Jones' Run For Life

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, July 1878

James Jones was a miner working a claim on a tributary of Rock Creek in what is now Granite County when the shooting started in July of 1878. He was not a soldier, not a scout, not a man whose profession required him to think about tactics or terrain under fire. He was a man with a pick and a pan and a modest hope that the ground beneath his feet contained enough silver to make the summer's work worthwhile. What the ground contained, on that particular morning, was a band of Nez Perce warriors moving south through the mountains, and the distinction between what Jones had expected and what he found is the whole of the story.

The band that crossed Granite County in July 1878 was not the same group that Chief Joseph had led on the famous flight of the previous year. Joseph had surrendered on October 5, 1877, in the Bear Paw Mountains, forty miles from the Canadian border, after a pursuit of 1,170 miles that had lasted four months and involved eleven major engagements with the United States Army. His surrender speech, as recorded by Lieutenant Charles Wood, ended with the words "I will fight no more forever," and it is one of the most quoted sentences in the history of the American West. But not all of the Nez Perce had surrendered with Joseph. A portion of the band, led by White Bird, had broken through the Army's lines at the Bear Paw and crossed into Canada, where they joined Sitting Bull's Lakota in exile.

The 1878 crossing was a return movement. Some of those who had escaped to Canada were making their way back south through Montana, moving through the mountains to avoid the Army posts and the settled valleys. They were not at war in the formal sense. They were traveling. But they were armed, they were in hostile territory as the Americans defined it, and they were not inclined to leave witnesses behind them. The Army, for its part, was still looking for Nez Perce who had not surrendered, and any band of armed warriors moving through Montana in the summer of 1878 was going to be treated as a threat regardless of their intentions.

The mining camp on the Rock Creek tributary had three men in it when the warriors arrived. Two of them did not survive the encounter. The third was James Jones, and Jones ran.

He ran uphill, which was the right decision. The terrain above the creek was broken and steep, the kind of ground where a man who knew where he was going had an advantage over men who did not. Jones knew where he was going: he was going to Mt. Emerine, which rose above the drainage to the east, and from Mt. Emerine he could descend into the Flint Creek Valley and reach Philipsburg. The distance was approximately twenty-five miles. He was wounded. He made it.

The pursuit, if there was a sustained pursuit, did not catch him. Whether the warriors decided he was not worth the effort, or whether the terrain defeated them, or whether Jones simply moved faster than anyone expected a wounded man to move, is not recorded. What is recorded is that he arrived in Philipsburg and warned the town, and that the town took the warning seriously enough to remember it, and that Jones was known as "Nez Perce" Jones from that day until his death in 1926 at the age of eighty-two.

He lived forty-eight years with that name. He was approximately thirty years old when he made the run, which means he spent more than half his life as the man who had outrun the Nez Perce on Mt. Emerine. The name was not a slur and it was not a joke. It was a record. In the vernacular of the frontier, a man's nickname was his biography compressed to a word or two, and "Nez Perce" Jones meant: this is the man who was there, who ran, who survived, who came back and told us.

What he told the town is not recorded in detail. The practical content of the warning was straightforward: there are armed Nez Perce in the mountains, they have killed two men at the Rock Creek camp, and they are moving south. Philipsburg in 1878 was not a large town. The silver boom that would produce the masonry buildings on Broadway was still several years in the future. The town was a collection of wooden structures housing a few hundred people who were there because of the silver deposits, and a warning of this kind would have produced the same response in any such town: men would have armed themselves, women and children would have been moved to the most defensible buildings, and riders would have been sent to the nearest Army post.

The Army post in question was Fort Missoula, established in 1877 partly in response to the Nez Perce War. The fort was about sixty miles north of Philipsburg by the most direct route, and a rider carrying the news would have reached it within a day. Whether the Army responded and what they found is not recorded in the marker or in the local histories that have been consulted. The warriors, if they continued south, would have crossed into the Bitterroot Valley and eventually into Idaho, which is where most of the returning Nez Perce were trying to go.

The sculptor Benge Elliott of San Marcos, Texas, made the marker that stands near the site today, erected by the Granite County Historical Society. The marker records the facts with the economy that facts deserve: three miners attacked, two killed, one escaped wounded, climbed the mountain, walked twenty-five miles, warned the town. It does not record what Jones thought about during those twenty-five miles, or what he said when he arrived, or whether he went back to mining after the summer was over. The historical record is silent on these points, as it is silent on most of what makes a life.

What it does record is the route. The mountain is still there. The creek is still there. The distance from the drainage to Philipsburg is still twenty-five miles, and the terrain is still broken and steep, and a man walking it today in good health and dry weather would find it a serious undertaking. James Jones walked it wounded, in July, after watching two men die, and he walked it fast enough that no one caught him.

He died in 1926. He was eighty-two years old. He had been "Nez Perce" Jones for forty-eight years, which is longer than most men's entire careers. The mountain he climbed is called Mt. Emerine. The town he warned is still there.

See also

• Jones' Run For Life at Philipsburg, Granite County (Granite County Historical Society, erected 2009)
• Philipsburg at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)
• Two Moons at Busby, Big Horn County (Montana Historical Society)
• Retreat Crossing at Crow Agency, Big Horn County (Montana Historical Society)