Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (30 page)

With this new dark knowledge in their hearts, the remaining Nez Perce continued into the growing northern cold. They had already been forced to leave many lame and worn-out horses on the side of the trail, cutting their hooves so they would be of no value to the soldiers or their Indian scouts. Other animals wandered off each night and had to be left behind because there was no time to search for them before the morning departure.

The Crow could be seen riding on the distant ridges, numbering sometimes in the hundreds, often with the Bannock at their side. At night they would sneak down and steal the resting horses, just as the Nez Perce had feared. During the day, they milled about at a distance, sometimes coming down from the ridges and scaring the women. The Nez Perce warriors would chase them away but dared not pursue. They needed to stay near the horses so other Crow would not sneak in and steal from the herd while it was left unguarded. But even so, many healthy horses were lost.

This continued loss of horses wore at the spirit of the people. The herd was their wealth; the herd was their hope. When the horses were strong, the people were strong. When the herd was weak, sick, and lame, the people were weak, sick, and lame. Little by little, their legs and heart were being taken from them.

The journey had been going on for almost a hundred days now. It had started in early summer when the waters in the rivers ran high. Now the time of the snows was coming near. At night, the water in the buffalo wallows was skimming with ice; in the morning the hills were blanketed with frost. On the far mountains the snow line was descending, and many days they rode through a steady downpour of wind-driven rain mixed with slush and snow.

The country through which they were now passing was broad and empty, made up of grassy hills that rolled endlessly toward a distant horizon. Sometimes, in the distance, herds of buffalo or antelope could be seen moving like small dots across the hills and plains. When the sun came out it was weak and without heat, and many days the skies were heavy bellied with gray, threatening clouds.

The scouts watched the buffalo herds closely. In this country, the buffalo could give them many messages. A group of soldiers moving behind hills could cause the buffalo to stampede. And the thickness of the hair on the buffalo could tell them about the nearness and depth of the coming winter.

The Crow and other soldier Indians were always a worry. They continued to raid the camp at night, thinning the herd. One night the Nez Perce caught a young Crow boy trying to steal a horse. They cut his hair, placed him on a worn-out mount, and sent him back to his people with the message that the Crow were old women and cowards and that the Nez Perce neither feared nor respected them.

In one instance, they encountered a group of river Crow out hunting buffalo for the winter. They killed some of the hunters, stole all their horses, and took as much of the dried buffalo meat as they could carry. They allowed the chief, Dumb Bull, to escape. His shame would be more fitting punishment than death, and all his people would know that the Nez Perce did not even consider him worthy of being killed.

Eventually, pursuit by the Crow and the other Indian scouts lessened. Their numbers were fewer, their raids more halfhearted. Many had gotten enough horses to satisfy themselves; others had no stomach for fighting with the desperate and angry Nez Perce. They had done their part for the soldiers; now they would go home. One by one, they dropped back, then disappeared altogether.

The soldiers, who were plodding along far behind, were also weary. The infantry was poorly equipped for the growing cold. They had only their summer jackets, and many now were without boots and socks. The cavalry was not faring much better. Their horses had developed a hoof disease, so they too were reduced to crossing this great open country on foot, leading their horses behind them. The Nez Perce or some other tribe had burned the prairie, leaving no grass for the horses to forage and no easy way to track the movements of the hostiles. Many of the men were sick from drinking the alkali water, and the enemy was nowhere to be seen. They had no more heart for this pursuit.

The white scouts that Howard had retained were mostly seasoned civilians who knew the country well, and they were disgusted with the army's sluggardly pursuit. They were convinced that Howard was a fool and that Merrill's timidity back at the canyon bottom—ordering his men to dismount rather than to charge—had cost them their best chance at catching the Nez Perce. Many were on renewable one-month contracts, and rode off as soon as their time was up, proclaiming that Uncle Sam's men weren't fast enough, smart enough, or brave enough for Indian fighting.

With his Indian scouts gone, his white scouts leaving, and his own troops almost too worn-out to travel, Sturgis brought his men to a halt. They were so sore and tired that they were strung out over ten miles, with those in the rear not arriving in camp until long after dark. Since their confrontation in the canyon, his men had never encountered another Indian other than their own scouts.

They set up camp on the banks of the slow, winding Musselshell River, thankful to be able to rest near water that they could drink without getting ill. There they subsisted on horsemeat, half rations, and tart berries picked from bushes near the riverbank while waiting for General Howard to arrive with supplies and reinforcements.

