The Sedgley Place

The Sedgley Place is housed in a Stately Federal home built in 1786. Offering multiple dining rooms for all occasions.

ernment to open the Oregon valley of the Nez Perces Indians to white settlement in 1875. Howard knew and understood the Indians of the West. As a matter of fact, he was responsible for persuading Cochise, the great Apache war leader, to stop fighting. “Possibly Congress can be induced to let these really peaceable Indians have this poor valley for their own,” Howard had continued. However, Congress was not to change its mind. Two years later Oliver Otis Howard would experience firsthand just how great a mistake the government had made when he would be ordered to direct the war against some of the finest guerrilla fighters the world has ever seen.

That Leeds native Oliver Otis How- ard, who had once considered entering the ministry for his life’s work and was known as a champion of the rights of minorities and the poor and dispossessed, was the commanding General of United States forces in what General William Tecumseh Sherman called “one of the most extraordinary Indian wars of which there is any record” is truly ironic. By the time the four-month war with the Nez Perces, which covered more than seventeen hundred miles, was over, the kind general, who had participated in the horrors of bloody fighting from Antietam to Gettysburg because he was opposed to slavery, would be responsible for overseeing the deaths of over half of one of the most unique and cultured of Native

American tribes.

Oliver Otis Howard was born in Leeds on November 8, 1830. He grew up on the family farm helping his older brother Charles, who would also become a general in the Civil War, caring for the family’s chickens and livestock. One of Howard’s first playmates was a free, destitute black youth named William Johnson. Oliver’s father had befriended this young African-American on a trip to New York and brought him to Leeds in hopes of providing him with a better life. It was his friendship with William Johnson that would in part make Howard a champion of the disadvantaged later in life. After finishing grade school in Leeds, Howard attended North Yarmouth Academy in Yarmouth. North Yarmouth Academy was a boarding school that prepared students for Bowdoin College. Howard graduated from Bowdoin in 1850 and then enrolled at West Point which was then under the superintendency of Robert E. Lee. Graduating fourth in the class of 1854, Howard returned to Maine on leave and married Elizabeth Waite, his childhood sweetheart. Lieutenant and Mrs. Howard then moved to Florida where Howard began active duty on his first military post. Here he witnessed the horrible conditions the few survivors of the Seminole War were subjected to. It was an experience that further added to his sympathies for the oppressed. Because of his academic talents, Howard was soon posted at West Point as a mathematics instructor. It was during this period that he began to develop the deep religious sense that would serve as his guide throughout his life. Whenever Howard returned to the family farm in Leeds he took the opportunity to be a lay preacher in the local church and, in fact, was considering resigning from the army to become a minister when the Civil War broke out.

Lieutenant Howard had expected to be posted with a company fighting at the front in the Civil War, but West Point wanted him to continue teaching. Feeling that he would be more valuable in what he saw as a fight to end slavery, (cont. on page 28

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(cont. from page 27)

Howard left the army and returned to Maine where he was appointed Colonel of the Third Maine Infantry, Maine Volunteers. On September 3, 1861 he was promoted to Brigadier-General and given command of a battalion. On November 29, 1862 he was promoted to brigade command as a Volunteer Major-General. By 1864 he was back in the regular army as a Major-General.

Oliver Otis Howard took part in some of the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War. Besides Antietam, he was at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, where he found himself fighting his former West Point commander Robert E. Lee. At Gettysburg he was shot twice in his right arm but fought on, refusing to leave the field. If he had had the arm treated immediately it might have been saved, but by the time he got to a doctor it was in a hopeless condition and had to be amputated. After three months of rest back in Leeds, where he again took up lay preaching, General Howard was back on active duty. In 1893 General Howard was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery under fire when he was wounded.

Perhaps Howard’s greatest work was as head of the Freedman’s Bureau which was set up in 1865 to aid former slaves and poor whites and to be responsible for abandoned lands in the South. Under General Howard’s direction, the Freedman’s Bureau, which was run by the U.S. Army, distributed some twenty-one million meals to African-Americans and dispossessed whites. About five hundred thousand people received direct medical aid. The greatest contribution of the Bureau, however, was in the field of education. By 1870 over four thousand free schools had been established for African-Americans and over two hundred and fifty thousand pupils had received some degree of education. In addition, several well-known colleges such as Fisk, Morehouse, and Howard University were established. The latter, which General Howard served as president, was named in his honor. Howard even took a personal interest in helping dispossessed African-Americans. In 1865 he saw to the uniting of former slave Washington Kemp with his wife and children, then saw to it that the family was settled on a farm in Leeds. This was the man who was called upon by his government to wreak havoc upon one of the most advanced and civilized of America’s Indian tribes.

