While this concept of how the war began and was prosecuted may be currently in vogue, and most certainly what we would call politically correct, it is wrong. Ignorance of the real story does neither side any justice in this tragedy, much less serve the historical record.
Speaking of the historical record, the crucial May sessions between General Howard and the Non-Treaty chiefs at Fort Lapwai are rendered from more than Howard’s writings. I also drew from the recollections of some of the chiefs who attended the councils and in later years took exception with Cut-Off Arm’s version of the dialogue between the principals, which he published soon after the war in Nez Perce Joseph. It’s only natural that both sides in a passionate dispute would have serious differences over what occurred, if not what was actually said in the heat of argument.
Thirty-four years later, an aging Yellow Bull (whose name was actually Sun Necklace at the time of the 1877 war) claimed Toohoolhoolzote’s words in that council confrontation were less severe than Howard rendered them. Other Nez Perce joined in to claim Howard used rude and inconsiderate language, occasionally telling Toohoolhoolzote to “shut up” and even pushing the old tewat angrily at one point.
I can understand how such raw tensions might have flared during those heated discussions. Both Howard and Toohoolhoolzote were men with unshakable convictions. It’s easy to see how the old shaman could goad the soldier chief into something rash, just as easy as it is to see Howard unable to resist his natural impulse to berate or even shove the stubborn “heathen.”
Oliver Otis Howard had come west under a cloud of suspicion from a scandal concerning his mismanagement of funds at the Freedmen’s Bureau, not of his own doing. Although he would later be cleared of those charges before assuming his command in the Northwest, it is also true that Howard never weathered criticism well. He would smart from the indignities of those charges for the rest of his life. Perhaps those still-oozing wounds, if not his own thin-skinned nature, might well have contributed to his inability to deal more evenhandedly with the Nez Perce when his patience was tested.
Despite the way the chiefs found Howard treating them, it remains part of the historical record that after the council at Lapwai when Howard ordered the Non-Treaty bands onto the reservation or he would have to send his soldiers after them, but prior to the murders on the Salmon and Camas Prairie, Joseph reportedly told a friendly settler, “But you know they won’t kill us, for General Howard and [Agent] Monteith are Christians.”
A belief more tragic than it is ironic. Tragic in that a few chiefs like Joseph still believed that the white man would unflinchingly adhere to their own Christian beliefs and not make war on the Nez Perce. Ironic in that it seemed the Indian agents of the West—at least those who were not robbing their wards blind through graft and greed—were so consumed with preparing their Indians for a life everlasting in heaven that they ended up making the Indians’ existence a veritable hell on earth!
For decades the Nez Perce had suffered indignities without any hope of redress. With every season they became more confused about the world they were compelled to live in—a world where the white man made not only the rules about the land but also the rules about what the Nez Perce could believe regarding the supernatural. In this world, and in the next, the Non-Treaty bands must have felt themselves set adrift in a roiling sea of despair and frustration that simmered—but never quite boiled over.
Not until June of 1877.
After so many years—so many rapes and robberies, so many land swindles and crooked whiskey men, so many murders of the Nez Perce without any of the murderers coming to justice—exactly what was the spark that finally set off the powder keg? Was the outbreak of the Nez Perce War really caused by something so simple as the wounding of one young warrior’s cocky pride?
To judge by an exhaustive reading of the contemporary records, it appears to be no more complex than that. The story I’ve written of just how this young warrior, Shore Crossing, came to be the spark is compiled from all the various, and sometimes conflicting, accounts. Most of those who left some record on this part of the story don’t mention that Shore Crossing was married or that even though he was married, he was nonetheless still quite taken with another young woman.
