Big Hole National Battlefield Administrative History

Chapter One:
The Battlefield after the Battle

When dawn came on August 11, Gibbon's force was in possession of the field. But he could hardly claim victory. His losses in the Battle of the Big Hole were heavy: 29 dead and 40 wounded. The volunteers had sustained a 30 percent casualty rate, the officers 50 percent. Although two volunteers reported the whereabouts of the fleeing Nez Perce cavalcade – distinguished by the dust cloud rising on the west edge of the valley about 30 miles to the south – Gibbon's force was in no shape to pursue. [22]

Most of the non-Indian dead lay among the willows where the initial attack had occurred or at the Point of Timber, to be known henceforth as the "Siege Area." Most of the wounded lay in the rifle pits. When General Howard arrived with his advance party of cavalry about 10:00 a.m. on the 11th, he found the place resembling a hospital guard:

So many wounded; nearly half lying cheerful, though not able to move; many white bandages about the head and face; some arms in slings; there were roughly constructed shelters from the heat of an unrelenting August sun. [23]

Two doctors with Howard's command provided medical care until more help arrived. On August 13, a force of thirty-five volunteers, two doctors, and four wagons arrived from Butte. Another party of 60 volunteers, three doctors, and twenty wagons arrived from Helena. These relief parties also brought ambulances and tents. Eventually the wounded men were transported to St. Joseph's Hospital in Deer Lodge. [24]

While doctors attended the wounded, the able-bodied soldiers and volunteers buried their fallen comrades. In general, the volunteers and the soldiers each buried their own. Aubrey Haines, an historian with the National Park Service who served on the Big Hole staff in the 1960s, made a close study of both the physical and documentary evidence concerning the location of these burials. Haines concludes that the bodies were probably buried near where they lay rather than gathered together in a common grave. He quotes a statement by Cpl. Charles W. Loynes that the dead "were buried as best we could at that time." Haines notes the lack of digging tools and the difficulty of transporting bodies across the sloughs. [25]

G. O. Shields, author of The Battle of the Big Hole (1889), described the initial burials as somewhat more dignified:

Captain [Richard] Comba was sent out on the morning of the 11th with a party of men to bury the dead soldiers and citizens, all of whom were found, recognized, and decently interred. Rude head boards, obtained by breaking up cracker boxes, were placed at the heads of the graves, on which were written, or carved, the name, company, and regiment of the citizen whose grave each marked. [26]

Even if Shields' account was colored by sentimentality, it still lends support to the theory that the soldiers were buried about where they lay.

No one could report with certainty how many Nez Perce were killed in the Battle of the Big Hole. Colonel Gibbon reported that his burial detail counted 83 dead Nez Perce at the battlefield plus 6 more who died from their wounds and were found in a ravine some distance from the battlefield. [27] Like the soldiers, the Nez Perce appear to have buried most of their dead near where they lay. A number of bodies were placed along the river banks where the earth could be caved in over them. Others were buried in camas ovens – pits that the Nez Perce had dug for roasting camas. Gibbon's burial detail made some effort to deepen these graves but without much success. In the days following the battle General Howard's Bannock scouts returned to the site, broke into these shallow graves, and desecrated the remains of their erstwhile enemies. White souvenir hunters defiled the Nez Perce burials as well. [28]

The many corpses were not the only sign of battle. A number of the Nez Perce's horses lay dead and bloating in the summer sun. The battlefield was littered with equipment, clothing, blankets, and spent cartridges. There were several tepees still standing in the Encampment Area, stripped of their skin covers, and dozens of tepee poles lay scattered about where the Nez Perce women had peeled them the day before the battle. [29] Around the Siege Area, the lodgepole pines showed numerous abrasions where flying bullets had grazed the bark or embedded themselves in the trunks of these trees. The rifle pits, which the men had gouged out of the soil in desperate haste on August 9, probably still smelled of newly turned earth in the days after the battle. These impressions in the trees and earth would soon dull with exposure to rain and sun, but in muted form they would last for decades.

General Howard waited for the arrival of the rest of his command on August 12, and with the addition of 50 men from Gibbon's command he resumed his pursuit of the Nez Perce on August 13. Gibbon, meanwhile, dismissed the volunteers and led the remainder of his force, including the wounded, to Deer Lodge. [30] Three days after the battle the place was already deserted.

