Few men in the nation at that time had the training or experience to assume such lofty positions of grave leadership in either of those two great armies poised to hurl themselves into a bloody maelstrom. Howard was no exception. Yet over the next four years he, like many others, would struggle to learn his bloody profession on-the-job.
Ordered to lead his brigade of 3,000 toward the front at the first Battle of Bull Run, on the way to the battlefield he and his men saw the hundreds of General McDowell’s wounded as they were carried to the rear. The nearness of those whistling canisters of shot, the throaty reverberations of the cannon, the incessant rattle of small arms—not to mention the pitiful cries of the maimed, the sight of bloodied, limbless soldiers—suddenly gave the zealous Howard pause.
For the first and only time in his life, his knees began to quake. Nearing McDowell’s position with his brigade for that opening battle of the war, Howard pleaded with God to give him the strength to do his duty that day. He later wrote that in an instant his trepidation was lifted from him and the very real prospect of death no longer brought him any fear. From that moment on, Oliver Otis Howard would never again be afraid in battle.
Bull Run was a demoralizing defeat for the untrained Union volunteers. But while others were sickened with despair at the loss, Howard wrote home to Lizzie saying: “I try to rely upon the Arm of Strength.”
Not long after George B. McClellan took over the Union Army, Howard was promoted to brigadier general of the Third Maine. In action during the Peninsula Campaign, his brigade found itself sharply engaged on the morning of the second day of the Battle of Fair Oaks as the Confederates launched a determined attack. Ordered to throw his remaining two regiments into the counterattack rather than holding them in reserve, Howard confidently stepped out in front of his men and gave the order to advance. Although Confederate minié balls were hissing through the brush and shredding the trees all around them, Howard continued to conspicuously move among the front ranks of his men on horseback, leading his troops against the enemy’s noisy advance.
Less than thirty yards from that glittering line of bayonets and butternut-gray uniforms, a lead .58-caliber bullet struck Oliver Otis Howard in the right elbow. Somehow he remained oblivious to the pain as his men closed on the enemy. Within yards of engaging the Confederates in close-quarters combat, a bullet brought down his horse. When Howard was getting to his feet seconds later, a second ball shattered his right forearm just below the first wound.
With blood gushing from his body, Howard grew faint, stumbled, and collapsed, whereupon he turned over command of the brigade to another officer. Later that morning Howard was removed to a field hospital at the rear, where the surgeons explained the severity of his wounds, as well as the fact that there was little choice between gangrene, which would lead to a certain death, or amputation. By five o’clock that afternoon, the doctors went to work to save Howard’s life.
The following morning as Otis was being settled upon a litter for transport to the rear, up rode General Phil Kearny, who himself had lost his left arm during the Mexican War. After Kearny gave the new amputee some reassuring and sympathetic words, Howard—minus his right arm—surprised Kearny with his own courageous sense of humor, proposing that in the future the two of them save money by purchasing their gloves together!
Lying on his stretcher beside the railroad tracks awaiting a freight car that would carry the Union wounded to White House Landing, Howard gripped a pencil in his left hand and clumsily attempted to write his Lizzie. All but impossible to read, his letter said in total: “Dearest I am on my way with only my left arm.”
Fair Oaks had been one of Howard’s bravest hours.
* * *
“What did they do with your arm when they sawed it off?”
He turned now that spring evening in Nez Perce country, gazing down at the little girl who stood right where his missing elbow would have been, finding the FitzGerald child staring at the fold in that empty sleeve, her wide, inquisitive eyes slowly crawling up to his face as her mother swept toward them with red-faced embarrassment and a rustle of crinoline petticoats.
“So, so sorry, General Howard,” Emily FitzGerald gushed in apology as she laid her hands on her daughter’s shoulders and dragged the girl back a step.
