Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (39 page)

Through such chroniclings, feelings for and against the Indians were both escalating and hardening, though in many cases the reports were being created secondhand or even fabricated entirely from hearsay and anecdotes gathered by whiskey-drinking layabouts who spent their time sitting at the bars of hotels in frontier towns rather than observing any actual battles.

Even in the diligent press, conflicting biases were resulting in conflicting pictures. The western press was quick to focus on savage actions of the various unconquered Indian tribes and to see every conflict as the potential harbinger of the dreaded pan-Indian uprising, while the eastern press openly suggested that the Indian policy of the United States was a bumbling, economic failure as well as a cruel and wrongheaded attack on people whose crimes often were no greater than wanting a little bit of justice and the chance to live unmolested and unharassed on their traditional tribal lands. The
New York Times
minced no words on the matter. It called the pursuit of the Nez Perce “a war which, on our part, was in its origin and motive nothing short of a gigantic blunder and a crime.”

With regard to the Nez Perce, papers everywhere took to chronicling the ongoing misadventures of the U.S. military in its efforts to catch and subdue the hostiles, and General Howard, with few exceptions, was vilified and ridiculed as an incompetent laggard. Headlines such as the
Bismarck Tribune'
s “Howard Fizzles Again” were commonplace, and every editor and letter-writing armchair general had a better idea of how the general should have fought and how the Nez Perce could have been captured. Meanwhile, the fleeing Nez Perce, who initially had been portrayed as a restless group of marauders committing depredations on innocent settlers in the deep folds of Oregon and Idaho, slowly metamorphosed from violent savages into a beleaguered group of refugees who, through personal bravery and masterful military strategy, were outwitting the entire U.S. military and, in the process, costing the military and the U.S. government money that could be better spent elsewhere. After the capture, some writers waggishly suggested that the United States should enlist Nez Perce warriors to serve as lieutenants in their army since they were clearly far more competent militarily than those currently in command.

Perhaps most significant of all, and completely unknown to the Nez Perce, was the elevation of Joseph in the public consciousness to the status of sole chief and strategist for the entire retreat and military campaign. Howard's incessant efforts to put the face of Joseph on the war and the willing adoption of the phrases “Joseph's war” and “Joseph's Indians” by other military leaders and civilian correspondents had combined with Joseph's presence as the surrendering chief at the Bear's Paw to create the impression that he had been responsible for every act and decision that had taken place during the entire long, tragic journey.

His explanation to the other chiefs as to why he was giving up had been embellished into a surrender speech by General Howard's aide, Lieutenant Wood, an aspiring author, and had been transmitted across the country. His solitary ride up the snow-covered gullies of the Bear's Paw and his subsequent handing of his rifle to Miles had been depicted ornately by correspondents vying with each other to offer the most epic and dramatic portrayals of the events and the participants. Typical was the
New York Herald
correspondent's florid description of the chief at the moment of surrender to Miles: “His eyes, black brilliant, and as piercing as an eagle's, rested on those of Colonel Miles with an expression once melancholy and reserved.”

Thus, with no effort or knowledge on his part, Joseph had become, in the public's mind, the great general, the master of strategy, the charismatic leader of all the Nez Perce people. And the contrast of the behavior of his Nez Perce people, both during and after the campaign, with the behavior of the Sioux, whose battles had been equally well chronicled the year before, made his stature as a great and compassionate leader grow to almost legendary proportions.

In him, the public that sought the noble savage and wise child of nature had found its man, while the voices of those who wished to see him hanged and held responsible for Indian atrocities grew more and more faint, until they amounted to little more than a squeak from the tiny frontier towns and newspapers scattered across the sparsely settled intermountain and high plains West. Joseph, the camp chief, leader of one isolated band in the great Nez Perce nation, had become, in the American public's mind, a military genius of Napoleonic proportions, a national symbol of the Indian plight, and the flash point for a fierce moral, economic, and political debate.

As he and Miles rode side by side down the steep trail to the few wooden buildings that constituted Fort Keogh, greeted by salutes of cannon fire and the musical offerings of the assembled post band, he had no idea that he and his people were quickly becoming a cause célèbre. For him, it was just the end of a sad journey that had begun almost four months earlier on the Camas Prairie, and the beginning of a long winter's wait before he could lead his people back across the mountain passes to the land where the Creator had always intended them to be.

But in the distant Washington offices of General Sherman, things were seen quite differently. The real financial costs of the Nez Perce war were coming to light, and the public and the politicians were not happy. If the military was to have any hope of upgrading its personnel and equipment, not to mention expanding its scope and scale to meet the challenges facing the nation in the post–Civil War era, it needed to show an absolute control over its budget. Quartering captive hostiles at sites of their choice, even if based on promises made by field commanders, was not the way to demonstrate that control. If the Nez Perce could be wintered more economically at a location closer to supply lines from the East, that was what should be done.

