Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (19 page)

When Howard finally did begin moving over the trail, fully two weeks after the Nez Perce had undertaken the journey, he was faced with terrain that had been stripped clean of pasture and forage by the Nez Perce horses, and was ill suited to his pack mules and horse-drawn artillery pieces. He had to send men ahead with axes to clear the logs and stumps and widen the trail, and even then could travel no faster than his large contingent of foot soldiers allowed. He was less willing than the Nez Perce to drive his animals to exhaustion, and even had he been willing to do so, he did not have the luxury of a herd of fresh ponies to use when his regular mounts and pack animals got tired. So he was often forced to rest when he really did not wish to do so. But he wanted to spare his troops and his animals any unnecessary hardship.

His men pressed ahead through this unfamiliar mountainous country, traveling by day through blinding, cutting rain and shivering by night in their thin military coats while the waters in the high mountain meadows and passes crusted over with ice. On occasion they were forced to make camp on slopes so angled that the men had to dig out flat spots in order to keep from rolling down the hills during their sleep. More than one soldier commented that this was the most difficult trail, and these the most broken mountains, that he had ever seen. Those who had known the Adirondacks and mountains back East now took to referring to those as “picnic” mountains. One man noted simply that these mountains were “grand, gloomy, and peculiar.” It was a description with which none would disagree.

But for the Nez Perce, to whom these mountains and trails were familiar, the mountains were the least of the difficulties. There had been tragedies, like the sad death of the child at the hands of her mother, and there had been logistical problems of finding resting and grazing places for so many people and horses. But the great problem was what to do once on the other side.

There was talk that Joseph and White Bird wanted to finish the journey across the Lolo, then travel south and take the southern trail back across the mountains to their homelands. There was also the issue of keeping the young men under control if and when white soldiers or settlers again appeared. Looking Glass spoke strongly in this regard, stating in no uncertain terms that no harm was to come to white settlers they met, and this meant no stealing, no looting, no killing. The war was over, he said. They were to leave all anger and confrontation behind.

Eventually they completed the crossing and descended into the broader valleys of the low Montana foothills. Here there were wide, flat meadows with meandering creeks and good grass for pasture. It was easy country to travel and country that offered easy rest. They still assumed that Howard would stop at the summit and break off his pursuit; in their minds the soldiers and the war were left far behind. They could now move leisurely down the remaining trail to the land of their Flathead friends, purchase goods from the stores in the white settlements, and proceed unmolested to buffalo country, if that was the course they chose.

But this sanguine outlook was shattered when one of the advance scouts came riding in with a desperate message. “Soldiers are in front of us building a fort. They are heading us off. In a little while we will see soldiers. They know our camp.”

This made no sense. The war had been left behind.

Leaving the camp and the people, Looking Glass, Joseph, and White Bird went down to see this white fort and consider the situation. What they found was a small group of soldiers and settlers hunkering behind a barrier two logs high. These logs had been hastily cut and laid across a narrow spot in the trail. By leaving open spaces between the logs, the soldiers had created a makeshift breastwork with firing channels. It was hardly more than knee high and was anything but a fort.

Upon seeing it, Looking Glass laughed, calling it a “soldier corral.” It presented no significant military impediment to their journey, but it did raise the question of who these soldiers were and why they had built such a barrier. More disconcerting still was the presence of Flathead warriors wearing white armbands and white scarves on their heads. Such things were not part of traditional Flathead dress. They could mean only one thing—the Flatheads were expecting hostilities, and wanted the soldiers to be able to differentiate them from the Nez Perce when fighting started. Their friends—the people they considered a brother tribe and from whom they had counted on gaining assistance—had joined with the military. And they were dressed in a manner that spoke of war.

But still, there was hope of resolution. The Nez Perce meant no harm to the Montana people. They wanted only to pass through peacefully. The whites in the Bitterroot Valley were their friends and had been for a long time. A proper explanation could set things right.

