The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (19 page)

As light faded on the evening of 20 January, the column resumed its march, following the south bank of the Teton River in a northeasterly direction for twenty-two miles. With the first fingers of dawn on the next morning, Baker ordered another halt, and the soldiers bivouacked at the mouth of Muddy Creek. There was no rest for Joe Cobell and Joe Kipp, however, as Baker dispatched his scouts to reconnoiter the area and make certain that the column’s intended route was clear of Indians and whiskey traders who might alert the enemy to the advancing troops.

At dusk on 21 January the men once again broke camp, though now they left the Teton and traveled north across open country, right into the heart of the Blackfeet winter campgrounds. The terrain in this part of Montana is perilous: undulating plain fractured by hundreds of coulees, steep gulches that run dry in the summer but fill with snow during the colder months and thus pose a considerable hazard for travelers, especially those on horseback. After twenty exhausting miles, the column struck the dry fork of the Marias River around daybreak on 22 January and set up camp. This time Baker forbade the making of any fires, for he was certain that the Piegan hostiles were close at hand. His shivering men had no choice except to bundle themselves against the piercing chill and to stave off their hunger with cold food.

As the sun slipped behind the Rockies that afternoon, the column shoved off once again, moving to the northeast along the riverbed toward its intersection with the Marias. Sometime that night, after the soldiers had traveled about eleven miles, Baker’s intuition was rewarded—his scouts located a small group of five Piegan lodges pitched near the juncture with the Marias. The troops quickly surrounded the encampment and awakened the sleeping inhabitants. From the terrified Indians, Baker learned that the camp belonged to a headman named Gray Wolf, but that Mountain Chief and two other wanted Indians—Big Horn and Red Horn—were settled together five to ten miles downstream, at the Big Bend.

With this news, Baker swung into action. First, he sent a small detachment twenty miles upriver to the North West Company fur post under the command of a trader named Riplinger. (De Trobriand had written such instructions into Baker’s orders, so that in the event of Indian retaliation the dozen or so employees there would have protection.) Next, he broke off the supply train from the main column, leaving the wagons, their drivers, and a squad of infantrymen to keep watch over Gray Wolf and his followers. Baker then directed the balance of his troops to move rapidly downriver, following a wide trail that ran parallel to the river. He hoped to reach the camp before daybreak.

I
N THE GLOAMING
, Bear Head worked his way through the timber in search of his horses. The boy was frustrated, for he had planned to go out with a hunting party the day before but had been unable to locate his mounts, which had drifted off into the woods above the camp at the Big Bend. Still, the young Piegan was determined to join the buffalo hunters, even if it meant an arduous ride to overtake them. Though he was only fourteen years old, many people depended upon him. Two years earlier, Owl Child had killed Bear Head’s father in a dispute, leaving the boy to care for the dead man’s four wives as well as their daughters. Hence the boy’s desperation to bring food back to the campsite, where his leader, Heavy Runner, had settled his smallpox-ravaged band in mid-January after Mountain Chief abandoned the location in favor of another spot a few miles downriver.
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Just as Bear Head spotted his horses on that frigid morning, a throng of soldiers apprehended him. He recalled years later, “I was so astonished, so frightened, that I could not move.” One of the troops, who the boy guessed was an officer because of the yellow metal stripes on his uniform, seized Bear Head by the arm and touched his finger to his lips. Still clutching the boy, the soldier advanced toward the camp, dragging Bear Head behind him. When they arrived at the edge of a bluff overlooking the Big Bend, the boy was petrified to see dozens of soldiers stretched out in a line to his right. Despite the troops left upriver and the fact that every fourth man on the bluffs that morning was a horse holder, Baker still had nearly two hundred guns trained on the thirty-seven lodges below.

In the camp all was quiet, as the Piegans—mostly women, children, and old men, given the recent departure of the hunters—slept, some of them fitfully, as their bodies tried to fight off the dreaded “white scabs” disease burning through the village. Whatever concerns they might have had during that bleak midwinter, a surprise attack by U.S. soldiers was probably not among them, considering their chief’s well-known status as a friend to the whites. But just before dawn, the barking of the Indians’ dogs suggested that something was amiss.

