M. Mark Miller, Author

Tag: Yellowstone Park

  • A Tale: Captured by Indians by Emma Cowan—1877

    Cowan Party
    The Cowans visiting the site of their capture in 1901.

    Emma Cowan and her family visited Yellowstone National Park in 1877—the year the U.S. Army pursued the Nez Perce Indians there. The Nez Perce generally had amicable relations with whites, but in what has become a familiar story, the peace was shattered when gold was discovered on their land. Some Nez Perce acquiesced to government demands that they move to a tiny reservation, but others decided to flee their homeland instead.

    The Army sent soldiers to subdue the defiant Nez Perce, but the Indians defeated them several times. In the most dramatic battle, the Army made a pre-dawn attack on a sleeping Nez Perce camp on the banks the Big Hole River in southwest Montana. The Indians rallied, drove back their attackers, then retreated leaving their equipment, teepees, and at least 89 dead—most of them women and children.

    After the battle, they fled though Yellowstone Park where they captured Emma’s party.  Here’s her account of what happened later.

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    Every Indian carried a splendid gun, with belts full of cartridges. As the morning sunshine glinted on the polished surface of the gun barrels, a regiment of soldiers could have not looked more formidable. The Indians pretended all the while to be our very good friends, saying that if they should let us go, bad Indians, as they termed them, would kill us.

    Suddenly, without warning, shots rang out. Two Indians came dashing down the trail in front of us. My husband was getting off his horse. I wondered what the reason. I soon knew, for he fell as soon as he reached the ground—fell heading downhill. Shots followed and Indian yells, and all was confusion. In less time than it takes to tell it, I was off my horse and by my husband’s side….

    I heard my sister’s screams and called to her. She came and crouched by me, as I knelt by his side. I saw he was wounded in the leg above the knee, and by the way the blood spurted out I feared an artery had been severed. He asked for water. I dared not leave him to get it.

    I think we both glanced up the hill at the same moment, for he said, “Keep quiet. It won’t last long.” That thought had flashed through my mind also. Every gun in the whole party of Indians was leveled at us three. I shall never forget the picture, which left an impression that years cannot efface. The holes in those gun barrels looked as big as saucers.

    I gave it only a glance, for my attention was drawn to something near at hand. A pressure on my shoulder was drawing me away from my husband. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw an Indian with an immense navy pistol trying to get a shot at my husband’s head. Wrenching my arm from his grasp, I leaned over my husband, only to be roughly drawn aside. Another Indian stepped up, a pistol shot rang out, my husband’s head fell back, and a red stream trickled down his face from beneath his hat. The warm sunshine, the smell of blood, the horror of it all, a faint remembrance of seeing rocks thrown at his head, my sister’s screams, a faint sick feeling, and all was blank.

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    Two days later the Indians released Emma, her sister, Ida, and her brother, Frank. They made their way to Mammoth Hot Springs where they found help. Emma’s husband, George, survived the shooting. He carried the slug that an Army surgeon dug out of his head as a watch fob for the rest of his life.

    While making their way through the Yellowstone wilderness, the Nez Perce discovered they were not welcome with their old friends, the Crow, who had made accommodations with the whites. The Nez Perce decided to head north to join Sitting Bull and his Sioux in Canada. In October the starving and exhausted remnants of the band surrendered to the Army just 40 miles from the Canadian border.

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    — You can read Emma’s complete story in my book, Adventures In Yellowstone.

    — You might also be interested in:

    — Photo, Pioneer Museum of Bozeman.

  • An Event: Off to a Family Reunion

    On Saturday, I’m going to the Page-Redfield family reunion in Twin Bridges. I was invited to the event by—let’s see—my second cousin once removed. Something like that; I never did get the hang of calculating kinship. I don’t expect to see any relatives much closer than a third cousin. Sometime a couple of generations back branches of the family drifted apart and I’m pretty sure my brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, etc, won’t be there. But, there could be dozens of shirttail relatives. My family has had nearly a hundred and fifty years of being fruitful and multiplying in Montana.

    The first of my relatives to arrive in Montana Territory was an 11-year-old girl named Mary Christianson. In her application for membership in the Montana Historical Society, Mary said she arrived in Montana in 1864 by the Bridger Cutoff. I imagine Mary walking beside a covered wagon in a train led by the famous mountain man Jim Bridger. Bridger’s wagon train emerged from the canyon that bears his name early in July 1864. From the mouth of the canyon, Mary could have looked past the point where three rivers run together to form the Missouri to the Tobacco Root Mountains 70 miles to the west. Mary’s odyssey from her birthplace in Germany, across the Atlantic and then across America was almost over. Mary would spend the rest of her life west of the Tobacco Roots.

    While Mary contemplated her new life in gold-rush Montana, her future husband, James Madison Page, languished in the notorious Civil War prison at Andersonville where union soldiers died by the thousands of starvation and disease. (Andersonville Prison has been burned into the American consciousness as a symbol of inhumanity, but Page said he never saw  any intentional cruelty there. In fact, in 1908 Page published a book that said the charges against Major Henry Wirtz, who was hanged for murders he allegedly committed at Andersonville, were trumped up.)

    Jim Page was released from Andersonville in a prisoner exchange and returned home to Michigan. After recovering from his ordeal and attending business college, Jim decided to move to Montana in 1866. Family lore says he wanted to rejoin the army so he could fight under his hero, General George Armstrong Custer, but his mother talked him out of it.

