Cries from the Earth (65 page)

5.) Not long after the fight, Sergeant McCarthy wrote: “Many of the guns choked with broken shells, the guns being rusty and foul.” Sounds all too familiar after reading about the fatal experiences of those five doomed companies who followed George Armstrong Custer into the valley of the Little Bighorn, doesn't it? I might be able to believe that the raw recruits, not given much of an opportunity to practice with their weapons, left their carbines to grow rusty, to become fouled and unusable … were it not for the fact that in both the case of Ouster's defeat and the debacle at White Bird Canyon those guns were retrieved from the battlefield and put to good service that very day as well as in the months to come by the victorious Indian warriors!

Make no mistake that I take my stand on just what happened to Perry's command that Sunday morning. It was a simple case of a combination of small, otherwise insignificant, factors that when brought together overwhelmed the abilities of the army commanders.

Under any circumstances, the loss of not only one, but
both,
of Perry's trumpets made it virtually impossible for the captain to issue orders under battlefield conditions.

In the days and weeks to come, the Mount Idaho volunteers would suffer severe criticism for abandoning their position at the far end of the left flank—almost from the first shots! In fact, the first volunteers to flee the fight reached Mount Idaho by 9:00
A.M.
! That's when Loyal P. Brown began writing his first dispatch to General Howard.

When those volunteers abandoned the fight, this exposed Theller's left to a brisk fire. At first it took only two or three of Theller's men to waver, turn, and leave the line—following the retreating civilians. And once the first few soldiers turned to flee the fight, once enough soldiers refused to heed the orders of their noncoms or their mediocre commanding officers … the trickle became a tidal wave.

In his recollections, that courageous, if not impetuous, Sergeant McCarthy went on to summarize the shortcomings of the command:

We were in no fit condition to go to White Bird on the night of the 16th. We had been in the saddle nearly 24 hours and men and horses were tired and in bad shape for a fight. To cap the matter, we were marched into a deep canyon and to a country strange to us, and familiar to the enemy. If there was any plan of attack, I never heard of it. The troops were formed in line and about a third advanced in squads and the remainder very soon afterwards retreated in column up a ridge and out of the canyon. The detached advance squads, each acting independently and extended over considerable ground, were attacked in detail and scattered and scarcely any escaped out of the canyon … Many of these men could have been saved if the retreat of the main column had not been so rapid.

I don't think any of you will argue with me that Ollokot's fifty or sixty Nez Perce horsemen, outnumbered even as they left their village behind, acquitted themselves most admirably in that first battle ever fought between their people and the U.S. Army.

Now if any of you have an opinion on the mystery of how Jonah Hayes's wife knew of this fight even before it began, if you have some idea how she knew of the “massacre” the night
before
Perry led his men into White Bird Canyon and why she would describe a “trap” being laid for the soldiers
before
the fact … I'd sure like to hear from you! Very simply, for me this is one of the two most enduring mysteries of this entire outbreak of hostilities.

And while we're on the subject of these Nez Perce women, consider for a moment the courage, what was nothing less than unvarnished heroism, it took for the older woman named
Tulekats Chickchamit
to leave the emotion-charged gathering at the traditional campsite of
Tepahlewam
and make a long, looping ride south over the divide, down the White Bird, reaching the Salmon River settlement of Slate Creek, where she reported those first murders that had occurred along White Bird Creek itself. Many of the refugees huddled among the few buildings at Slate Creek realized the miners in the nearby hills should be warned of the outbreak and the appeal should be made for those miners to come over to the Salmon, where they could help reinforce the community's defenses.

But when the white men looked sheepishly at one another, not one of them would volunteer for that twenty-six-mile wilderness ride to Florence. Eventually, the defenders agreed to offer five dollars apiece to the Indian woman, who was a noted gambler, if she would carry their message to the miners.

She completed that difficult ride to the white stronghold of Florence … and that's where a colorful bit of folklore was given birth. Like Portugee Phillips more than ten years before her, arriving at Fort Laramie in the midst of a winter blizzard, when
Tulekats
dismounted among a gathering of curious miners her horse collapsed beside her, dead of exhaustion.