What the accounts do agree upon is that the tel-lik-leen, or the martial parade, performed at Tepahlewam by the young men was a chance to strut and preen before the eligible young women. Most of the historical record goes on to state that during this parade through camp the pony Shore Crossing and Red Moccasin Tops were riding accidentally, perhaps brazenly, stepped upon a canvas where an old woman had laid her roots to dry. Furthermore, most of the accounts are consistent in stating that the old woman’s husband, Yellow Grizzly Bear, sharply berated Shore Crossing for his rude clumsiness—even unto chiding the young man that he had no right to parade with the warriors because he himself had not avenged the death of his father at the hands of Larry Ott.
For more of the story I had to scratch deeper and deeper into the records, eventually finding out that Shore Crossing might well have been scolded again, even ridiculed before other young men and women at a traditional dance that very evening in the Split Rocks camp. And I discovered that the one who embarrassed Shore Crossing—a young warrior named Red Grizzly Bear (is it nothing more than coincidence that his name is so similar to Yellow Grizzly Bear?)—might well have been the older brother of the young woman Shore Crossing had been seeking to impress. An obscure story about their confrontation at the dance indicates that Red Grizzly Bear challenged all those who had not avenged the deaths of their relatives.
The story almost appears sophomoric at this juncture—something that might happen between some teenagers at a school dance, what with the blustering and bullying, the name-calling and wounded pride. Almost like an amusing tale ripped from the hallways of any modern-day high school … were it not for the tragic consequences of that challenge issued by both the old man, Yellow Grizzly Bear, as well as the young warrior named Red Grizzly Bear.
This part of the outbreak story is awash with discrepancies, and a great deal of personal opinion as well.
The author of one of the landmark books on the Nez Perce, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., appears to me to have set himself up as an apologist for the cruelty, murders, and depredations committed by the war parties in the early days of the conflict. At the most, he attempts to justify the bloody retribution taken on innocent white settlers, and at the very least Josephy does his best to deflect the blame from falling where it should by stating that—according to what he calls “tribal legend”—Shore Crossing did not drink alcohol. For this claim Josephy has taken not only the word of the tribe’s unofficial white historian, L. V. McWhorter, but also the testimony of a more recent tribal elder, Otis Halfmoon, who repeated the very same Nez Perce oral lore.
Weighed against are the many accounts given by other Nez Perce stating that Shore Crossing was, in fact, drinking the night before he rode off on that first raid. Three of those accounts come from very reliable sources: Young Joseph, Sun Necklace/Yellow Bull, and Two Moons.
We know that there was a great deal of whiskey in that camp, brought in by unscrupulous white traders out of Grangeville, Mount Idaho, or even as far away as Lewiston. And these reliable accounts declare that the warriors young and old did indeed partake of the whiskey over those days immediately prior to the outbreak. Even Jerry Greene, the Nez Perce War’s newest historian, writes that the three young warriors were “fortified with liquor” when they raced off for the Salmon River settlements.
So it appears to me that Josephy’s story becomes nothing more than a politically correct apology for brutal, bloody atrocities committed against innocents, because the truth of the matter is that Shore Crossing not only lost more of his good sense the more he drank but also found his courage to commit cold-blooded murder at the bottom of a cup of whiskey.
It’s a matter of the historical record that there was considerable whiskey trading going on with the Nez Perce in that da
y, a story replete with the varied troubles that whiskey was causing in the region. We know that long before the Nez Perce War, members of the tribe understood how Joe Craig, half-breed son of former mountain man William Craig, often abused his Nez Perce wife when he was in his cups. Likewise, Samuel Newell, son of mountain man Robert “Doc” Newell, was in and out of trouble with white officials as one of the “troublesome half-breeds” repeatedly indicted for “disposing of whiskey to an Indian of the Nez Perce nation.”
Make no mistake: the sale of liquor to the tribe became a constant source of trouble in the months preceding the outbreak. Not only did it cause turmoil for such notorious whiskey traders as Samuel Benedict and Harry Mason, but also the trade in alcohol had been escalating every year around the time of the Camas Prairie gathering. Dancing, horse-racing, getting drunk on the white man’s liquor—these activities all went together, summer after summer, making for a potent brew that would eventually spell disaster.