    Jim got a job as a teamster on one of the wagon trains hauling supplies to the gold fields. When he arrived in Montana, he tried his hand at prospecting, but, like many gold rushers, he soon turned to other ventures. He established his Excelsior Ranch near Twin Bridges and began enticing his siblings to join him. His brother, Robert Wallace Page, came to Montana with his family by steamboat up the Missouri in 1879. Low water stopped the boat at Cow Island, but the family had planned to come overland the remaining distance anyway. A sister, Elmira Utley, came with her family a year later on an “immigrant train” operated by the Utah and Northern Railroad. The track ended at Lima, Montana, then, so the Utleys had to continue by horse and wagon from there to Twin Bridges.

    My Great Great Grandfather Rodney Page and his widowed sister, Elvira Stephens, were the last to arrive, coming in 1882. By then the track reached as far as Dillon. Actually, Grandpa Rodney went ahead leaving  his wife and sister to manage the move while he rushed ahead to join his brother, Jim, on a surveying expedition to Yellowstone Park. That was the beginning of the Page brothers land survey company, which operated for nearly 40 years. Jim Page said the company surveyed in every county in Montana (probably meaning the original territorial counties).

    Descendants of the Pages still tell stories about the 1882 Yellowstone trip. Rodney hired two young assistants named Fred Mercer and Harry Redfield. Mercer and Redfield become close friends and loved playing practical jokes on each other. They used to steal each other’s red flannel underwear and toss it into Old Faithful tinting the next eruption pink—so the story goes. With nearly 4,000 gallons in the typical eruption of Old Faithful, it’s doubtful that one pair of flannels would dye it, but perhaps the prank involved a smaller geyser.

    Rodney must have liked Mercer and Redfield well enough. When the survey was done, they followed him home and married his daughters. Harry Redfield married Elvira Page and they had eleven children, so their descendants doubtless will dominate the family reunion. Fred Mercer married Eva Page and they had four children. I descend from the Mercer line.

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  • A Tale: Shooting Jake Smith’s Hat by N.P. Langford

    Jake Smith

    One of the members of the famous Washburn Expedition that explored  the uppper Yellowstone in 1870, a jocular man named Jake Smith, was always ready to gamble. Unfortunately, he lost all his money in a card game the night before the trip started. But Jake came up with a way to replenish his stake. N.P. Langford tells the story.

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    Descending the range to the east, we reached Trail creek, a tributary of the Yellowstone about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, where we are now camped for the night. We are now fairly launched upon our expedition without the possibility of obtaining outside assistance in case we need it. Our safety will depend upon our vigilance. We are all well armed with long range repeating rifles and needle guns, though there are but few of our party who are experts at off-hand shooting with a revolver.

    In the course of our discussion Jake Smith expressed his doubt whether any member of our party is sufficiently skilled in the use of the revolver to hit an Indian at even a close range. He offered to put the matter to a test by setting up his hat at a distance of twenty yards for the boys to shoot at with their revolvers, without a rest, at twenty-five cents a shot.

    Several members of our party blazed away with indifferent success—with the result that Jake was adding to his exchequer without damage to his hat. I could not resist the inclination to quietly drop out of sight behind a clump of bushes. From my place of concealment I sent from my breech-loading Ballard repeating rifle four bullets in rapid succession, through the hat—badly riddling it.

    Jake inquired, “Whose revolver is it that makes that loud report?” He did not discover the true state of the case, but removed the target with the ready acknowledgment that there were members of our party whose aim with a revolver was more accurate than he had thought.

    ∞§∞

    — Excerpt Langford’s book, The Discovery of Yellowstone Park. in my book, Adventures in Yellowstone.

    — Photo, Yellowstone Digital Slide.

    — You can read a condensed version of Langford’s The Discovery of Yellowstone Park in my book, Adventures in Yellowstone.

    — To see more stories by this author, click on “Langford” under the “Categories” button to the left.

    — For more stories about the Washburn Expedition, click on “Washburn” under the “Categories” button to the left.

  • A Tale: Yellowstone’s First Car — 1902

    Henry G. Merry and his Winton

    Cars weren’t officially admitted to Yellowstone Park until 1915, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there before that. One story says that Henry G. Merry drove his Winton to Mammoth Hot Springs in 1902 to a dance at the National Hotel. He was caught—the story goes—but was allowed to drive out under cover of darkness. Here’s a more colorful version told by his son.

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    When the Winton car arrived it was the conversation piece of the time. The word reached the commandant at the fort, along with the information that the noise it made was terrifying to horses. Very wisely he issued an order prohibiting this machine and others like if from the confines of the Yellowstone Park. My father knew of this order, but thought he would pilot the car to the fort and talk things over with commandant. In the interim, two troopers had been stationed at the entrance to prevent any such violation of the commandant’s order.

    As related in father’s diary, on June 2nd, 1902, he and  my Mother took off. When the north entrance was reached, he opened up the speed to about 25 mph, and the troopers’ mounts acted up so that they could not block the passage. The machine was well on its way before they got their horses quieted down and started after the car—which was rapidly widening the distance between them.

    All went well as long as the road was level but that was not for long. As the grade became steeper—the speed was reduced—and soon the car came to a stop. The troopers arrived at a hard gallop.

    Fortunately, each one had a lariat and between the two horses they managed to pull the car to the commandant’s office and gave him a report of how things happened. He was quite pleasant and took time to explain to father, who already knew, that the noise of his conveyance posed a threat to the lives of all tourists who were visiting the park in horse-drawn vehicles. Then he became quite stern and reminded him that he was still under arrest and would have to pay a penalty to be released. When my father asked what the penalty would be, the officer very seriously replied, “You will have to take me for a ride in this contraption.” He got his ride and then assigned a detail to escort father to the gate.

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    —Photo and text from The Pioneer Museum, Bozeman, Montana.

    — You might also enjoy “Touring Yellowstone Legally by Car — 1916.”