Soon some of Howard's men did arrive, carrying five hundred pounds of beef the general had sent forward when his advance scouts had informed him of Sturgis's predicament. Howard himself had detoured to a nearby fort to drop off his wounded and pick up more supplies for his own and Sturgis's worn-out men.

By the time he and the rest of his troops finally caught up to the group, it had been a week since Sturgis had encountered the Nez Perce in the dry canyon. Neither of the men held out any hope that they would be able to catch the fleeing Nez Perce before they made it to Canada, now only 180 miles due north. But Howard had sworn to Sherman that he would chase the hostiles until they were caught or managed to get across the border, and this was what he intended to do. It was possible that they had already made it to the border. In any case, he no longer looked upon this pursuit as a preface to military engagement but rather as a herding action designed to make sure that the hostiles really did leave the country. Indeed, there were those among his men, and many higher up in the military as well, who claimed that this was the outcome they should have sought in the first place.

Howard decided that his best course was to advance with a small group of men made up mostly of Sturgis's troops, who, though exhausted, were still fresher than his own foot-weary soldiers, who had been on the trail for almost five months. His own men would go back by river and ultimately by rail to their home posts in Oregon and Idaho. Many were now privately expressing sympathy for the courage of the Nez Perce, and many others were expressing open disdain for the task they had been assigned. They had not signed up to get trapped in a 40-below-zero winter on the high Montana plains.

Howard did not take Sturgis to task for his decision to rest, and it was not simply out of respect for the men's exhaustion. Both he and Sturgis had come to the hard realization that the Nez Perce sped up their travel when the army sped up its pursuit. By slowing their own pace, they believed they perhaps could keep the hostiles in the country until Colonel Miles, marching vigorously on his diagonal line from the distant Tongue River encampment, could overtake them and pin them down. Howard could then come up from behind with his men, and he and Miles could share the glory of the capture, if indeed there was to be any capture at all.

The question now was whether capture was even possible. Miles himself had stated that he held out faint hope for success, and Howard, by his decision to send many of his troops home, was making his feelings on the matter clear. However, he still clung to the slight possibility that success was possible. He had even turned to prayer, beseeching God to grant the expedition success, “even at the expense of another's receiving credit….” But with or without God's help, he would persevere. As a military man, it was his only honorable choice.

A
HUNDRED MILES
farther ahead, the Nez Perce sensed the weakening pursuit. Attacks by the Crow and Bannock had dwindled to almost nothing. The rear scouts saw little in the way of soldier movements to concern them. Their struggle now lay with the great emptiness of the buffalo plains.

Within the camp some felt that their spirit powers had saved them. Warriors like Yellow Wolf, who had received a vision in his youth that he could not be killed by bullets, had survived direct attacks by soldiers and the Crow. Old Wahnistas Aswetesk, whose body had been riddled by bullets in the battle of the Big Hole and had emitted steam rather than blood, not only was still alive but had healed. Many others too had been kept alive by their
wayakin
s. Though the trail was littered with the graves of their dead, the medicine power of the people still seemed to be working. Their good fortune at finding the camp of Dumb Bull with its horses and store of dried meat had increased this feeling. There was more talk that the time had come to slow down and let the people rest.

But Poker Joe was insistent. He knew the soldiers, he knew their ways. Until the Nez Perce crossed the border into the Old Woman Country, they should not feel safe. As long as he was leader, they would not have easy rest.

The vast empty spaces allowed the groups to travel separately, each leaving when it saw fit and taking the route it chose. Many among them knew this country well, and the distant landmarks of low-lying mountain ranges and lines of hills allowed them to designate camping places where all would gather at the end of the day. By moving in small groups, they could hunt more effectively and find better forage for their horses as well as confuse any pursuing soldiers. But it also increased the divisions that were beginning to show in the hearts of the people.

The one constant was Joseph, who been steadfast and unwavering in his role as camp chief. The bands could disagree about the wisdom of the young warriors' actions; they could differ on the leadership of Poker Joe and the speed with which he was driving them; they could be for or against the way Looking Glass had led them. But none could fault the steady hand and calming influence that Joseph had exercised in guiding the young boys to care for the horses and in making sure that the orphaned children were cared for and the elders clothed and fed.

All knew that he had opposed this war, and many now shared this feeling. They were moving north into unknown land to join with a tribe they did not know well and with whom they shared no strong bond. The peace that had been made between their people and the Sioux was a peace of warriors, not a peace of camp friendship. They were unsure how they would be received and what they would find. All the promises of safety and sanctuary had come down to joining with a tribe very different from themselves and with whom they shared little except a common refusal to turn to white ways.

