Cries from the Earth (64 page)

Beyond those bloody murders and the brutal rapes, the raiding left widespread destruction. The tall columns of smoke Captain David Perry and his cavalry spotted in the distance as they crossed the Camas Prairie proved to be only the tip of the iceberg. Houses, barns, outbuildings, and stacks of first cuttings of hay—anything that the warriors could put to the torch—were set afire. What buildings weren't burned they plundered. What wasn't taken was destroyed and left in ruin. Horses and cattle were stolen. What sheep and hogs were not driven back to the
Tepahlewam
camp and from there to the White Bird Canyon were slaughtered and left behind at the looted ranches, their carcasses bloating among the piles of ash and rubble.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the discrepancy between some of the sources regarding Mrs. Benedict's four-year-old daughter. Two of the writers attempted to give the girl a broken arm when it was actually six-year-old Maggie Manuel who suffered the broken arm in her fall from the horse while fleeing with her father, John Manuel. In addition, one of the modern-day sources reports that the Benedict girl was even named Maggie too!

It seems perfectly clear to me that the historian got his girls confused—conveniently turning Maggie Manuel into Maggie Benedict.

Another source reported that the Benedict daughter had a fractured skull. Did this historian mix her up with the older of the Chamberlin girls, who had her skull crushed? Appears there's more than enough confusion to go around concerning these poor little girls.

Oh, and a brief word of caution concerning the elder of the two Benedict daughters. Because no record exists (at least any source I can locate in any of the archives or the literature on this account), I have arbitrarily given the Benedict girl a first name—Emmy—in hopes that the two young girls (Manuel and Benedict) are kept entirely separate in the reader's mind.

When considering all the innocents caught up in this outbreak, how tragic and pitiable is the aftermath of what happened to Helen Walsh and Elizabeth Osborn once they rejoined their white frontier society. Because they had been gang-raped by a war party in front of their own small children, both were too ashamed to show themselves in public for a long time following their rescue. What unspeakable horror was committed against them they themselves never divulged. Yet there's enough testimony to convince historians that the women were repeatedly brutalized by the warriors, a horrific trauma those on the Indian frontier in that day called “a fate worse than death.”

So it's very intriguing to note that in all the published accounts she gave over the months to come Helen Walsh claimed that she and Elizabeth Osborn were treated kindly by the war party. Mrs. Walsh wrote: “[The Nez Perce warriors] told us that they did not want to kill us; that we could go to Slate Creek or Lewiston without fear.” But First Sergeant Michael McCarthy, who saw them at Slate Creek a week later, stated that the women would not show themselves, did not venture out of the self-imposed prison they made of a small cabin. He surmised it was because of their overwhelming shame.

Another settler declared that the two women had “received treatment that was but little better than death,” leaving no doubt what either of these accounts really meant. Rape was far from being an unknown allegation during the first few days of the outbreak, but if these two women were abused in this manner, then Mrs. Walsh and Mrs. Osborn both took their terrible secret to the grave. Friends and neighbors never pressed either survivor for a public admission—a small blessing those folk could bestow upon two women who had somehow survived torture and terror.

For me the rape of these two women brings up the nagging question that appears to be all too easy for others to dismiss but difficult for me to fathom: why did the warriors on both raids murder some of those they caught, while letting others go without harm? What accounts for this most curious and unexplainable fact?

At their core, the raids along the Salmon were clearly reprisals against only a few of those whites who had settled along a part of the river where the land was ill-suited to much of anything. Remember, this was a valley without attraction except for its wild and seductive beauty: there was no gold in the gravel bars along the Salmon as there was in the nearby mountains; the steep hills rising abruptly from the river's edge did not lend themselves to agriculture in any shape or form. So except for the storekeepers, why did these settlers put down roots there?

