Although fighting with their usual grim fearlessness, the Nez Perces did not harm any of the soldiers who fell within their lines, but only relieved them of arms and ammunition. “They even gave some of the wounded water after nightfall when it could be done with safety,” writes Lieutenant Romeyn.14
The weather turned stormy on the evening of September 30. Snow fell thickly, driven by a high wind that developed into a blizzard. This caused much suffering in both camps, especially among the wounded soldiers who were on higher ground and had no tents or shelters of any kind to protect them from the raw wind, snow, and cold. Nor could they have the comfort of a fire, for every light attracted the marksmanship of Indian sharpshooters. It was not until the next evening of October 1 that Captain Brotherton’s wagon train arrived, bringing medical supplies, tents, blankets, and food.
Miles had brought his artillery into action and shelled the Indian camp with telling effect. He also sent a dispatch to Howard, saying he had the Nez Perces corralled.
The general had reached Carroll on the Missouri on October 1, and took a boat up the river to Cow Island, leaving Sturgis in command of the column. October 3, Howard dashed on to join Miles, being accompanied by two aides—one, his son, Lieutenant Guy Howard, the other, Lieutenant C. E. S. Wood—and seventeen men, including the two faithful Nez Perce scouts, Old George and Captain John. Arthur Chapman, who had a Umatilla wife and was said by the whites to be a good friend of Joseph’s (this, however, was denied by the Indians), also rode with the general in his capacity as official interpreter.
During the evening of October 2, Colonel Sturgis received a note by courier from Miles, informing him of the Bearpaw battle and asking for reenforcements. So Sturgis ferried his and Howard’s command over the river and started to the relief of Miles with all the troops. Sturgis continued until he was within a two hours’ march of the battlefield, when a courier from Howard apprised him of Joseph’s surrender. Then he went into camp to await the general’s return.
On the morning of October 1 Miles had started negotiations for surrender with Joseph and some of his warriors. Joseph sent Yellow Bull, a subchief, as his representative to meet the messenger of Miles, who entered the Nez Perce camp under a flag of truce. The report of this first interview and subsequent ones we have in Joseph’s own words as follows:
Yellow Bull understood the messenger to say that General Miles wished me to consider the situation; that he did not want to kill my people unnecessarily. Yellow Bull understood this to be a demand for me to surrender and save blood. Upon reporting this message to me Yellow Bull said he wondered whether General Miles was in earnest. I sent him back with my answer, that I had not made up my mind, but would think about it and send word soon. A little later he sent some Cheyenne scouts with another message. I went out to meet them. They said they believed General Miles was sincere and really wanted peace. I walked on to General Miles’s tent. He met me and we shook hands. He said, “Come, let us sit down by the fire and talk this matter over.”15
Joseph was accompanied by some of his warriors, for Miles states in his official report to the Secretary of War that at first the Indians seemed willing to surrender and brought along eleven rifles and carbines, but he thought they became suspicious “from some remarks that were made in English in their hearing,”16 and so hesitated to lay down their arms. At any rate, Miles, in his own words, “detained” Joseph in his camp overnight. Meanwhile, he dispatched Lieutenant Jerome of the Second Cavalry to “reconnoiter” the Indian village, which is military parlance for orders to spy on the camp.
When that officer appeared in the village and there was no sign of Joseph, the Indians became distrustful. Yellow Bull himself seized the bridle of Jerome’s black horse and pulled the lieutenant out of the saddle. Some of the young men wanted to kill him, but were restrained by Yellow Bull. While Joseph was held as a hostage in Miles’s camp, Jerome was likewise “detained” as a prisoner, being confined in a damp, cold, underground passage. His Indian guards had to dance to keep warm in the freezing air. The battle continued intermittently, and they finally left him, saying, “We must fight again pretty soon to get warm.”
Joseph was not as well treated by his civilized captors, he reported later. Miles had him “hobbled” hands and feet, rolled in a double blanket and quartered with the mules. These indignities were heaped upon the chief after the colonel had deliberately violated the flag of truce.
