Lay the Mountains Low (54 page)

In the last month the Nez Perce had killed nearly ninety people and done close to a quarter-million dollars in damage, a monstrous sum in a day and time when the average laborer made no more than seventy-five cents at the end of his dawn-to-dusk workday. To put the very public humiliation of the scandal at the Freedmen's Bureau behind him, to
blunt the unseemly reputation he suffered among his army colleagues, Howard had to press forward with his plan without delay.

But, right from the start, the general's hopes began to suffer one wounding after another.

Just yesterday, on the morning of the eighteenth, his men had discovered three Non-Treaty warriors hiding among the ruins of the agency buildings on the east side of the Clearwater. Two of them were wounded, in all likelihood left behind when the rest of the village fled toward
Weippe
Prairie.

After stationing a token force—Throckmorton's battery of artillery, Jocelyn's company of infantry, and Trimble's troop of cavalry—at the Kamiah crossing on the nineteenth and directing McConville's volunteers back upriver to finish destroying the last of the caches at the enemy's Clearwater camp, Howard set off with the rest of his command for Lewiston. He got no farther than the halfway point when a courier reached him with the news that hostiles had doubled back, slipping out of the hills, and had the soldiers pinned down at Kamiah—stealing more than four hundred of the Christian Indians' horses, killing what cattle they could not drive off, and diligently burning houses of Lawyer's Indians.

Leaving his infantry and artillerymen there at Cold Springs, Howard ordered his cavalry back to Kamiah before he and a small headquarters group rode on to Fort Lapwai with Captain David Perry's escort. At the post he intended to make arrangements for the supplies required by the next phase of the war.

When they were finished with their destruction on the Clearwater, McConville's militia was under orders to drive several hundred head of captured ponies past Mount Idaho and Grangeville, into the head of Rocky Canyon, where they were to be slaughtered, in hopes of eliminating any reason the warrior bands might have for returning to central Idaho. That done, McConville and his men were to station themselves in the area, protecting the settlements should
Joseph and his henchmen slip back out of the mountains and make a wide sweep for the Salmon River.

Oliver knew it would be a tiring ride for his old bones, pushing those long hours in the saddle, but three days ago he had received word that his wife would be arriving by steamboat in Lewiston that very night. Oliver managed to make it in time, but when the steamboat was moored at 10:00
P.M.
his sweet Lizzie was not on board. However, Mrs. Perry was on board. And upon spotting her husband among those welcomers on the dock, she went into a fit of theatrical hysterics, a display that totally disgusted Howard.

In town for the night, he picked up the first newspapers he had seen in weeks—finding he was under personal assault from the normally conservative San Francisco
Chronicle
to the New York
Herald.
But the sharpest attacks were those of the local papers like the Lewiston
Teller,
whose editor, Alonzo Leland, lost no opportunity to write about how poorly Howard had done with the campaign so far. His brutal words cut Oliver to the marrow.

“The sheep is a very pleasant and amiable animal and has none but sterling qualities,” Leland had written in the most recent editorial, perhaps still furious over his own son's reports on the poor showing the army made at Cottonwood, “but we do not expect him to chase wolves and coyotes; we assign the task to the dog—also an amiable brute, but better adapted to the purpose.”

Leland broadcast that General Crook was a better man to send against the wolves and coyotes: “He sticks his breeches in his boots, keeps his powder dry, eats hardtack, and goes for ‘em…. But Howard regards the army as a kind of missionary society for the Indians and holds himself as the head of a kind of red freedman's bureau.”

While Crook was a first-class Indian fighter, as proved down in Arizona and during the Sioux campaign, if Howard continued to lead the chase of the Nez Perce, the war would be a six months' campaign, hunting the enemy in the mountains.

Summoning up from inside him his reservoir of fairness
in the face of brutal assault, Oliver sighed and folded the paper before handing it off to Lieutenant Charles Wood, his aide-de-camp.

“How wonderfully news can be spread,” he began with a cool, even detached, air so unlike what he had boiling inside. “It is like the cloud no bigger than a man's hand, when it leaves us, it is magnified several times before the journals at Lewiston and Walla Walla have put it into type, and by the time it has reached Portland and San Francisco it has become a heavy cloud, overspreading the whole heaven.”

“It's those civilian volunteers, General,” Major Edwin Mason grumbled. “They play at citizen militia when they're nothing more than a worthless set of trifling rascals! Utterly worthless, a cowardly pack of whelps, sir!”

Captain Birney Keeler jumped in, saying, “Many times I myself have explained to General McDowell how he should not give a grain of credence to any of the civilian accounts of our campaign, sir. Time and again I've informed the division commander that such news reports and editorials are nothing more than wanton, systematic lies. I've even told him that to continue employing civilians of such low character would be worse than useless in ending this war.”

