Those who served with him vouchsafed that he was a man absolutely without fear, a true warrior in whom the fighting spirit was aroused in battle. While not as large as many infantrymen of the day, Bradley was lithe and sinewy, ever active and energetic.
Ever since his arrival in Montana Territory, he had endeared himself to many of its earliest pioneers as he tirelessly collected their reminiscences for the possible publication of a book at some future date. In particular, he was fascinated with the early fur trade of the Far West. His collection of narratives was one of the earliest to record the history of Fort Benton and the American Fur Company on the Upper Missouri River. With an insatiable appetite for the history and ethnography of the region, this budding scholar—who was just now joining the ranks of other inquisitive frontier army officers like John G. Bourke and Charles King—hoped his studies would one day provide a comfortable life for him and his Miss Mary and give both their daughters the grand weddings every girl dreams she will have.
But war would remain his chosen profession.
On the evening of 26 June 1876, as he was leading a few Crow scouts and the small advance up the valley where they would eventually discover the grotesque, dismembered bodies of the Custer dead, in some way the lieutenant already sensed what he was about to stumble across. Only a day earlier, he had confided to his journal: “There is not much glory in Indian wars, but it will be worthwhile to have been present at such an affair as this.”
He hoped the Seventh Infantry would now have a chance to make a little history—instead of merely witnessing it.
Their colonel commanding had mobilized the Seventh from Camp Baker, Forts Ellis and Shaw, and even out at a tiny way camp pitched beside Dauphin Rapids on the Missouri River to pull together this skimpy force of eight officers and eighty-one* enlisted men.
Gibbon had wired Governor Benjamin F. Potts concerning two possible eventualities, depending upon where the Nez Perce turned once they debouched from the Lolo. If the Non-Treaty bands turned north at the end of the Lolo Trail for the Blackfoot River, Gibbon wanted Potts to have his local militia assist Captain Rawn, who would be forced to follow the Indians until the colonel met them somewhere west of Cadotte Pass. But if the hostiles turned south, Potts was to send his volunteers to guard those passes leading into the Big Hole basin, with orders to delay the Non-Treaty bands until Gibbon could catch them from the rear and give a fight.
“Please give instructions,” the colonel told the governor, “… to have no negotiations whatever with the Indians, and the men should have no hesitancy in shooting down any armed Indians they meet not known to belong to one of the peaceful tribes.”
Rendezvousing just west of Cadotte Pass with eight troopers from the Second U. S. Cavalry out of Fort Ellis, they soon met wagons loaded with families and their meager belongings, civilians escaping the western sections of the state. Near New Chicago, several small parties of militia from Pioneer and Deer Lodge, already on the way to the Bitterroot, joined Gibbon’s men.
Accompanied by the eight cavalrymen, the colonel himself had pressed ahead of his column for Missoula City with all possible dispatch, reaching the community on 2 August. There he commandeered some wagons to be sent back for his foot soldiers and pack-master Hugh Kirkendall’s mule train from Fort Shaw.
Bradley himself reached Captain Rawn’s post the next afternoon with the rest of Gibbon’s undermanned column. At this early stage of the pursuit, the colonel maintained the optimism that he could overtake the slow-moving village within two days by making long, forced marches.
“I speculated the same thing you did, General,” Charles Rawn disclosed to Gibbon, using the colonel’s highest brevet rank awarded for gallantry in the Civil War. “Utilizing locals and some of my own men as spies, I’ve managed to keep an eye on the hostiles, charting their movements every day. We should be able to overhaul them in a matter of days and bring them to a fight.”
“They’re headed over the mountains by their normal route, Captain?” Bradley asked Rawn.
“They’ll have to go through Big Hole Prairie. Two days ago when I wasn’t proof certain of when you’d arrive, I wired Governor Potts that I would lead some fifty or sixty regulars in pursuit, knowing full well I’d have to temporize my march so that you or General Howard could catch up before I overtook the rear of the hostile village.”
“What do your sources tell you the bands are doing, Captain?” Bradley asked. “Are they moving any faster the closer they get to the head of the valley?”
