Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (28 page)

Poker Joe argued for continuing to move quickly. Much time had been wasted staying in the high mountains waiting for word from the Crow. This had given General Howard time to resupply and come up close behind, and winter was coming fast, as the days of rain and sleet attested.

Joseph remained quiet. He knew now that escape would be hard. The people were tired. Their clothing was worn. They had little food, and for shelter at night they huddled in gullies or hung blankets over bushes. Ahead lay only more days of cold rain and snow and freezing wind. This was no good life for the elders, for the small children and the newborns, for the sick and the wounded. Too many of the people had already been buried; too many more would have to be placed in shallow graves before the bands found their way to safety.

The pace was taking its toll on everyone. One young boy had become so exhausted on the trail that he had fallen asleep in his saddle, then slipped to the ground unnoticed. Only when his mother saw his horse with no rider did she go back to find him. He was still asleep on the ground where he had fallen.

The elders too were losing the strength to go on. Old women, old men, some blind, some with eighty winters of life, were telling their families to leave them behind. Sad and tearful good-byes were said, and the caravan moved on while the elder would huddle in a blanket to wait for certain death.

Looking Glass felt the burden heavily. His trust in his friends had brought the people to this point. Chief Charlot, Chief Tendoy of the Lemhi, the young chieftain son of his Crow friend, Double Pipe—all these he had trusted, and all had betrayed him. Now the people were suffering. He still stung from the dishonor of having been replaced as trail chief after the Big Hole. He still believed it was wrong to drive the people so hard. He would not have allowed this escape to become a death march.

But Poker Joe paid no attention to such concerns. His job was to save the people. If some had to die so others could live, this was how it had to be. He would lead them north, driving them hard, so they could get safely to Sitting Bull and the Old Woman Country. He did not want them to get caught either by soldiers or by the coming snows.

The land now had begun to flatten out. It was rumpled and furrowed— no longer mountainous but not yet the great open country of the buffalo plains. Buttes and mesas rose from the low sagebrush, offering good places for ambush. Vigilance now had to be total. Not only soldiers and the Bannocks but the Crow as well were arrayed against them. And this was the Crow's home country. They knew its landscape, its gullies and rivers and safety and danger, were closest to its spirit powers. They also were the best horse thieves of any tribe, able to sneak into the most heavily guarded camp and escape unnoticed. If the Nez Perce were not attentive at every moment, they could find themselves surrounded, cut off, or stripped of their horses, which were their only remaining possession and their only remaining hope.

Once again, the young warriors took it upon themselves to act as the protectors of the people. Any white person seen was killed, often brutally, often wantonly. One prospector was later found with a miner's pick driven through his neck.

Meanwhile, Sturgis was trying doggedly to catch up. It was his error in judgment that had allowed the Nez Perce to escape from the trap at Clarks Fork. When he and Howard had closed their noose and discovered that it contained no Nez Perce, Sturgis had become so upset that he swore he would go after the hostiles by himself if necessary and even if he had to do it on foot.

Howard, noting the spring in the step of Sturgis's fresher men and horses and sensing that their embarrassment might provide them with increased motivation, had assigned fifty of his best men and some extra artillery to Sturgis's command and sent them off in pursuit of the fleeing Indians. He would move his own tired, footsore, and dispirited troops more slowly behind them.

Sturgis was indeed filled with shame and determination. He raced off on the path the Nez Perce had taken, driving his contingent of 400 men relentlessly through the rain and cold. By the time they stopped for the first night, their clothes were soaked and their boots were filled with water. To a man they were exhausted and chilled to the bone. They had traveled over sixty miles, but they had not overtaken the Nez Perce.

The next morning Sturgis tried to get them to resume the pursuit with the same intensity. But the horses were stiff and sore, and his men were weary and listless. He pushed them hard for a while, but when they had to ford the cold waters of the Yellowstone River, it was clear that they had no more will for this hard travel. Reluctantly, the colonel ordered them to dismount, unsaddle, and tether their horses. It did no good to catch up with the Indians if the men who caught them were too cold and exhausted to fight. These Indians were a formidable foe. To attack them when your men were tired and dispirited was to risk another Little Bighorn. He did not want to lead other men's sons into the same tragic death his son had experienced because of Custer's false bravado.

