Cries from the Earth (6 page)

For a moment the soldier chief remained thoughtful, studying the old
tewat
's face before he spoke. “Your story is all fine and well, but you must understand that we are all subjects to those who are not here, those above us. You must accept that we are all children of a common government and must obey what that govern—”

Toohoolhoolzote did not wait for any more of the translation. Arching forward suddenly, he interrupted James Reuben the instant the translator interpreted the word
children.
“I am only one man's child! Surely I am no white man's child!”

Cut-Off Arm jerked back in surprise at the suddenness of the
tewat
's scathing reproach, looking as if he was on the verge of sputtering a response when Toohoolhoolzote pressed on.

“I have heard much of the bargain struck between you white men and the Treaty bands who gave away our land for all of us. But I want you to know that my father's bones are buried in this country and I cannot give it to you. Remember that I am no longer a child. I came from this land. Therefore the land does not belong to me.
I
belong to
it
—”

“Those of your people who did not sign the treaty are in the minority,” Cut-Off Arm interrupted the old chief's argument with an impatient wave of his one hand. “Those who did sign live peaceably on the reservation. Only your few bands are making for the trouble we now find ourselves in. Because the majority signed the treaty, your people are bound by that agreement too.”

Toohoolhoolzote shook his head violently, flecks of spittle crusted at the side of his mouth as he said, “You have no right to treat me as a child, trying to order me to come here or go there.
Tamalait
made the world as it is, just as He wanted it—without your people coming to change things for everyone else. The Creator made a small part of the world for us a long time ago, and so we have lived here ever since. Neither your government nor all your soldiers have any authority to declare that my people shall not live where the Creator placed us in the beginning of time.”

The soldier chief was flexing his one hand into a fist, his jaw jutted, neck flushing red again as he lunged a step toward Toohoolhoolzote—then brought himself up short. The rest of the chiefs clambered to their feet, immediately causing the soldiers and the other Shadows to stand. Behind their leaders, the warriors grew restless and the women murmured anxiously—

“It would be better for us to talk another day,” Joseph suggested, worried that the next foolish words would be the spark that could set off this explosive situation.

When Cut-Off Arm turned to him, the soldier chief's eyes were filled with the closest thing to appreciation Joseph had seen on the face of a Shadow.

“Yes, I agree, Joseph,” Cut-Off Arm said. “It is Friday. We will adjourn until Monday. These next two days will give your people time to reflect upon the grave choices they face. Two days to deliberate with careful thought on the welfare of your families, on their future.”

Chapter 3

May 4–6, 1877

But forty-six-year-old Brigadier General Oliver Otis Howard found himself far too worried by the bellicose display of that ugly old heathen to sit on his thumbs doing nothing while he awaited the resumption of peace talks come Monday, the seventh day of May.

After dark that Friday night, the fourth, this commander of the Military Department of the Columbia, headquartered at Portland, dispatched a courier to Fort Walla Walla with his orders for two companies of cavalry to embark for the Wallowa, where they would be in position when and if trouble erupted.

So if this old Civil War brigade commander, this veteran of the Apache wars in Arizona, knew anything … he knew trouble was on its way.

Everything that had gone before in his life had prepared Howard for this critical trial. If Otis, as he had been called since childhood, ever believed God was testing him before … then surely the Almighty had been doing nothing less than preparing him for this opportunity of a lifetime. The winding, bumpy road that had carried him here to this moment had been a journey that clearly prepared him for this day of redemption.

*   *   *

Born in the tiny farming village of Leeds along the Androscoggin River in the south of Maine on the eighth of November 1830—the same day his maternal grandfather turned sixty-two—Oliver Otis had been dutifully named by his mother for her father. Throughout his life he often spoke proudly of how his Howard ancestors reached Massachusetts from England in 1643, not migrating north to Leeds until 1802.