“No, Lieutenant,” Rawn said. “If anything, they appear to dawdle a little more each of the last few days. I’ve become pretty well satisfied that they will not hurry out of the Bitterroot until they know that one army or the other has arrived to give them chase. Not surprisingly, they have been keeping a watch on us, too, and therefore know everything that’s going on with us.”
“How many warriors do you estimate are with them at this point?” inquired Bradley, who would be in charge of a small detail of scouts.
Rawn turned to the lieutenant and said, “At least two hundred and fifty.”
His eyes squinting with determination and a heap of keen anticipation, Bradley looked at Colonel Gibbon and declared, “That ought to make for a damn good scrap of it, sir.”
BY TELEGRAPH
—
KANSAS.
—
An Imposing Military Funeral at
Fort Leavenworth.
LEAVENWORTH, Ks., August 3.—Yesterday evening the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific brought the remains of Captains Yates and Custer, Liets. McIntosh, Smith, Calhoun and Worth. The bodies were placed in the Post chapel, and a guard of honor was stationed and remained during the night. This morning a large number of people visited the chapel and viewed the caskets containing the remains of the honored dead … The procession was formed, and the remains taken to the cemetery, about one mile distant, upon artillery caissons. Each caisson was drawn by two bay horses. Following each caisson was a horse caparisoned in mourning, and led by a cavalry soldier, according to the custom of the funeral ceremonies for officers in the cavalry service. During the march to the cemetery, minute guns were fired and flags lowered to half-mast … Arriving at the Post cemetery, the Episcopal service was read and a salute of three volleys was fired over the graves. The ceremonies were very imposing. All the arrangements were complete and carried out in perfect order. It was estimated that there were nearly three hundred carriages in the procession … The fact that the lamented dead had lived at that garrison and were well known and honored by our people created an intense feeling of sympathy among the entire community. Five of the brave soldiers in the army have thus been tenderly placed in their final resting place in the beautiful Leavenworth cemetery with all the honors due to men of noble and daring deeds, and their memory will be cherished by every patriot in the land.
Fort Lapwai
Sunday August 5, 1877
Dear Mamma,
It is doleful living alone this way without John and not knowing when he will come home. I don’t know how much longer I can get along … We are four ladies at the post now. Dr. Sternberg sent for his wife, and she has arrived.
Yesterday the Indian prisoners were taken away from here down to Vancouver. The squaws seemed to feel awfully about being taken away. Some of them moaned and groaned over it at a great rate. I did feel sort of sorry for them, as parts of all their families are still up here. One poor woman moaned and cried and really looked distressed. Just before she left, she took some ornaments of beads and gave them to the interpreter to give to her little girl who is up somewhere near Kamiah. One old man cut the bead ornaments off his moccasins and left them for his wife.
We have not heard anything from General Howard’s command up in the Lolo Trail for a week. I wish we could hear! We have had all sorts of rumors about the Indians, but we don’t know anything. I had a note from John written Monday night at their first camp on the Trail. He said it was a hard mountain trail. They h
ad been all day going 15 miles. It is a zigzag, winding, steep trail, in many places impossible for two to walk abreast, with either rocks or a dense pine forest close on all sides.
There are several companies of troops over on the other side in Montana, and we have heard that the Indians were allowed to pass, but we don’t think it possible. We also hear the Indians have gotten back on General Howard’s rear …
Your loving daughter,
Emily F.
Rationed for twenty days, General O. O. Howard’s seven-hundred-thirty-man column struck out for the western terminus of the Lolo Trail beneath a steady, cold, depressing rain early that Monday morning, 30 July.
It had taken more than a day to repair the wire cable across the Clearwater, then two more days to slog the entire command across to the north bank. That final day of preparation, the twenty-ninth, was a Sunday. Howard attended a Presbyterian service conducted in both Nez Perce and English by Archie Lawyer, son of the great treaty chief. It was a chance to offer prayers to the Almighty. And that night, their last beside the Kamiah crossing, the general committed his innermost doubts to paper:
There is a stern reality in going from all that you love into the dread uncertainty of Indian fighting, where the worst form of torture and death might await you. It is very wise and proper to ask God’s blessing when about to plunge into the dark clouds of warfare.
