Big Hole National Battlefield Administrative History

Chapter Three:
Interpretation: The McWhorter Era

Lucullus V. McWhorter brought to light the Nez Perce side of the battle just when it was in danger of dying with the last of the Nez Perce war veterans. On five separate occasions between 1927 and 1937, McWhorter visited the Big Hole Battlefield with his Nez Perce friends and elicited their recollections of what happened on August 9, 1877. Accompanied by a surveyor, McWhorter and the Nez Perce veterans staked the battlefield in 1928 and again nine years later. The staking superseded the earlier staking done by Tom Sherrill and greatly amplified the Nez Perce perspective of the battle. McWhorter also presented a Nez Perce "voice" in two books that were based on his extensive interviews with tribal members: Yellow Wolf: His Own Story (1940) and Hear Me, My Chiefs! Nez Perce History and Legend (1952).

McWhorter was a cattle rancher and historian who had an abiding interest in Indians. According to his biographer, McWhorter's reading of frontier history "convinced him that the American Indians had been 'cold-decked' . . . and their heroic defense of their homes and families constituted a true American epic." Moving his family from Ohio to central Washington in 1903, McWhorter sought to befriend Indians and to write their story. His early endeavors focused on the Yakama tribe who lived near his ranch outside of North Yakima, Washington. In 1907 he met a Nez Perce named Hemene Mox Mox, or Yellow Wolf, who had just finished his seasonal job in the nearby hop fields and was returning to his home on the Colville Reservation. McWhorter's friendship with Yellow Wolf became his point of entry to the Nez Perce people. [36]

Over the years McWhorter struck up friendships with a number of Nez Perce veterans of the War of 1877. On the fifty-year anniversary of the war, he made his first automobile trip to the Montana battlefields accompanied by Yellow Wolf, Peo Peo, and Sam Lott (Many Wounds). They camped at the Big Hole battlefield. McWhorter's biographer has described this first visit:

Since 1908, McWhorter had been listening to veterans describing the Battle of the Big Hole; now everything was exposed with clarity. There was the open hillside, surrounded by timber, where the bands had kept the horse herd. Below, along the base of the hillside, ran the meandering stream – the North Fork of the Big Hole – which separated the horse pasture from the tipi village. Across the north side of the river and upstream from the encampment, rose the low timbered hill where the warriors surrounded Colonel John Gibbon's troops and held them under siege. A little farther up the drainage, Peo Peo showed McWhorter where he had helped capture Gibbon's mountain howitzer. He found the spot where he had buried the howitzer barrel, but it no longer was there. As McWhorter looked to the south, he could see the open country across which the retreating bands escaped with their wounded. With this on-site investigation of the Battle of the Big Hole, McWhorter could document individual acts by warriors, and recreate a clear and comprehensive historical picture of the battle from the Nez Perce point of view. [37]

The party did not have time to stake the battlefield on this brief visit. (Later in the trip, at the Bear's Paw Battlefield, the party did place stakes to mark the veterans' memories of events.) The following July, however, McWhorter returned with Peo Peo, Sam Lott, another veteran named Black Eagle, an unnamed surveyor, and Seattle sculptor Alonzo S. Lewis. Three other veterans who had hoped to go (Joe Albert, Jefferson Green, and Yellow Wolf) did not make the scheduled rendezvous in Lapwai. On this trip the party staked and surveyed the entire battlefield including the Nez Perce Encampment Area, and it placed a small memorial shaft with a bust of Chief Joseph on the head near the soldiers' monument. [38]

McWhorter returned to the Big Hole battlefield for a third time in July 1930 accompanied by Yellow Wolf, Sam Lott, Peo Peo, Lewis, and his son Virgil. As his biographer explains, McWhorter was interested in recovering more details about the battle, believing that "Indian narrations are entirely different from that of the average white person." It was McWhorter's experience that an Indian informant "seldom branched from the line that he may have in mind, but later some trend of mind might bring it to him." Consequently, each new visit to the battlefield elicited new facts from each individual, and "then comes another enstallment [sic]." [39] Moreover, McWhorter made repeated visits with the aim of acquiring an understanding of the battle from many individual points of view.

McWhorter made yet another trip in August 1935, this time with Sam Lott and Chief White Hawk. The main purpose of the trip was to restake the Bear's Paw battlefield. The original stakes from 1927 were in poor condition. The local chapter of the Lion's Club in nearby Chinook, Montana raised funds to defray the travel expenses of the two Nez Perce veterans, and a Blaine County engineer named Noye helped with the surveying. [40] While visiting the Big Hole battlefield on this trip, McWhorter was saddened to find that the tree which sheltered Peo Peo in 1877 had died since their previous visit. It was after this trip that he asked Ranger Ramsey to preserve a section of the tree for him.