Joseph's constant calls to turn back to their own country—calls that had been discounted by the other chiefs in council decisions—now seemed like the voice of wisdom. His wish had become the wish of many of the people. Though the dream of return was no longer possible here in the high buffalo plains, with soldiers behind them and winter in front of them, none forgot whose voice it had been that had spoken so strongly and fondly for remaining in their home country. If they must die, would it not have been better to do so in land that would accept their bones rather than in unknown country, where coyotes and Bannocks insulted the dead and disturbed their spirits? Would they not have done better to listen to Joseph than to the chiefs with their grand promises of sanctuary and to the young warriors with their hollow boasts of honor?

Joseph himself remained a calm, quiet presence, caring for the camp and doing what he could to keep up the people's hopes and spirits. All knew that he understood their burdens. He had an infant daughter only several months old and an older daughter just moving into womanhood. He knew how fragile young lives were and how important it was to protect the helpless. He had helped bury his brother's wife and had shared in grieving for the dead. While other chiefs had been off scouting or fighting, he had stayed among the families and assisted in the frantic packing and frightened retreat. He had helped distribute food and had seen the hunger in the faces of the sick and the elderly. He was not blinded by false dreams of honor or bitter feelings of revenge. His eyes were always on the people, and his heart was always open to their suffering.

With uncertain hearts they moved toward the last great barrier that stood between them and the border to the Old Woman Land. It was the fractured landscape and turbid river known as the Place of the Caves of the Red Paint. Once across this difficult terrain, they would find only rolling high plains for the remaining eighty miles to the border.

The river, known to the whites as the Missouri, wound brown and muddy through the bottom of its own canyon, which cut like a deep furrow into the rolling flatness of the buffalo plains. Travelers approaching from either side, accustomed to the vast distances and hypnotic emptiness of the high plains, were suddenly confronted with a complex welter of hillocks and dry washes that extended downward for miles until it ended at the twisting, brown ribbon of river far below. Seen from the rim of the plains, these descending hills looked like a rumpled maze of dry mud mounds and sand spires dropped upon the earth by a giant, careless hand. In reality, they were tall, peaked cones and pyramids of desiccated rock and earth, sculpted into fantastic shapes and layers by eons of erosion as the river had ground its way downward into the earth. Passage through them meant navigating a labyrinth of tight draws and canyons on trails barely wider than horse paths.

It was a confusing, barren, inhospitable landscape, relentlessly hot in summer, frigid in winter, and slick and mucky and nearly impassable after even the slightest rain. The white men called this country the “dreaded badlands,” or the Missouri Breaks, and anyone wishing to descend from the plains to the tiny ribbon of river or ascend from the river to the plains high above had to make their way through it in order to reach the buffalo grasslands on either side.

Nez Perce buffalo hunters had forded this river many times on their way to and from the great northern hunting grounds. The spot where they always forded lay at a bend in the river where several cottonwood-studded islands provided shade and rest. It was also the only place shallow enough for the people to cross on foot and horseback without stopping to construct bull boats to ferry themselves and their goods to the other side.

But this shallowness had made this bend a significant spot for the white travelers as well. The Missouri was the mother river of the West—the river into which all the others fed and the route that could be followed all the way from St. Louis into the little-known western interior. It was the route of exploration, the route of supply. As settlers had moved to the interior, and as soldiers had been sent to protect them, it was the Missouri and its tributaries that had carried them. As travelers and supplies came up from the growing settlements at Council Bluffs and Bismarck, it was the Missouri and its tributaries that brought them. Troops were ferried on it, goods were carried on it. Steamboats, flatboats, and all manner of watercraft navigated its muddy, brown flow during times of high water. Sometimes as many as forty steamboats could be traveling its wild, uninhabited upper reaches here in Montana Territory.

But though it was the mother river, it was also the river that looped farthest to the north and so was less hospitable than some of its lesser tributaries farther to the south. Aside from Fort Buford, which lay almost 300 miles to the east in the Dakota Territory, and several smaller military encampments, the few stopping places in this upper Missouri were mostly rude log huts or temporary encampments of tents—lonely, widely separated embarking and debarking points for troops, goods, and the occasional settler moving to or from the interior. The closest thing to a meaningful settlement on this upper river was Fort Benton, 120 miles to the west from the wide bend where the Nez Perce intended to cross. Between Fort Benton and the crossing point there was nothing but the turbid, murky river running between uninhabited banks of rocky outcroppings and woolly scrub.