In the advance by four o’clock that Monday morning rode twenty-four members of a tribe that was an ancient enemy of the Nez Perce, Bannock scouts, who had arrived on the twenty-eighth from Fort Boise with Major George B. Sanford of the First U. S. Cavalry. Major John Wesley Green, also of the First, would be along soon, temporarily delayed with two infantry companies at the nearby mining community of Florence. Above their traditional leggings of buckskin or antelope hide the Bannock wore army tunics of dark blue, gaily set off with bright sashes of stars and stripes fashioned from old garrison flags. They were led by Buffalo Horn, who, just two days before departing Fort Boise, had returned to his people after serving Colonel Nelson A. Miles during the last skirmishes of the Great Sioux War.* Despite the rain that fell in sheets, Buffalo Horn and his fellow trackers were eager to hunt down the fleeing village filled with their longtime enemies. With the arrival of these Indian scouts, the general dismissed McConville’s volunteers mustered from the rural settlements of eastern Washington.
The quartermaster had seen to it the column was supplied with rations for twenty days, along with additional beeves on the hoof. Howard designated Lewiston as the main depot for his army in the field, leaving orders that the general staff was to keep the depot well furnished with at least three months’ supplies on hand. Forage would not be carried along, because the general and his officers believed they could obtain what they needed for their stock along the way.
The column’s supplies would be transported on the backs of a long train of more than 350 mules, in addition to what mules were needed to carry the dismantled Coehorn mortar** and drag the two Gatling guns and a pair of mountain howitzers over the rugged Lolo Trail. This march would prove itself to be like no other since Hannibal himself had crossed the Alps.
From the Kamiah crossing of the Clearwater, the rainsoaked, slippery trail was an ordeal Howard likened to a monkey climbing a greased rope, as it angled northeast for sixteen miles toward the Weippe Prairie—where the soldiers found that the Nez Perce women had dug up much of the lush camas meadows—then would extend almost due east into the Bitterroot Mountains for more than a hundred miles of narrow ridges and harrowing precipices, not to mention boggy mires where man and beast sank to their knees and slapped at blood-devouring mosquitoes or that fallen timber so thick an exasperated Howard believed a man could cross from one side of the Lolo to the other stepping only on downed trees, without his feet once touching the ground.
Eleven years before, at the time of both the Idaho and Montana gold rushes, Congress had funded a party of ax-men and former Civil War engineers under Wellington Bird and Sewell Truax to survey and build a road over the Bitterroot. It was, by and large, this narrow, primitive “wagon road” that the Nez Perce had started out on a full two weeks before General Howard ever got under way, his column following the same exhausting path toward Montana Territory—fighting their way over and around trees felled by high winds and heavy, wet snowfall, over and across the remnants of once-massive snowdrifts. On either side of the plodding column arose peaks rising more than seven thousand feet high, all still blanketed with a thick mantle of white that day by day became moisture draining into the Middle Fork of the Clearwater on the west, into the Bitterroot River to the east.
So slow was their pace that it did not take long every morning for the entire command to find itself strung out for more than five, sometimes as many as six, miles in length.
“How far ahead of us do you think Joseph’s village is now?” Howard once asked Ad Chapman near the end of a day’s march.
The civilian had shrugged, clearly unsure of how to answer. “Far enough I fear we won’t catch ’em less’n they stay put for a time, General. No man can get so much out of a horse as an Indian can.”
Almost from the first day they began to come upon remnants of the Indians’ passage: horses abandoned with serious wounds and broken limbs, other ponies already dead and stiffening upon the trail. At many of the tightest switchbacks and where the Nez Perce had forced themselves through tight stands of trees, the soldiers found streaks of blood and bits of horsehide still clinging from the busted branches.
