Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (15 page)

But now he was forced to ask if perhaps he had been too trusting. Joseph's increasing adamance had been a concern to him, but the chief had always counseled peace to his young men, even in the most trying of circumstances. Yet now there were rumors of Joseph's being right in the middle of the bloody killing. There was even a report that he had stabbed one of the settler women in the heart down on Slate Creek.

It was difficult to get a clear picture of what had actually occurred. There were reports of rapes and torture and babies' tongues being cut out. Houses had been burned; miners' goods had been stolen. There was the appalling story of a brave placing a young child's head between his knees and squeezing it until the skull cracked. Everything was one great swirl of horror, hearsay, and, quite likely, hysterical fabrication. But how to sort fact from fiction? He did not wish to send troops, especially raw troops such as his, into battle based on rumor.

And, truth be told, even if his men had been well equipped and well trained, the Nez Perce were not a foe he was anxious to engage. They were seasoned, open-country fighters whose horses were far better than any possessed by his cavalry. To see their young warriors galloping across the prairies, as if the horse were an extension of their bodies, was to realize how rudimentary were the riding skills of even his best men.

And this was not terrain congenial to infantry fighting. Though the fifty miles down to the Camas Prairie and Mount Idaho were relatively easy to traverse, beyond there, down in the canyon of the Snake where much of the killing had taken place, the land became like the spine of a great animal. The angles of the hills became so acute that you had to traverse them on laborious switchbacks or climb them on all fours. Weather changed with the altitude and could go from frigid to scorching in a matter of a few miles. Storms were so severe as to wash out passes in a single rainfall; rock slides and timberfall were common, rendering trails impassable; and forests grew so dense that you had to break fresh trail to get supply wagons and artillery through. Even if you knew the trails and passages—knowledge decidedly in the Indian's favor—there were other, less manifest dangers. The sun was deceptive and hard to gauge. Outside the river valleys, water was often hard to find, and dehydration was a constant threat.

And then there were the rivers themselves. Joseph had been quite right about the difficulties in crossing them. While the Indians had generations of experience with currents and building bull boats, Howard's men were reduced to sending a good rider across with a rope, fastening it to a tree on the other side, then dragging themselves across on horseback or rafts, if they could even find the lumber necessary to build them. If they chose wrongly, they were swept to their deaths, and even if they successfully navigated the treacherous currents, their ammunition and artillery were often rendered useless by the soaking they took in the crossing.

Howard silently cursed his naiveté. How blind he had been during that sun-blessed ride with Joseph, Looking Glass, and White Bird during the search for homestead sites on the new reservation! It had never crossed his mind that the good-humored horse race proposed by White Bird might really have been a way to assay the speed and agility of the military's best horses and riders. Likewise, it had never occurred to him to question the purpose of White Bird's daily visits to the parade ground to watch the men drill. Now each moment of the treaty negotiations, each corner of the post that the Nez Perce had been allowed to observe, each casual comment made on those comradely rides up and down the length of the Lapwai and the Clearwater became a moment of vulnerability.

He might not have pursued this line of thinking, might have written it off as idle speculation and unprofessional second-guessing, had not a single memory kept creeping into his mind. During the council meeting the previous month at Fort Lapwai, he had shown the chiefs a petition sent by the settlers along the Salmon River outlining their grievances against the Nez Perce. The people who had signed it were solid citizens, not prone to fabrications or self-serving claims against innocent Indian people. He had hoped, by showing this to the Indians and reading the names of those who had signed, to make them realize that good people had legitimate complaints about the behavior of some members of their tribe.

Now those same names of those same good people were coming back to him in a different context. They were the names of the settlers who were being murdered and raped and tortured in the deep canyons of the Salmon River and White Bird Creek sixty miles to the south.

The war that few had wanted now raced like cloud shadows across the landscape. The Norton family, trying to escape through the Camas Prairie at night, had been run down and killed by Nez Perce. John Chamberlain, who had been bringing a wagonload of flour to Lewiston, was found dead a few hundred yards from his wagon. He was cradling the lifeless body of his three-year-old daughter, while his youngest child, barely a toddler, was discovered lying beneath the bodies of her father and sister with a gaping knife wound in her neck. Chamberlain's pregnant wife was found wandering incoherently about a mile away, still alive but hysterical from repeated rapings and an arrow wound in her breast.

All across the wide Camas Prairie and over the ridge along the creeks and rivers of White Bird Canyon, the scene was being repeated. None of the settlers knew what was happening or why. All they knew was that eight hundred Nez Perce and all their horses had been gathered on the Camas Prairie and that Indians were now attacking settlers in their homes. Families were frantically gathering in small groups and standing logs on end in trenches to build makeshift forts against attack. From their hiding places they could see smoke from burning haystacks and homestead cabins filling the sky.

The Nez Perce too were desperate. Most of them had not wanted this war. They had feared it perhaps even more than had the white settlers. All knew that there had been divisions within the tribe. Much talk had been taking place even in the great gathering on the Camas Prairie as to whether or not the people should move onto the reservation, but few had thought that an attack on the whites was a right course of action.

The chiefs met in hurried council. This was an unprecedented situation. They were used to long deliberations where each spoke until finished while all others took such time as they needed to consider the arguments put forth. But there was no such luxury now. They were now a hunted people, traveling with all their earthly goods, all their horses, all their children, and all their elders.

After short deliberations they had decided to move the people off the open Camas Prairie to a protected rock overhang several miles back toward the passage down to the Salmon River. At least there they would be safe until they decided what to do.

But the young men were not finished. The initial wave of killings had only whetted their appetite for blood and vengeance, and their pent-up anger could not now be contained. Other warriors both young and old joined them. This was the war their fathers had not had the courage to fight. This was the chance to reclaim the honor of the Nez Perce and show the spirits of the ancestors that the Nez Perce would not abandon their land.

