The battle, with its incidents, is one that will enter into history; its results, immediate and remote, will surely bring permanent peace to the Northwest, so that it is with great satisfaction the General can say that not one officer or soldier that came under his eye on that field failed to do his duty, and more gallant conduct he never witnessed in battle. The General feels deeply the loss of the killed, and sympathizes heartily with the wounded, and unites with their friends in, their anxiety and sorrow. He mentions no one by name in this order, hoping to do justice to individuals after reports shall be received. The command is indebted to the officers of the staff for their indefatigable work previous to and during the engagement.
WITH that bit of officiousness put behind him, the general gathered with his headquarters staff on the south bank of the Clearwater, waiting for Joseph to bring his people in to surrender.
“This surrender means nothing short of the end to the war,” Howard enthused outwardly, while inside he remained full of doubt.
“We’ve heard reports from a few Christians that White Bird is driving all those who hoped to surrender before him with the lash,” Monteith admitted. “There’s some room for error in these rumors, but … I feel that if Joseph attempts to surrender, it will lead to an open clash between the Non-Treaty bands.”
That’s when Watkins declared, “And Agent Monteith doesn’t think Joseph will risk such a clash within the Dreamers.”
The hours slowly dragged past that morning. The Nez Perce did not show.
His hopes crushed, Howard sensed his anger simmering—figuring that he had been played a fool by Joseph. Not only was the chief a superb military tactician in outmaneuvering Oliver’s West Point-trained officers, but Joseph was an unequalled diplomatic strategist in outplaying Howard himself in this ruse* at surrender.
“It was nothing more than a well-manufactured lie designed to hold me in check while he had time to take his hostiles and their livestock toward the terminus of the Lolo Trail,” Howard admitted to his staff later that morning as they gathered for officers’ call in the shade of some trees.
“Joseph wants to play cat and mouse again with us,” Captain David Perry said, “we’ll show him the cat can catch that mouse—”
“General Howard! General Howard! Pickets report Indians coming down to the crossing!”
Was it too much to hope?
Howard busted through the circle of officers who barely had time to step aside for him. The moment he had a clear view of the distant hillside, the general stopped in his tracks, staring. A thin column of Indians both on horseback and foot angled down the grassy north slope toward the Kamiah crossing. Not quite a hundred, but close enough from what he could tell. While it was nowhere near all the souls in that hostile camp, it was nonetheless a start. So with Joseph at the head of this first group to surrender, the others would soon see the Tightness in giving up and eventually follow their leader in to turn over their weapons and horses.
But by the time the first leaders had their ponies halfway across the Clearwater, Howard was standing at the edge of the river, shifting from foot to foot, bewildered that he did not see Joseph among those riders.
“Where is Joseph?” he demanded of his translator as James Reuben came up at a lope and dismounted on both feet.
“Joseph isn’t with them,” Reuben said after he had spoken to the first arrivals. “He is with the others camped back in the hills.”
“Joseph is coming down later?”
“No, General. These are the only people surrendering today,” Reuben explained. “Their names are Red Heart and Three Feathers. They brought their families in to give up their guns and horses. Don’t want to fight the soldiers. No war, so they come in to you.”
Bitterly, with more disappointment than he wanted to admit was boiling in his belly, Howard grumbled at his aides, “Take their guns and dismount them. They are my prisoners of war.”
He whirled on his heel.
“General,” Reuben said, lunging in front of Howard, “these are no fighters. Never fight the army. You can’t make them prisoners of war.”
He glared at Reuben as he snapped, “I can make any Nez Perce a prisoner of war when I know they’ve been with the hostiles in their camp. Who’s to say they’re not spies? Or that they don’t mean to kill me if they had the chance? You tell them they are my prisoners!”
Later that morning Second Lieutenant Charles Wood came up to report that Red Heart’s people had only two old guns to turn over.
“Were they completely searched?” Howard inquired.
“Yes, General. The translator told me they said more of their people would be coming in later today or tomorrow.”
“Joseph?”
Wood shook his head. “The one called Three Feathers said Joseph has been compelled to take his people to the buffalo country with White Bird and Looking Glass. He also claimed he lived on the reservation and has never been—”
“A reservation Indian, is he?” Howard sniffed. “I want them all arrested and taken off to Lapwai under armed escort. They shall remain my prisoners of war until this war is over.”*
“I’ll see that escort is arranged, sir,” Wood replied. “It seems to me that these people showing up to surrender to you is a good sign.”
“A good sign?”
“Yes, sir. To me it shows that there is dissension in those warrior bands. I think it bodes well that the war is close to an end, General.”