So he allowed his men to stop and abandon the pursuit. The Nez Perce had gotten away. Much as he had wanted to catch them, that accomplishment, if it was to belong to anyone, it was to fall to someone else. That someone else was likely to be Colonel Nelson Miles, his commanding officer, who at that moment was camped 150 miles to the east at a crude collection of log buildings called the Tongue River Cantonment.

Colonel Nelson A. Miles, the commander of the District of the Yellowstone in the Department of the Dakota in Phil Sheridan's Army of the Missouri, was the man who had sent Sturgis off toward the Judith Basin before Gibbon had ordered him to change course.

Sturgis did not like Miles. He thought him arrogant and ambitious. It did not help that Miles looked upon Custer, the man who had cost Sturgis's son his life, as the very model of what a good Indian fighter should be. But Sturgis had concurred with Howard's conviction that Miles should be alerted after the pincer movement at the base of the Clarks Fork had failed.

So General Howard had sent messengers ahead to Miles at the same time he had sent Sturgis on his pursuit. He knew that a failure by Sturgis would leave nothing but three hundred miles of open country between the Nez Perce and the safety of Canada. He also knew that if they crossed into Canada, they would cross at the very place where Sitting Bull was now camped, out of the reach of U.S. soldiers. The linkup that the entire West feared, and that he had been charged with preventing, would take place. If Sturgis could not overtake the hostiles, only Colonel Miles remained to keep them from making the border.

Howard knew Miles well, and he respected him. Miles had served under him during the Civil War and had been with him at Fair Oaks when Howard had lost his arm. There was no doubt in Howard's mind that Miles was a good and capable soldier. There was also no doubt in his mind that Miles was extremely ambitious. The colonel had married the niece of General Sherman and had done everything possible to rise in the ranks, despite his lack of a West Point pedigree.

In the Civil War and post–Civil War army, generalships were almost always reserved for graduates of the military academies. Howard knew that a general's star was the single, overriding goal of Miles's military career and that a success like the capture of Joseph would more than make up for Miles's lack of military pedigree. If someone else was to have the glory of capturing Joseph and the Nez Perce, Howard would be pleased to have it be his old subordinate.

But his thinking was not altogether altruistic. He was also well aware that Miles's ambition might be the single greatest asset they had in their final push to catch these elusive hostiles. Miles's hunger for that general's star would make him drive his men without compromise. If anyone could accomplish the impossible task of overtaking and bringing the Nez Perce to account, it was Miles. After all, he had brought the Sioux and Cheyenne to bay by attacking them in winter when no other soldier in the West dared undertake winter campaigns, and he had been so single-minded in pushing his men that on one occasion they had attacked the Sioux while badly outnumbered, simply to get to the food stores they knew the Sioux possessed. Such a man could perhaps accomplish what thus far had proven impossible and thus assist in fulfilling Sherman's command to Howard to capture the Nez Perce no matter what the cost.

Miles himself was fully cognizant of the opportunity that was slowly presenting itself. He knew how crucial this capture was for both the reputation and political prestige of an army that had fallen out of favor in the eyes of the public. The man who brought down Chief Joseph would be the toast of the military and the pride of the nation. He wanted to be that man.

But he also had been loathe to take his eye off Sitting Bull. The growing national obsession with Joseph and the Nez Perce was real, but it was nothing compared to the nation's obsession with Sitting Bull. Though the pursuit of the Nez Perce was galvanizing the nation's attention, sympathies ran both ways. To some, Joseph was still the ruthless, escaping savage, while to others he was the heroic leader of a desperate band of innocent people being mercilessly hounded for nothing more than wanting to live in accord with their traditional way of life. Some of the public was now rooting for his escape, while others clamored for his capture.