In his
The Flight of the Nez Perce,
author Mark H. Brown posits a claim that the hollows of the Salmon near the mouth of White Bird Creek became a “Hole-in-the-Wall” country for those hard-core “undesireables” banished from Lewiston, as well as Florence and other mining camps (as we already pointed out in the case of what led Larry Ott to be in the valley). Evidence for this is that they attempted to grow a few crops on some poor ground instead of prospecting in the mountains. Such “banished” characters couldn't simply leave Idaho and go to Montana, where a decade before vigilantes had already proved very ably that they were not about to put up with ruffians and scofflaws in their mining camps. So Brown goes on to declare that this area of the Salmon was home to “far more than a normal proportion of tough characters.”

Pardon me? Are we really to believe that these family men—Samuel Benedict, Jurden Henry Elfers, Harry Mason, Benjamin Norton, John Chamberlin, and others—were outcasts banished from the roughest element of frontier society? Can you actually picture any of these citizens as historian Brown depicts them? Could he seriously believe that these were such hardened characters that they were unable to live in the crudest of wild societies operating in those mining camps?

Bullshit. What kind of politically correct claptrap is that, to declare that the men who were murdered had it coming because they were the outcasts, the dregs, of even the worst of frontier society?

If these few settlers and “store men” were guilty of anything, it was nothing more than being guilty of greed, along with a healthy dose of stupidity. What do I mean by that? you might ask. Guilty of greed for selling or trading whiskey to the Nez Perce and guilty of utter stupidity for not realizing that the sale of that whiskey could come back around to bite them in the ass at some future point in time. After all, an undisputed fact of life for these folk who carved out a place for themselves on the western frontier was that, as author Brown states, “drunken Indians have always been known to be noisy and ugly.”

Standing on the heights and gazing down at the valley of the White Bird Canyon, I was immediately struck with how the Nez Perce managed to cram their herds of some twenty-five to thirty-five hundred (or more!) horses in so confining a place. It boggles my mind when I look down upon the village site from the new Highway 95 or from White Bird Hill or even from Perry's “command post” itself! Yet the Non-Treaty bands would wrangle those horses across rivers, over mountain chains, driving the herds through more than a thousand miles of wilderness in the flight to come. In crossing and re-crossing the ground where this war started I grow all the more awestruck at this monumental feat.

Many of the accounts vary on just what happened in those moments while Ollokot and Two Moons waited with their warriors as the six peace delegates made their way under a flag of truce toward the first, small group of soldiers. Civilian Ad Chapman—who had a cold, then hot, relationship with the Nez Perce—fired those first two shots without any provocation. Why? Especially when most every source, except Chapman, of course, stated the peace party was carrying a white flag?

Did Chapman actually feel such hatred for the tribe that he decided to start the battle single-handedly? In his own heart did he fear that Perry's soldiers and the Indians would end up talking peace and there would be no fight? Was he really afraid the warriors would flee back to the camp and the entire village would escape across the Salmon just as he and the other civilians had warned Captain Perry? Or, in the end, was Chapman just so arrogant that he thought he was only doing what was needed to open the fight?

What's surprising is that no one, not even Perry himself, ever confronted Chapman on that score, even though some thirty-three dead men lay abandoned back in White Bird Canyon because of what Chapman had started. No one ever called the civilian to task for the fact that what he did meant there would be no turning back. Not for many months, not for many, many miles of drama, tragedy, and heroism.

In growing acquainted with every facet of this short battle I was fascinated with the legend of the “Red Coats.” Why did those three young warriors wear those blankets? Was it to conspicuously show the other men or perhaps the young women that the three of them were that much braver than all the other warriors? Or was it a visible appeal to their
wyakin,
their own personal spirit helpers, to watch over them in the coming fight? One thing was certain in this story: what soldiers survived to make it out of that valley did indeed remember those “red coats” and the damage they inflicted.