He allowed himself to enjoy a little self-congratulation, at least until midafternoon, when a courier arrived from Fort Lapwai with a leather envelope filled with letters and even a dispatch from division headquarters in Portland. Included was a terse wire from General Irwin McDowell’s aide, which read in total:
See Associated Press dispatches which
state General Howard’s removal under
consideration by cabinet.
That flimsy was attached to several clippings from recent newspapers, all dealing with stories picked up off the wire from Washington City.
His long string of failures, blunders, and misplaced optimism had gotten him nothing but a blackguard’s treatment in the press. All at once, the awful specter of those scandals at the Freedmen’s Bureau loomed over him once more like a sword suspended on a very thin thread. Everyone, it seemed, had been calling for his removal, and those cries had found ears all the way to Washington itself.
But, as General McDowell himself wrote in a wire to Howard, with that news of his success in the Clearwater fight Howard himself had reversed all that ill will with one fell swoop:
To army heads sorely perturbed over Nez Perce
successes, your telegrams were welcome news
when they reached headquarters a day ago.
Instead of being the one who would have had to remove Howard by order from Washington, General McDowell now relayed his unbounded elation at Howard’s turnaround, writing, in part:
Your dispatch and that of Captain Keeler of your
engagement on the eleventh (11th) and twelfth (12)
gave us all great pleasure. I immediately
repeated them to Washington, to be laid before
the Secretary of War and the President. These
dispatches came most opportunely, for your
enemies had raised a great clamor against you,
which, the press reported, had not been without
its effect in Washington. They have been
silenced, but I think they (like Joseph’s band)
have been scotched—not killed—and will rise
again if they have a chance …
“This is great news, General!” Thomas Sutherland exclaimed as he came up to join the headquarters group. “Those wags with their asses plopped down in some comfortable horsehair sofa back in Washington—what do they know of Indian fighting?”
The other officers cheered that approbation.
“It’s for sure they haven’t been reading any of my dispatches!” Sutherland conti
nued. “If they had, those myopic narrow-sighted imbeciles would know better than to criticize a fighting man in the middle of a fight!”
Howard nodded. “I appreciate your help and understanding, Mr. Sutherland.”
“No need to thank me at all, General,” the correspondent replied. “Only a blind man couldn’t have seen that those two days on the Clearwater were the only fight Joseph’s had where his ambition was victory … and its plain to see that, ever after, his highest aim will be simply to escape your army.”
*As the years passed, ample evidence came to light to show that Joseph may have indeed been very interested in surrendering to Howard. Years after the war, Lieutenant C. E. S. Wood wrote that he had been told by an unnamed Nez Perce informant, “Joseph wished to surrender rather than leave the country or bring further misery on his people, that, in council, he was overruled by the older chiefs … and would not desert the common cause.” As late as 1963 Josiah Red Wolf stated, “… not only was Joseph hard to persuade to stay in the fight, but he tried to drop out after the [Clearwater battle].”
*Which is just what happened. These men in chains, along with their women and children, were herded on foot through scorching heat and choking dust to Fort Lapwai, more than sixty miles away, then on to Lewiston, from there by steamer to Fort Vancouver, where they remained incarcerated behind walls and bars until the end of the Nez Perce War that winter.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
KHOY-TSAHL, 1877
“I AM NOT AFRAID TO SAY THIS!” WHITE BIRD EXCLAIMED AS the twilight deepened, accenting his many wrinkles as the firelight played off his face. “There were too many cowards in our last fight with the suapiesr!”
Toohoolhoolzote grunted his agreement just an arm’s length from Yellow Wolf. “There was no convincing them to rejoin us in our fight. Cowards who fled to the smoking lodge. Some cowards slipped back down to the village while the rest of us held the soldiers away from our families!”
Looking Glass bolted to his feet, furious. “Because I came down from the ridge to see that my people were safe, does that make me a coward in your eyes?”
“Did you stay and fight through the cold night?”
Shaking his head, Looking Glass answered White Bird, “You do not understand. My people had been attacked and run off by the soldiers. More than any of you, I did not want to be chased away again, carrying only what we had on our backs.” He whirled on the Wallowa chief, pointing accusingly. “Joseph should have had the camp packed and ready to go before we were forced to fall back the second day. Joseph should have made more women tear down their lodges and pack their goods so that we would be ready.”
Yellow Wolf glanced over at his chief. It was true he had not played a major role in any of the fights against the suapies thus far. But Joseph had fought as a warrior with the other fighting men, returning to the camp only when it appeared the soldiers were about to roll over the entrenched warriors. There had been little time for the women to tear down the lodges and pack the travois before the warriors came boiling down to the river.