Just why Miles “detained” Joseph he never made clear. Perhaps he hoped to speed up the surrender by depriving the Nez Perces of their chief, or perhaps he feared that Joseph might attempt to slip away if given his freedom. Ambitious officer that he was, Miles may have hoped to score a decisive victory before Howard could arrive to take over command as ranking officer and thus defeat the colonel’s desire to win national acclaim (and a promotion) for the capture of the Nez Perces.
In any event, Yellow Bull came into “Bear Coat’s” camp to find out if Joseph was still alive and why he had not returned. Joseph complains:
General Miles would not let me leave the tent to see my friend alone.
Yellow Bull said to me: “They have got you in their power, and I am afraid they will never let you go again. I have an officer in our camp, and I will hold him until they let you go free.”
I said: “I do not know what they mean to do with me, but if they kill me you must not kill the officer. It will do no good to avenge my death by killing him.”17
Yellow Bull was permitted to return to the village where he then made good his word about holding Jerome. The next day mutual confidence was restored when Miles showed good faith by releasing Joseph, exchanging him for the lieutenant under a flag of truce midway between the two camps.
In later years Yellow Bull related the affair, from which we can infer that the Indians were almost starving while negotiations were under way:
After we kept Captain [Yellow Bull’s mistake; Jerome was a lieutenant.] Jerome in our camps for a day and night he wanted something to eat. I and Tom Hill [a half-breed Indian] told him that we had nothing he could eat; that he had better write a note to General Miles and ask him for something to eat. He wrote a note to General Miles, and Red Wolf’s son took the message to General Miles, and we made an exchange of prisoners. . . .18
Upon Joseph’s return to the village he held a council with the surviving chiefs and found them divided about surrendering. “We could have escaped from Bear Paw Mountain,” he says, “if we had left our wounded, old women, and children behind. We were unwilling to do this. We had never heard of a wounded Indian recovering while in the hands of white men.”19
Again the battle was resumed amid chilling snow flurries.
23
Joseph’s Surrender
General Howard approached Miles’s camp after dark on a cold, snowy evening of October 4. He could see flashes of rifle fire from the pits of both sides. Miles, bringing his adjutant, Lieutenant Oscar Long, an orderly, and two or three soldiers, all mounted, advanced across the prairie to meet the general’s command.
Both parties dismounted, and Howard held out his hand, saying heartily, “Hello, Miles! I’m glad to see you. I thought you might have met Gibbon’s fate. Why didn’t you let me know?”1
Instead of answering the question Miles replied with a cold, formal greeting to his superior officer, and asked the general to his tent while another was being prepared for Howard.
With his characteristic kindness and consideration for those beneath him in rank, Howard requested Miles to have the two Nez Perce scouts and Chapman well cared for, and then the others went on to the colonel’s tent.
In the presence of his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Wood, Howard promised to give Miles the credit for capturing the Indians. The colonel, Howard well knew, was ambitious for a brigadier generalship. Miles’s wife was a niece of General W. T. Sherman, then General of the Army. Howard further promised not to take over command until after the surrender—a promise which he kept. Then, Wood recounts: “Colone
l Miles’ entire manner changed; he became cordial, thanked the General for all he had said. . . .”2
Wood reports there was much bitterness against Miles among the men of Howard’s command over Joseph’s surrender. It would appear that messages from Miles to Howard keeping the latter informed of Miles’s movements against the Nez Perces apparently failed to reach the general, since he had left his command under Major Edwin Mason and Colonel Sturgis. It turned out later, however, that Major Mason did receive the messages, but he was unable to communicate with Howard. So, not hearing from Miles, Howard began to fear that the colonel had suffered Gibbon’s fate. Wood states he privately told Howard that he distrusted Miles, but the general defended his subordinate officer. However, the opinion was prevalent, Wood writes, that “Miles did not want Howard to close up for fear Howard, as senior officer, would by operation of military law, supersede him in full command.” No mention of this resentment appears in Howard’s book or in his official report to the Secretary of War, although he makes a veiled allusion to “garbled dispatches” sent to General Sheridan in Chicago.