When he was five, his father returned from a trip down to the Hudson River Valley of New York State with a young Negro boy not much older than Otis. Over the next four years they became fast companions—working the farm and playing together—until it came time that his father returned Howard's young friend to that New York farm far away. Still, their fast friendship would indelibly inscribe Howard's future years.

There was winter schooling while the snows lay deep, a little more schooling when the fields were fallow. Every week on the Sabbath there was Scripture class and sermons, most family evenings spent reading by the lamp or listening to his father play the flute, as well as a grandfather with a strong and guiding hand who regaled Otis and his brothers with tales of the Revolutionary War. When Otis was ten his father died and Grandpa moved away to live with another son. The following year his mother remarried a man who would treat his stepsons with such kindness that Howard recalled those years as “a blessing to us all.”

After persevering at some of the hardest work of his life while preparing for the daunting entrance exams, he was admitted to the freshman class at Bowdoin College in September of 1846. “I seek not mere money,” he wrote home during his tenure at Bowdoin, “but a cultivated and enlightened mind.” And later, when some of his closest friends had abandoned college to return home for a “more practical life,” Otis would remind his mother that “a general education fits a man for any work.”

This opportunity to learn was not an opportunity he would let slip through his fingers. “I am strongly ambitious,” he wrote his mother. So it was that throughout his life, this powerful drive to succeed—an ingredient inscribing the character of those who aspired to leadership—would ultimately come to taint this thoughtful and moral man. While he did not drink, he did enjoy his pipe and tobacco, unsuccessfully trying twice to rid himself of the habit.

More than any thought of national politics of the time, the Mexican War, or the Wilmot Proviso, Otis was interested in Elizabeth Ann Waite, the young but serious fifteen-year-old cousin of his college roommate. It was Otis's deep love for Lizzie that eventually compelled him to give up his tobacco. By the time he was in his junior year, the two of them agreed to an engagement, planning on marriage after his graduation. But in June of his senior year, his uncle suggested Howard seek an appointment to West Point, although that would delay his marriage to Lizzie for another four years.

In the fall of 1850, Howard began his career in the United State Army as a cadet underclassman. How he missed his Lizzie in those early days, and grew extremely homesick, made “sore by the sharp drilling, and a little angry, from having my pride so often touched.” But by the next spring, when he began to feel more comfortable at the academy, Otis suffered some ostracism and ridicule because of his regular attendance of Bible classes and for his abolitionist views, becoming despised by no less than Custis Lee, the son of Colonel Robert E. Lee, who became superintendent of the academy in 1852. Nonetheless, one of Howard's fastest friends during his last two years at West Point proved to be Jeb Stuart, soon to become the flower of the Confederate cavalry.

Howard's friendship with Stuart and other Southerners of that day went far to disproving the contention that Howard was an ardent, if not rabid and uncompromising, abolitionist. In fact, during one of his presentations before the Dialectic Society, a cadet literary and debating forum, Howard eloquently advanced the argument that the Constitution actually sanctioned slavery!

Upon graduation in June of '54, while Custis Lee was ranked first in the graduating class, Howard was not far behind: proudly standing fourth in a field of forty-six. He was leaving the academy in success. Feeling a powerful
esprit de corps,
he wrote his mother that “The Professors are without exception my fast friends, and I wish I was half as good a man as I have the reputation of being here.”

At the beginning of those years at the academy, he had little idea just what he wanted to become when he would graduate. But in those four intervening years, Oliver Otis Howard had become a soldier. It was the only profession he would ever know.

Still, there was one thing he wanted even more than a career in the army—Otis wanted Elizabeth Ann Waite. They were married on Valentine's Day in 1855, and their first child was born on December 16.

*   *   *

While he had been reading the Scriptures since childhood and attending Bible study at the academy, it was not until two years after the birth of his first child that Howard actually turned his life over to his God. Although he consistently went to church and diligently read his Bible every night in those intervening years, Otis had long been troubled that he hadn't yet experienced his own emotional conversion. Then, just before the birth of his second child, Howard found what he had been seeking. So it came as little surprise to him now that he spent the long spring evenings of this first weekend in May 1877 striding up and down the long vine-covered porch that graced the front of the Fort Lapwai house where the Perry and FitzGerald families lived as he recited Scripture.