Joseph, White Bird, and Looking Glass continued down to meet with the soldier in charge of the barrier. The man introduced himself as Captain Rawn. He had with him an interpreter known to the Nez Perce as Delaware Jim, a Flathead warrior who was married to a Nez Perce woman.

The Nez Perce explained that they did not want trouble. “We do not want to fight,” they told him. “If you allow us to pass, we will pass peacefully. But we are going to pass.”

Rawn listened carefully. He was not here by choice. At the command of his superiors, he had hurried down from Fort Missoula thirty miles to the north and had hastily constructed the barrier. Howard had begged for assistance at the Montana end of the Lolo Trail, asking that troops be sent to delay the Nez Perce until he could catch up to them from the rear and engage them in a final battle. Rawn had been given that assignment.

He had done his part, but his heart was not in it. His “troops” consisted of about twenty-five regular soldiers, one hundred fifty to two hundred settler volunteers, and twenty or so Flathead warriors. The regulars had arrived in the area just several weeks before to help with the construction of Fort Missoula and knew nothing about the people and the terrain.

His settler volunteers too were problematic. Rawn was a military veteran. He had dealt with volunteers before. They always thought they were smarter and stronger than the army and that they would set things right when they got the chance. It was true that they usually knew the country better than the soldiers because they lived on the land they had volunteered to protect. But they were undisciplined and untrustworthy. Their motives ranged from foolish arrogance to a frightened desire to protect their families to a selfish greed for the spoils of battle. They could never be organized for troop movements and they could not be counted on to fight more than was necessary to achieve their own private ends. The best you could hope is that they would form skirmish lines and hold their ground or that they would be willing to charge when called upon to do so. To expect them to hold their fire as part of a larger, overall tactical maneuver or to operate in controllable formations was foolhardy. If they had bravery, that was all you could expect. Discipline in the face of fire was beyond reasonable possibility.

Rawn's current volunteers were clearly cut from this mold. About fifty of them had come down with him from the area around Fort Missoula, and they were filled with the customary bluster and swagger. They were itching to “eat Indians for breakfast,” as they were fond of saying. The other volunteers were from the little settlements right at the base of the Lolo Trail in the wide Bitterroot Valley. Some of them too had grandiose visions, but many were friends with the Nez Perce and had engaged in trading and horse racing with them. They knew each other by name and were not anxious for fighting. Had it not been for the horrible reports of savagery that had filtered over from the Salmon River country and the fact that their families lived in the direct path of the Nez Perce travels, they would never have joined in such a dangerous and foolhardy venture. All they wanted was to protect their homes and wives and children.

Then there was the issue of the Flathead warriors. They too had no real heart for the fight. They had joined with the soldiers only because they did not want to incur the wrath of the white government. Many were friends and family of the Nez Perce. Neutrality was the most Rawn could expect from them. Even though the Flathead, like all tribes, coveted the Nez Perce horses, that was probably not inducement enough to make them fight fiercely against a people they had long regarded as brothers.

Overall, it was not a force with which a seasoned commander like Rawn felt comfortable going into battle. He would discuss issues with the chiefs and try to hold them as long as possible so Howard could come up from the rear. But he was not interested in a full-scale engagement.

During the discussions, Looking Glass wandered off and spoke with some of his friends among the volunteers. He told them he and his people would pass through quickly and without incident. The Nez Perce, he explained, were on their way to buffalo country, and this passage would be as peaceful as all their other journeys.

This was all the local volunteers needed to hear. Why start an Indian war when one of the Indian leaders you knew and trusted told you that he and his people were simply passing through? Relieved and reassured, they picked up their arms and went home.

This left Rawn with only twenty-five unseasoned soldiers, fifty undisciplined volunteers, and twenty warriors of suspect loyalty—not a force to stand against the tide of warriors he believed was massing against him farther up the trail. Aided by liberal amounts of whiskey, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and after a halfhearted attempt at negotiations, he agreed to let the tribe pass unchallenged.