“Yes, well,” Howard replied to McDowell's aide, sent by the department commander to have a look at the campaign for himself. He cleared his throat of the ball of fury just then rising. “I'd like to put a few of these dishonest enemies attacking me far from their warmth and safety of the rear out on those mountain trails of the Salmon, or march them dawn to dusk and order them to fight under a broiling July sun.”

By the following morning, Oliver Otis Howard had changed his mind. It was to be one of the most crucial decisions he made in his life. Turning his back on his initial plan to loop north to the Mullan Road, then sweep down on the Non-Treaty bands emerging from the Lolo Trail just south of Missoula, the general had now committed his men to pursuing the fleeing camp across the Lolo itself. While
awaiting his reinforcements in Lewiston, he polished the details of his three-column strategy.

Upon his arrival at Lewiston with his ten companies of the Second Infantry, Colonel Frank Wheaton would start north to the Mullan Road, accompanied by F and H Companies, First Cavalry, along with two companies of mounted volunteers mustered from the eastern regions of Washington Territory. Inspector Erwin Watkins of the Indian Bureau, on the scene with Agent Monteith, had proposed this march of thirty-six officers and 440 enlisted men through the Coeur d'Alene country to blunt any rising zeal the disaffected tribes in the area had for joining up with Joseph's Nez Perce.
*

Major John Green, of the First Cavalry, would position his Fort Boise column and some Bannock scouts at Henry Croasdaile's ranch,
**
located ten miles from Mount Idaho on Cottonwood Creek. With D, E, G, and L Troops of the First Cavalry, along with B and F Companies of the Twelfth Infantry, in addition to those thirty-five Warm Springs trackers, the entire force of twenty-two officers, and 245 enlisted men, Green would be deployed in a central location allowing his men to protect the Camas Prairie settlements and the Kamiah subagency, too, where the major would position an artillery battery and two fieldpieces. From his base of operations Green would dispatch reconnaissance parties to the region of the Salmon and Snake, with orders to capture and arrest any Nez Perce who might possibly be allied with the Non-Treaty bands.

But O. O. Howard had saved the right column for himself. Accompanying him on Joseph's trail would be a battalion of the Fourth Artillery A, C, D, E, G, and L Batteries, commanded by Captain Marcus P. Miller. Under Captain Evan Miles would serve a battalion of foot soldiers: Company H, Eighth Infantry, Company C, Twelfth Infantry—both of which had recently arrived from Fort Yuma along the Mexican border in Arizona Territory—in addition to C, D, E, H, and I Companies of the Twenty-first Infantry, who had already been seeing a lot of service with Howard in the first weeks of this outbreak. Major George B. Sanford was coming up to command the general's horse soldiers: B, C, I, and K Troops of the First Cavalry—all of them fresh companies that had not seen any service so far in the campaign.

Howard wired McDowell: “Will start with the rest of my command through the impenetrable Lolo Pass, and follow Joseph to the very death.”

This one-armed general was about to lead forty-seven officers, 540 enlisted men, seventy-four civilian and Indian scouts, as well as some seventy packers for his 350-mule pack train into one of the most far-reaching and inhospitable tracts of wilderness in the United States.

 

*
Wheaton would not reach the theater of operations until July 29, having traveled from Atlanta to Oakland, California, by rail, boarded a steamer to Portland, and traveled by riverboat up the Columbia to Lewiston.

**
In August 1877, an officer with the campaign wrote: “… The [Non-Treaty] Indians entered the house first and destroyed most of the furniture &c and were followed by the soldiers & volunteers who completed the destruction.” From the home of this retired British army officer the Non-Treaty warriors removed many high-powered and explosive bullets, some of which later saw use by the Nez Perce at the Battle of the Big Hole and eventually at the Battle of the Bear's Paw Mountains.

J
ULY
20–21, 1877

BY TELEGRAPH

—

The St. Louis Bank Panic Subsiding.

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The Great Strike on the Baltimore and Ohio road.

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OREGON.

—

Latest From the Indian War.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 18.—A Walla Walla dispatch says the Indians have killed three men and one girl on Cow creek. Old Salty, a Spokane chief, believes fifty of his warriors have gone to join Joseph. They are beyond his control. Col. Green with his column has reached Little Salmon river from the South. A messenger from Smookhalls and Spokane Jerry, non-treaty Spokane chiefs, announces that they desire to remain friendly and go upon a reservation, provided one is set apart for them and food furnished for the winter.

C
HARLES RAWN WATCHED THE YOUNG FIRST LIEUTENANT
stride across the dry, dusty ground, leading his horse. Just
steps behind him followed an enlisted man and a handful of civilians, all of them dismounted, their animals in tow.