*   *   *

Autumn of 1857 had found Howard on the faculty of West Point, where he would remain until the outbreak of hostilities with the rebellious Southern states. Shortly after Lincoln's election, he wrote his mother that he really didn't care if South Carolina did in fact secede from the Union, figuring it would prove a good lesson for “her people to stand alone for a few years.”

Although December brought secession, that following spring of 1861 found Howard considering a leave of absence to attend the Bangor Theological Seminary. The notion that the North and South should ever go to war over their political squabbles was hardly worth entertaining. Yet April brought the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter.

Oliver Otis Howard stepped forward to do his duty as a professional soldier. But rather than remaining as a lieutenant in the regular army, he instead lobbied for and won a colonelcy of the Third Maine Volunteers. Before the year was out he would win his general's star, and scarcely a year later he would become a major general.

Few men in the nation at that time had the training or experience to assume such lofty positions of grave leadership in either of those two great armies poised to hurl themselves into a bloody maelstrom. Howard was no exception. Yet over the next four years he, like many others, would struggle to learn his bloody profession on-the-job.

Ordered to lead his brigade of 3,000 toward the front at the first Battle of Bull Run, on the way to the battlefield he and his men saw the hundreds of General McDowell's wounded as they were carried to the rear. The nearness of those whistling canisters of shot, the throaty reverberations of the cannon, the incessant rattle of small arms—not to mention the pitiful cries of the maimed, the sight of bloodied, limbless soldiers—suddenly gave the zealous Howard pause.

For the first and only time in his life, his knees began to quake. Nearing McDowell's position with his brigade for that opening battle of the war, Howard pleaded with God to give him the strength to do his duty that day. He later wrote that in an instant his trepidation was lifted from him and the very real prospect of death no longer brought him any fear. From that moment on, Oliver Otis Howard would never again be afraid in battle.

Bull Run was a demoralizing defeat for the untrained Union volunteers. But while others were sickened with despair at the loss, Howard wrote home to Lizzie saying: “I try to rely upon the Arm of Strength.”

Not long after George B. McClellan took over the Union Army, Howard was promoted to brigadier general of the Third Maine. In action during the Peninsula Campaign, his brigade found itself sharply engaged on the morning of the second day of the Battle of Fair Oaks as the Confederates launched a determined attack. Ordered to throw his remaining two regiments into the counterattack rather than holding them in reserve, Howard confidently stepped out in front of his men and gave the order to advance. Although Confederate minié balls were hissing through the brush and shredding the trees all around them, Howard continued to conspicuously move among the front ranks of his men on horseback, leading his troops against the enemy's noisy advance.

Less than thirty yards from that glittering line of bayonets and butternut-gray uniforms, a lead .58-caliber bullet struck Oliver Otis Howard in the right elbow. Somehow he remained oblivious to the pain as his men closed on the enemy. Within yards of engaging the Confederates in close-quarters combat, a bullet brought down his horse. When Howard was getting to his feet seconds later, a second ball shattered his right forearm just below the first wound.

With blood gushing from his body, Howard grew faint, stumbled, and collapsed, whereupon he turned over command of the brigade to another officer. Later that morning Howard was removed to a field hospital at the rear, where the surgeons explained the severity of his wounds, as well as the fact that there was little choice between gangrene, which would lead to a certain death, or amputation. By five o'clock that afternoon, the doctors went to work to save Howard's life.

The following morning as Otis was being settled upon a litter for transport to the rear, up rode General Phil Kearny, who himself had lost his left arm during the Mexican War. After Kearny gave the new amputee some reassuring and sympathetic words, Howard—minus his right arm—surprised Kearny with his own courageous sense of humor, proposing that in the future the two of them save money by purchasing their gloves together!