M. Mark Miller, Author

Tag: Indian Wars

  • We Are All Heros in the Stories We Tell About Ourselves

    A few days ago, I posted Andrew Weikert’s story about his first encounter with the Nez Perce in Yellowstone Park. It drew a lot of attention and this comment from Danny O’Keefe:

    Methinks Mr. Weikert may have been a bit prone to exaggeration judging by the litheness expressed about being able to bound into the saddle. I also doubt the Nez Perce were such poor shots. Other, more sober and historical, reports indicate they were highly accurate. Imagine the state of mind of a people on the run and fearing oblivion. The decency they exhibited in most instances stands in contrast to the treatment they received.

    I began to respond to Danny, but soon discovered I had so much to say that I flooded the reply box. I decided to gather my thoughts and use them for a blog post.

    The most important thing to say is that I agree with Danny’s statement about the Nez Perce: “The decency they exhibited in most cases stands in contrast to the treatment they received.” That’s the consensus now and everything I see in the historical record supports it. But the phrase “in most cases” is important.

    Overall, the Nez Perce behaved in an honorable fashion, but the historic record is mixed. Emma Cowan, who was taken captive by the Nez Perce, said this: “they were kind to us, a handful of the hated oppressors. Think of it, you who assume to be civilized people! Less than ten days had elapsed since the Big Hole fight in Montana, in which women and children, as well as warriors, were killed by the score. A number, badly wounded, were in camp while we were there. Yet were we treated kindly, given food and horses, and sent to our homes.”

    On the other hand, a party of Nez Perce scouts did indeed attack the camp where Weikert and Wilkie’s friends were hiding, and later Indians shot an unarmed music teacher dead when he stepped into view at a cabin door.

    We’re all heroes in the stories we tell about ourselves, so I don’t doubt that Weikert embellished his recollections. But it’s certain that the Nez Perce attacked him and his friends. He had the dead bodies to prove it.

    I don’t know where Danny gets the ideas about Weikert’s “litheness expressed about being able to bound into the saddle.” Weikert clearly said, “I was riding ahead when I saw them [the Indians].” He was already mounted and quickly hunched over to make a smaller target. Doubtless, the Nez Perce were fine shots, but it’s very difficult to shoot a man on a moving horse. The best evidence that Nez Perce weren’t the sharpshooters Danny says they were is that Weikert and Wilkie both lived.

    I’m still working my way through the mountains of material that have been written about the flight of the Nez Perce and I could already write thousands of words about such things as the failure of whites to understand their culture, writer’s motivations to portray them either as “Red Devils” or “Noble Savages,” and why the events of the summer of 1877 led to alternating periods of peace and violence. But I’ll save those explanations for my book.

    The items I put on my blog are stories, not historical documents. I collect, edit and post them in hopes that readers will find them interesting and fun.

    I am a storyteller, not a historian. I choose well told accounts that describe interesting experiences. I don’t fret over their literal truth. No doubt, many stories contain exaggerations and embellishments. When I think stories contain outright fabrications, I provide caveats. But I trust my readers to take things with the proverbial “grain of salt.”

    My sincere thanks to Danny for his comment. It forced me to think through a lot of important issues—far more than I could discuss here. That will make this blog—and all my work—better.

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  • Researching Attitudes Toward Indians

    What would it feel like to wake up in a wilderness with a lead slug embedded in your skull and remember watching your wife being dragged away by hostile Indians? That happened to George Cowan when the Nez Perce fled through Yellowstone Park  a hundred and thirty-three years ago.

    I’m writing about George’s ordeal for my next book, Encounters in Yellowstone 1877, so I need to know how he felt. Actually, it’s not hard to empathize with George. We all know that his head hurt from the bullet lodged there. And of course, George felt anger  — maybe even rage — at his attackers, and fear — maybe even terror — at what they might do to his wife.

    George’s story is compelling because it’s easy to identify with him, but can we assume he reacted in the same way we would? Wouldn’t events like the Battle of the Little Big Horn that happen just a year before George’s ordeal have colored his reactions?

    Last week, I did some research to answer questions like those. I started by searching the index of Montana the Magazine of Western History. I scanned subject headings until I saw “Indians, attitudes toward.” Under that heading I found an article published in 1957 by Robert W. Mardock entitled “Strange Concepts of the American Indian Since the Civil War.” Mardock says in the 1870s Americans called Indians everything from “noble savages” to “red devils.”

    New England writers like Cooper and Longfellow promoted the “noble savage” view, but Mardock says things were different on the frontier. He quoted a Virginia City, Montana, newspaper: “It is high time that sickly sentimentalism about humane treatment and conciliatory measures should be consigned to novel writers, and if the Indians continue their barbarity, wipe them out.’”

    According to Mardock, “The apprehensions and viewpoints of our frontier areas were strongly reflected in the Eastern newspapers. Exaggerated dispatches from the West, incredibly wild and inaccurate when reporting Indian ‘massacres’ and depredations, were commonly printed without ever questioning their accuracy. The frontier ‘red devil’ concept dominated the national press with few exceptions.”

    George Cowan was an attorney so he probably read both territorial and national newspapers. Visions of “red devils” must have danced through his mind when he came to that morning.

    And what was George’s wife, Emma, thinking when the Indians hauled her away? I found a 1984 article by Glenda Riley entitled “Frontierswomen’s Changing View of Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West,” that provides some insight.

    Riley says, “Journalists and novelists fed the anti-Indian prejudices of their reading publics with fictionalized accounts of brutal and primitive savages who preyed especially on women. When women’s accounts were published they were usually ‘penny dreadfuls’ or narratives of captivity that further inflamed hatred of Indians.”

    In their accounts, George and Emma Cowan don’t dwell on their feelings toward Indians, but they were creatures of their times so the insights Mardock and Riley provide must apply to them. I’ll use those insights as I scrutinize the Cowans’ accounts and write about their adventures. Encounters in Yellowstone will be a better book because I took the time to dig into these things.  Of course, I will do more research.

  • Outline Complete for Encounters in Yellowstone 1877

    I have completed a major milestone for my next book, Encounters in Yellowstone 1877. I finished an outline. That was a complicated task because I’m writing about a myriad of overlapping events and disparate (often desperate) people.

    First, there are the Nez Perce, who decide to flee their homeland in Idaho and Washington State and make a new life in the buffalo country of Montana. After the army’s predawn attack on their sleeping camp on the banks of the Big Hole River, the Indians fragment. The Chiefs try to avoid whites while leading the main group, but they lose control over small bands of young men who spread out to seek revenge. These young warriors attack settlers along the Montana-Idaho border and tourists in Yellowstone National Park.

    Like a nuclear chain reaction, each attack breaks up a group of people yielding several dramatic stories. For example, when a young warrior named Yellow Wolf and his companions attack a tourist party near the lower geyser basin, they capture a young woman, shoot her husband in the head and leave him for dead, and send several other tourists fleeing into the forrest. This one event yields Emma Cowan’s chilling tales of her captivity and quest for help after being released in the wilderness; George Cowan’s story of regaining consciousness to find himself wounded and alone, and the Cowan’s companions’ efforts to hide, flee and find help. Meanwhile, army units converge on Yellowstone Park from several directions, trying to find and subdue the elusive Nez Perce.

    I’ve organized these events into 20 chapters that chronicle events beginning in 1805 when the Nez Perce befriend several starving men from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and ending 130 years later with publication of a book entitled Adventures in Geyserland. Doubtless I’ll make changes as my research proceeds. I’ll need to merge some chapters, split others and rearrange things. But I have an outline that organizes a complicated human drama into a coherent narrative. For now, I’m happy with that.

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