He really had little choice. The army had concentrated all its forces and forts farther to the east to protect them against the Sioux, so he could not count on prompt or adequate reinforcements. And the battles with those very Sioux had provided graphic examples of what happened to armies that lost engagements with hostile Indians. If saving lives and property was his purpose, acquiescing to the Indians' request was the surest way to achieve that end. It also, incidentally, was probably the only way to stay alive and keep all your body parts attached to one another.

When the actual passage of the Indians began, any remaining fighting sentiment among the soldiers dissipated almost entirely. The sight of the mounted Nez Perce dressed in their beautiful beaded shirts and leggings, coming in unknown numbers and carrying weapons equal to or better than those possessed by the troops and remaining volunteers, made Looking Glass's promise of peaceful passage seem like an offer only a fool would refuse. And any last flicker of ardor for combat was quickly doused by a continuous, dreary drizzle. Soon the last of the volunteers had packed and headed back down the canyon toward their homes, and the remaining soldiers were left with the realization that a fight would surely result in their annihilation.

Meanwhile, the Nez Perce had stationed warriors on the ridge high above the valley where the log “soldier corral” had been constructed, and had begun moving their people along the back side of the ridge out of sight of the troops. The few army regulars looked up from their huddled position behind their two-log barrier to see mounted, armed, Nez Perce warriors high above them flanking their puny defenses and well positioned to shoot down directly into their pitiful compound. They fired off a few token shots, but only for show. The Nez Perce proceeded unopposed down into the valley of the Bitterroot.

Despite the disquieting issue of why some of their brother Flathead had stood with the soldiers, and the unanswered question of why this Captain Rawn had attempted to stop them, Looking Glass was pleased. He had led his people peacefully across the mountains to the country where they were friends with both the Indians and whites. In the process, he had reached an agreement with a soldier chief that there should be no more war. Truly, he had achieved his objective. The fighting was now behind them, and they could now take the time to decide, once and for all, what course of action to follow to bring this unfortunate situation to an end.

The Bitterroot Valley, which the Nez Perce now entered, was a very different place from the Salmon River country from which they had come. While the Nez Perce side of the Bitterroot Mountains was carved and furrowed with deep, almost impassable canyons, the eastern side was made up of broad, intramontane valleys that stretched in a long north-south corridor from the plains of Canada to the deserts of the Southwest. Soft, pellucid, Pacific hazes had been replaced by bright blue skies of crisp, sharp-edged, high-mountain clarity.

Without the ocean to soften temperature swings, this long string of valleys saw sweltering heat swoop up from the south during the summer and frigid, snow-blown cold sweep down from the north in winter. Though there was the daunting range of the Rockies yet to cross before a traveler reached the buffalo plains, those mountains did not offer the formidable barrier formed by the jagged, forested Bitterroots through which the Nez Perce had just come. Once they were on this side, the east and the great plains beckoned, and travelers, both Indian and white, moved easily on several well-known trail passages to and from the land of the buffalo.

This had not been the case while the Nez Perce were snaking along the narrow Lolo Trail. There they had been without options. Once they had embarked on the Lolo, their only choices had been to proceed or turn back. But now, having reached the end of the Lolo and entered into the wide, long, north-south corridor of the Bitterroot Valley, they found themselves confronted with several choices and faced with a significant decision.

It would be an easy journey to turn north and proceed up the broad, open valleys to the British possessions they knew as the Old Woman Country. They could also take a broad, easy route directly east across the Rockies onto the buffalo plains. A third route followed the Bitterroot Valley south for about sixty miles then turned east across a low pass into a great open expanse called the Big Hole, or “the place of ground squirrels,” and from there across the land of the geysers into the southern buffalo plains and the country of the Crow. A last option would be to travel those same sixty miles south but then turn west and double back into the Bitterroots on another of the narrow Nez Perce mountain trails in order to return to their homelands.