Saga of Chief Joseph

by Helen Addison Howard

  The position of the troops had become untenable, so Colonel Gibbon ordered them to retreat up the hill and take cover among the scanty growth of small pine trees, the only defensive point nearby. Valiantly fighting, they withdrew across the river through the clumps of willow, carrying their wounded comrades, being compelled to drive the Indian sharpshooters out of the very timber they wanted as shelter. These warriors took refuge in a shallow washout, their accurate aim decimating the troops. Expert marksmen among the soldiers finally killed or routed all the Nez Perce sharpshooters.

  6. A hand-to-hand encounter during the battle of the Big Hole.

  One warrior had piled large rocks about the roots of a pine tree. From a loophole through the stones he was able to shoot five soldiers, although he himself was safe from the bullets of the troops. G. O. Shields reports:

  7. Big Hole battlefield, looking north. Point of timber fortified by Gibbon may be seen in middle background. From original sketch made by Granville Stuart, May 11, 1878. Reproduced courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

  Finally, however, a soldier, who was an expert marksman and cool as a veteran, took careful aim and sent a bullet into this loophole which struck the rock on one side, glanced and entered the Indian’s eye, passing out at the back of his head—a veritable carom shot. This tree was girdled with bullets. . . .13

  Soon after the battle had started a squad of mounted braves rounded up their hundreds of ponies, and drove them down the river beyond reach of the troops after a sharp skirmish with a party of citizen scouts on foot.

  Colonel Gibbon writes in his report to the Secretary of War:

  Just as we took up our position in the timber, two shots from our howitzer on the trail above us were heard, and we afterward learned that the gun and pack-mule with ammunition were, on the road to us, intercepted by Indians.14

  So desperate had the plight of the soldiers become that the colonel himself was reduced to using his rifle like a private of the ranks. Ammunition was getting low, and the supply train had not been heard from. Gibbon gave orders for the troops to reserve their fire. As meager protection against the deadly aim of the Indians, the soldiers dug rifle pits with their trowel bayonets and piled up rock defenses. G. O. Shields relates: “A half-breed in the camp, familiar with the Nez Perce tongue, heard White Bird encouraging his men and urging them to charge, assuring them that the white soldiers’ ammunition was nearly gone.”15 But they made no concerted assault.

  As quickly as the command withdrew from the village the Indians reoccupied it. “Few of us will soon forget,” Gibbon wrote later, “the wail of mingled grief, rage, and horror which came from the camp . . . when the Indians returned to it and recognized their slaughtered warriors, women, and children.”16

  The women began pulling down some of the tepees and packed a few of their belongings on ponies. Then they quickly mounted saddle animals and with the children fled down the valley. White historians state that all this was accomplished under a hot fire by the troops who were returning the volleys of the Nez Perce sharpshooters. The Indians paid for their boldness in the loss of some horses and the lives of several people. Those slain at this time, the whites believed, were two of Joseph’s wives and a daughter of Looking Glass.17

  However, Indian survivors deny this. Black Eagle told L. V. McWhorter, “No! The horses were packed without enemy firing. Soldiers were then in the woods entrenching. They could no longer see our camp, what we were doing.” Sergeant Noyes (Loynes?) of Captain Rawn’s company also confirmed this to McWhorter.18

  Yellow Wolf likewise corrects the account by historian Shields. Only one of Joseph’s wives was wounded, and she recovered.19 A wife of Alokut’s he declared, who was wounded in the fighting, died later.20

  In their hurried retreat the Nez Perces had to abandon many buffalo robes, large quantities of dried meat, and other food and clothing.

  Indian marksmen from the cover of the riverbanks and from behind trees and rocks, harassed the troops all day. Lieutenant English received a fatal wound, and Captain Williams was hit a second time.