Just behind the Bannock scouts, who ranged far in the lead, a unit of fifty skilled civilian “pioneers” hired by Jack Carleton, a Lewiston timberman, all of whom served under Captain William F. Spurgin of the Twenty-first Infantry, labored day after day after day with their axes and two-man crosscuts to chop down and saw their way through that knotty maze of timber slowing the army’s progress. When there was time, Spurgin’s “skillets,” as they were affectionately called by the soldiers, built bridges across rocky chasms and improved portions of the dangerous trail by corduroying with timber or shoring up muddy walls with fragments of rock.
Up every morning with reveille at four. Breakfast by five. On the march no later than six. One long, arduous afternoon as they plodded toward the pass, correspondent Thomas Sutherland reined to the side of the trail to let others pass by while he let his horse catch its breath.
He called out, “General!”
“Yes, Mr. Sutherland?” Howard asked as his horse slowly carried him past the newsman.
“I was wondering if you intended to kill all your men by these hard marches, rather than waiting for them to have the chance to kill Joseph!”
It rained every afternoon, long enough to soak through their woolen garments and make the trail a slippery, mucky, sticky obstacle to be endured. Many evenings when they finally limped into bivouac after 6:00 P.M., the men were mud-caked from chin to toe. But a cheery fire and a little sunshine as that bright orb fell from the undergut of those dark clouds to the west did much to raise any flagging spirits, despite a monotonous diet of salt pork, hardbread, an occasional dollop of potatoes while they lasted, and plenty of coffee to wash it down.
The column ended up losing a little of its crackers and some of its bacon the fourth day out, abandoned along the way with the injured and broken-down mules carrying those packs up the torturous loops of the Lolo Trail.
Not only did the unbelievably rugged terrain hamper the speed of the march, but so did the fact that the men could water only a few of their horses and mules at a time when they ran across those infrequent springs and freshets on their climb toward the Continental Divide. In addition, at one stop after another, the soldiers failed to find enough forage to fill their weakening stock. The Nez Perce herd had grazed nearly all of the coarse, non-nutritious wire grass down to its roots.
That, and the cocky defiance of the hostiles, infuriated Howard to no end. On the fourth day, the Bannocks located a beautifully executed carving of an Indian bow,
whittled out of the bark of a dark pine tree growing alongside the trail. The bow and its arrow were pointed to the rear—clearly meant to strike Howard and those soldiers who were following.
That same afternoon the general’s advance heard the dim rattle of gunfire up the trail. He and others hurried ahead, fearing the Bannock had been ambushed by a rear guard, but found instead his trackers, scouts, and some of Spurgin’s pioneers standing knee-deep in the headwaters of a gushing creek, shooting salmon with their carbines. That night, most of the column had a brief change in diet.
Then on 4 August as the head of the column entered a pretty mountain glade dotted with swampy ponds and the lushest green grass, disappointing news arrived with James Cearly and Joseph Baker, those two Mount Idaho couriers he had sent south over the Old Nez Perce Trail with dispatches for Captain Rawn. They rode up to Howard that Saturday afternoon, accompanied by Wesley Little, who had run across the couriers on the Elk City Road and ended up accompanying the pair all the way to Missoula City.
Rawn, he learned, along with his small force of soldiers and a large contingent of civilian volunteers, had somehow allowed the Nez Perce to get around them and exit the canyon into the Bitterroot valley. In fact, they were reportedly camped near the small community of Corvallis and were likely to move toward Big Hole Prairie on the Elk City Trail. And according to the dispatch brought him from Captain Charles Rawn, Colonel John Gibbon was momentarily expected from Fort Shaw, along with a small force of his Seventh U. S. Infantry.
The captain addressed his note to Howard:
Start tomorrow to try to delay them, as per your letter and Gen’l. Gibbon’s order. Will get volunteers if I can. Have sent word to Gov. Potts, that it appears from information gained from men who know the country, that the Indians intend to go through Big Hole or Elk City trail. By sending his 300 Militia ordered mustered in, direct from Deer Lodge to Big Hole Prairie, can head them off.
Lay the Mountains Low Page 48