In the following weeks, many people from the Bitterroot Valley and elsewhere visited the battlefield to satisfy their curiosity or collect souvenirs. A circuit-riding Methodist minister, Rev. W. W. Van Orsdale, passed by the battlefield in mid-September en route from Bannack to the Bitterroot Valley. He reported the grim news that bears and other wild animals had dug up a number of the human remains and dragged them from their graves. As a result, a party of Bitterroot settlers was organized to retrieve the bodies of the volunteers for reburial in cemeteries in the Bitterroot Valley, and a detail of soldiers from Fort Missoula was dispatched to rebury the soldiers' remains at the battlefield. The officer in charge of the latter, Lt. J. T. Van Orsdale, 7th Infantry, had been in the fight. [31]

Van Orsdale's report was unusually vague regarding locations of the soldiers' graves. [32] Since it is the only first-hand account of where the bodies were laid to rest it is quoted here in full:

I have the honor to report that in compliance with Post Order No. 54, dated Hdqrs. Post Near Missoula, M.T., Sept. 19, 1877, I left said Post with party of 8 enlisted on the morning of the 20th and proceeded via Deer Lodge to the Battlefield of the Big Hole for the purpose of re-burying the dead, etc. I found that some fourteen (14) including Capt. [William] Logan and Lieut. Bradley had been disinterred; the officers had been scalped showing that Indians as well as wolves and other animals had been at work at the dead. I reburied the same with the exception of Capt. Logan whose remains I brought to this place and deposited in the Cemetery for the time being. I examined the Field thoroughly with a view of finding out if possible the numbers of Indians killed and determined the presence of more than eighty (80) scattered from a point one mile below where the lower end of their Camp rested at time of battle to a point opposite the rifle pits constructed by troops, a total distance of nearly 1-1/2 miles. Said number included those visible or partially so.

Haines suggests that Van Orsdale placed all of the soldiers' remains in a common grave on the edge of the bluff below the point where the granite soldiers' monument would be situated six years later. He cites as evidence Colonel Gibbon's poem of the battle, in which he writes,

There is the very spot where [William] English fell,
Close by the spot where our dead soldiers sleep. [33]

Moreover, this would have been standard military practice. (Soldiers' remains were placed in common graves after the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 and after the Battle of the Bears' Paw in 1877.)

There is some evidence to the contrary, however. Thomas C. "Bunch" Sherrill, a Bitterroot volunteer, later served as caretaker of the battlefield and placed a number of interpretive signs around the site. A number of Sherrill's interpretive signs described not only where soldiers and Nez Perce were killed or wounded, but also where the dead were buried. "Three soldiers burried [sic] here one shot thru the head, names unknown," stated one sign. "Another soldier burried [sic] here with [Sergeant Edward] Page," read another. [34]

Sherrill may have been ignorant of the soldier reburials; however, his description is corroborated by mountain man Andrew Garcia's description in the posthumously published Montana classic, Tough Trip Through Paradise (1967). Garcia visited the battlefield in 1878 at the behest of his young Nez Perce bride, In-who-lise, who had lost her father and sister and was herself wounded in the battle. Although Garcia wrote his account more than fifty years later – after visiting the battlefield a second time in 1930 when Sherrill's interpretive signs might have "refreshed" his memory – his description nonetheless casts doubt on the supposition that the soldiers were reburied in a common grave:

We tried to find the grave of In-who-lise's sister, Lucy, but our search was in vain. The sight was awful to see. Human bones were scattered around as though they had never been buried. Still, it looked as if the soldiers had been buried where they fell and their graves were in fair condition. [35]

Another document written in 1910 further clouds the issue of where the soldiers' bodies lie. U.S. Army Quartermaster General J. B. Alshire was asked how much area should be reserved for the War Department to protect the national monument. He replied as follows:

The only interments ever made on this site were of those who were killed in the battle of 1877. There are no marked grave sites now, and according to the best information obtainable it seems that all these bodies have since been removed. All that there is there is a monument erected in 1883 by authority of the Secretary of War, around which a protective steel fence was erected in 1909. It is thought that all that is necessary is to have sufficient ground set apart for the protection of this monument. [36]

A search of the Army Quartermaster's records at the National Archives failed to disclose what information, if any, formed the basis of Alshire's remarks. In any case, Alshire's statement appears to have resolved any doubts about how the battlefield ought to be memorialized. The transformation of this site from burial ground to national monument is the subject of the next chapter. [37]