  In the afternoon the wagon train and the howitzer, guarded by twenty men in charge of Hugh Kirkendall, the citizen wagon master, was brought to within five miles of the command. During the night there occurred one of those incidents on the hairsplitting borderline between tragedy and comedy, but which relieves the nervous tension of men in battle. William Woodcuck, Lieutenant Jacob’s Negro servant, was on sentry duty, armed with a double-barreled shotgun. Kirkendall went the rounds to see if his guards were on the alert. Near William’s post he was commanded to “Halt!” and was almost instantly fired upon. The buckshot tore up the ground at the wagon master’s feet, but luckily did not hit him. The next day the too-alert sentry became the butt of the men’s jokes, and he was slyly asked, “Who goes there?—Bang!”

  At daylight six men started with the howitzer to join Gibbon’s command. They halted a half mile from the scene of action when a band of thirty mounted Indians emerged from the timber. As the soldiers placed the lone piece of artillery in a position to fire, the warriors attacked them. Two of the privates became panic-stricken and fled. Nor did they stop until they had put a hundred miles between themselves and the Indians. Such was their terror that they spread exaggerated reports of the fate befallen the command. The other four soldiers stood their ground, firing the gun twice. Then the Indians closed around them, and they resorted to their rifles.

  Being unable to defend the howitzer, the soldiers threw it off the trunnion and retreated, but not until Sergeants Daly and Frederics were wounded at their posts and Corporal Sale killed. Private Bennett, the driver, was pinned beneath one of the wounded horses. By feigning death he was able to make his escape after the warriors withdrew, and reached the wagon train ahead of the sergeants. The Indians dismantled the howitzer and captured a pack mule carrying two thousand rounds of ammunition—a serious blow to the troops.

  Late in the afternoon Gibbon’s men noticed a cloud of smoke approaching them. Someone cried out that the Indians had set fire to the grass. A strong wind was blowing the blaze directly toward the soldiers. Gibbon feared the warriors would assault his men under cover of the smoke screen. Only the year before, Gibbon recalled, Looking Glass’s band of Nez Perces had entertained the soldiers and their wives at Fort Shaw by a mimic battle in which similar tactics had been employed. On this occasion they were used in deadly earnest.

  He issued orders to his troops, “If the worst comes, my men, if this fire reaches us, we will charge through it, meet the redskins in the open ground, and send them to a hotter place than they have prepared for us.”21

  Anxiously the soldiers watched those leaping, crackling tongues of flame racing uphill toward them. Nearer and nearer they came, the smoke blinding the men and almost suffocating them. When the fire was only a few yards away the wind turned about and blew the flames back over their own blackened embers, where they died for lack of fuel. A wild cheer came from the hoarse throats of the soldiers.

  As the hours wore on the troops suffered from hunger, from the heat of the August sun, but mostly from thirst. Not until after dark could a fatigue party dare to crawl the few hundred yards to the river for water. For food that night the famished men cut up Lieutenant Woodruff’s horse, conveniently killed by the Indians inside the lines. The soldiers devoured it raw, since they were not allowed to make fires. Fearful of a night attack and being without blankets, the men could not sleep, but shivered the cold night away, the second one since the battle began. Occasional shots came from the Indians who feigned several charges nearly to the troops’ entrenchments. The soldiers greeted these sallies with businesslike fusillades. Chief Joseph afterward told Gibbon that a night attack was “proposed, and arranged for, but finally abandoned.” Just what caused the change of plans, Joseph did not explain. But Yellow Wolf told McWhorter that the Indians did not charge because if they killed one soldier, a thousand would take his place. T
here was no one, though, to replace the loss of a single warrior.

  Since it seemed likely that his command would be indefinitely besieged, Colonel Gibbon dispatched a man to Deer Lodge, one hundred miles away, for medical assistance and supplies. This man, an Englishman, W. H. Edwards, made his way on foot for sixty miles and the remaining forty on horseback.

  On the morning of the tenth of August a courier arrived from General Howard with the news that he was bringing up a force of cavalrymen and Indians.

  It was a day of good news for Gibbon. Later on a messenger from the wagon train brought information that it was safe. Although white historians claim it had been successfully defended against attack, the Indians deny ever discovering it. By sundown a detachment of twenty-five men under Captain Browning escorted the train into camp, and thankful were the troops to get their blankets and provisions.