From 1805 when they met their first whites in the persons of the Lewis and Clark Expedition until 1877, the Nez Perces maintained peaceful relations with the ever-increasing numbers of white settlers in their Wallowa Valley. They were famed for the horses they bred in their lush meadows and mountain-protected canyons — horses with large white spots which were the forebears of today’s Appaloosas. They were also a people known for valuing bravery and honor, and above all, for seeing their land as a sacred charge granted them by the Great Spirit. These were the people who in 1877 General Oliver Otis Howard was ordered to move from their homes in Oregon to a reservation in Idaho so that whites would have unrestricted access to their lands. When the saddened Howard told the Nez Perces they had to leave in thirty days, he warned them, “If you let the time run over one day, the soldiers will be there to drive you on the reservation.” The Nez Perces were not to heed the warning, however. Instead of going to the reservation, seven hundred and fifty of them, two thirds of whom were women and children, led by the great Nez Perces statesman and spiritual leader Chief Joseph, and two thousand horses, began the incredible running fight that would lead from Oregon through Idaho and Wyoming before ending in snow and bitter cold in northern Montana.

At the beginning of the flight, General Howard, with his experience in the Civil War, commented that “we will make short work” of the Nez Perces. He was to be proven very wrong.

The first battle between the army and the Nez Perces occurred just across the Snake River in Idaho. On June 17, 1877 Chief Joseph, still hoping to avoid bloodshed, sent a treaty party bearing a white flag to the army. However, perhaps due to the recent defeat of Custer at the Little Big Horn, an army patrol fired on them. The Nez Perces responded by killing thirty soldiers. There were no Nez Perces casualties.

On July 11 Howard struck the Nez Perces at their camp on the Clearwater River with five hundred artillery-supported cavalry troops. Moving with extreme order the Indians retreated, suffering only four casualties, and fled with all their possessions and horses. From this time on the Nez Perces called Howard “General Day After Tomorrow” because he always seemed that far behind them. This was not a reflection on Howard but rather a tribute to the Nez Perces’ mountain-bred horses which were far superior to United States Cavalry mounts.

The next day after the surprise attack at the Clearwater, the Nez Perces used a surprise of their own. They dug in — a tactic seldom used by Indians. Then they proceeded to encircle the army troops. However, they were not able to maintain the siege against the better-equipped United States Army forces and were forced to withdraw.

On August 8th the army again caught up with the Nez Perces. This time in Wyoming. In a surprise dawn attack, eighty Indians were killed. However, the Nez Perces were able (cont. on page 30)

(cont. from page 29) to repel the much larger force of better-armed soldiers, and fighting continued on into the next day as the expert marksmanship of the Indians pinned down Howard’s veteran troops. Of the eighty Indians killed, fifty were women and children. General Howard was appalled at this and was later to write and lecture on the government’s “great mistake,” using his personal observations from these days.

The next encounter was on August 20th just outside of Yellowstone National Park where twenty-seven Nez Perces doubled back and stampeded Howard’s horses and mules. Then on September 13th a small band of Nez Perces sharpshooters held four hundred soldiers at a narrow canyon so that the women and children were able to escape what the Indians were now sure was their intended annihilation by the United States Army. Chief Joseph, realizing the relentless nature of his foe, had now decided to flee to Canada and join Sitting Bull, who had fled there after Little Big Horn. For most of these, however, this was not to be.

On September 23rd, just a few miles from the Canadian border, the Nez Perces, believing themselves finally safe as General Howard was far behind, were attacked by a force of four hundred soldiers under the command of Colonel Nelson Miles. The fighting lasted through five bitter cold, snowy days until General Howard arrived. With this, Chief Joseph gave up, uttering his famous words, “I shall fight no more forever.” Joseph surrendered eighty-seven men, three hundred and thirty-one women and children, and fifteen hundred horses. A small group of Nez Perces was able to escape across the border into Canada.

Part of the surrender terms negotiated by General Howard promised that the Nez Perces would return to the res- ervation in Idaho. However, officials in Washington countermanded them and the Indians were sent to Oklahoma. Howard apologized, but the damage was done. In Oklahoma, many of the mountain-bred Nez Perces died of malaria and from pining for their beautiful lost Wallowa Valley.

On his next visit to Leeds, General Howard attended the local fall agricultural fair. It was a much different scene from that of Montana on the bitter cold September day when the Nez Perces finally met defeat. It was warm with the trees just beginning to change. Children ran everywhere with their anxious mothers in close attendance. At one tent there was a long line of people waiting to see a minstrel show. The sign at the tent door read “The Kemp Family From the Old Sunny South.” Washington Kemp and his family, who General Howard had united and settled in Leeds, had found their place in the community.

Oliver Otis Howard retired from the army in 1894. He divided his time between the family homestead in Leeds and a home in Burlington, Vermont. He spent much of his final years writing and lecturing on his experiences. The general and humanitarian died in Burlington on October 26, 1909, a man of duty and honor.