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Wars In The Far Northwest

Most Indian fighting was against small bands, but in many cases it took a considerable proportion of the available Regular Army to run them down. Of course, there was not much Regular Army: in 1869 the infantry had been cut to twenty-five regiments, the cavalry remaining at ten regiments and the artillery at five, an aggregate of 37,313. An act of Congress of June 16, 1874, provided that the number of enlisted men in the Army should not exceed 25,000. There was no further reduction in the number of regiments, and because of the importance of cavalry in Indian fighting, most of the cut in numbers of enlisted men was taken in the infantry. From this time to the end of the Indian wars, there was no material change in the organization of the Army.

The Modoc War

More than a thousand soldiers were needed to fight fifty Modoc in 1872-73. These Indians, one of the Pacific Coast's numerous small tribes, resided in Oregon near the California border. In the 1850's they had raided a few wagon trains and staged a massacre or two; once they were the victims of a countermassacre by miners led by Ben Wright. In the course of time the Modoc adopted white man's clothes and some white man's vices. Their only linguistic relatives were the Klamath, who lived near them in the Klamath Lake region. The Indian Bureau, in its wisdom, decided that Modoc and Klamath should share a reservation, quite forgetting that family quarrels may be the bitterest, but when the Modoc had had enough of being dominated by their kinfolk they returned to their old homes along Lost River, just north of the California boundary. At the time, this region was being rapidly settled by whites. The Modoc's standing among these settlers is indicated by the names they gave their leaders - Captain Jack, CurleyHeaded Doctor, Black Jim, Bogus Charley, Shacknasty Jim, Scarfaced Charley, Hooker Jim.

On November 28, 1872, Brevet Major James Jackson, captain of Company B, 1st Cavalry, came with thirty-eight men to move Captain Jack's band back to the Klamath Reservation. Shooting started; one soldier and two or three Indians were killed. The Modoc fled, killing eighteen settlers on their way, but sparing women and children. The Indians took refuge in the Lava Beds south of Tule Lake in northern California. This "Land of Burnt-out Fires" was a dreary area of volcanic rock broken by a labyrinth of sharp fissures, craters, caves and natural tunnels - nature's version of a World War I trench system.

It was not until January 16, 1873, that Brevet Major General Frank Wheaton, lieutenant colonel of the 21st Infantry, assembled sufficient force, about 400, to attack this stronghold. He had awaited the arrival of a section of mountain howitzers, which, manned by cavalrymen in the fight, proved more dangerous to the attackers than to the Modoc. In two days of fighting, few soldiers ever saw an Indian, and it is doubtful whether any were hit. However, the troops lost sixteen killed and nine officers and forty-four enlisted men wounded - adequate reason for not pushing home a charge in the open.

No worse time could have been chosen for appointing a peace commission to negotiate with the Modoc, but that was the next step. At a meeting on April 11 the Indians turned a peace council into a massacre. Captain Jack killed Brigadier General E. R. S. Canby and Boston Charley killed the Reverend Dr. Eleazer Thomas. A. B. Meacham, a former Indian agent, was shot four times but rescued by a Modoc woman, Winema, called Toby Riddle. The only peace commissioner to escape unhurt was Leroy S. Dyar, an Indian agent armed with a derringer. Canby, a brevet major general and brigadier general in lineal rank, commanding the department, was the highest ranking officer ever killed by Indians.

Troops moved in but were called off by the ranking officer Brevet Major General Alvan C. Gillem, colonel of the 1st Cavalry, until he could bring his full force into action. A valued reinforcement came in the form of Donald McKay's Warm Springs Indian Scouts. Gillem's enlarged force included five companies of the 1st Cavalry, two of the 12th Infantry and six of the 4th Artillery. The artillerymen brought a section of twelve-pound coehorn mortars and took over the howitzers, the rest fighting as infantry.