The officers consulted that night on the details of bringing about a surrender. The general suggested that his two Nez Perce scouts, Captain John and Old George, who had accompanied him from Idaho and both of whom had daughters in the Indian camp, should be sent as emissaries to Joseph.
In their own tent later that night, Lieutenant Wood reproached Howard for his generous gesture, and reiterated his distrust of Colonel Miles. Again the general expressed implicit faith in Miles, and there the matter rested. Miles had been Howard’s aide during the Civil War, and Howard had secured for him his first regiment. At a later date Wood further accused Miles of changing the dispatch sent to General Sheridan in Chicago which gave credit to Howard for his part in the surrender. Miles’s version of the capture (giving all the credit to himself) was published in a Chicago newspaper. Upon reading it, Wood wrote a true account, which was also published and drew forth Sheridan’s anger because he had not been consulted first by the general. But Howard, although deeply hurt by the matter, refused to be a party to a public criticism of Miles. Wood declared that Miles never alluded to his (Wood’s) open criticism of him whenever they met in later years.3
However, on the Bearpaw battlefield during the surrender negotiations, a seeming appearance of harmony prevailed among the officers. The next day (October 5) before noon, the two Nez Perce scouts parleyed in the village with the surviving chiefs and other headmen in council. After much “running to and fro between the camps,” Joseph sent his reply, to which White Bird agreed, saying, “What Joseph does is all right; I have nothing to say.”4
Joseph realized that further resistance was futile and that his hope for aid from Sitting Bull was vain. The terms of surrender as the chief understood them are best explained in his own words:
I could not bear to see my wounded men and women suffer any longer; we had lost enough already. General Miles had promised that we might return to our country, with what stock we had left. I thought we could start again. I believed General Miles, or I never would have surrendered. I have heard that he has been censured for making the promise to return us to Lapwai. He could not have made any other terms with me at that time. I would have held him in check until my friends came to my assistance, and then neither of the generals nor their soldiers would have left Bear Paw Mountain alive.5
According to Lieutenant Wood, when old Captain John brought Joseph’s message, “his lips quivered and his eyes filled with tears as he delivered the words of his chief.”6
This famous speech of surrender has been quoted and misquoted so often in history that it is illuminating to note Howard’s comment in his official report to the Secretary of War: “This reply . . . was taken verbatim on the spot by Lieutenant Wood, Twenty-first Infantry, my acting aide-de-camp and acting adjutant-general, and is the only report that was ever made of Joseph’s reply.”7 Contrary to the statements of some writers, Joseph’s surrender speech was not spoken to Howard and Miles on the battlefield but was delivered orally to the officers by old Captain John.
In the simplicity of its dramatic intensity the speech is without parallel in aboriginal oration:
Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before I have in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no [that is, vote in council]. He who led on the young men is dead [Joseph’s brother, Alokut]. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. 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.8
True to his word, Joseph made a formal surrender at 2:20 P.M. on October 5, and all firing ceased.9 Around 4:00 P.M. of that raw, windy, overcast day with a dim sun visible, he rode from his camp, accompanied by a guard of five warriors, including Chief Hush-hush-cute, who walked beside him talking in low tones. The chief’s hands clasped the saddle pommel, his rifle lay across his knees, and his head was bowed. His scalp lock was tied with otter fur, and the rest of his hair hung in thick braids on either side of his head. He wore buckskin leggings and a gray woolen shawl, containing four or five bullet holes. His head and wrist also showed scratches from bullets.