If you include Larry Ott in their number, seventeen white miners crossed over the divide on what was called the Nut Basin Road to reach the tiny settlement of Slate Creek, led by
Tulekats.
And when not one but two small bands of warriors showed up at the Slate Creek stockade under a white flag to settle their accounts with trader John Wood before they departed for the buffalo country,
Tulekats
made her way to the walls, where she berated the men of her tribe for killing her friends—saving her harshest scorn for when she chastised them for murdering white women and children.

I'm saddened, but not surprised, to report that neither the settlers nor the Florence miners ever paid
Tulekats
what they had promised her for that daring ride. Eventually, however, this brave woman was rewarded for her courage in the face of her people's fury when her name—once it had been corrupted to
Tolo
over time—was given to that forty-acre lake six miles southwest of Grangeville, the lake on
Tepahlewam
where her people had traditionally gathered for generations. Upon her death, Tolo was buried nearby in Rocky Canyon. It was there that the American Legion Auxiliary erected a memorial to her in 1939.

In years after the Nez Perce conflict, First Sergeant Michael McCarthy became quite vocal in what complaints he had to lodge against Captain David Perry. McCarthy had kept a diary on the campaign,
1
a record of his escape from the battlefield, which he expanded upon years later. In reading his critical testimony against Perry, along with his unflinching support of Captain Joel G. Trimble, I pause to wonder if McCarthy's memory isn't tinged with rancor at Perry for ever leading the command into the canyon in the first place.

It took two decades after his miraculous escape, but in 1897 the courageous Michael McCarthy finally received the Medal of Honor for his bravery in the face of enemy fire at White Bird Canyon. The citation—though marred with minor errors—reads:

Was detailed with six men to hold a commanding position, and held it with great gallantry until the troops fell back. He then fought his way through the Indians, rejoined a portion of his command, and continued to fight in retreat. He had two horses shot [out from] under him, and was captured, but escaped and reported for duty after 3 days' hiding and wandering in the mountains.

Second Lieutenant William Russell Parnell also received a Medal of Honor for his courage in combat at White Bird Canyon.
2
In addition, he was awarded a brevet of colonel for his distinguished gallantry in action.

Lew Day, the courier who started from Mount Idaho for Fort Lapwai with news of the first attacks but didn't get very far beyond Cottonwood House when he was jumped, and Joe Moore, the Nortons' hired man, together held back the Nez Perce, preventing them from rushing in to finish the last of those survivors huddled under the wagons or behind the carcasses of their dead horses. Day lingered with his wounds until the morning following their rescue (although Mark Brown says he lived six days). And Joe Moore tenaciously clung to life an agonizing six weeks before he died (Brown claims Moore lasted three months).

I sensed an undeniably strong presence as I stood before the graves of these two men in that small, out-of-the-way cemetery tucked at a far edge of the tiny community called Mount Idaho, a feeling of standing in the presence of genuine, honest-to-goodness heroes. As I slowly moved from one grave marker or headstone to another in that quiet, shady cemetery, I found many of them memorials to those unfortunates caught in the cross-fire of a conflict that made little sense. With the sunlight slanting through the trees, stirring the remnants of the ground fog left by last night's rain, I stayed longer than I had intended—just listening.

Not all the heroes are buried there.

Delia Theller had been the only officer's wife still at Fort Lapwai when Perry's command marched away at dusk that fifteenth day of June. Tragic that Edward Theller should be the only officer killed with his men less than thirty-six hours later.

Once General Howard led his reinforcements into the bottom of White Bird Canyon and temporarily buried the lieutenant with the other dead, Mrs. Theller penned heart-wrenching letters to the newspaper editors throughout central and northern Idaho. Realizing that the Nez Perce might take in some captured goods to trade off for ammunition, supplies, or whiskey to some storekeeper in the region, she offered to pay a reward for the return of any personal item that had been taken off her husband's body by the warriors who had killed him, items the lieutenant had carried with him when he kissed her farewell and marched away from Fort Lapwai into history: his watch, rings, cabinet photos, or any papers that might serve as mementos.