Yellow Wolf, Peo Peo, and Sam Lott all died in the following months. Perhaps it was this news, which McWhorter relayed to Ramsey the following August, that prompted the ranger to urge McWhorter and his Nez Perce friends to make yet another trip to the battlefield and stake some additional ground. "There are many things we talked about," Ramsey wrote, referring to the original staking in 1928, "that I figured at the time I would never forget, but as I try to recall some of the instances that occurred in different places I find that by not writing them down they are not as clear to me now as they could be." [41]

To this letter McWhorter replied:

I can get two of the warriors, and a first class interpreter, one who is deeply interested in the work that I have on hands [sic], who will go with me and point out the places of particular historic interest, both in the lower meadow where the village was attacked, as well as where the howitzer was captured, and also confirm the mistakes pointed out to me by both Peo and Yellow Wolf, in the staking of the park field, relative to the Indians killed there. I am satisfied that Mr. Sherrill had those stakes incorrectly placed. [42]

Significantly, McWhorter saw the role of his Nez Perce informants as not merely to augment, but to correct or reinterpret information that had come from white participants in the battle. McWhorter's efforts at Big Hole supported his larger goal to retell the story of the Nez Perce War from an Indian point of view.

Ramsey was supportive. On the occasion of McWhorter's earlier visits in 1927 and 1928, Ramsey had given the party a hearty welcome. Although he did not see McWhorter and his Nez Perce companions in 1930 or 1935, he put some effort into arranging the last trip in 1937. Ramsey tried to obtain financial support from both the local Lions Club and the National Park Service before securing private donations through the Big Hole Road Association. With the help of the "wide awake women" of this organization, Ramsey sent McWhorter a check for $75 in July to pay expenses to the battlefield. [43] McWhorter returned in September 1937, accompanied by two elderly Nez Perce, Camille Williams and Phillip Williams, to restake the battlefield and to map various points of interest. [44]

By 1937, McWhorter had been collecting material on the Nez Perce for thirty years. Although he had no official capacity, he had become a major asset to the national monument. Forest Supervisor W. B. Willey, anticipating Park Service administration of the site, informed Yellowstone Superintendent Edmund B. Rogers of McWhorter's efforts in December 1936:

Mr. McWhorter is in the last stages of preparation on a book delineating the details of the Nez Perce War. He has made his home among or near the Nez Perce Indians for many years and is in possession of facts that probably can never be gathered again. . . . Ranger Ramsey tells me that Mr. McWhorter speaks the Nez Perce language fluently besides having acquired a great deal of background and confidence while preparing his manuscript among the Indians. It is my opinion that you will be taking advantage of a rare opportunity if you include in your program the surveying and marking of the Big Hole Battlefield with the help of this historical researcher. [45]

McWhorter published Yellow Wolf: His Own Story in 1940. He died in 1944. Another book, Hear Me, My Chiefs! Nez Perce History and Legend was published posthumously in 1952.

McWhorter's contribution was enormous. Without his organizing efforts it is doubtful whether any Nez Perce war veterans would have returned to the battlefield, much less imparted their knowledge to non-tribal members in a way that could be preserved for posterity. McWhorter recovered the voice of the Nez Perce in the 1920s and 1930s just as the last of the warriors were dying. As a result, recollections of Yellow Wolf, Peo Peo, and other Nez Perce came to inform interpretive efforts at the battlefield just as much as recollections of Tom Sherrill and written accounts by Colonel Gibbon, Amos Buck, Will Cave, and other white battle veterans.

The Nez Perce "voice," literally engraved in many of the signs around the battlefield, drew the attention of the battlefield visitor to the village Encampment Area where so many Nez Perce women and children had lost their lives in the initial attack. This was, of course, a section of the battlefield that greatly impressed "tourists" soon after the battle – it featured prominently in Granville Stuart's sketch of May 1878, and in Andrew Garcia's haunting memories of his visit to the battlefield later that same year. Yet for more than fifty years after the Nez Perce surrender, the Big Hole battlefield was commemorated primarily through the placement of a war memorial to the U.S. soldiers. The soldiers' monument as well as the many signs and splintered trees throughout the Siege Area put the interpretive focus squarely on the plight of the white soldiers and volunteers. Although the soldiers' monument would continue to be a focal point for picnics, reunions, and commemorative events (often involving relatives of the Bitterroot volunteers), these activities gradually became more muted. As early as 1935, one Forest Service official urged that "purely recreation activities, particularly those of a more frivolous nature such as organized group picnics and camping," should be discouraged. Rather, it was "fitting and essential that an air of quiet dignity be preserved about it." [46]

It is not too much to say that McWhorter and the Nez Perce veterans preserved what was most vital to the national monument not just for the Nez Perce people but for the nation. Even while the Nez Perce War was in progress the renegade bands had aroused the sympathy of many Americans, and their long fighting retreat through Idaho and Montana had long since entered the annals of American history as one of the epic tragedies of Indian defeat. As one travel magazine writer described the visitor experience at the Big Hole battlefield some years later, "There slumbers a valley in southwestern Montana so impregnated with silence that the spirit of the visitor seems to hear sorrow...as if the sound waves of a once great misery enacted here moved on but left sad ghosts behind." [47]