Stolidly he rode, looking neither to right nor left. Slowly the group ascended the hill to a halfway spot between the lines on the snow-covered plateau where General Howard and Colonel Miles were waiting. A little aside stood the aides, Lieutenants Wood, Guy Howard, and Long, and, farther away, an orderly and Arthur Chapman, the interpreter. At some distance a courier waited beside his horse that nervously pawed the snowy ground. The soldiers observed that the chief’s clothes were pierced by more than a dozen bullet holes.
Reaching the officers, Joseph straightened himself in the saddle, and then with a graceful dignity swung off his horse. He flung out his arm to its full length in an impulsive gesture and offered his rifle to General Howard. The latter, with a smile, generously motioned to his subordinate officer, who accepted the token of surrender.
The officers then shook hands with Joseph, whose worn face lit up briefly with a sad smile, as he silently took each proffered hand. Afterwards he turned away and entered the tent provided for him. Lieutenant Wood visited him and offered to make him as comfortable as possible.
From then on a straggling line of Indians, wounded, sick, half-starved, came into Miles’s camp on Eagle Creek, bringing their guns and the remnants of their ponies in miserable condition—lame, thin, and bone-weary.
After the early winter dusk had fallen that night, according to Howard’s report to the Secretary of War, White Bird and a band estimated variously at twenty to fifty, and later officially established at 104, escaped through the pickets’ lines and joined Sitting Bull.10 Later, Black Eagle told McWhorter that 233 Nez Perces in all slipped away and that only six of White Bird’s warriors surrendered. Three of these were Yellow Bull and his two brothers. Howard states that thirty warriors, twenty of whom were wounded, and two hundred ponies were reported by the Red River French half-breeds to have crossed the Canadian border.
Joseph, likewise, could have escaped, but he chose to become an honorable prisoner of war and remain with his people as their tribal guardian. Other fugitives sought refuge among the Gros Ventres and Assiniboines. The Nez Perces were either murdered by them or driven to the hills, whither Miles’s Sioux scouts could not be induced to pursue the fleeing remnants of the hostiles. Some time later White Bird’s band returned to the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho. According to McLaughlin, White Bird himself continued to live in the land of the Redcoats until his death a few years before 1900.11 The chief sought refuge in Canada because he evidently expe
cted to face a firing squad if he surrendered as it was his young men who had commenced hostilities.
In the last analysis the real test of greatness is how an individual bears defeat. Joseph acquitted himself well in his darkest hour—a hero with moral courage—and in his last stand fought a brave battle, causing casualties of 20 percent among the troops. He had lost twenty-five killed, and of the eighty-seven warriors who surrendered, forty were wounded.12 Besides these, there were 184 women and 147 children, a total of 418 prisoners out of the original 800 who fled from Idaho. The troops lost twenty-six killed, including two officers, and of the forty-two wounded, four were officers.13
10. “He flung out his arm to its full length in an impulsive gesture—”
11. Escape of Chief White Bird.
Joseph, his older wife and daughter Sarah in exile with White Bird, had left only his younger wife and his baby girl, less than five months old.14 He had come to the end of the trail, but behind him he and his tribesmen left an illustrious record. The Nez Perces never at any time had more than three hundred warriors, and their fighting strength was diminished with each battle, yet they had engaged in all some two thousand soldiers. The troops’ casualties for the campaign were 126 killed and 140 wounded, whereas the Nez Perces’ fighting force lost 151 killed and 88 wounded, which does not include the loss of women and children.15
The Nez Perces had fought eleven engagements, five of these being pitched battles, of which they had won three, tied one, and lost one. Howard’s troops marched in pursuit some 1,321 miles in seventy-five days, and the Indians about 1,800 miles, since they had to double and loop and backtrack. Judged by any standard, the fighting Nez Perces had accomplished a military exploit of the first magnitude. Although McLaughlin observes that Joseph had made “one of the greatest campaigns in the history of the world’s wars,” the credit properly belongs to the five nontreaty bands. When McLaughlin asked him where he got his military knowledge, Joseph replied, “The Great Spirit puts it in the heart and head of man to know how to defend himself.”16
Saga of Chief Joseph Page 30