Isn’t it strange that after Larry Ott murdered Eagle Robe, Shore Crossing’s father, the settler very conveniently seems to have been absent from home when the three warriors came calling? Here’s where we find differing accounts concerning just what happened to the man. Some of the contemporary reports circulating among the Nez Perce at the time reported that Ott learned of the nasty temperament of the Tepahlewarn gathering and grew scared. Sensing that he was going to be the target of a reprisal, Ott promptly ran off to the nearby mountain mining town of Florence. It was there that Yellow Wolf reported Ott put on “Chinamen clothes and worked with the Chinamen washing gold.”
Contrary to this bit of tribal lore is the fact that Ott’s name appeared on the roll of volunteers mustered at the Slate Creek barricades, joining sixteen civilians who came down from the Florence mines. So did Larry Ott first flee his homestead on the Salmon and reach safety in the mountain mining town? Then when he was reinforced with the strength of numbers did he journey back to the Salmon River to reinforce the settlements with the miners?
The name of this forty-two-year-old Philadelphian on the muster roll at Slate Creek is written in a neat script. Could it have been written by someone else? Perhaps one of the women if Ott could not write it himself?
Ott’s flash-fire murder of Eagle Robe indicates that he was unquestionably of the ruffian type often found on the frontier. His very presence on this tiny bit of land beside the Salmon River gives rise to the speculation that he had been a miner who failed to make a strike or—more likely—that he might even have been an extreme “undesirable” who was run out of the rip-roaring mining camps of Lewiston, Florence, or Elk City.
A man living alone on that narrow strip of land bordering the river where the murder took place sure leads me to believe he was persona non grata among even the most violent element on that Idaho frontier. In the final analysis, it’s not hard to understand why Ott’s casual killing of Eagle Robe is generally regarded as the match that ignited the fuse already priming the powder keg that eventually exploded into the Nez Perce War.
One by one over the past few years I read those books listed in the bibliography that appears near the end of this afterword. With each new volume I found one or more details of the story that differed in some minor, obscure way from what I had read before. It didn’t take long before I realized that the published accounts of what occurred with Shore Crossing at the Tepahlewam gathering, as well as many of the complex of details in what happened to the Salmon River settlers, were imprecise and very often in disagreement with one another. More likely than not, the various stories recounted slightly different chronologies.
From the very beginning of this Indian Wars saga that began with my writing Sioux Dawn, I have been confronted with the necessity of making decisions and arriving at conclusions that the historians aren’t forced to reach. In a work of nonfiction, the academic writer can present the various opinions, options really, of what might have happened, offering his reader several different scenarios.
But I’ve never had it so easy. I can’t plausibly write a character across two or more story lines. My character can’t be in two places at once, nor can there be two time lines or conflicting chronologies for my stories.
In short, I have to come to an informed decision on what happened to who and when it happened, then stick to it without any equivocating. So despite all the conflicts I found in more than three dozen sources used to write this story—even among some of the most respected of historians—I had to write the story that my own instincts told me actually happened.
Remember that fact when, or if, you ever pick up one of the books I recommend for further reading on the Nez Perce War. Which means we must be perfectly clear on this: From among all the conflicting clutter of the firsthand contemporary records and secondhand historical accounts I had to weave a story not of what might have happened. Instead, you’ve just read the story of what I believe actually did happen. Remember what I told you in the introduction before you even started this novel. Every incident happened when and where and how I have written it.
Conflicts? Sure there were. Let’s examine one of the thornier ones.