Sherman was also fundamentally opposed to the idea of the military getting involved in nonmilitary activities. He looked upon his army as “the sheriff of the nation,” not its court or its jailer. His army had caught the Nez Perce, and that was all it had been charged to do. Let some other agency incarcerate them, and let them do it on its own budget.

So while the Nez Perce were setting up their camps in a grove of stately cottonwoods on the east bank of the Yellowstone and preparing to survive the approaching winter in government tents with government rations, Miles was receiving notification by courier that his captives should be moved farther east to Fort Lincoln, near the new town of Bismarck in the Dakota Territory. Bismarck was the terminus for the rail lines from the East, so supplies could be transported there more cheaply and the Indians could be quartered and cared for more economically. There, in the shadow of the house where General Custer had lived, they would await further disposition, probably to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma.

Miles protested vigorously. His captives had suffered enough. Among their number were wounded who could not survive another move. Fort Lincoln was three hundred miles to the east but an eight-hundred-mile journey by river. He could look out from his quarters at Fort Keogh and see the Yellowstone River filling with ice, and he had experienced firsthand the snow-filled gales that were blowing across the frozen prairies. To make the tired and injured Nez Perce travel further was inhuman.

Sherman, however, was quite happy to subject his captives to inhuman conditions. He had not changed his basic stance about warfare since the march through Georgia and the burning of Atlanta. Opposition must be crushed in body and spirit, rendered incapable of and unwilling to ever fight again. And all who might entertain thoughts of opposition in the future must be made to bear witness.

In Joseph and his people he found the example he had been seeking. He admired the Nez Perce as fighters and strategists. After all, burdened with elderly, women, and children and, eventually, substantial numbers of wounded, they had managed to defeat Perry at White Bird and Gibbon at the Big Hole, to elude Rawn and Sturgis and Howard, and to hold Miles to a virtual stalemate. Such tactical and strategic skill, he said, rivaled any in the history of warfare. But he would never allow them to look like anything other than a defeated foe. He would place the boot to their neck, and do so publicly. After he was finished, any other tribe would think hard before resisting government policy.

This would also serve to silence the political drumbeat from the increasingly influential West. Voices there were demanding that the Nez Perce never be allowed to return to Idaho and Washington. Under the guise of protecting them from inevitable retribution, Sherman could send these people into an exile that would effectively erase them from the public consciousness while pleasing the western legislators and teaching the Nez Perce and all other potential hostiles a lesson. He could save the army money, increase the military's public prestige and political influence, disimbue all other tribes of any ideas about resistance, and silence the popular pro-Indian outcry that was galvanizing around the Nez Perce and their leader. He could also move them out of the jurisdiction of the military and into the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior.

It was a solution too perfect to resist.

M
ILES FOUND
J
OSEPH
walking among his people in the camp by river's edge. It was a healthy setting with abundant water and large, sheltering trees, and Miles had been heartened by the progress his captives had been making in establishing a normal camp life. They were still complaining about the loss of their weapons and horses, and they had been angered by Miles's decision to award each of his Cheyenne scouts a choice of five Nez Perce horses as a reward for faithful service. But overall they seemed as happy as could be expected after only a week in this setting, and Joseph seemed to have taken control of the camp with a firm and decisive hand. Miles knew that the message he was about to deliver would undo all the goodwill that had been building up slowly during the long journey from the battle site at the Bear's Paw.

He broke the word as gently as he could. “You must move again,” he told Joseph, “to a fort many days' journey to the east. There it will be cheaper to house and feed you for the winter.”

Joseph listened silently. “You must not blame me,” Miles continued. “I have endeavored to keep my word. But the chief who is over me has given the order, and I must obey it or resign. That would do you no good. Some other officer would carry out the order.”

Joseph knew that Miles was speaking the truth, but it was small consolation. If a nation sent a man to fight another man, then would not stand by the word of the man who had done the fighting, by whose words would it stand? If Miles's promise to winter the Nez Perce near the Yellowstone was so easily broken, what other promises might be broken in the future?

Joseph knew he had to keep his people calm. They were well aware of the white man's penchant for going back on his word. It had been a big part of the discussions about whether or not to cease fighting at the Bear's Paw. Now they were being told to move again, and this time to a place even farther from their homeland and the graves of those they had buried along the trail. How would he explain this new order to his people who had trusted him and were already filled with doubts about the wisdom of the surrender and fear of the white man's justice?