  Fearful that Edwards might have been killed, Gibbon dispatched another messenger to Deer Lodge. Sergeant Wilson, who had so bravely guarded the wagon train, volunteered for the service. Both men safely reached the settlement by morning.

  The last rear guard of the Indians withdrew by eleven o’clock in the night, Gibbon reported, after a farewell salute of bullets. The remainder of the night passed quietly, giving the men a much-needed rest, for they had only slept for two hours out of forty-eight.

  When Howard had learned of the Big Hole battle he had rushed ahead to overtake Gibbon on the morning of August 12 with a detachment of twenty men of the First Cavalry under Lieutenant Bacon and seventeen Indian scouts. Across the Continental Divide he met seven citizen volunteers, who, he writes to the Secretary of War, “gave a fearful picture of matters at the front.” The general made due allowance for exaggeration, but a growing anxiety hurried him on. The rest of his cavalry, a day’s march ahead of the infantry and artillery, followed more slowly up the Bitterroot Valley. Howard’s headquarters party saw occasional glimpses of what they presumed to be a Nez Perce scout who kept watch on their movements.

  The main force of Nez Perces had retreated as quickly as possible after the attack began, because they learned from a volunteer that Howard was close by with reenforcements. It was most fortunate for Gibbon’s command, since the Indians knew that the soldiers were nearly out of ammunition and would have repeated the Custer Massacre, no doubt, had it not been for Howard’s timely presence.

  The Nez Perces had first learned of Howard’s coming through questioning a citizen whom they found wounded on the field of battle, after the troops had retired on the morning of the ninth. When discovered by the warriors the citizen feigned death, but on being picked up by them he tried to run away. Looking Glass ordered the braves not to kill him, but to ask him for information about the soldiers. He told them of Howard’s approach, and of the presence of citizen volunteers from Virginia City who would attempt to head off the Indians. A woman who had lost relatives in the battle slapped the citizen in the face. He retaliated with a vicious kick at her, and the warriors promptly killed him.

  The sun shone during the day of August 11 on a peaceful if sad scene, for fatigue parties under Captain Comba were afield burying the bodies of their comrades. Not a man was scalped, as the Nez Perces no longer practiced this barbarous custom. The casualties of the 191 soldiers engaged as given in the Report of the Secretary of War for 1877 stood at twenty-nine dead and forty wounded, including the colonel himself. Later two of the wounded died, bringing the final total to thirty-one killed and thirty-eight wounded. Three officers had been killed—Captain Logan and Lieutenants Bradley and English. The soldiers counted eighty-nine dead Indians on the battlefield. Two of these were the foremost warriors—Five Wounds and Rainbow, sometimes called “Looking Glass.”

  It has been erroneously stated by various historians that Chief Looking Glass22 died in the Big Hole fight, Howard and Gibbon both reporting that he was buried “under the cut-bank.” However, Miles states that he was killed at the Bearpaw battle by a bullet in his forehead, and Joseph himself corroborates the fact of the chief’s death in the final battle.23 There were two Looking Glasses, the confusion arising in the fact that the chief of that name and the warrior, correctly called Rainbow,24 both wore small mirrors. Rainbow, who was killed in the Big Hole, was mistaken for the great chief because of his unique adornment.

  Lieutenant Albert G. Forse, First Cavalry, talked with several officers who had been in the Big Hole fight. They told him that they estimated “the number of women and children killed at about 70, which would leave but about 19 warriors killed. I do not wish to criticize General Gibbon’s report, but it certainly gave the public a wrong impression.”25 In the colonel’s report he had stated that eighty-nine Indians lay dead, but he did not specify their sex or age.

  Indeed, the ethics of an unprovoked assault upon a peaceful and undefended village has since raised grave moral questions among white Americans about many aspects of the Big Hole combat.

