Bear Paw Monument

By editor

Crow Agency, Big Horn County, Montana, 1881

The monument was made of granite and it listed names. That was what monuments did in 1881. The men who ordered it made had decided that the names were enough, that the names were the whole story, and so they cut them into the stone in neat columns: name, company, date, place. John E. Cleveland, Company A, September 30, 1877, Bear Paw Mountains. Lewis Kelly, Company A, same day, same place. Samuel McIntyre. William J. Randall. David E. Dawsey. The list went on.

The monument was erected at Fort Keogh, the cantonment on the Yellowstone that Colonel Nelson Miles had built in 1876 as a base for his winter campaigns against the Lakota and the Nez Perce. It was a practical place, Fort Keogh. It had been built to hold soldiers and horses and supplies, and it had served its purpose. By 1881 the campaigns were over. The Nez Perce had been defeated at Bear Paw in October 1877, and the Lakota had been pushed onto reservations, and the District of the Yellowstone had been, in the language of the monument's inscription, "cleared." The men who had done the clearing were dead or retired or posted elsewhere, and the fort was settling into the routine of peacetime garrison duty.

The inscription above the names read: "To the officers and soldiers killed, or who died of wounds received in action in the Territory of Montana, while clearing the District of the Yellowstone of hostile Indians." The word "hostile" was the word the Army used. It was a military classification, not a moral judgment, though the men who cut it into the stone may not have distinguished between the two. The Nez Perce had been classified as hostile in the spring of 1877 when General Oliver Howard issued his ultimatum requiring the non-treaty bands to report to the Lapwai Reservation within thirty days. The Wallowa band, led by Chief Joseph, had been living on land they considered their own under the treaty of 1855. They did not consider themselves hostile. They considered themselves home.

Captain Owen Hale of the 7th Cavalry died at Bear Paw on September 30, 1877, the first day of the siege. He was thirty-four years old. Second Lieutenant J. W. Biddle died the same day. First Sergeant George McDermott of Company A, First Sergeant Michael Martin of Company D, First Sergeant Otto Wilde of Company K -- the sergeants who held the companies together in the field -- died that morning on the slope above the Nez Perce camp. The Nez Perce had dug rifle pits in the night, and when Miles's cavalry charged at dawn, they rode into fire from positions they could not see.

The charge had been a disaster. Miles had expected the Nez Perce to scatter. They did not scatter. They had been fighting the Army since June, across more than a thousand miles of mountains and plains, and they had learned how to fight it. Yellow Wolf, a warrior who survived the battle, described the opening charge in terms that the monument does not record: "Outside the camp I had seen men killed. Soldiers ten, Indians ten. That was not so bad. But now, when I saw our remaining warriors gone, my heart grew choked and heavy... Children crying with cold, no fire. There could be no light. Everywhere the crying, the death wail."

The monument does not record the Nez Perce dead. It records only the Army dead, which is what monuments built by armies record. But the Nez Perce dead were there too, on the same ground, in the same cold. The battle lasted six days. The Nez Perce dug in and held their position while the temperature dropped and the snow came. They were forty miles from the Canadian border. They had been forty miles from the Canadian border when Miles arrived, and they were still forty miles from it when Joseph surrendered on October 5.

Sergeant Joseph Cable of the 5th Infantry died on October 15, 1877, ten days after Chief Joseph's surrender. He had been wounded in the fighting and did not recover. The monument notes that Cable received the Medal of Honor. The citation said he had "gallantly led a charge against a superior force of the enemy." He was twenty-three years old.

The monument stood at Fort Keogh for decades and eventually made its way to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, where it stands today among the markers and memorials on the ridge above the river. It is a different kind of memorial from the red granite markers that the Park Service erected in 1999 to mark where Lame White Man and Noisy Walking fell. Those markers name the Cheyenne dead. The granite monument from Fort Keogh names the Army dead. Both sets of names belong to the same days, the same ground, the same war. The stone does not resolve the question of who was right. It only records who died.

See also

• Bear Paw Monument at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument)
• 1984 Archeological Survey at Crow Agency, Big Horn County
• Cheyenne Warrior Markers at Crow Agency, Big Horn County