Gillem's fight of April 15 to 17 was on the same plan as that of Wheaton in January - an attack from opposite sides to squeeze the Modoc out of the Lava Beds. This time the coehorn mortars helped, and the two columns joined at Tule Lake, cutting the Modoc off from their water supply. Nevertheless, the Indians escaped.

Their whereabouts were unknown until April 26, when they successfully ambushed Brevet Major Evan Thomas, captain of the 4th Artillery, with two companies of his regiment and one of the 12th Infantry. Major Thomas, three lieutenants and eighteen enlisted men were killed; one lieutenant, one surgeon and seventeen enlisted men were wounded. The survivors held off the Indians until next day, when they were rescued.

After this defeat a third commander took over - Brevet Major General Jefferson C. Davis, colonel of the 23rd Infantry (not related to the Confederate President, although the similarity of name has caused much confusion). General Davis reorganized the command, recalled Wheaton to duty in his regiment and inspired a new morale while he sent strong detachments in search of the elusive Modoc.

The last fight was commanded by Captain Henry C. Hasbrouck, whose Company B, 4th Artillery, was equipped as cavalry. Accompanying him was Captain Jackson (who had commanded in the first fight against the Modoc) with two companies of the 1st Cavalry and McKay's Indian scouts. At dawn on May 10, 1873, the Modoc band attacked Hasbrouck's camp at Sorass Lake, or Dry Lake, in an area of volcanic clinkers. The horses were stampeded, and while a few cavalrymen rounded them up, the rest of the force charged on foot, routing the Modoc from surrounding bluffs. With McKay's scouts threatening to cut them off in the rear, the Modoc fled precipitously and were pursued for four miles. The survivors broke up into small parties which surrendered or were captured. Captain Jack, Schonchin John, Boston Charley and Black Jim were hanged on October 3, 1873, for the murders of General Canby and Dr. Thomas.

The Nez Perces and Chief Joseph

The Nez Perces lived among the tributaries of the Salmon and lower Snake rivers. When Lewis and Clark met them in 1805 they had had horses for a century or so; in fact, they were the developers of the Appaloosa horse. The Reverend Henry H. Spalding opened a mission among the Nez Perces in 1836 and christened one of his first converts Joseph. This Joseph was the father of the Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce War of 1877.

A treaty of 1855 confirmed to the Nez Perces the lands on which they actually lived. A new treaty, negotiated in 1863, reduced the reservation by three-fourths. Chiefs of the bands residing within the new boundaries signed it; chiefs of bands residing outside did not. The government held that the lands had been sold by a "majority" of the tribe, but meanwhile the Senate delayed ratification of the treaty until 1867, leaving the cession in doubt.

The band headed by Old Joseph lived outside the new boundaries in the Wallowa Valley, south of the Grande Ronde. His protests were heeded in 1873 and part of the valley was set aside as a hunting reserve for them. Two years later this concession was canceled when it was pointed out that they did not live there the year round. Like many tribes they were migratory, hunting during the hunting season, moving to the camas meadows for the harvest of that root crop, and so on in a fixed, annual routine.

The younger Joseph appealed the cancellation to the department commander, Brevet Major General Oliver Otis Howard. Howard had won the Medal of Honor and lost his right arm at Fair Oaks during the Civil War; he had been voted the thanks of Congress for valor at Gettysburg and had been brigadier general of the line since 1864. He was religious, conscientious and humanitarian. But in this case he had no authority to negotiate; his orders were to move Joseph's band to the reservation. Joseph agreed to the inevitable, but his hand was forced by young men, most of them of other nontreaty bands, who began raiding and killing white settlers.

Brevet Colonel David Perry, captain of the 1st Cavalry, was ordered to pursue and punish them. With two companies of his regiment he marched out of Fort Lapwai on the Clearwater (about ten miles above present Lewiston, Idaho). At dawn on June 17, 1877, as he approached a Nez Perce village in White Bird Canyon, his force was attacked on both flanks. The troops had been marching for thirty-six hours, and the thin, tired line was thrown into confusion; thirty-four soldiers were killed and four wounded. Perry escaped with the survivors.