Emily’s husband, the post surgeon, was already making his way off the porch railing where he had joined other officers who were relaxing after supper this Sunday evening, smoking their pipes and cheroots, drinking coffee or a delicious port Colonel David Perry had dragged from some hidden corner of his residence. These soldiers had all been getting to know one another very nicely this weekend just drawing to a close. Career men, one and all, along with a few wives and their children, too—the whole evening made Otis very, very homesick for Lizzie, for those bygone days when their children were little. But Guy, their firstborn, would be twenty-seven this December—
“May I touch it, sir?” the girl asked.
“Bessie!” Mrs. FitzGerald shrieked in horror at her daughter, who had her arm out pointing at that sleeve empty from the elbow down.
For photographs and other formal settings, Howard tucked the empty coat cuff into the front of his belt just behind his buckle, but most of the time he kept the useless sleeve folded and pinned neatly against the upper arm.
Howard flashed Mrs. FitzGerald a quick smile in his beard, realizing she could not be any older than his own daughter, Grace Ellen. Then he gazed into the little one’s face as he sank to one knee. One day soon he might well have a child as curious as this one for a granddaughter.
“Now, what was your name again, young lady?” he asked her, his eyes crinkling at their corners, bemused.
“Bess—,” she began, then thought better of it and took one big step back, correcting herself very properly, “Elizabeth FitzGerald, sir.”
“He’s a general, Bessie,” Mrs. FitzGerald prompted.
“General,” Bess echoed, then surprised everyone on that long porch in the last of spring’s warm twilight as she grabbed the sides of her long pinafore, dragged one foot quickly behind the other, and dipped into a low curtsy.
When Emily FitzGerald spontaneously clapped her hands before her face, the tears of motherly pride brimming in her eyes, Howard himself was overcome by the moment. His eyes began to sting as he laid his left arm across his belt, smartly clicked the heels of his muddy boots together, and snapped his upper body forward stiffly in an elegant bow. And before he straightened, Howard reached out with his left hand, inserting his fingers within Bessie’s tiny palm, then raised the girl’s hand to his lips.
He kissed the back of it, lowered the hand, and released her gently as he said, “I am so honored to meet you, Elizabeth FitzGerald.”
Howard glanced up at all the faces of the officers, wives, and children, at the faces of all those soldiers who had suddenly seemed to halt in mid-stride out on the starlit parade, everyone’s attention suddenly turned his way.
Struck by the sudden regard riveted on him, Otis announced, “And I am very honored to meet all of you—”
“He gonna tell you, Bessie?” the FitzGerald boy whispered noisily as he instantly shuffled up beside his older sister, tugging on her free arm.
“Yes,” Howard replied with no more prompting, “I’m going to tell your sister all about it, young man.”
He held out his hand for Elizabeth, and she placed hers in it without the slightest hesitation. The general led her over to the edge of the porch, where he could sit on the railing as darkness settled down on the Lapwai country.
“Here, Miss Elizabeth FitzGerald,” and he tapped the fold in his right sleeve. “You may touch it now, to your heart’s content.”
“It’s all right with you, General?” John FitzGerald asked in that apologetic tone parents of precocious children must take of times.
“Quite all right, Doctor.” Then he took hold of the girl’s hand and laid it on the end of that upper arm. “There.”
He waited a moment
while she felt around the blunted stub in a most tentative manner, then turned to her brother.
“Go ahead on, Bertie,” she announced. “It won’t hurt you a bit.”
The little boy stepped up, much braver now, and held up his hand as Howard leaned forward so the young child could reach the amputation.
“Miss FitzGerald,” Howard began as the boy was pursuing his examination, “I don’t really know what the doctors did with my arm that day so long ago. I only know that outside those surgical tents, there was a pile of arms and legs big enough to fill another tent, all by themselves.”
Mrs. FitzGerald and the other wives immediately put their hands to their mouths with gasps of horror and surprise.
“I apologize, ladies,” he said, sorry for his candor. “I’m just an old soldier, and I forgot myself there.” Howard looked again at the young girl. “I heard that your father was a surgeon in the war, Miss FitzGerald. Perhaps when he believes you are ready to understand, your father can explain to you just what they did with all those people parts that had to come off to save the lives of so many men in that horrible war.”