He went throughout the camp, gently informing the people that they must move one more time. The people looked at him with disbelief and incomprehension. Why could they not stay here? Had they not been promised this? There was room enough and they would bother no one. The river was already flowing with ice. How would they survive such a journey?

Already they were grieving the parents and children and relatives who had fled toward the Old Woman Land. Now they were being moved even farther away. Would they ever see their families again? Would they ever touch the earth of their ancestors? Would they even live to see the melting of the snows, or were they simply being taken away to be hanged?

Joseph could not give them answers. But he dared not show his own doubts. He instructed the people to break camp and prepare for this new journey.

No one moved quickly. They did not wish to travel again. This might be unfamiliar land under unfamiliar sky, but in their short time at that spot they had begun making their peace with it, putting up lodges and shaping their days into a comfortable camp routine. The wounded were healing, the old men were whiling away their time gambling and playing cards, and the children were running about and playing as children should. Though their hearts were heavy and their spirits weary, this encampment had given them hope. They had only to survive one winter in this place, then they could travel back over the mountains to the hills and valleys of their homeland. Now they were being told to gather their belongings for another journey.

The soldiers kept prodding them to hurry. Though the weather here was not so bitter as it had been on the high plains of the Bear's Paw, the temperature at night was now dropping below freezing. Already on some days they had awakened to a ground covered with snow. The river too spoke of impending winter. Its edges had begun to freeze solid, and its center was running heavy with slush ice coming down from the north. The journey had to begin at once.

Colonel Miles had brought up fourteen flat-bottomed boats made of heavy, sawn timber—little more than rafts with low, protective sides. The sick and the wounded and the elderly and the very young—all the people who might slow the pace or fail to survive on an overland journey—would travel in these, along with some of the women who could care for the others. Those who were strong enough to travel by land would cross the country with the soldiers. They would all meet at a fort several days' journey farther along the river.

Joseph protested vehemently. He did not wish to leave the women and children and the sick and the elderly. He had been charged by his father to protect his people. Those were the people who most needed his protection.

But Miles was adamant. It has to be this way, he explained. We do not have enough boats to carry all your people and their provisions. And even our own sick and wounded are always transported by water when possible. Would you not rather have your weak and injured carried on the smooth, fast surface of the river than being jolted and jarred across frozen ground?

Joseph could not argue, and even had he wished to, he had no choice. Miles's word, or the word of those who commanded Miles, must be obeyed. So, reluctantly, he said his good-byes to the sick and the elderly and promised that he would see them soon at the new fort farther down the river. Then, on the morning of October 31, he set out with the soldiers and the other strong and healthy among his people on this new journey across these cold and unfamiliar plains.

The weather had taken on the character of early November. On good days, the travel was easy, though cold. On bad days, when the snows and sleets of the approaching winter cut into their exposed flesh, it was a journey almost too painful to endure.

Joseph was profoundly upset that the people were being hauled in wagons and that all their horses other than the few they were riding had been left behind. He had not agreed to give up his horses when he had handed over his rifle. First it had been their weapons, now it was their herds and their saddles. How were they to survive? Without guns and animals, they were as helpless as children.

The soldier Miles had placed in charge had no answers. He was instructed only to deliver the captives to the place where the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers met. There they could speak to men with more authority. Until then they must accept their situation and do what they were told.

Several days into the journey, Joseph and the others saw one of the boats coming up the river behind them. It beached nearby, and Colonel Miles, who had stayed behind to oversee the launchings, stepped out wearing a long, blue, caped coat and high leather boots. He announced that he would travel the rest of the way with the overland party.

While the transfer was being made, Joseph had time to speak with his people who had been traveling on the boat. There had been a frightening rapids early on, they said, and one of the other boats had been lost, killing many of the people. One of the young mothers with her child on her back had bent over the side of the boat to get a drink and her baby had fallen in. When she had jumped in to save it she had been lost along with the child. But by and large, they had been treated well. They were allowed coffee to drink and salt pork and sugar and beans and rice to eat. The white man in charge of the boat was not a soldier, and he had been very trusting, even allowing the boys to steer and row and one of the old men to use a rifle to go ashore and hunt.

The remaining boats were still far behind because the white men had decided to make a race of the journey. Since their boat was curved toward the front and the back, and because their young boys had proven to be such strong rowers and polers, they were now in the lead. The others would be coming up soon.

Joseph listened with sadness. It was good that his people were being fed and that the young boys were able to find some pleasure and satisfaction in this endless journey. But more of his people were now dead, and he had been powerless to help them.

