Chapter 10: Cow Island and Cow Creek Canyon
The Nez Perces' successful deliverance up Canyon
Creek Canyon after the fight with Colonel Sturgis enabled them to reach
the high plains that rolled gently away to the Musselshell River,
twenty-five miles north. They probably camped the night of September 13
in the area of present-day Molt, Montana, and Big Lake Basin before
traversing the open ground and multiple tributaries to reach the area of
modern Lavina, where they turned west to about where Ryegate is today.
There they forded the Musselshell and continued toward the Big Snowy
Mountains. The trek was not easy, given their depleted condition and
loss of horses coming out of the Canyon Creek encounter, and the pursuit
by Sturgisand especially by the Crow scoutsmade it even
worse. Some Nez Perces later claimed that after Canyon Creek Joseph
began to exude more authority than heretofore; that his assertiveness
increased measurably as the tribesmen left Sturgis farther behind and
they became more confident that they would reach Canada safely; and
that, as the intratribal unity that had been born of the common threat
and danger began to fray, disputes and disharmony broke out with greater
frequency. [1]
Sturgis started on the trail with pack mules at dawn
on the fourteenth, and early into the day's march, a large party of 150
Crows caught up with the command. [2] They
were "gaudily arrayed in war costume, but more eager for Nez Perce
ponies than for Nez Perce blood," wrote the colonel. [3] Because their own horses were so fresh,
Sturgis sent them ahead, hopeful that they might catch the tribesmen and
somehow hold them until the troops arrived. The scouts raced forward,
but were unable to stop the Nez Perces. They did harass them
sufficiently to cause them to abandon about four hundred more ponies
(some that were recovered proved to be mules taken from Howard's command
at Camas Meadows), and, joined by some Bannocks, they kept up a running
skirmish with the Indians' rear guard that resulted in their killing
five Nez Perces. [4] Also, on the
fifteenth, the Crows and Bannocks tried unsuccessfully to cut off and
capture the families, but were prevented by the Nez Perce guards. "My
heart was just like fire," recalled Yellow Wolf.
I do not understand how the Crows could think to help
the soldiers. They were fighting against their best friends! Some Nez
Perces in our band had helped them whip the Sioux who came against them
only a few snows before [in 1874]. This is why Chief Looking Glass had
advised going to the Crows, to the buffalo country. He thought Crows
would help us. [5]
The moving encounter with the Crows, coming on the
heels of the Canyon Creek engagement in which those scouts had appeared,
must have confirmed to the Nez Perce hierarchy the propriety of finally
adapting their course toward the British Possessions. [6] Theodore Goldin witnessed the distant
affair and years later recollected what he saw:
The Crows had come up with a considerable body of the
enemy and were hotly engaging them near the edge of a belt of timber,
but the fighting seemed to be at fairly long range. As we watched the
fight, still spurring forward with the hope that we might soon have a
part in it, we were surprised to see the Nez Perces ride out of the
timber in almost perfect line of battle formation; there were possibly a
couple of hundred of them and for some distance they moved forward in
what appeared to be perfect alignment, then the two flanks opened out
into a perfect skirmish line with the seeming purpose of flanking the
Crows. This style of fighting was too much for our allies; they couldn't
understand it, and as practically all of them were young warriors, they
fired a few hasty shots and then broke and fell back in great confusion.
In fact by far the larger part of them kept on falling back until they
reached the reservation miles away. [7]
Following far behind, Sturgis's officers also caught
glimpses through their field glasses of the Nez Perce procession moving
far ahead of their rear guard. During the march, the troops came across
the bodies of two dead Indians on the trail, evidently having died of
wounds received the previous day.