Within a week General Howard moved out from Fort Lapwai with a force of 300, including four companies of the 4th Artillery and a company of the 21st Infantry. He detached Captain Stephen Girard Whipple with two companies of the 1st Cavalry to round up Looking Glass's village on the Clearwater. It is not at all established that Looking Glass's Nez Perce band had intended to join the hostiles, but they fled when Whipple appeared, and eventually joined Joseph's band. Meanwhile, Joseph's band had eluded Howard by twice crossing the Salmon River, and on July 3 annihilated a scouting party of ten under Second Lieutenant Sevier McClellan Rains of the 1st Cavalry at Craig's Mountain, before the main body of troops could reach them.

Up to this point Nez Perce scouting had forecast every army move, but on July 11 Howard surprised the Indian camp on the Clearwater and opened fire on it with a four-inch howitzer and two Gatling guns. In this fight Howard had five companies of the 1st Cavalry, seven of the 21st Infantry and four of the 4th Artillery, mostly serving as infantry, a total of 400 regulars, and 180 citizen volunteers. Even with the advantage of surprise, Howard was unable to overrun the Indian camp and had to entrench with rifle pits in a defensive position. An attack the following day found the Indians abandoning their camp. In two days of fighting Howard lost thirteen killed and twenty-seven wounded. He reported twenty-three Indians killed and fortysix wounded; some Indian accounts admit only four killed and six wounded.

At this point the Nez Perces had reached their greatest strength in the war. There were five bands, totaling 600 to 700 persons, of whom fewer than 200 were warriors. Chief Joseph of the Wallowa band was the dominant figure, but Indian accounts deny that he exercised any military command. He was not at all the master of strategy imagined by Generals Howard and Miles. Even in his own band Joseph's brother Ollokut was war leader, and each of the four other bands was led by its own chiefs and experienced leaders of war parties. Their tactics were concerted and effective only because they were at all times fighting to protect their families.

After the fight on the Clearwater, General Howard pursued the Indians to the Kamiah crossing, where warriors delayed his troops while the main body of the Nez Perces began a slow retreat along the precipitous Lolo Trail over the Bitterroot Mountains. This move was hailed as a masterpiece of strategy; actually the Indians believed that they had no quarrel with troops or citizens east of the mountains, where they came into the department commanded by General Terry.

At Fort Missoula Captain Charles C. Rawn with only 30 men of Company L, 7th Infantry, raised 300 volunteers and attempted to stop the Nez Perces by constructing a barricade, later appropriately dubbed Fort Fizzle. In a parley with Captain Rawn the Indians promised to march peaceably through Bitterroot Valley. As they had built up good reputations during hunting expeditions of previous years, the volunteers took them at their word and dispersed. The Indians bypassed Fort Fizzle and went on to Stevensville, where they bought flour, sugar, coffee and tobacco from local merchants. In many ways this was the most amazing of Indian wars.

They stopped to rest at an old campsite just east of the Continental Divide on the Big Hole River, and with the usual lack of camp guards were surprised on August 9, 1877, by General Gibbon with 200 men, including six companies of the 7th Infantry, two of the 1st Cavalry and volunteers. Part of the camp was captured, and the troops attempted to burn it, but the Nez Perces rallied and hemmed the soldiers in, shooting from concealed positions. The Indians captured a howitzer and put it out of action. Lieutenant Bradley, first to find the dead on the Custer field, was among twenty-nine killed; General Gibbon was one of forty wounded. Howard's pursuing cavalry came to the rescue, and the Nez Perces moved on, having suffered their heaviest battle loss here with sixty to ninety killed, many of them women and children.

Howard was now close on the heels of the Nez Perces, but in a night raid they stampeded his pack mules, and while he reassembled his supply train, they moved leisurely through Yellowstone Park, capturing a party of tourists, who were released unharmed. Small Nez Perce raiding parties, however, killed two tourists in the park.