The sun had finally come out that morning, warming the lush, grassy meadows where the thousands of ponies grazed after the last two days of intermittent rain that made for a muddy, slippery trail ascending from the Kamiah crossing. After breakfast the women scattered to dig what camas the Shadows’ hogs hadn’t already rooted out of the damp soil. The white men who had settled in the area had always been that way—turning those disgusting animals loose on the Nee-Me-Poo digging grounds. Many days ago the settlers fled the Weippe, so this morning the young men rode off to torch all the white man’s buildings they could find in the area, shooting and butchering what cattle they did not want to steal but refusing to touch one of the white man’s hogs. Instead, the warriors killed every one.
Now with the sun’s setting, this momentous, solemn council had begun to air all the grievances among the chiefs and to determine the future of the Non-Treaty peoples.
“But instead of talking about what is behind us in the past,” Looking Glass growled, “I think we should be talking about what should be for the days ahead.”
“I agree,” said Hahtalekin, known as Red Echo or Red Owl. Earlier that afternoon the Palouse chief had come in with sixteen warriors. “Yesterday is behind us. Now we must think about what to do tomorrow. Where to go.”
“Why do you and Looking Glass say we have to go anywhere?” Joseph argued, having been silent for a long time. “Why can’t we stay and fight, die if we must, in our own country?”
“Some of our leaders are giving us bad advice,” Shore Crossing said as he leaped to his feet near White Bird. “I think we should listen to Looking Glass and go to the buffalo country!”
White Bird shook his head, pointing at the young “Red Coat” warrior from his own band, one of three who had worn their famous red blankets tied at their necks while making the daring charges at Lahmotta.” Is this what you want to do now that we are gathered to fight the soldiers? You sons of evil started this war for all the rest of us. No, you are not running away. You will stay with me and Joseph and fight till we kill all the white men, or die like Nee-Me-Poo warriors!”
“No, this cannot be so,” argued Looking Glass. “Don’t we have enough friends and brothers dead already? And still the suapies and Shadows come after our trail. They seem like the sands in the riverbed. No matter how bravely we fight them, the more we kill, the more will invade our country.”
“Can’t we make the best peace we can with Cut-Off Arm?” Joseph pleaded. “Think of our women and children—they will be left widows and orphans if we keep on fighting.”
“Surrender?” Looking Glass snorted. “Those of our fighting men the soldiers do not kill in battle Cut-Off Arm will hang.”
“This is true,” White Bird agreed begrudgingly. “I remember what the suapies did to Captain Jack and his Modocs when he surrendered to the Shadows. They died at the end of a rope!”
“If our men are either killed by the soldiers in battle or hanged,” Looking Glass argued, “then who will care for our women and children, Joseph? How can you say we should stay when our brothers from Lapwai and Kamiah have turned their backs on us and are helping the Shadows like snakes?”
Joseph turned to White Bird, saying, “Perhaps some of the Shadows’ wrongs against us have made a few of our young men do bad things. Because of that you are saying we must now give up the land of our fathers and follow Looking Glass into the land of the buffalo far away from the place of our birth?”
“Yes!” Looking Glass cheered. “The white men there are not like the Shadows in this Idaho country. They trade with us. We leave our lodges and poles and many horses with the Shadows and the Flathead every hunting season when we visit them on our way home from the buffalo country. Rainbow and Five Wounds are just back, so they will tell you: The E-sue-gha say they are willing to go on the warpath against the white man with us!”
“But what of Cut-Off Arm?” White Bird wondered.
Rainbow stepped forward to say, “If we follow Looking Glass, we will put the Idaho soldiers behind us. Cut-Off Arm will not follow us with his army over the mountains.”
“Joseph,” White Bird persuaded, apparently won over, “perhaps we can leave the war here. The Shadows will not remain angry with us for long. If some of your people want to come back, they can return to their old homes in a few summers; maybe even by next spring everything will be back to the way it was before.”
But the tall chief of the Wallamwatkin band prodded the other leaders by saying, “What are we fighting for? Is it for our lives? No. It is for this land where the bones of our fathers lie buried. I do not want to take my women among strangers. I do not want to die in a faraway land. Some of you tried to say once that I was afraid of the whites. You evil-talkers stay here with me now and you will have plenty of fighting at my side! We will put our women behind us in these mountains and die on our own fighting for them. I would rather do that than run I know not where.”
Tooho
olhoolzote, that stocky firebrand, now said in a calming tone, “Joseph, I know you think only of the families, those who do no fighting. Now it is time for you to think of the good we will do for them by no longer fighting, by going over the mountains away from the soldiers.”
“Joseph?” Looking Glass prodded impatiently.
He wagged his head. “I don’t know—”
Lay the Mountains Low Page 36