After making about thirty-five miles, by nightfall
Sturgis's soldiers were so fatigued that men and horses were strewn over
the back trail for ten miles, with at least one-third afoot. "Captain
Bendire's detachment," reported Sturgis, ". . . did not arrive in camp
until late at night, with every officer and man on foot." [8] That evening a courier brought orders for
Howard's troops to return to the Yellowstone, and next day Major Sanford
with Bendire's company (along with Fisher and his scouts, whose
one-month enlistment time had expired) started back while Sturgis with
the Seventh Cavalry pushed ahead to the Musselshell, which they reached
on Saturday, September 15. By then, the condition of the horses and the
men had become so critical that Sturgis decided he could go no farther.
The men had been on half rations for the past few days and now were
reduced to eating pony meat. Ninety-three of the Seventh's horses had
been lost, either killed in the fighting, wounded and abandoned, or
played out and abandoned on the trail, leaving an equal number of the
men dismounted. Compounding this, a painful hoof disease appeared among
the remaining cavalry mounts, making them too sick to carry their
riders, most of whom had themselves become too weak even to walk. [9] "Under these circumstances," declared
Sturgis, "I felt compelled to suspend further pursuit, in order that
both men and animals might rest, and the troops provide themselves with
game until our supplies [en route by wagon from Fort Ellis] should
overtake us." [10] He sent a letter to
Howard notifying him that the Nez Perces were heading toward the Judith
Basin and that he was reluctantly abandoning "a hopeless pursuit before
my horses are completely destroyed." [11]
The fact that the Nez Perces faced similar afflictions with the loss of
even more of their horses, and that he believed that they, too, would
commensurately slow their progress after the troops stopped pushing
them, made Sturgis's decision all the more palatable. On the nineteenth,
the colonel's adjutant read aloud an order acknowledging his men for
their hard service"a bombastic card of thanks," recalled one Seventh
cavalryman. [12] Sturgis remained in camp
on the Musselshell and one of its tributaries until September 22, during
which period his men continued to subsist on pony, mule, and buffalo
meat, along with locally available buffalo berries, "which we broke off
in great clusters as we rode under the trees that bore them," remembered
Redington. "Those berries are certainly the best puckerers on earth.
They put on a pucker that never comes off." [13]
While Sturgis rested his troops on the Musselshell,
General Howard with his own force moved to catch up. On learning by
courier of Sturgis's encounter on Canyon Creek, Howard left his command
near Rocky Creek in charge of Major Mason and rode thirty-five miles
through the night with fifty mounted men, reaching the battlefield on
the morning of the fourteenth after Sturgis had departed in his pursuit
of the tribesmen. He notified Sturgis that he expected supplies from
Fort Ellis and that he had brought forward five hundred pounds of
freshly slaughtered beef for Sturgis's men. Howard then sent to the
Bighorn Post (Fort Custer) for supplies for his own troops, and after
the balance of his command got in (including the troops sent back by
Sturgis), he started with the Canyon Creek wounded down the Yellowstone
to Pompey's Pillar on September 17. From there, two days later, the
column started north over the prairie, reached the Musselshell on the
twentieth, and marching west joined Sturgis the next day. [14]
With the certainty that Colonel Miles would march
diagonally northwest from the Tongue River Cantonment based on the
information contained in Howard's September twelfth dispatch, Howard and
Sturgis continued purposefully to slow their pace, thereby causing the
Nez Perces to correspondingly decrease their own rate of advance,
ultimately to the benefit of Miles's movement. (Although most evidence
for this purposeful delay by Howard and Sturgis appeared in writings and
documents filed after the fact of most of the Nez Perces'
containment and surrender at Bear's Paw, there is indeed pre-Bear's Paw
documentation to support it. However, all contemporary evidence suggests
that their troops and animals were likely too severely fatigued to
continue the march even had they been disposed otherwise, and that the
intended delay was more of a happy coincidence. [15]) With Sturgis's soldiers now constituting
a part of Howard's command, and the supplies from Fort Ellis having
arrived, the weary troops crossed the Musselshell on the twenty-second