Brevet Major General Samuel D. Sturgis, colonel of the 7th Cavalry, took the field with six companies of his regiment, which had been reorganized during the winter after the Little Big Horn defeat. Making several false starts. Sturgis found the Nez Perce trail in the gorge of Canyon Creek, Montana Territory. His soldiers were exhausted after long marching and when dismounted made slow progress against the Indians. Even a mounted charge led by Colonel Benteen failed to cut off the Indians' retreat. After dark on September 13 the Nez Perces escaped. They moved north and ten days later crossed the Missouri east of Fort Benton at Cow Island, low-water mark for steamers. They hoped eventually to reach Canada and join Sitting Bull's Sioux.

It was now up to General Miles to resume the pursuit. From Fort Keogh (Miles City) he quickly marched 150 miles to the Missouri with Cheyenne scouts and 600 men - three companies of the 2nd Cavalry, three of the 7th and six of the 5th Infantry mounted on captured Indian ponies and armed with a Gatling gun and a twelve-pound Napoleon. When Miles learned that the Nez Perces had crossed the river he ferried his troops over on the steamer Benton, only two days behind them.

Marching north, he struck the Nez Perce camp in the Bear Paw Mountains on September 29. As usual the Indians were surprised, and as usual they rallied and broke the cavalry charge, but troopers of the 2nd Cavalry stampeded the horse herd, leaving the Indians afoot. Miles then settled down to a siege, and General Howard, who had never faltered in his long pursuit, arrived with an advance party on October 4. On October 5 Joseph surrendered his rifle with an eloquent speech concluding, "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more."

The Bannock War of 1878

After their defeat at Bear River by General Connor in 1863, the Bannock had lived mainly in the vicinity of the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho, confirmed to them by treaty in 1869. They supplemented the scant government rations by hunting buffalo on the Plains and digging camas roots in annual visits to Big Camas Prairie, north of Snake River. During the Nez Perce War they were confined to their reservation for their own protection, but they soon became hungry and restless. While they had understood Camas Prairie to be a part of the reservation guaranteed to them, a clerk had heard it as "Kansas Prairie," which no one could identify, so it was left out of the final draft of the treaty. In the spring of 1878 when the Bannock made their usual trip to Camas Prairie, they found hogs and cattle feeding there and shot two of the herders.

Brevet Colonel Reuben Frank Bernard, captain of Company G, 1st Cavalry, was ordered to the scene from Boise Barracks, eighty miles away. He arrived two days later, found the wounded herders and followed the Bannock across lava beds and through scenes of their raids at King Hill Station and Glenns Ferry. The Bannock were soon joined by their kinsmen, disaffected Paiute bands led by Oytes and Egan, who dragged with them the less disaffected Paiute band of Chief Winnemucca. Bernard, as he continued the pursuit, was fortunate in being able to employ an Indian "princess" as scout and guide. Sarah Winnemucca, educated daughter of the chief, agreed to enter the hostile camp, and was successful in detaching her father's band from the Indian alliance.

Colonel Bernard had a remarkable military record. Having risen from the ranks in the 1st Cavalry, he already had taken part in 98 of the "103 fights and scrimmages" he was to boast of in the Civil War and Indian wars - a record not challenged by any of his contem poraries. He kept close on the trail of the Indians while General Howard pushed reinforcements after him.

He had four companies of the 1st Cavalry with him when he overtook the Indians on June 23 at Silver Creek, which runs into a dry sink west of Silvies River in the south central Oregon desert. Bernard's four troops charged with revolver and carbine in successive waves, capturing and destroying the camp and driving the Indians into surrounding hills. The Indians lost ten known dead with the estimated killed at fifty; the troops lost four killed and three wounded. The Bannock stole away during the night and the four troops pursued them next day for ten miles. A few shots were exchanged at 7 P.m., but the Indians kept moving.

