Chapter 3: Looking Glass's Camp and Cottonwood
On July 1, boats having arrived from upstream, the
troops, horses, pack animals, ammunition, and mountain howitzers of
Howard's command negotiated the churning and boiling Salmon to the other
side. By then, the Nez Perces had withdrawn into the highland recesses,
leaving the army to follow their trail and try to divine their
intentions. The region chosen by Howard occupied the lofty terrain lying
between the deep gorges of the Salmon and Snake rivers, south of the
point where the Salmon angles its flow westward toward the Snake. It is
partly dissected plateau, partly steep and rugged canyon breaks, of
varying grass and pine forest growth and sharply changing altitude, and
partly level grass prairie, in all making river navigation slow and
difficult. After fording the river, the soldiers marched for the Snake.
In their course of July 2, Captain Trimble and his First cavalrymen and
McConville's volunteers joined Howard, having forded at Horseshoe Bend.
All pushed toward the summit of Brown's Mountain, where heavy sleet and
rain pummeled their bivouac. Several pack animals were lost in
surmounting the steep and slippery grades, and the artillerymen, unused
to campaigning, complained bitterly as they tried to keep up. The Indian
trail, well marked by the passage of their fifteen hundred ponies, was
easily followed, but the rugged terrain kept progress to an average of
ten or twelve miles per day. Sergeant McCarthy observed that "the
command was strung out all the way from base to summit of divide."
Howard believed that the Nez Perces had possibly
divided into two groups, with one headed south, and he anticipated that
the troops from Boise under Major John Wesley Green might encounter
them. (Howard was unduly optimistic about these troops; they had not yet
departed Boise.) The other group moved in his own front; his troops had
discovered caches of their flour, clothing, and supplieseven
abandoned poniesleading the general to believe that the Nez Perces
planned to return to the Wallowa and Imnaha valleys. On the afternoon of
July 4, however, while in the process of camping opposite Rocky Canyon,
Howard received word that Nez Perce warriors had struck the soldiers
posted at Cottonwood on Camas Prairie. Thinking that these tribesmen
were but a raiding party from the main group quartered somewhere near
the Snake, Howard dispatched McConville's and Hunter's volunteers to
ford the river and go in support to Cottonwood.
In fact, the entire body of Nez Perces had gone back
across the Salmon, having forded at the then-defunct Craig's Ferry,
opposite Billy Creek and some twenty-five miles downstream from White
Bird Creek, evidently when they learned that the soldiers had gained the
south bank. Realizing that, Howard tried to move back across the raging
Salmon on the morning of the sixth, but failed, and he sent word to
Whipple that his raft had been swept away by the current. After shooting
twenty ponies that the Nez Perces had left behind, Howard's command
started on a "Horrible retrograde march" for his earlier fording point
miles away and nearly opposite the mouth of White Bird Creek. [1] Sergeant McCarthy recalled the frustration of
the moment:
We were in a bad fix, with no means of crossing the
river. We could not cross like the Indians. Our force, except our
company, were foot troops. A part of the next day was spent in trying to
swim the Cavalry [and their horses] but it was a failure. A raft was
tried but it was a failure also. How the whole tribe of Indians with
horses, women, papooses, etc., got across was a puzzle. It is yet a
puzzle. We didn't seem to have engineering skill enough to devise ways
and means to cross and the command marched back two days' march to White
Bird Crossing. [2]
Howard's orders to Captain Whipple to arrest Looking
Glass proved of dire consequence for the army, as well as for the chief
and his people. Until June 29, when he issued instructions for
neutralizing those people, however, Howard remained unconvinced that
Looking Glass would seriously factor into the conflict, and had written
the treaty chief, James Lawyer: "I am glad to hear that Looking Glass
remains at home. If the others who gave me promises had kept their word
there would have been peace and prosperityand not war." [3] Howard's change of mind came with reports
from Mount Idaho that four volunteers scouting toward the Middle
Clearwater had found evidence that Looking Glass's Nez Perces had sacked
two homesteads, one between the forks of the Clearwater owned by Idaho
County commissioner George Dempster, which they burned, and the other
owned by James T. Silverwood. They had also driven off livestock. When
the four volunteers tried to approach the Nez Perce camp on Clear Creek,
about six miles above Kamiah, the tribesmen motioned them away.