and plodded their way west, up Careless Creek toward Judith Gap, amid
rumors that their campaigning was at an end. "The latest scheme for our
return," wrote Captain Stephen P. Jocelyn, ". . . is to march from here
north to the Missouri River at the mouth of the Musselshell. There or at
Fort Peck (east down the river) we take steamer to Omaha." [16] Grazing the animals was difficult because
the buffalo herds the troops had seen there in August had eaten almost
all the grass. On the twenty-fourth, the men moved eight miles to Elk
Creek, and next day skirted the Big Snowy Mountains and entered the
Judith Basin. There the scouts came on a recently vacated camp of River
Crows with several dead inhabitants lying around; according to
Redington, it was the village of Dumb Bull, upon which the Nez Perces
had taken vengeance on September 21 by attacking, wrecking their
property, taking their dried meat, and running off their ponies. [17] Reaching Beaver Creek on September 26,
Howard next day sent Major Sanford's four First Cavalry companies
homeward, believing that Sturgis's Seventh companies would suffice for
the duration of operations. [18]
Also on the twenty-seventh, a courier brought word
that the Nez Perces had crossed the Missouri at Cow Island. Deeming it
no longer necessary to follow directly on the trail, Howard now
determined to get to the Missouri River and find a steamer to transport
him upstream. Over the succeeding four days, Howard's column followed
the road to the trading settlement of Carroll City, located on the south
side of the Missouri about twenty miles above the mouth of the
Musselshell. There he learned of Miles's movement from the Tongue, and
on October 1, the general and one hundred foot soldiers boarded the
steamer Benton and started for Cow Island, forty miles west,
resolved to there pick up the Nez Perces' trail; the rest of his command
would remain with Sturgis at Carroll pending Howard's further
communication with Miles. "The plan is to turn over the closing of the
campaign to Miles and then start for home," wrote Major Mason. [19]
Cow Island, situated in the Missouri River about 120
miles downstream from the river port of Fort Benton, served as the head
of navigation during low-water each autumn. Cow Island, in fact, in 1877
comprised two large islands (both extensively covered with cottonwoods)
and several smaller ones, located in a major bend on the south side of
the stream. The width of the river to include the islands was
approximately twenty-two hundred feet, although the navigable channel
spanned only about five hundred feet. Across from the island proper, on
the north bank of the river and west of the mouth of Cow Creek, stood
Cow Island Landing, where steamboat cargoes were unloaded to await
delivery upstream by freight wagons to Fort Benton for military and
commercial use. A road paralleled Cow Creek to ascend the pine-dotted
bluffs leading from the canyon to the open benchlands north of the
Missouri. South of the river, the bluffs rose sharply in similar
fashion, but without access to the river.
During the summer of 1877, a civil engineer unit
upstream from Cow Island was working to remove obstructions and
stabilize the river channel at Dauphin Rapids, near the mouth of the
Judith River. Company B, Seventh Infantry, from Fort Benton, served as
guard to the engineers. On August 18, a detail of men started for Cow
Island to guard commissary supplies. No permanent buildings stood at the
landing, only tents surrounded by a drainage ditch, approximately two
and one-half feet deep, with its excavated dirt thrown outward forming
an embankment that could double as an entrenchment in an emergency. The
tents and ditch stood about four hundred feet upstream from the landing
area above the mouth of Cow Creek. [20] By
the afternoon of September 23, when several hundred Nez Perces appeared
on the south bank, [21] the garrison at the
landing numbered twelve men in the charge of Sergeant William Molchert,
who had been sent down from the project just a day earlier to obtain
additional rations from the army stores located there, plus four
civilian disbursing clerks who represented the freighting interests in
the region. One of them was Michael Foley, chief clerk for the agent of
the Josephine line of steamboats, Colonel George Clendenin, Jr.,
a breveted former Union army officer. [22]
Fifty tons of government and commercial freight lay under tarpaulins at
the landing awaiting shipment by wagon to remote corners of the
territory, including Deer Lodge, Missoula, Helena, and Fort Shaw.
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