The Bannock did not stop again to fight for ninety miles. On July 8 they opened fire from a mountain ridge near Pilot Rock on Birch Creek, a branch of the Umatilla River (south of Pendleton). General Howard had joined Bernard, who led a charge of seven companies of the 1st Cavalry. Front and flank, they drove the Indians from the crest, but the red men retreated only to another ridge.

The 1st Cavalry's regimental history claims that part of this fight was the first example of cavalry fighting on foot without separating the men from the horses - each trooper firing his carbine while he led his horse by reins thrown over his forearm. The Indians scattered, some eastward into the Blue Mountains, while others tried to cross the Columbia River but were turned back by gunboats manned by detachments of the Ordnance Department and 21st Infantry.

A final fight on July 20 on the North Fork of John Day River was commanded by Brevet Brigadier General James W. Forsyth, lieutenant colonel of the 1st Cavalry, who had arrived from Chicago to take charge of the battalion. The Indians were flanked out of a strong position in a deep canyon and again, for the last time, broke and scattered. This ended the Bannock War. Bernard, who had a key position in this last charge, was brevetted brigadier general in 1890 for his fights at Silvies River and Birch Creek and for one against Cochise at Chiricahua Pass, Arizona.

Sheepeater Campaign, 1879

The last Indian war in the Far Northwest was a small one against a small band of Indians but one of extreme difficulty for the troops. In February, 1879, five Chinese miners were killed at Oro Grande, Idaho; in May two ranchers were killed on the South Fork of the Salmon. These crimes were charged to the Tukuarika, a Shoshonean band numbering about 300, called Sheepeaters because they lived principally on Rocky Mountain sheep. As the campaign developed, it seemed probable that the Sheepeaters were never near the scenes of the murders.

Again it was a campaign for Colonel Bernard's Company G of the 1st Cavalry. From May 31 to September 8 Bernard's troop toiled through middle Idaho, the country of the Salmon River, called the "River of No Return" because it is barely navigable, and that only downstream. This country is so rough it could be mapped adequately only by airplane. Sheepeaters attacked Bernard's pack train on August 20 at Soldier Bar on Big Creek. The train was defended by Corporal Charles B. Hardin (who was later commissioned from the ranks and rose to the grade of major) with six troopers and the chief packer, Jake Barnes. They drove off the raiding party of ten to fifteen. One private was killed. (As late as 1925 a headstone for his grave had to be transported seventy miles by wagon and forty miles by pack mule from the nearest railroad station.) A company of twenty Umatilla scouts led by Lieutenants Edward S. Farrow and W. C. Brown completed the campaign by negotiating the surrender of the Sheepeaters in October.

The Ute War of 1879

In the years between the coming of the white man's horse and the coming of the white man, the Ute were a powerful and warlike tribe. Then they took to the mountains of western Colorado and eastern Utah (named for them). Like Spotted Tail of the Brule Sioux, their wise chief, Ouray, born about 1820, realized the power of the United States, had no desire to tangle with it, made no concessions he could not avoid, did the best he could for his people and kept the peace. However, not all of the Ute bands went along with his pacifism.

Oddly enough, the White River Ute were goaded into war by one of the best and most honest men ever assigned to the Indian Service. Appointed personally by President Rutherford B. Hayes he was a talented writer, friend of Horace Greeley, an idealist sincerely interested in the welfare of the Indians. No man ever deserved the name do-gooder more than did Nathan Cook Meeker. He planned to establish schools, teach agriculture, assign the Ute to family farms and abolish tribal government. Meeker moved the agency to the middle of a favorite hunting ground; he wanted to stop their hunting. He built a school across their horseracing track; he wanted to end gambling. He plowed up the grass where they had grazed their ponies; he told them they had too many ponies and some should be killed. By this time their anger was so evident that he sent for troops.