At Heavy Runner’s lodge, located in the middle of the camp, a visitor rousted the headman with news that soldiers had been spotted nearby. Citing his good relationship with the
napikwans,
the chief attempted to calm his panicked followers, insisting that there was nothing to fear. With that, he took his “name paper” (Alfred Sully’s note of safe passage), opened his tent, and began walking purposefully toward the bluffs, waving the document high over his head.
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Up on the ridge, Joe Kipp had broken the stillness demanded by Baker. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the scout had recognized to his horror that the markings on the central teepee were those of Heavy Runner, and not of Mountain Chief, as Kipp had anticipated. Realizing his mistake and the disaster about to ensue, Kipp shouted frantically to Baker that the unsuspecting encampment below was the wrong target; in fact, it was one of the villages the troops were expressly ordered to avoid. Baker, however, hissed at Kipp to fall silent and placed him under guard.

At that moment Heavy Runner emerged from the camp below, brandishing his paper and, according to some accounts, a peace medal as well. Before he could reach the troops and establish his identity, the chief was hit by a single shot and fell to the snow, clutching Sully’s note to his chest. Years later a relative of Joe Cobell’s stated that Cobell himself had confessed to cutting down Heavy Runner, and for deeply personal reasons: the scout knew that if fighting broke out at the Big Bend, Mountain Chief’s band, into which Cobell had intermarried, would have sufficient time to strike their campsite and head for safety beyond the Medicine Line.
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Following the initial blast, the other soldiers on the bluffs opened fire immediately. Most of the men were armed with Springfield rifles or Sharps carbines, both of which used a heavy, .50-70 caliber brass cartridge, an earsplitting charge strong enough to bring down buffalo and other heavy game.
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The soldiers aimed not only at the sides of the fragile skin tents but shot also at the bindings attached to the lodge poles, so that some of the teepees collapsed on the cooking fires within, suffocating or incinerating their smallpox-ravaged inhabitants. Though virtually no resistance came from the camp, firing continued unabated for almost an hour before Baker called a halt to the shooting and then loosed his cavalrymen upon the Piegans. The troopers swept down from the ridge and charged into the defenseless camp with pistols or sabers drawn, shooting and slashing indiscriminately as the Indians sought cover among the few lodges still standing. The foot soldiers were right behind them, however, cutting their way into the teepees and dispatching those hiding inside.
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Other troops, who had forded the river just before the shooting began, rounded up captives and corralled the Indians’ sizable horse herd. It was all over before midday.

With the end of the skirmish, Bear Head, whom his captor had dragged all the way to the village, was finally released. The dazed boy picked his way among the smoldering ruins of the camp until he found his own tent, which like the others had been utterly destroyed. He stood before the carnage and felt sick. “In the center of the fallen lodge,” he remembered, “where the poles had fallen upon the fire, it had burned a little, then died out. I could not pull up the lodge-skin and look under it. I could not bear to see my mother, my almost-mothers, my almost-sisters lying there, shot or smothered to death.” In time he was joined by a handful of survivors, who wept at the soldiers’ terrible cruelty and mourned the violent deaths of those who had done no wrong.
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Thereafter the Blackfeet called the Big Bend Itomot´ahpi Pikun´i—Killed Off the Piegans.
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I
N THE AFTERMATH
of the fight, Major Baker conferred with his officers and scouts. From Kipp and Cobell he received definitive word via Indian survivors that the annihilated camp was indeed that of Heavy Runner, the one headman Baker had been explicitly instructed to avoid. Mountain Chief, Baker learned, had moved his village a few miles down the Marias. Baker hurriedly adjusted his plans, ordering Lieutenant Gus Doane and F Company to remain at the Big Bend while the major himself led the rest of the troops downriver in search of the other encampment.