Fort Benton, like many western towns, was a huddled outpost that sat lonely and isolated in a vast, forbidding landscape. It had grown from a converted military fort into a thriving commercial settlement of more than 600 residents because it was the end point for steamboat travel up the Missouri and the beginning of the Mullan wagon road, which bumped its way for 600 miles to the settlements of eastern Washington. Unfortunately for the town's residents and for the military and far-flung settlers who relied on the town for supplies, the Missouri was not a cooperative river. It was so full of shallows and shifting sandbars that the steamboats that plied it had to be equipped with large, insectlike, hydraulic arms that could be extended from their sides to lift the boats out of the water and over spots too shallow to be navigated.

But even with this mechanical assistance, and despite the constant efforts of teams of soldiers to dredge channels and remove snags and deadfall, there was a point beyond which steamboat travel could not take place when the water level in the river fell too low. This point was Cow Island, the wide, shallow bend in the river toward which the Nez Perce were heading.

As a result, the Cow Island landing had become a supply drop where goods were offloaded and kept under tarps until their owners, whether military or settlers, could arrange for their transport. Clothing, bedding, foodstuffs, cooking utensils, fabric, medicine, tobacco, alcohol—whatever the people in Fort Benton and beyond needed—had to be left on this unprotected, uninhabited riverbank 120 miles from their destination. And since hauling anything other than the most minimal goods up the narrow trails through the ravines of the badlands was almost impossible by horse-drawn wagon, a lively commerce of what were called “bull trains” had sprung up.

These bull trains were series of heavy, groaning wagons hooked together like train cars and pulled by teams of oxen, sometimes sixteen strong. They would load up at river's edge, then slowly creak their way up the narrow trails through the breaks to the plains high above. From there they would proceed through the rolling buffalo country to Fort Benton.

Their passage along the narrow trails up through the badlands was so slow as to be almost painful. Passengers who had taken the steamboat on their way to the settlements often walked to the top and waited rather than suffer through the slow, agonizing climb at the pace of the bull-drawn wagons.

On the day that the Nez Perce arrived on the ridge overlooking this great valley of badlands, a bull train of fifteen heavily loaded wagons had just begun its climb from the river flats to the plains, and the remaining piles of goods on the riverbank had reached over twenty-five feet in height. Normally, only a few men who worked for the steamboat line stayed camped at the river drop point. But on this day, there happened to be a contingent of twelve soldiers, eight of whom had been stationed there to protect military goods and four who had come down the river from the direction of Fort Benton to pick up rations for a group of men who were trying to clear a channel a few miles upstream.

Upon descending through the narrow trails of the breaks, the lead men of the Nez Perce looked across the river and saw the small collection of military tents and tall piles of goods that stood directly in their path. The five lead chiefs called their men together for a discussion. There was no other good place to cross. If they were to move to the other side and continue on to the Old Woman Country, it had to be done here.

It was agreed that there should be no fighting if at all possible. Enough people had been hurt, and the wounded were suffering enough from the cold. These few tents did not speak of many soldiers. Perhaps if the warriors did not shoot first, the soldiers would not be inclined to fight.

The chiefs sent an advance group of twenty warriors across the river to stand between the soldiers' tents and the people as they crossed. A strong show of strength might stop the soldiers from taking any rash action.

The warriors rode calmly across the half-mile-wide expanse of brown, slow-moving water and set up a picket line. The people then began crossing the river behind them. Though the piles of goods that the soldiers were guarding were covered with tarps, it was possible to see food, cooking gear, and cloth protruding from around the edges.

Since the raid on the camp of the River Crow, the people had eaten only dried buffalo meat, and most of their camp goods had been lost along the trail. It did not go unnoticed that these piles contained much of what they would need to make it comfortably to the Old Woman Land and to start a new life among Sitting Bull's people.

Carefully scrutinizing the piles as they passed, the people moved across the shallow river as the soldiers observed them from the safety of shallow trenches they had dug around the edges of their tents. No one from either side fired, though rifles were kept at the ready.

Once the people were safely across, several of the chiefs went forward to ask the white men for food. The people, they explained, were tired, and the children were hungry. It did not seem much to ask for some small gift of supplies from piles so great as these.

One of the civilian men advanced to meet them. He tried to make indications of friendship, but when the chiefs found he was not a soldier they refused to talk to him. It was the soldiers who were their potential adversaries, so it was the soldier leader with whom they wished to speak.

Cautiously, the group's leader, a Captain Moelchert, came forward. He and his men had been informed upon their departure from the channel-clearing brigade that there was some chance they might confront the Nez Perce, who were known to be somewhere in the area. His men had responded with typical soldier bluster, saying, “Let them come. We are here first,” and he had applauded their bravado.