While the families huddled in the place of the overhanging rocks, the young warriors rode in and out of camp, shouting and brandishing weapons they had found in settlers' cabins. It was clear now that they were out of control. They had found an ample stock of alcohol during their raids of settlers' homes and stores and wagons and now were crazed beyond all possibility of reason. Young men who had been raised to look upon rape as an offense punishable by death and had been taught that the murder of a woman or a child was an act of supreme cowardice were now moving across the landscape raping and murdering with an almost gleeful abandon.

Once Joseph and his people arrived, it was determined that the whole group should move over the ridge into White Bird Canyon. Since there was only one way into the canyon, it could be guarded easily by a handful of warriors. When the soldiers arrived, and they surely would arrive, perhaps a group of men sent forth under a flag of truce could forestall any further violence. It was worth a try, and surely preferable to an all-out war with soldiers and enraged settlers who had now seen their families murdered and their homes pillaged and burned.

Only Looking Glass disapproved. His men had played no part in this attack, and his women had already planted their gardens back at home. He wanted no involvement with the whites for himself or his people. The other bands could do what they wished, but he and his band would return to their land along the Clearwater.

This left four bands—Joseph's, White Bird's, Toohoolhoolzote's, and the Palouse people led by Hahtalekin and Husis Kute. Of these chiefs, Joseph was the youngest and most conciliatory. All knew that his heart was in the Wallowa and that he would do what was necessary to reclaim his distant homeland. Talk had passed that he had been ready to join the religion of the Black Robes if it would help his people keep their land. There was even some doubt about his motives for staying back at the Camas Prairie when the others had left after the initial killings. Perhaps it had been as a rear-guard lookout, as he had said. But perhaps it had been to make private deals with the soldiers and government.

So despite the high regard in which he was held as a spokesman for the Wallowa people, he was now looked upon with a shadow of suspicion. His counsel would be valued, but it would not be heard with a completely trusting ear.

General Howard tried to quell the hysteria. He did not know what had happened, but he knew if the Nez Perce really had gone on the warpath, the scattered families of settlers had no realistic possibility of defending themselves without military assistance. He had no choice but to act.

He decided to send out a force of about a hundred men under the command of Captain David Perry, a seasoned Indian fighter who had exhibited great bravery and skill in the fight against the Modocs in the California lava beds four years before. Despite the rawness and lack of training of the Lapwai troops, he fully expected that these men, under Captain Perry's able leadership and assisted by treaty Nez Perce scouts, could bring the situation under control, either through negotiation or confrontation. Howard himself would remain at Lapwai until reinforcement troops he had summoned from the Wallowa Valley arrived.

For the next two days he followed Perry's progress in reports delivered by riders. He had every reason to believe that his troops would soon have the situation in hand. But on the afternoon of the second day, when two of Perry's men came riding into camp frightened and disoriented, he began to sense that all might not be right. On the third day, a dispatch from Perry himself arrived, and the reality of the situation began to sink in.

“The fight resulted most disastrously to us,” it read, “in fact scarcely exceeded by the magnitude of the Custer massacre in proportion to the numbers engaged.”

The mention of the Little Bighorn debacle and the images of its 250 murdered and mutilated soldiers sent chills through the general's heart. To use that battle in reference to an engagement meant that something dreadful had happened. Howard now knew that this was no isolated eruption of small dissatisfactions. He was facing the possibility of an Indian war that might involve all the tribes of the Columbia Plateau.

For the Christian treaty Nez Perce living in the white manner at Lapwai and Kamiah this was the fulfillment of their worst fears. Though many of the Nez Perce women cared for the children of the whites and the men of both races traded together and farmed together, this kind of outbreak was sure to make the worst among the whites turn against all people of brown skin, and maybe even bring the wrath of the government down upon all Nez Perce.

The nontreaty bands were their brothers and sisters, and many had relatives living among them, but they knew they had to distance themselves as much as possible in order to save their own homes and families. Their choice of loyalty—to blood or belief—now became a matter of personal survival.

Meanwhile, sixty miles away in White Bird Canyon on the banks of the Salmon, the nontreaty Nez Perce were now in a quandary. The soldiers had indeed come, as they had expected. A group of six warriors had ridden out to greet them with a white flag held high, hoping to work out some kind of peaceful accord. But one of the settlers whom many of them knew, a hotheaded coward and bully named Ad Chapman, had begun firing at the warriors. The six emissaries had quickly raced behind the hills and made their way back to the camp. The warriors who were able to fight then mounted their horses and prepared for battle.

It was not a strong force that the Nez Perce sent out against the soldiers. Many of the best warriors had been involved in the raids on the settlers' stores and wagons and had spent the previous evening drinking themselves into a stupor on the whiskey that was one of the key spoils of those attacks. By the early dawn, many of them had been too drunk to even stand.

Nonetheless, the battle had been short and surprisingly easy. The young soldiers who had come from the Lapwai had been exhausted from a thirty-hour ride with almost no sleep. They had seemed poorly trained and unaccustomed to both riding and shooting. Many of their weapons had jammed when they fired, and their horses, unlike those of the Nez Perce, were skittish in the presence of gunshots. They had shown no stomach for the fight, and their tactics had been clumsy and flawed.

The Nez Perce had simply waited behind some of the rolling hills in the canyon while the soldiers came over the ridge, then ridden out and struck the army in the flank. The troops who had not been killed outright had been scattered and sent into a panicky retreat. Though the Nez Perce had been fighting mainly with bows and arrows and ancient rifles, their skills on horseback had given them a great advantage. From their youngest days they had been raised on horses, often even sleeping strapped in the saddle on family journeys.