Part 5 (1/2)
Some newspaper scribblers have accused General Gibbon of rashness in attacking the Nez Perces when he knew that their force outnumbered his own so largely. He has been censured for sacrificing the lives of a large number of men in an action where he could not reasonably hope for success. But so far as known, no army officer, no military scholar, in short, no one competent to judge of the merits of the case, has ever criticised his conduct adversely.
An old maxim, loved and quoted by all Indian fighters is, that the time to fight Indians is when they are found. In Indian campaigning, a stern chase is usually not only a long, but a severe and tedious one, and the case in point is no exception to the rule, save in that General Gibbon overtook the Indians much sooner than a retreating band is usually overtaken. Yet he had made a hard march. He had been ordered to intercept and strike the renegades. In obedience to this order, he had marched his command more than 250 miles, and now that he had overtaken the fugitives, must he go into camp, fortify himself, and calmly wait for reinforcements, or for the Indians to attack him? Had he done so, the Indians would of course have retreated so soon as they found that he had arrived in their neighborhood. What would have been thought of such a course by his superiors? What would have been thought of it by these same pretentious newspaper critics? They would doubtless have raised the cry of cowardice as promptly as they raised that of rashness.
General Gibbon is not one of the kind of soldiers who stops to count hostile Indians under such circ.u.mstances as these. He fights them at sight, just as any other brave commander does, and takes the chances.
His brilliant record in the civil war, as well as on the frontier, has long since convinced his superiors that he was made of this sort of material, and this is why he had so often been intrusted with commands in which he was required to exercise just this kind of generals.h.i.+p.
While he is a cautious commander, within due and reasonable bounds, he is brave as a lion, and knows no such thing as disobedience of orders.
He felt himself and his little army equal to a contest with the band of hostiles in his front, and the result proved that he was correct in his estimate.
The St. Paul _Pioneer Press_ replied to an editorial which appeared in the New York _Herald_, soon after the fight, and written by one of these carpers, in these cogent terms:
”Both in its conception and execution, the plan of campaign followed by General Gibbon was a master-piece of Indian fighting. Nothing can be further from the brilliant folly of Custer's dash than Gibbon's march and attack. It was wisely planned, and boldly carried out. The necessities of an Indian war are simple. They are to move swiftly, strike suddenly and hard, and to fight warily, but perseveringly and vigorously. All these things Gibbon did. He made a forced march, and completely surprised the enemy at the end of it. He fought the savages after their own fas.h.i.+on, retiring to cover after the first onset, and fighting singly, rifle in hand, officers and men alike, from the commander down, becoming sharpshooters for the time, and picking off the Indians like born frontiersmen. And the battle was a victory, a brilliant success, in that it inflicted a terrible punishment on the Nez Perces, strewed the valley with dead Indians, and sent the crippled remnant of the band fleeing to the mountains. General Gibbon is a shrewd and bold Indian fighter--and the _Herald_ writer is an a.s.s.”
General Gibbon took into the action, six companies of infantry. Had these companies been maintained on a war-footing of 100 men each, as all companies and regiments should be, his force would have been 600 men, instead of less than 200. With such a force, he could easily have surrounded the Indians while they slept and have killed them all; but a pettifogging Congress had cut down the strength of the army to such an extent that the companies numbered less than twenty-five men each, and with this force Gibbon was unable to deal with the Indians as he could have done with a proper force. The fight was prolonged, and the loss of life was much heavier than it would have been with a suitable force of soldiers on the field, so that the Forty-third Congress, which first reduced the army to its present beggarly proportions, is morally responsible for many, if not all, of the lives lost and wounds received by the brave men who partic.i.p.ated in that affair.
Although, owing to this insufficient force of men, the fight was not a complete victory for our troops, it was nevertheless a most stinging blow to the Nez Perces. They had never before engaged in a war with our soldiers, but Indian tradition and Indian gossip had told them that the pale-faced soldiers were slow riders, slow walkers, and poor fighters; that one Indian could whip five soldiers any day. But this fight proved to them the falsity of these stories. It taught them that even ”walking soldiers” were swift pursuers, good hunters, and deadly a.s.sailants when led by a brave chief. It taught them that the white man could move by night; that while the Indian slept, the soldier crept; that his tread was so stealthy that even the lightest sleeper, the most watchful warrior, could not hear his approach, and that it was not safe for the red man to close his eyes while the white soldier was on his trail. It taught them that the foot soldiers were marksmen; that their bullets could search out the hiding-place of the wiliest Indian in the mountains; that in the face of the deadliest fire the Indians could pour forth, they, the soldiers, could come into his camp, shoot him down, and burn his lodges. It taught him that one white soldier could whip two Indians; that the Indian's ability to skulk and hide were no match for the white man's courage. In short, it taught him that the Indian's only safety, when overtaken by soldiers, was in surrender or in flight, in reaching a hiding-place beyond the White Father's domain, and that the flight thither, in order to be successful, must be the most rapid that horses could make. It taught the Nez Perces a lesson they will never forget, and undoubtedly rendered their final capture a much easier and less costly affair than it otherwise would have been, if indeed it could else have been accomplished at all.
And the Nez Perces accepted the lesson so taught. So soon as their village was well out of the way of Gibbon's rifles, they started for the British Possessions, and though closely pursued by troops all the way, who thrice overtook and attacked them en route, they made no other stand until General Miles headed them off near Bear Paw Mountain in Northern Montana, and captured nearly all their horses. Then they were compelled to fight or surrender. They made a four days' fight, but it was a spiritless one, and finally succ.u.mbed to the inevitable, and laid down their arms.