“Yes, one day I will do just that, General,” FitzGerald promised, stepping up behind his children, placing a hand on a shoulder of each one.
“Thank you for rescuing me, Doctor,” Howard said gratefully, then knelt before the two youngsters. “But as for me, children—I’ve always wanted to believe my arm just went on to heaven a little bit before I will. Why—do you know that when I came home in 1862 right after losing my arm, my daughter, Grace, was about your age?”
“Did it scare her to see her daddy without his arm on?”
“I really think it did, Miss FitzGerald. But she soon found out I could give her just as good a hug with one arm as I had done with two.”
“I want you to thank the general now, Bessie,” Mrs. FitzGerald said as she stepped up beside her husband to scoop her children against her. “It’s time I took you both inside to get dressed for bed.”
“Good night, General,” the little girl called as her brother turned shyly into the folds of his mother’s dress. “When I say my prayers in my bed tonight, I’ll ask God to take good care of your arm for you in heaven till you get there to see it again for yourself.”
Suddenly struck with a deep, unexplainable sadness, Howard stood ramrod straight in that spring moonlight. He felt all of his forty-six years. “Thank you, Bessie,” he said softly. “But I also want you to pray that we won’t have any war with the Indians. I want you to pray that no one will have to lose an arm, or a leg, or their life. Will you pray that for me?”
“Yes, General,” she replied before she curtsied again, turned suddenly, and led her brother by the hand toward the far doorway.
Howard watched after the children as their mother hustled them off for the night. He blinked his stinging eyes and looked about at those officers gathered on the porch: his departmental staff and those leaders of Fort Lapwai who would bear the brunt of things if hostilities broke out.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I believe we can all say amen to that prayer I asked little Bessie to make on behalf of us, one and all.”
In the sudden, still hush of that spring evening, more than a dozen career officers softly whispered as one.
“Amen.”
Chapter 4
Season of Hillal
1877
“Soldiers have come to the Wallowa?” Joseph echoed that shocking news the courier had just told him in the darkness of their camp here on the edge of the army’s fort beside Lapwai Creek.
The breathless rider gasped as he pulled the dripping canteen from his wet lips. “Little more than a day ago. The suapies are camped where the valley widens by the point of rocks.”
“Yes, I know the place,” Ollokot growled as menacingly as a dog with its neck hair ruffled by danger, gazing south toward that faraway valley where their families, their people, were awaiting the outcome of this crucial council with the soldier leaders.
Not surprising to Joseph, the late-night arrival of this messenger from the Wallowa had awakened some of the delegates from the other bands. From all sides the leaders appeared out of the cold, pre-dawn darkness to close in on him and his followers.
“What is this news he brings?” demanded Alalimiatakanin, whose name literally meant “A Vision.”
Because of that round lens from the white man’s far-seeing instrument he wore strapped around his neck in the middle of a thick leather star decorated with tarnished brass tacks, not only for decoration but also as symbol of his venerated status, this veteran war chief of more than forty-six winters was known to the Shadows as Looking Glass.
“Horse soldiers have made a camp in the Wallowa,” Ollokot announced.
“Perhaps they are only on their way through and won’t be staying,” White Bird offered hopefully. He was an attractive older man of more than fifty summers—his hair, once chestnut rather than black, now turning white with the snows of his life.
“No,” the courier argued. “Before I left yesterday to hurry here with the news for my chief, it was plain the soldiers intend to stay for some time.”
“And keep watch on our village until we are driven onto the reservation,” Ollokot growled sourly.
“It is just what they did to the Lakota called Red Cloud some ten summers ago,” grumbled the older Toohoolhoolzote as he lumbered to a stop among them. Almost as broad of shoulder as he was tall, this stout and powerful man could easily carry two deer back to camp, one on each shoulder, back in his younger days.