Major Thomas Tipton Thornburgh of the 4th Infantry commanded the expedition ordered out from Fort Fred Steele, Wyoming Territory, almost 150 miles away. On September 29, 1879, after crossing Milk Creek, a shallow stream on the northern border of the White River Reservation, his command was ambushed in a narrow, brushy draw. Perhaps to avoid alarming the Indians, Thornburgh had taken no precautions. He was killed by the first fire. Captain John S. Payne's Company F of the 5th Cavalry, and Company E of the 3rd, formed in line but were soon driven back by the concealed Ute. Company D under Second Lieutenant James V. S. Paddock had been left behind to guard the wagons. He immediately corralled them, and the two advance companies fell back on this defensive position.

The Ute tried to drive out the troops by setting fire to the grass and, when this failed, began shooting into the enclosure from surrounding rimrocks. Eleven men were killed and most of the horses were shot clown. That night Captain Payne sent four men - two guides and two soldiers - who volunteered to ride to the telegraph station at Rawlins, Wyoming, with reports of the disaster.

Meanwhile Captain Francis S. Dodge, on patrol to the eastward with Company D, 9th Cavalry, heard about the fight from fleeing settlers and rode to the scene. He arrived at the barricade on October 2, but his forty men were also penned in, and during the next three days all their horses were shot down.

General Wesley Merritt at Fort D. A. Russell, near Cheyenne, 280 miles away, received Payne's message on October 1. Within four hours he entrained Companies A, B, I and M of the 501 Cavalry for Rawlins. There he picked up four comapnies of the 4th Infantry, later adding one more from Thornburgh's supply base, and loaded them into wagons for the "lightning march" cross-country - 125 miles from 11 A.M. October 2 to dawn October 5.

As Merritt approached the besieged soldiers in the dark, he ordered his trumpeter to sound Officer's Call. He remembered that on the night of July 28, 1876, while the 5th Cavalry was bivouacked on the north fork of the Mini Pusa on its way to join Crook's column in the war against the Sioux, he had heard the distant notes of this same call. At that time Captain Payne with Company F and Captain George E. Price with Company E were making forced marches to join him, and to guide them through the dark to his camp he had ordered the trumpeter to repeat the call. Now, on October 5, 1879, the situation was reversed. He was coming to the relief of Payne and Company F, instead of Payne coming to him. Henceforth Officer's Call would have a traditional meaning to the 5th Cavalry beyond its utility as a service call.

On arriving at the barricade Merritt deployed his tired troopers and wagonloads of infantrymen in the dark. They occupied the surrounding ridges, found no Indians and fell asleep in line of battle. Next morning a small party of Indians appeared accompanied by an employee from the Los Pinos Agency. They had ridden day and night from far off southern Colorado with a message from Ouray saying that a council of southern bands of the Ute had decided to have no part in the fighting and urging the White River Ute to seek peace.

Perhaps the White River Indians had already quit, half-frightened at what they had done. While some had been fighting the soldiers, others had killed six men at their agency, including Meeker, and all had fled to the mountains, carrying off Mrs. Meeker, their grown daughter Josephine and the post trader's wife, Flora Ellen Price. Ouray aided in getting them released.

Jay Monaghan. Wars in the Far Northwest. The Book of the American West. Simon & Schuster New York, NY 1969.

Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890: The Wars for the Pacific Northwest Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865 -- 1890: The Wars for the Pacific Northwest is the second in a planned five-volume series that will tell the saga of the military struggle for the American West in the words of the soldiers, noncombatants, and Native Americans who shaped it. Patterned after the classic Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, the series will represent the most comprehensive work on the Indian Wars in the West yet published. Volume II: The Wars for the Pacific Northwest covers five distinct conflicts and their aftermaths: The Snake -- Paiute War and After (1866-72), The Modoc War (1872-73), The Nez Perce Campaign (1877), The Bannock War (1878), and The Sheepeater Campaign (1879). It contains accounts from participants on both sides of the conflict, including George Crook, Charles King, and Nelson A. Miles, as well as Chuslum Moxmox (Yellow Bull), Young Two Moon, and Heinmot Tooyalakekt (Chief Joseph).

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