Soon the boat pushed away, and the tired party of overland travelers resumed its eastward journey across the increasingly cold and alien plains. With each mile, the weather grew colder and the journey more difficult. The land still felt like buffalo country, but the grass was shorter and the hills were becoming lower and fewer. The sky had turned from blue to empty gray, and the winds were often filled with driving sleet and snow.

For more than a week they traveled this way. Colonel Miles had assumed command, and he forced a rapid pace. The people's mood was once again descending into hopelessness and despair. Even Miles was saddened to see them suffering so as they made their way silently through these cold, empty lands. The men longed for their families and spoke of all who had been lost through flight or death during the long journey. No one knew if the boats on which the others were traveling would be able to navigate the ice-filled waters or if the injured could survive the numbing cold.

Hardest of all was their uncertainty about their impending fate. Just a few weeks ago they had been free people, willingly though sorrowfully walking forth to meet with the soldiers in a common armistice. Now they were captives, divided and herded like white men's cattle, being driven to a place they did not know in a country they did not understand. Their weapons had been taken from them, their horses and saddles had been claimed by the white soldiers and Cheyenne, and the man to whom they had entrusted their fate seemed to have no authority to keep his own promises. They were moving into a white man's world where no man was master of his own word and no Indian seemed able to long survive.

The journey to the meeting place, which the soldiers called Fort Buford, took ten cruel, cold, and wintry days. The only thought that lifted the people's deep sadness and growing gloom during the travel was the promise of being reunited with their brothers and sisters.

When they finally reached the fort, they were relieved to discover that the boat travelers had arrived two days earlier. Their journey had been hard and cold, they said, but it had not been unbearable. Almost all were alive, except for those on the boat that had capsized, the mother and child who had fallen overboard, and one man who had died just before they had arrived at the fort. And they had learned much from the white boatmen during their travels.

They had been told about Washington, the strange, mysterious white settlement to which the soldiers and government people were always referring. So many white men lived there, the boatmen said, that people had to fight for space to live and air to breathe. They also had been told of huge boats that traveled over all the waters of creation and of a great, fire-snorting iron horse that lived on wood and water and could outrun the fastest Nez Perce pony.

All agreed that the white boat leaders had been good to them. They had fed them well and let them pray in their own way. They had shown them new birds and animals that were good to eat and had even let the boys hunt with bows and arrows. The women had been permitted to go ashore to pick berries, and they had found many that they knew from their own country.

At this soldier fort too they had been treated well. They had been provided with firewood and allowed to sleep in an empty soldier building, even though there had always been white soldiers positioned nearby as guards.

They said there had been much arguing between the soldiers and the boat leaders, and the soldier chief of the fort had taken the boat leaders and put them under arrest. The argument, they believed, had something to do with the boat leaders' not wanting to travel down the new river that joined where they were now camped.

The people could understand the boatmen's concern. This new river was brown and wide, and its whole surface was covered with fast-moving slush. The boatmen said that it was the same river the people had crossed back at the place where they had raided the piles of supplies—the river the white man called the Missouri. But here it was a winter river, giving off steam as it passed and moving with a constant, ominous hiss.

Neither the people nor the boat leaders wanted to get back on this river. They knew that some morning soon the slush would stop moving and the river would freeze, trapping the boats and the people in a sheet of solid ice. But the soldiers did not care. They had received orders from the Great Chief in Washington, and the boats were to resume their travel as soon as the foot travelers arrived.

Again, Joseph asked Miles what was to become of his people. Miles told him that he would allow them several days' rest, then they would begin the journey to another fort far down the ice-filled river. The people again would be separated, with the healthy men continuing their travel overland and the weak and elderly again traveling in the boats. At this new fort they would be kept for the winter before being allowed to go back to their own country when the snows melted in the mountain passes.

This did not please Joseph; it left too much unknown. But if it were true, at least his people would be together, and he could keep his promise to care for those who had chosen to stay with him and remain under his protection.

After several days at the fort the people were instructed to prepare to leave quickly. The river, they were told, was within days of freezing solid.

The women hurried to the small buildings that housed white women who did laundry and made bread and cookies for the soldiers. There they bought bread and cakes and pies with some of their remaining coins and American dollars.

The boats soon pushed off into the slush-filled river, leaving behind the men, who were to travel overland by horse and wagon. The soldiers informed them that the trip would take about another ten days.

As before, Joseph remained with the overland travelers. Once again, it was hard to see the people separated; surely more would die on this leg of the journey. Hardest of all was the realization that they were now entering country that none of them knew. Since the deaths of Poker Joe and Looking Glass and the escape of the remaining healthy warriors with White Bird, there were none among them who had ever traveled to this eastern edge of buffalo country.