Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce (26 page)

The campers asked to see Chief Joseph. This surprised and confused the scouts. They did not understand why the white people should know about Joseph or want to see him. But the campers had been reading the newspaper accounts, and in their minds the Nez Perce were all under the command of Joseph. It only made sense to them to ask to see the man they believed to be in ultimate control of the tribe.

The scouts discussed this development among themselves but ultimately decided to bring the people back to the chiefs. The leaders could decide whether these people should live or die. However, before leaving, the warriors decided to help themselves to the food the campers were preparing.

One of the campers, wishing to secure the good graces of the warriors, started to hand the Indians sugar and flour and bacon. But another became angry and tried to stop him. This angered the warriors and almost resulted in the instant murder of the entire party. But in the end, the warriors decided to abide by their initial decision to bring the white people to the chiefs and led them forward toward the main encampment.

During the journey, more trouble erupted. The campers and scouts encountered another group of young Nez Perce warriors, maybe sixty in number, who had been reconnoitering on their own. This group was more hostile and aggressive. They tipped over the white campers' wagons, rifled their goods, and began breaking up the wagon wheels to make whip handles. One grabbed some mosquito netting the campers carried and tied it to his horse's tail. Another made a turban out of a piece of cloth that the women had been carrying.

Soon the warriors became belligerent toward the white men and began moving toward the women. At this, one of the male campers tried to stop them. He was the husband of one of the women and the brother-in-law of the other, who was a child of only thirteen. The belligerent warriors quickly turned on him. One of them raised his gun and shot him, then began beating his head with a rock. His wife ran to her wounded husband and threw herself upon him to protect him from the warriors, and it was only with great difficulty that the other warriors who did not want more trouble were able to control their aggressive brothers. During the confusion, all but three of the campers were able to escape.

Eventually, the remaining three people were gotten to camp. They had asked to see Joseph, and to the warriors who wanted no trouble, this seemed like a good idea. Joseph and Poker Joe were the most positively disposed to whites and the least likely to allow their killing. Other chiefs, like White Bird and Toohoolhoolzote, might not be as generous and lenient.

The campers were ushered to the lodge sites of Poker Joe and Joseph, who told them to stay close. Poker Joe, with his broken English, tried to explain that the warriors were not all of a common mind and that the safety of the campers could not be assured if they fell into the hands of the wrong bands.

Meanwhile, the more belligerent young warriors were running about the camp shouting and making war cries. They were ready to take their anger out on these white people. It made no difference to them that these were not combatants. They could not be carried along, and they could not be allowed to escape and inform the soldiers of the Nez Perce whereabouts. This left only one option in the young warriors' minds, and it was an option they were more than willing to exercise.

Joseph was silent and somber at the violent turn events had been taking, but now he became angry. Some of the young fighters were no more than sixteen years old and had no proper sense of what it meant to be a Nez Perce warrior. They confused killing with protecting and revenge with honor. Events had made them like dogs that had tasted blood.

He took the older woman and her brother into his camp. It was nothing more than a piece of canvas draped over some bushes, but he did his best to make the man and woman comfortable, smiling often, offering them food, and even giving the woman a Nez Perce infant to hold, hoping that this gesture would show them his good heart and serve to calm their fears. For sleeping, he brought the people close to the fire and provided them with blankets. They slept with his family, rolled in their blankets with their feet close to the warmth of the fire, in the traditional Nez Perce way.

They awoke the following morning to a freezing drizzle. Since the captives had few warm clothes, Joseph insisted that the woman be provided with a blanket to cover her shoulders. His wife made some willow tea, camas porridge, and fry bread, but the woman would not eat, and the man would eat but little. Ice was almost an inch thick on the water in the nearby ponds.

The belligerent young warriors were again milling around in a threatening manner. Poker Joe tried to keep them at bay by telling them that he knew all the whites in the territory and that the Nez Perce would be chased forever if they harmed white women. Joseph too did his best to protect the campers, and the campers themselves tried to play upon the warriors' fear of magical powers by making the sign of the cross whenever someone approached them in a threatening manner.

Eventually the young warriors turned their attention elsewhere. The camp was getting ready to travel, and their responsibilities as scouts took precedence over any anger or desire for personal revenge. They also had been informed of another group of whites in the vicinity, and many of them had ridden off to find and confront this new potential threat. The prisoners were left to travel with families who wished them no harm.

When the moment was right, these sympathetic families gave the captives new moccasins, bedding, jackets, bread, and matches and helped them slip out of camp. Poker Joe led them on two old horses he provided for the women. He did not wish to provide a third horse for the man because he did not want the group to be able to travel too quickly once they were released. He knew that they would eventually meet up with soldiers and provide information about the Nez Perce's location and direction of travel. Best to leave them to their own devices in the wilderness, knowing that they had been well supplied and well cared for. By the time they reached white soldiers or white settlements, the tribe would have moved ever farther into the confusing landscape of the Yellowstone, and any information the captives gave the soldiers would be of little value.

But before setting them free, Poker Joe made an impassioned plea for them to tell the whites that the Nez Perce wanted no more fighting, that they wanted only peace. The captives listened impatiently while he struggled to make himself understood with his limited English; then they rode off in the direction he pointed them, hoping they would reach Bozeman before being caught by some of the more hostile Nez Perce who were not so disposed to allow them to escape.

The Nez Perce then turned to the task of moving farther into the high mountain country. They still had the old miner, Shively, with them, as well as a white soldier they had recently captured. They were moving now on small trails, not well known to the Nez Perce, and covered with fallen trees and large boulders. Poker Joe made the miner and soldier clear a trail with axes, but even so, many injured horses had to be left behind.