It has for years been claimed, and repeatedly shown, that one white man was equal to three or four Indians in a fight, position and other things being equal, and rarely has any band of Indians been encountered who would willingly stand their ground and fight white men, either soldiers or citizens, unless certain that they outnumbered the whites to some such extent. But here was a body of Nez Perces who stood bravely up against a force of nearly half their own numbers; who fought so desperately and so gallantly that the troops who a.s.saulted them and at first put them to flight, were afterward compelled to fall back and take cover; who followed these troops; hemmed them in; advanced on them; hara.s.sed them with a deadly fire for twenty hours; only withdrawing when they had reason to believe that reinforcements for the troops were at hand.
Yet General Gibbon and his Spartan band of veterans attacked this superior force, charged into its midst, drove it from its camp in confusion, fought it hand-to-hand in the brush, and inflicted on it such a punishment as probably no command of equal numbers has ever before inflicted on Indians under similar conditions and in so short a time. Several of the veterans who were in this action, and who had fought Sioux Indians repeatedly, said afterward that they would rather fight five Sioux than one Nez Perce. It is, therefore, the highest possible tribute to Gibbon and his men, to record the fact that they were able to hold their ground for a day against such a force as this, and to kill and wound so many of them.
Eighty-nine dead Indians were found and buried on the field, nearly three times the number of men lost by General Gibbon, and it is known that a large number of mortally wounded warriors were carried away and hidden during the day and night that the soldiers never found. Ranchmen residing near the battle-field tell us that they find skeletons in the neighboring forests every summer; some of them two or three miles away from the battle-ground; some of them hidden in gulches and among rocks and logs, which they suppose to be those of Indians killed in this fight, and who were doubtless carried away and concealed by their friends, or who, finding themselves mortally wounded, crawled hither and hid themselves to die in seclusion rather than have their bodies fall into the hands of the white men.
Besides, it is said that Joseph carried away with him a number who were so seriously wounded that they died on the trail. He is said to have admitted, after his final capture, that 208 of his people were killed in the Big Hole fight. If this be true, then there were a larger number of Indians killed than of white men engaged. It is a well-known fact, that only about one hundred warriors finally surrendered to General Miles, and that only about one hundred escaped to the British Possessions at the time of the surrender. Hence the conclusion seems just, that 200 or more must have been lost in the fight with Gibbon.
How skillfully General Gibbon planned his attack on the Nez Perces; how quietly and stealthily he moved his little army down Trail Creek and up along the side of the bluff; how carefully he formed it in line of battle within a stone's-throw of the hostile camp without alarming it, and all in the dead of night; how gallantly his men charged through the jungle, waded the river, swept through the camp dealing death to its fleeing occupants; how the men subsequently took and held their position in the mouth of Battle Gulch under the galling fire of these trained warriors, are facts which no one can properly realize and appreciate save those who were there.
But the battle-field tells its own mute story even now. As I walked over it and saw the hundreds of bullet marks on trees, rocks, and logs, and thought of the thousands of other missiles that entered the earth and left no abiding marks, I was impressed with the remarkable accuracy of the shooting done by the Indians. Nearly every tree and every object in the valley and in the mouth of Battle Gulch capable of bearing a bullet mark is cut and scarred in a frightful manner, and some of the trees are literally girdled. Many of the teepee poles that still lie scattered over the river bottom have bullet holes through them, and thousands of empty cartridge-sh.e.l.ls still lie scattered over the field, though it is said that thousands more have been carried away by relic hunters or trampled into the earth.
No true American can read the record of this light without feeling proud that he is an American; that he is a brother to the brave men who stood so n.o.bly together under such an ordeal--an ordeal, in short, that will stand in history on a parallel with the charge of Balaklava or the battle of Bunker's Hill.
As an evidence of the severity of this fight, and of the courage displayed by the officers, attention is called to the fact that of the seventeen engaged, seven of them were hit fourteen times, as follows:
General Gibbon, thigh 1 Captain Williams, head and body 2 Captain Logan, head (killed) 1 Lieutenant Bradley, head (killed) 1 Lieutenant Coolidge, both hands and legs 3 Lieutenant English, head, wrist, and back (died of wounds) 3 Lieutenant Woodruff, both thighs and heel 3 --- Total 14
CHAPTER VI.
Veterans of the civil war, and men who have been years on the frontier, who have partic.i.p.ated in many of the most sanguine Indian campaigns ever fought, say this was the most hotly-contested field they were ever on. They tell us that never have they seen such cool and determined fighting, at such short range, kept up for so long a time, by Indians; that never have they known so many bullets placed with such deadly accuracy, and so few to fly wild as in this fight. Nearly every man engaged in the action, white or red, officer, private soldier, or citizen, seemed a cool, deliberate sharpshooter; and the fact that after the first a.s.sault both parties kept closely covered all day, alone accounts for the fact that so many survived the fiery ordeal. The Indians did splendid work and elicited from the beleaguered soldiers expressions of admiration for their marksmans.h.i.+p, as well as for their bravery and prowess in fierce, close work.
An old sergeant, who was with the Seventh at Gettysburg, when it aided so n.o.bly in holding Little Round Top, says there was no hotter place on that historic hill than he found in the Big Hole on the 9th of August, 1877.
After the battle General Gibbon issued the following congratulatory order to his men:
[Regimental Orders, No. 27.]
HEADQUARTERS SEVENTH INFANTRY, BATTLE-FIELD OF THE BIG HOLE, _Montana Territory, Aug. 11, 1877_.