“I do not remember that story of the Lakota,” White Bird said.
The thick-necked Toohoolhoolzote took the canteen from the runner, drank a swallow to wash down the night gather from the back of his throat, then handed it back before he explained, “The army said they wanted to talk to Red Cloud about making a treaty for some of the Lakota land over there in buffalo country. But at the same time … the army was already sending its soldiers into the Lakota’s hunting ground to build their forts, making ready to steal it.”
Looking Glass, his hair streaked with iron, snarled angrily, “The army means to take our land from us anyway, my friends. All this polite talk from Cut-Off Arm is nothing more than a ruse to convince us we have had our say before they—”
“No, no,” Joseph protested sadly, sensing the angry frustration in that circle of leaders. “I cannot believe they would make such fools of us.”
“The time for war is coming!” cried Sun Necklace,1 a war chief among White Bird’s band.
Joseph whirled on him. “Enough of such talk. That’s all the young men think of—fighting and war. It remains for the rest of us to think of our women and our children. What of them, if you go racing off to kill those soldiers in the Wallowa even though you do not know why the army has come to our valley?”
“My hands are ready to fight,” Ollokot explained to his brother, “but my heart will go with you, Joseph.”
“We know what happened to the Modocs: They are no more,” Joseph reminded them. “Their leaders were hanged. All the rest now scattered to the four winds, far from the lands of their forefathers. And now the Lakota, too. Sitting Bull takes his people to the Old Woman’s Country2 far away, a land where his people have never lived. Meanwhile, reports from the buffalo country say the rest of the Lakota are trickling in to the reservations the white man has established to corral them.”
The group fell silent around him until the voice of Looking Glass broke the hush.
“Joseph is right. From all sides the Shadows have pushed in upon us. There are more white men than there are trees in the Imnaha. We chop down a few, like those soldiers invading the Wallowa … There will always be more trees than we could ever hope to cut down.”
Joseph studied the graying war chief, sensed the pain such an admission caused this veteran of many battles against the Lakota and Blackfoot. “The white man’s powerful religion gives him the might to create his weapons and wealth: not just kettles and bl
ankets, but guns and bullets. He possesses his Book of Heaven, which contains the knowledge our people once went far to the east to find and bring back.”
“The Boston Man’s Book of Heaven means nothing to our Dreamer religion,” snarled Toohoolhoolzote. “It is true the Shadows may have those things, but we Dreamers believe that one day the earth will swallow up all the Shadows and everything will be as it was before the first whites ever came among us.”
“Until that day,” Joseph sighed, “we must somehow protect our people—safeguard our women and our children. For the time being, we must make as good a peace as we can … for the sake of those who must survive until the Dreamers’ vision comes to pass and the earth finally swallows up the white man.”
Later, after breakfast, the leaders dressed in their finest, adorning their ponies with the heavily beaded headstalls and feathered bonnets much like those the headmen themselves wore. Wrapped in blankets and buffalo robes, they paraded onto the fort grounds in a long procession, singing and beating their drums, the women u-looing afoot on either side of the chiefs’ caravan as they approached the council awning for this last, crucial day of talks with Cut-Off Arm and his soldiers.
As soon as the half-breed interpreter said his Christian prayer to open the ceremonies, the old men started their pipe on its rounds among the chiefs and headmen. For the most part the white men were quiet and respectful until the pipe had finished its path among the leaders of the Non-Treaty bands. Yet Joseph could clearly see that disdain the agent held for the practices of his Nee-Me-Poo.
“One of the things I fear most about being forced to come live in this place is that I worry about what will happen next to my people,” Joseph explained as he stood before the agent, the missionary, and the soldier chief in the shade of the council tent.
“Only good can come of you bringing your people here,” Agent John B. Monteith asserted.
Cries from the Earth: The Outbreak Of the Nez Perce War and the Battle of White Bird Canyon June 17, 1877 (The Plainsmen Series) Page 5