In some places travel was easy, taking them across wide meadows with curving streams and grass good for grazing. These places, with their abundance of elk and fish, reminded the Nez Perce of their home country in the Wallowa and Clearwater. They stopped in these clearings as long as possible to give their people and stock a chance to build up strength and to savor the bittersweet feeling of being in land similar to their own.

August was drawing to a close, and high summer was now long past. Each day they watched as more of the aspen leaves turned yellow, and each morning they awoke to thin ice on creeks and frost on their buffalo robes. Snow was descending lower on the high mountain peaks, often shrouding them in a distant, wintry mist. The cold of winter was beginning to be felt on the winds.

Every morning the scouts went out at first sun, traveling far in all directions. Unlike the camp chiefs, they had no compunction about killing white people they encountered. If they had their way, there would be no white eyes left to see, no white tongues left to talk.

Their reports at night were a conflicting welter of information and boasting. It had been assumed that General Howard would have to slow his pursuit while he sent for more horses and pack mules, but none had counted on the confusing collection of white people they would encounter in this odd, rugged country. They had seen settler volunteer soldiers riding in groups, and regular soldiers with new clothes and new guns. There were packers, miners, and campers. They had seen Indians too—mostly Bannock, but maybe even Crow. All that was known for certain was that the soldiers' Indian scouts were killing the elderly and wounded whom the people were forced to leave behind when the rigors of the trail became too difficult to endure.

In the face of such confusion, the people redoubled their efforts to get to Crow country. They were trusting in Looking Glass's promise that the Crow would welcome them, that they would be able to join together with their Crow brothers and sisters into one great village of a thousand lodges, with good horses and many guns. It was their fervent hope that, once united, the tribes would live together in peace, hunting the buffalo, trading with friendly white settlers, returning to a normal life of sweats and feasts and dances and song carried on under skies not darkened by the constant cloud of war.

The long journey had made them weary in body and spirit. They longed to see their children playing, their elders smoking, their horses grazing and growing strong rather than falling wounded from being driven too hard. They wanted to teach the young people the ways of life, not just the ways of war; to send them on their
wayakin
quests, to show them the skills of the camps, and to teach them the stories of Coyote and the ancestors. They longed once again to bury their dead in the proper way, with proper songs and rituals, not quickly in unmarked graves, leaving their spirits without rest and their bodies to be picked at by animals and insulted by enemy bands in unfamiliar land.

But shadows lay at the edges of these bright hopes. The possible presence of Crow warriors among the soldier scouts had been very upsetting. There was concern that maybe the Crow, like the Flathead and the Bannock and the Shoshone, had cast their lot with the soldiers. So Looking Glass rode ahead to meet with his Crow friends to learn their hearts. He had no concerns about their loyalty because the Crow had sworn their friendship to him after he and his men had fought beside them in their battle against the Sioux. He knew that a few scouts with the soldiers meant nothing. Those scouts were likely river Crow, a tribe more friendly to the whites than the mountain Crow, who were Looking Glass's friends.

Besides, as all Nez Perce knew all too well, each warrior was free to act in accord with his own heart. If tribes were able to control all their warriors, the killings on the Salmon and Slate Creek would never have happened, and the Nez Perce would not now be wandering through unfamiliar mountain passes in an effort to evade the U.S. Army. The Crow scouts, if indeed there were any, were probably young men who had chosen on their own to work with the soldiers and the U.S. government. But Looking Glass wanted the people to feel at ease, so he undertook this journey to calm their fears.

With two warriors he rode off to meet the Crow and tell them of the Nez Perce's arrival. They could give him information on the best routes and perhaps even send their own warriors to help if there was any danger of a white soldier attack. The rest of the tribe would move slowly until he returned so as not to arrive too quickly in the open country on the eastern side of the mountains. Once they were in open land, all advantage went to the soldiers because they could move quickly, and the Nez Perce would have no place to hide the presence of hundreds of Indians and thousands of horses.

In camp, Poker Joe continued to lead with a strong hand. Each morning he would ride in a circle around the lodges, shouting orders for the day. With a voice as loud as a buffalo bull's, he could be heard all across the camp, even though he was still nursing a cruel stomach wound received at the battle of the Big Hole. Under his guidance, the people had traveled a difficult route through the Yellowstone, passing through dense forests and down hills so steep that the horses literally had to slide on their haunches. The women and young boys had spent their days whipping the mules and horses in an attempt to urge them forward, hitting their noses with sticks when they became wedged between trees, and pushing them over logs and boulders until the flesh on their bellies and flanks was scraped bloody and raw.

Now they were in high country, where the nights were cold and the winds were cutting. The surviving animals, like the surviving people, were tired and weak, despite the stops in meadows and grasslands. A few days' rest could not make up for the months of harsh travel they had all endured. They moved with a weariness that was worn into their hearts and bones.

The people now split up and traveled in different groups, hoping to confuse the soldiers and find trails too difficult or obscure for soldiers to follow. At night they slept on frost-covered ground, and during the day they were often pelted by rain and slushy snow. The children now were always cold, always crying. It seemed that every morning another elder awoke too weak to travel and was helped to the woods or the nearby rocks and given blankets for comfort, then left behind. The group moved on to the haunting sounds of their loved ones' death songs receding in the distance.

All around now there were only mountains—high, jagged, snow-covered peaks stretching into the far distance. The wind blew constantly across the great spaces, and from the promontories a person could see many days' journey in all directions. Ascents were steep, descents precipitous. Sometimes they had the protection of thick forests, other times they were forced to move across naked, exposed ridges.

The scouts kept returning with sightings of soldiers moving on distant hillsides and through distant valleys. It was hard to know who they were or where they came from. The soldiers had many guns, including cannons. Thoughts of the Big Hole were in everyone's mind.