer through the grass, were picked off. The soldiers expected any instant to be massacred in a final screaming charge. The Indian war cries were now ear-splitting and hideous. But the charge didn’t come; storming a strong position in broad daylight was an alien tactic for Indians. As the afternoon wore on, the angry whooping began to subside. By nightfall the Indians stopped firing. Suddenly, after a long day of sound and fury, all was eerie silence.
But the prospect for the soldiers was hopeless. It was the lull before disaster. Steptoe painfully counted the rounds of ammunition—no more than three left per man. There was nothing for them now but to await the inevitable assault, which was certain to come, and to die a soldier’s death. He did not expect to have to wait long. It could come at any moment.
Steptoe’s officers, however, were not content with that. They pressed him urgently. They must make a run for it under the cover of night. What did they have to lose? To remain there was certain death—or worse, capture and torture—before the night was over, and if not then, surely by the early morning light.
The will was gradually rekindled in Steptoe. All of the dead whose bodies could be reached were hastily buried in shallow graves—Taylor was now dead. The two howitzers were dismounted and buried. The fifteen wounded troopers were made ready to leave. Those who could ride sat their
horses; those who couldn’t were lashed to their saddles. The spare horses were tethered. At about ten o’clock, the column began to move in silence off the hill down into the narrow valley of the Tohotonimme and into the dark night. At about midnight the Indians stormed the position. All they found were the tethered riderless horses and the fresh-filled graves.
The column of exhausted soldiers galloped southward, ghostly and spectral against the ridges one moment, dropping unseen into the black ravines the next. Victor DeMoy, the gun-wielding Frenchman who had fallen with Taylor, was so grievously wounded and in such pain that the soldiers were compelled to leave him by the side of the trail. He was never seen again.
By dawn the next day, May 18, the stricken column reached the Palouse River. By ten o’clock that night, twenty-four sleepless hours after leaving the bloody hill on the Tohotonimme, they reached the Snake. There, on the north bank, they slumped to the ground exhausted and slept for the first time in two days. The sun was well up over the eastern hills the next morning when they began to recross the river in the Nez Perce canoes. Later in the day they met the relief column from Fort Walla Walla, galloping to meet them at the river crossing; the Nez Perce scout had made it through.
On Saturday, May 22, the exhausted and riddled column filed into Fort Walla Walla, to do the duty they all dreaded—telling Kate Taylor and her children that their husband and father was never coming home.
But the story doesn’t end there.
On August 25 an avenging column of troopers under Colonel George Wright, a West Pointer from Vermont with retribution flaming in his eye, began crossing the Snake where Steptoe had crossed little more than three months before. The force filed out of a new temporary fort named after Taylor, and rode north, not looking this time to quiet Indian unrest, but to cause some.
Little more than a month later, Colonel Wright wrote to San Francisco from the heart of the Indian country. “The war is closed,” he said. “Peace is restored with the Spokanes, Coeur d’Alenes and Pelouses.”7 He meant, of course, that the Indians had been crushed.