So why did Perry's soldiers lose this fight—without making an attempt to regroup, to enjoin and hold against the enemy, much less countercharge the warriors? Most historians agree that those two companies of the First U.S. Cavalry suffered from mediocre leadership, despite the fact that they outnumbered Ollokot's and Two Moons's fighting men. Compounding this lack of decisive commanders, the loss of one or both trumpeters only exacerbated the officers' inability to direct and control their men.

Much of the blame must be laid at the feet of David Perry. Unlike some Indian Wars officers who chose to ignore the intelligence brought them by their civilian or Indian scouts, Perry considered what the Mount Idaho citizens had to warn him about … then chose to believe that the Nez Perce would indeed attempt to escape across the Salmon River. This meant he reasoned that he could believe the assessment of those civilians like Ad Chapman who had a long history of contact with the tribe when they claimed that the warriors would turn tail and run if confronted by the soldiers.

Would you have done any differently? If you had been in Perry's boots, dismounting on that ground at sunset outside Grangeville, listening to the opinions of those citizens who had daily contact with the Nez Perce … would you have decided to take a different approach?

With history as hindsight, we can now state that Perry might have chosen to send some of his Treaty scouts to the White Bird village to request a parley with the chiefs, a council during which he could demand to have the murderers turned over to him while he escorted the rest of the bands onto the reservation. But … he did not.

Perry was swayed by the “volunteers” who had his ear at that moment, volunteers who said they knew the true heart of the Nez Perce. The very same volunteers who would abandon his battalion almost from the first shot.

The debate has raged for years: centering on Perry's abilities or lack thereof; on the necessity of sacrificing one-fourth of your command when you send horse-holders to the rear; on the truth or fallacy in the actual number of warriors Ollokot led into battle; on the fact that many of the soldiers were raw recruits; on the dearth of training for both the soldiers and their horses; on the poor condition of their weapons … and on and on.

It's much the same debate that has raged over other battles when the army was found wanting and got itself whipped. There will always be those who step forward attempting to find some reason for a stunning defeat other than the fact that the army was simply beaten.

At White Bird, Ollokot's outnumbered warriors pressed their advantage and succeeded in frightening both the civilians and soldiers into turning tail on their weary horses. So let me quiet much of the debate, point by point:

1.) Perry's leadership in the fight would be assailed in the months to come—so much so that the captain requested, and was given, a court of inquiry to answer charges brought against him by Captain Trimble and others. After several days of hearings and testimony critical of Perry from Sergeant Michael McCarthy and very few others, the court did not find against him in his execution of the battle or the retreat. My belief remains that Trimble began the groundswell of sentiment against Perry when he realized just how culpable he would himself be for his own precipitous flight from the valley. Trimble was, after all, the first to the top of the ridge—and the first to finish the race to Grangeville! Trimble escaped, fled, ran … leaving far better men to close the file and cover the rear of his retreat. Trimble abandoned thirty-three far, far better soldiers in the valley of the White Bird that Sunday morning.

2.) Even after Perry's company commanders, Theller and Trimble, sent their horse-holders to the rear, it's an undeniable fact that the soldiers still outnumbered the Nez Perce.

3.) After more than a hundred years, there is no longer any dispute about the number of warriors who made it into that fight with the soldiers. Most of the “fighting men” were either too hungover or passed out and in no way capable of defending the village when Theller's detail appeared on the slopes of White Bird Hill. So, I want you to consider just what might have happened to those who did survive the Battle of White Bird if there hadn't been so much of the white man's whiskey in that camp. There is no doubt in my mind that had there been less whiskey, or none at all, more warriors would have been able to mount their ponies and ride into the fray, meaning more of Perry's command would have been killed. In fact, there is enough evidence to believe that Perry's cavalry might well have been annihilated to the last man.

4.) Despite all the apologists wanting to make hay over the fact that an appreciable number of Perry's men were untested recruits, you must remember one undeniable fact: for the most part, the majority of Ollokot's and Two Moons's warriors were even more untried in battle than those green recruits!