  An article in the Anaconda Standard for September 25, 1904, states that during the night many of the wounded Indians were strapped onto ponies by the squaws and hidden in the hills surrounding the Big Hole Basin. There for weeks the women nursed them back to health without being discovered by whites. Joseph is reported to have admitted after his capture that 208 of his people died as a result of the Big Hole battle, many of them during the flight. This seems probable, as the pursuing troops observed many fresh graves along his line of march.

  The Nez Perces were accused by Lieutenant Van Orsdale, who participated in the battle, of digging up the bodies of the soldiers and scalping them.26 He returned to the battlefield six weeks after the engagement, and found that “both Captain Logan and Lieutenant Bradley, as well as several private soldiers, had been dug up and scalped, presumably by those Indians who had been left behind to care for the wounded hidden in the hills near there.”27 However, in his report to the Secretary of War, Van Orsdale makes no mention of the Nez Perces being guilty of the scalping, although he notes, “the officers had been scalped.”

  It is more probable that war parties of Bannocks who were roaming through the region at the time did the scalping, or even the Bannock scouts attached to Howard’s command, for it is well authenticated that on three different occasions Bannock and white scouts scalped and mutilated the bodies of the Nez Perces.28 Joseph himself says in his own story:

  We never scalp our enemies, but when General Howard came up and joined General Gibbon, their Indian scouts dug up our dead and scalped them. I have been told that General Howard did not order this great shame to be done.29

  It is possible, of course, that the officers may have been scalped by vengeful squaws who had lost relatives in the fight, and in retaliation for the disrespect shown their dead by Howard’s scouts. Be that as it may, there is no evidence of scalping by the Nez Perces in any other battle. This fact is substantiated by the testimony of Captain Romeyn, and by Sherman’s statements (he was then General of the Army) in the Secretary of War’s reports, based on the official reports of the commanders who at various times engaged the Nez Perces—Perry, Howard, Gibbon, Sturgis, and Miles.

  Upon Howard’s arrival at the battlefield at 10:00 A.M. on August 12, he found the wounded Colonel Gibbon sitting under a roughly constructed shelter of pine boughs, cheerfully awaiting him. In discussing the recent engagement the colonel inquired, wonder still uppermost in his mind, “Who could have believed that those Indians would have rallied after such a surprise, and made such a fight?”30

  The five chiefs and their warriors were a worthy foe, indeed. Veterans of the Civil War and the Indian campaigns declared “it was the most hotly-contested field they were ever on.” The cool and determined fighting by the Indians at such short range was most remarkable, as was also the deadly shooting by red and white alike.

  Military authorities31 say the Nez Perce War would have been settled at the Big Hole had the Seventh Infantry been recruited to its full war strength of six hundred men, instead of being pared down by a thrifty-minded Congress to
less than a meager two hundred. The soldiers engaged were outnumbered by nearly two to one, as the Indian women and boys fought as desperately as the warriors.

  An example of this was reported by a scout with Lieutenant Bradley, who told of seeing three squaws hiding in a clump of willows. He was tempted to kill them, but since they made no resistance and were apparently unarmed, he did not fire upon them. While out with a burial party two days later he saw the three squaws in their same hiding place, all dead this time. One had a Henry rifle and another a revolver, containing five empty cartridges in the cylinder. He conjectured that they had taken the weapons from dead warriors and joined as combatants in the battle, to be in turn slain by the soldiers.

  After being joined by Howard’s force, Gibbon’s troops left the battlefield. The colonel wrote:

  The following day [the 13th], leaving three officers and fifty men to continue the pursuit with General Howard’s command, the balance of my party with the wounded, started for Deer Lodge, and twelve miles from the battlefield met a large party sent out by the warm-hearted people of Montana to our relief, with every comfort which could be hastily gotten together.32

  The Big Hole battle had a salutary effect upon the Nez Perces. Before that engagement the Indians had held a contemptuous attitude toward the soldiers; after it they had acquired wholesome respect for the United States Army. They had learned that even the “walking soldiers” of the infantry were a hard-fighting unit.

  Despite the Nez Perces’ huge losses, though, both in lives and property, the chiefs came off the field with honor.