By: Linda Ballou "Behavior is the reflection in which everyone shows their image." These are the words on the chalkboard behind the coffee counter at Big Hole Crossing a down-home diner in Wisdom, Montana. I contemplated this thought over juicy prime rib, the Saturday night special, as suntanned ranchers dressed in rawhide boots, cowboy jeans and wide brimmed hats sauntered into the café. Big Hole at 6400 feet elevation is the highest, widest and emptiest of the major basins in Montana. Dubbed "The Valley of 10,000 haystacks" it is one of the last bastions of the rural old west and remains home to some of the biggest spreads in the state. Harsh winters keep the Big Hole from becoming overgrown with anything but wildflowers. Most of the people who call this basin, framed in snow-streaked mountains, home are generational landowners who have learned to live lean so their cattle can get fat in lush summer pastures. My visit to these parts stemmed from my curiosity about the Big Hole National Battlefield, a memorial to the non-treaty Nez Perce Indians, just twelve miles west of Wisdom. Gray clouds smothered the basin the morning I set out for the battlefield on the 4th of July. The two-lane highway through expansive pastures, divided by buck-and-rail fences, was deserted. I cruised slowly scouting for wildlife. I spotted some white bottoms in the distance. About twenty antelope lay sleeping in the morning gloom. A stag saw me watching him through my binoculars and signaled his charges to move away from me. I looked into the pasture directly opposite and spied six whooping cranes stabbing the ground for grubs. One fanned his five-foot wings and did a bit of a jig for me. A nearby meadowlark stretched his yellow throat in song and my heart went flying with his to the heavens. Once at the Big Hole monument, I watched the video created by the park service to allow those who come this way to know what happened here on August 9, 1877. General Howard and Colonel Gibbons of the 7th U.S. Infantry, enforcing the young US government's demands that all Nez Perce Indians move to a reservation a fraction the size of their traditional homeland, had chased the Nez Perce for six weeks. They came here to rest in the Big Hole, a basin that once was a traditional a hunting ground for indigenous people. Howard led 184 men that included a band of local volunteers, who didn't cotton to sharing their pastures with the herd of 2,000 horses that the Nez Perce brought with them swooped down upon the sleeping village of about 800 people in the pre-dawn light. The soldiers were told to aim low so that they could kill women and children in the 89 tipis beside the Big Hole River. The enraged Nez Perce warriors managed to |
capture the howitzer gun and 2,000 rounds of ammunition the military brought to the siege site. They dismantled the canon, and turned the weapons of dead soldiers upon the rest of the men who came to destroy their village. This was one of the few battles won by the Nez Perce who fled from U.S. forces for a total of 1200 hundred miles trying to reach safety in Canada. In the end their leader, valiant Chief Joseph, was forced to surrender to General Howard and his tribe was herded to a reservation. I walked out to the village site where the bare poles of about twenty tipis remain standing in a tranquil meadow. I imagined the wails of women who watched the skulls of their newborns being smashed beneath of the boots of those who simply didn't want to share this valley with them. When the smoke from the burning buffalo hides that covered the frames of their tipis cleared, ninety members of the tribe had been killed mostly women, children and old people. Gibbons was wounded, and twenty-nine of the white men were dead. I came upon Chief Joseph's tipi where a deep sorrow settled upon me like the gray mist hugging the valley floor. The tired chiefs famous words kept playing in my head. "My heart is sick and I will fight no more, forever." Tears welled and I grieved for all those who have died or have been displaced in cruel acts of aggression to establish territorial supremacy. My thoughts went to today's headlines, the bodies of women and children I see being blown to bits on the news nightly; the recent beheading televised for the world to see. I knew that the human condition for all of our educated posturing has not changed. Our behavior reflects sophisticated savagery and wars continue around the globe. I tied my bandana, damp with tears, along with all the others that draped Chief Joseph's tipi. I stepped back from the sacred ground and spread my arms wide like an eagle in flight. Subtle energy pulsed into my upturned palms and I heard a voice in my head that told me to go in peace and to leave the burden I carried here upon the shoulders of the great man forced to swim against a current of change that eventually sucked him and his people under. On my walk back to my car the sun broke through the gray making the green world glisten. A mule deer with two speckled fawns jumped the sparkling Big Hole River stealing through a tall grass meadow spiked with lupine and walked directly toward me. She looked at me with tender eyes that held no fear as she paraded her babies, who sprang like they were on pogo sticks behind her. The sight of new life emerging from the Big Hole, spawned in the blood, bones and flesh of soldiers, civilian volunteers, women children and brave warriors filled the bruised, empty space in my own heart with lightness and the joy of being once more. |