Though best known for his role in escorting the Washburn-Langford expedition through the Yellowstone region in the fall of 1870 (a 10,500-foot mountain in the park is named for him), Gustavus Cheyney Doane was also a magnificent field soldier.
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Born in Illinois in 1840, the tall, powerfully built cavalryman—easily recognizable by his long, waxed mustache—was held in high esteem by his comrades, who admired his courage and integrity. For those reasons, Baker tasked him with a grim assignment: burning all of the Piegans’ supplies and tallying the dead. That afternoon the lieutenant counted 173 Indians killed in action, later reported by Baker to have consisted of 120 able-bodied men and 53 women and children (numbers strenuously debated afterward).
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Though Joe Kipp claimed to have seen 217 bodies, Doane’s became the official figure; the lieutenant deemed the engagement the “greatest slaughter of Indians ever made by U.S. troops.”
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Baker’s men, by contrast, suffered only one fatality in the battle: Private Walton McKay, a twenty-four-year-old Canadian who was shot through the forehead when he peered into an Indian tent after the cavalry charge.
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Meanwhile, Baker’s trip downriver took longer than expected. By the time he arrived that afternoon, the Indians had fled, leaving behind a hastily abandoned camp of seven lodges. As Baker expected, Mountain Chief, Owl Child, and some of the other wanted men had crossed to safety beyond the forty-ninth parallel, marked at that time simply by mounds of dirt or stone cairns but representing a haven from the vengeful Americans. There would be no satisfaction for either Horace Clarke or Bear Head, both of whom had lost their fathers at the hand of Ne-tus-che-o: the Indian renegade supposedly died several days later of smallpox, thus depriving the sons of the murdered men of an opportunity to exact their vengeance. Baker and his detachment camped at the site that evening and then burned the deserted lodges the following day.

The killing at the Big Bend, however, had not ended completely when the soldiers’ guns fell silent. That evening eight warriors taken prisoner tried to escape, and after their recapture an enraged Lieutenant Doane ordered the Indians dispatched. When some enlisted men reached for their rifles, Doane barked, “No, don’t use your guns … Get axes and kill them one at a time.” Bear Head claimed to have overheard this conversation, and the ensuing horror. He recalled, “I hear[d] a sound as if some one was cutting up meat with an axe and a Grunt[.] I looked around and could see by the firelight one of the … Indians lying on the ground with his head split open.”
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When Baker returned to the Big Bend on the morning of 24 January, Doane explained that the Indians had been killed in the act of escape (which apparently went unquestioned), and then he informed his commanding officer of a most unfortunate discovery: Heavy Runner’s camp was beset with smallpox, which though not much of a danger to the soldiers (who were vaccinated) was sure to complicate the fallout with Baker’s superiors as well as a skeptical public. In light of this news, Baker ordered the 140 captives freed at once, although he commandeered all of the Piegans’ three hundred horses, insisting that most of them had been stolen from whites in the first place.
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So that they might not starve, Baker left the Indians a few cases of bacon and hardtack. And then the soldiers departed, gone almost as quickly as they had appeared on the morning before.

T
HE SITUATION FACING
the survivors now became desperate. They had no shelter, no transportation, insufficient foodstuffs, and dozens of wounded. Many others were stricken with disease. Some of the Indians found shelter with friendly bands nearby, but others decided to make the arduous, seventy-five-mile trek to Fort Benton (even though many whites there loathed native people). The members of Heavy Runner’s family composed one such group. As Spear Woman, the dead man’s daughter—who was just a little girl in 1870—recalled many decades later, she and her mother and three siblings (one of them an infant) followed the soldiers’ tracks for a time, scavenging any of the column’s discarded food and supplies that they found along the way. After a few days they reached Fort Benton, but not before the baby perished.
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Baker and his men arrived at Fort Shaw on Sunday, 29 January. There the troops were met by the exuberant Colonel de Trobriand, who three days earlier had received unofficial word of the incident on the Marias. De Trobriand joyously telegrammed to his superiors, “The result of the expedition shows how well it has been conducted by [Baker], and I am Confident that peace and safety is secured for a long time to the Territory.”
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In fact, the colonel was so pleased that a few weeks later he wrote again to his commanders to praise Baker for his “activity, energy, and judgment” while recommending him for a brevet.
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