In the days following the first murders, Idaho district attorney J. W. Poe alleged that Hattie, the older Chamberlin daughter, had been killed as the mother was forced to watch, “by having its head placed between the knees of a powerful Indian and crushed to death.” So history records that Mrs. Chamberlin and her younger daughter survived. Just how they survived their terrible ordeal at the hand of the drunk, enraged warriors, and in what state, we can only surmise. But Bruce Hampton, author of Children of Grace, leaves me with the impression that the older daughter survived, when my reading of the accounts indicates that the younger one lived—the daughter who was found beneath her dead father’s legs, her tongue nearly severed, either from a knife wound or from a fall.
And in all my reading it appeared that there is some continuing dispute as to the number of whites killed during the outbreak of murders on both the Salmon and the Camas Prairie. But, here again, I had to write the story that history itself dictated. I couldn’t have it both ways. When the contemporary accounts indicated that a settler was murdered, my story tells of that killing—when, where, and how it happened. There are no two ways about it in this novel. Eighteen whites lost their lives in the uprising.
After his first report that thirty settlers had been killed, Howard whittled back his tally to fourteen. Around the same time, Arthur “Ad” Chapman placed the number at twenty-two. Later, on 26 June, Howard finally wrote division headquarters: “The number of murders thus far are seventeen (17), one woman, two children and fourteen men.” To that list would be added the name of Joe Moore, who lingered (as much as three months according to historian Mark H. Brown) before he succumbed. So eighteen is the number used by historians of the National Park Service.
Beyond those bloody murders and the brutal rapes, the raiding left widespread destruction. The tall columns of smoke Captain David Perry and his cavalry spotted in the distance as they crossed the Camas Prairie proved to be only the tip of the iceberg. Houses, barns, outbuildings, and stacks of first cuttings of hay—anything that the warriors could put to the torch—were set afire. What buildings weren’t burned they plundered. What wasn’t taken was destroyed and left in ruin. Horses and cattle were stolen. What sheep and hogs were not driven back to the Tepahlewam camp and from there to the White Bird Canyon were slaughtered and left behind at the looted ranches, their carcasses bloating among the piles of ash and rubble.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the discrepancy between some of the sources regarding Mrs. Benedict’s four-year-old daughter. Two of the writers attempted to give the girl a broken arm when it was actually six-year-old Maggie Manuel who suffered the broken arm in her fall from the horse while fleeing with her father, John Manuel. In addition, one of the modern-day sources reports that the Benedict girl was even named Maggie too!
It seems perfectly clear to me that the historian got his girls con
fused—conveniently turning Maggie Manuel into Maggie Benedict.
Another source reported that the Benedict daughter had a fractured skull. Did this historian mix her up with the older of the Chamberlin girls, who had her skull crushed? Appears there’s more than enough confusion to go around concerning these poor little girls.
Oh, and a brief word of caution concerning the elder of the two Benedict daughters. Because no record exists (at least any source I can locate in any of the archives or the literature on this account), I have arbitrarily given the Benedict girl a first name—Emmy—in hopes that the two young girls (Manuel and Benedict) are kept entirely separate in the reader’s mind.
When considering all the innocents caught up in this outbreak, how tragic and pitiable is the aftermath of what happened to Helen Walsh and Elizabeth Osborn once they rejoined their white frontier society. Because they had been gang-raped by a war party in front of their own small children, both were too ashamed to show themselves in public for a long time following their rescue. What unspeakable horror was committed against them they themselves never divulged. Yet there’s enough testimony to convince historians that the women were repeatedly brutalized by the warriors, a horrific trauma those on the Indian frontier in that day called “a fate worse than death.”
So it’s very intriguing to note that in all the published accounts she gave over the months to come Helen Walsh claimed that she and Elizabeth Osborn were treated kindly by the war party. Mrs. Walsh wrote: “[The Nez Perce warriors] told us that they did not want to kill us; that we could go to Slate Creek or Lewiston without fear.” But First Sergeant Michael McCarthy, who saw them at Slate Creek a week later, stated that the women would not show themselves, did not venture out of the self-imposed prison they made of a small cabin. He surmised it was because of their overwhelming shame.
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 48