Other reports, some brought to Howard by the Nez
Perce scouts, suggested that at least twenty men from Looking Glass's
village had already joined the nontreaty bands (however, these people
may simply have been visitors to the lakeside convocation who stayed on
after Looking Glass had departed) and that the chief and the rest of his
people would soon follow. Furthermore, rumors circulated from Mount
Idaho that Looking Glass's warriors would attack the settlements within
days, and Inspector Watkins characterized the chief as "running a
recruiting station for Joseph." Howard's orders to arrest the chief were
designed to stop any prospective union and to dissuade further support
for White Bird and Joseph. [4]
The directions were explicit and were delivered
verbally, as recalled by General Howard:
Captain Whipple, go with your cavalry and Gatling
guns, arrest the Indian chief Looking Glass, and all other Indians who
may be encamped with or near him, between the forks of the Clearwater,
and imprison them at Mount Idaho, turning them over for safe keeping to
the volunteer organization at that place. [5]
At 9:00 p.m., Whipple departed the Salmon with
Companies E and L, First Cavalry, his command totaling four officers and
sixty-two men. Arriving at Mount Idaho in the early morning of June 30,
the captain left two Gatling gunscrank-operated ten-barreled
rapid-fire machine guns of .45 calibre, each drawn by three
horsesalong with a detail of probably four men to operate them.
[6] After resting his troops for several
hours at Mount Idaho, he pressed forward late in the afternoon toward
his objective twenty-five miles away, accompanied by twenty volunteers
under Captain Darius B. Randall, so that his effective strength totaled
eighty-seven. [7]
The officers of the command represented diversity in
their experience. Captain Whipple, who commanded Company L, was the
senior, a Vermont native who had led a unit of California volunteers
during the Civil War. As a lieutenant colonel, he had seen extensive
duty on the California frontier, and he held a brevet for "faithful and
meritorious service." Appointed in the Regular Army in 1867, Whipple
continued on the frontier in Arizona Territory and joined the First
Cavalry in 1870. His first lieutenant was Edwin H. Shelton, from
Connecticut, and an 1870 West Point graduate, while his second
lieutenant was Sevier M. Rains, an 1876 academy graduate. Captain
William H. Winters commanded Company E. He had been appointed from the
enlisted ranks, having served with the First Cavalry during the Civil
War as a private, corporal, sergeant, and first sergeant before
receiving a commission in 1865. Winters had been a captain since June
25, 1876. His first lieutenant was Albert G. Forse, who had figured in
the Wallowa incident the previous September. An 1865 West Point graduate
appointed to the First Cavalry in June of that year, Forse had spent ten
years in the Northwest with the unit. He would be killed in 1898 at
Santiago, Cuba, during the Spanish-American War. Second lieutenant of
Company E was William H. Miller, an 1872 graduate of the military
academy, who had campaigned against the Modocs in 1873, and would one
day (1890) be breveted for that service. [8]
Thus officered, the men rode through the night,
planning to strike the village at dawn while the people slept, in the
customary army tactic of the time used against Indians, and especially
against small camps. [9] But the approach was
hard, and across rugged, hilly terrain, and through some calculating
error, the camp lay ten miles farther than supposed. The troops failed
to arrive until 7:00 a.m. [10]well after
daybreak when the occupants were awake and engaged in their daily
routine. The targeted village of eleven lodges stood within the
reservation boundary along the right bank of Clear Creek, a short
distance from its mouth on the Middle Clearwater and two miles southeast
of the present community of Kooskia, which is at the confluence of the
middle and south forks of the Clearwater. [11] The site was called Kamnaka, and there the
tribesmen had cultivated their land for farming; many were raising dairy
cattle. [12] Some of the people, including
Looking Glass, had recently returned from the Tepahlewam assembly,
professing their disinclination to join in the escalating warfare
involving the nontreaty Nez Perces. Looking Glass had turned away
nontreaty Nez Perces who had tried to camp near his village.
This Nez Perce encampment on the Yellowstone River near the mouth of
Shields River, Montana Territory, 1871, photographed by William Henry
Jackson, was similar in appearance to that attacked by Whipple's troops
on July 1, 1877. As the conflict dragged on, fewer lodges like these
were available for the Nee-Me-Poo, and by the time of the Bear's Paw
encounter many of the people were using alternative forms of
shelter. National Anthropological Archives,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
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