Hers is a part of the story that will bridge over to the second volume of this Nez Perce War tragedy.

That Irish miner named Patrick Brice had seen enough of war against the Nez Perce. Because of his uncanny release from the warriors, unsubstantiated rumors and various discrepancies would whirl around the man for close to a hundred years. Some of the early writers, Loyal P. Brown included, incorrectly recorded his name as Patrick
Price.
This mistake was carried over to modern days when writer Mark H. Brown likewise referred to him as Price.

Even L. V. McWhorter called him
Frederick
Brice! McWhorter, a great supporter of the Non-Treaty Nez Perce, was one of the first to give credence to the fanciful tale that Brice had saved himself when confronted with the warriors in White Bird Canyon by exposing his chest to show the tattoo of a Catholic crucifix. The rumor had it that the Nez Perce were so awed by the powerful medicine of this tattoo that they immediately gave Brice and Maggie Manuel their freedom. Yet it's strange that not one of the Indian informants McWhorter used to research his books (including the man who gave the authoritative Nez Perce account of that meeting with Brice, Black Feather himself) remembered anything of any marks on the white man's breast—no painting, no symbols, no tattoo!

Why would these members of the Non-Treaty bands, warriors who had rejected the white man's religion, suddenly give any special significance to the white man's crucifix?

Stranger still, Brice himself never mentioned anything of a tattoo in his account, nor does he say anything about the basis of a second, and even more fanciful, rumor popularized by McWhorter and a few others: that Patrick Brice secured his freedom from the warriors by vowing to return to the Indian camp once he had delivered little Maggie to safety.

In her book,
Saga of Chief Joseph,
General Howard's daughter perpetuates this myth regarding the courageous Irishman. It seems that after Brice had reached Mount Idaho with the small girl and rested a day, “… he went back to the Indian camp where he presented himself as a hostage, supposedly to Chief Joseph, who magnanimously sent him on his way unharmed.”

But this story would not enjoy its real heyday until after the turn of the century, when Charles Stuart Moody wrote an article titled “The Bravest Deed I Ever Knew” for the March 1911 issue of
Century Magazine.
In it Moody explained how Brice had hammered out a deal with the Nez Perce to return to the White Bird camp after he had taken the child to safety in the settlements. Moody explains that the Irishman offered the warriors to “work their will upon him” when he returned. This ludicrous tale ended with Moody declaring that Brice returned to the valley, just as he had promised Black Feather, and was promptly granted his freedom because the warriors were so deeply impressed with not only his courage but mainly the fact that he had kept his word!

A few of you might be wondering about the enduring mystery of whatever happened to Jennet Manuel, just where she and her young son disappeared to after daughter Maggie told Brice she watched Chief Joseph stab her mother in the house, where the Irishman was unable to find the bodies later on. When reunited in Mount Idaho, Jennet Manuel's father, George Popham, told Brice that the house had burned to the ground.…

No, I think I'll stop right there. Going to leave that matter until the next volume, when I'll address the conflicting accounts of her disappearance simply because of the reports that continued to drift in concerning a disheveled blond-haired white woman spotted among the Non-Treaty bands as they pushed south through the Bitterroot Valley, making their way to the Big Hole.

The high level of confidence the warriors—indeed, every man, woman, and child in the Non-Treaty bands—gained with the army's debacle at White Bird Canyon would assure that the Nez Perce War would not be a short-lived campaign. The
Nee-Me-Poo
would go on to fight at Cottonwood and Clearwater, then escape to Montana Territory via the Lolo Pass. Their great victory on the White Bird—just like the victory of the Lakota and Cheyenne on the Greasy Grass the year before—gave the Non-Treaty bands the unmitigated confidence that they would eventually triumph in their struggle, gave them unbridled hope that if they could not return to life as it had been in their own land, then they could not be stopped on their migration to the Old Woman's Country.