About Sitting Bull there was no such ambivalence. He was the murderer of Custer, the desecrater of bodies and committer of unspeakable abominations on corpses. He was every dark terror in the breast of every American who dreamed of seeing the land pacified and the nation linked from coast to coast. In press accounts he was the leader of a thousand warriors with long-range rifles, ready to swoop down from his Canadian refuge into the sparsely settled West, taking scalps and inciting fifteen thousand Indians to rise up against the scattered settlers. Since that Canadian refuge lay directly north of Miles's jurisdiction, Miles had been unwilling to commit all his forces to the pursuit of the Nez Perce while Sitting Bull was poised directly above him. Capturing the Lakota chief, or at least holding him at bay, remained his most important task.

But the message from Howard and Sturgis had changed his focus. Sturgis's Seventh Cavalry had been the one line of defense preventing a linkup of Joseph and Sitting Bull. Now that word reached him that Joseph had gotten past Sturgis, he realized that the Nez Perce were moving unimpeded toward the unification with Sitting Bull that everyone feared.

With his old commander, Howard, fairly pleading for his military assistance and the prospect of a major Indian fighting force being created to threaten his jurisdiction, he had all the reason he needed to take to the field himself. He would have a chance at the capture that would make him the toast of the nation, and in so doing he would secure the safety of the entire northern plains. This was exactly the kind of opportunity for which he believed he had been born.

Miles had dreamed of being a soldier from his earliest days as a grocery clerk in Boston. He had even hired an elderly French army veteran to tutor him in the skills of military drill and discipline. He had enlisted as a volunteer in the Civil War and had distinguished himself with both his skill and bravery, even earning the prized Medal of Honor. When he had heard of the debacle at the Little Bighorn, he had requested posting to the West and had set himself immediately to the task of studying the Indians and their ways. He made his men establish camps outside in the winter because he felt that if Indians could live and thrive in such conditions, so could his men. He studied the Indian character closely. And he spent long hours analyzing the strategic realities of warfare on the great, open buffalo plains.

The buffalo plains were unlike any other place in the West. A vast, undulating earthen sea of blowing grasses and hills and swales, they admitted of little natural cover for moving troops or large groups of people. A man on a promontory—whether a soldier or an Indian—could easily see for fifty miles. A campfire—by its plume of daytime smoke or its flicker of light in the midnight darkness—could reveal the location of a person a day's journey away.

Military maneuvers on such a landscape required a whole different mind-set and range of tactics than fighting where there was cover. One had to use the natural features to advantage—starting fires for diversions and cover, keeping behind hills and promontories when moving groups of men, knowing how to distinguish the tiny specks of distant buffalo herds from similar specks of distant enemies, keeping the dust clouds from your horses to a minimum, and knowing where good campsites and sources of water could support your troops. Skills in scouting, establishing effective supply lines, and understanding angles of pursuit were also essential. A commander who could move his men without being noticed, keep them watered, fed, clothed, and armed, and position them intelligently could accomplish much in this terrain.

Miles believed he was such a commander. He had proven it many times since his arrival in the West. It was he who had driven Sitting Bull north of the border, and it was he who had contained and pacified the Sioux and Crow and Cheyenne. Like his old friend Custer, he believed he understood Indians and their ways, and like Custer he was fearless in his leading of men. But unlike Custer, he knew the line between courage and rashness. He had full confidence that his reputation as the best of the army's Indian fighters was well deserved. The chance to capture Joseph was exactly the kind of opportunity he had been seeking to solidify that reputation and earn himself the general's star he believed was his due.

If Howard was too slow and Sturgis too timid, he himself was neither. He would move his men with speed and decisiveness across the 150 miles from their garrison into the path where Joseph and his people were traveling. If he was not too late, which he feared he already was, he would get ahead of this group of hostiles and use his military skills to bring this chase to an end.

He had received Howard's message by courier at 6:00 p.m. on the night of September 17. With hardly a pause to reflect, he had begun outfitting his forces and establishing the supplies and weaponry he would need for the pursuit. By sunrise the next morning, he had outfitted thirty-six supply wagons and two ambulance wagons, readied his pack mules, horses, and field artillery, and ferried all these goods and troops across the Yellowstone River in preparation for a morning departure. He had also sent off messages to his superior, General Terry, regarding his intentions, and had arranged for more supplies to be sent by steamer and dropped off at the Missouri River halfway to where he expected the Nez Perce to be.