ne dead Indians were found and buried on the field, nearly
three times the number of men lost by General Gibbon, and it is known
that a large number of mortally wounded warriors were carried away and
hidden during the day and night that the soldiers never found. Ranchmen
residing near the battle-field tell us that they find skeletons in the
neighboring forests every summer; some of them two or three miles away
from the battle-ground; some of them hidden in gulches and among rocks
and logs, which they suppose to be those of Indians killed in this
fight, and who were doubtless carried away and concealed by their
friends, or who, finding themselves mortally wounded, crawled hither
and hid themselves to die in seclusion rather than have their bodies
fall into the hands of the white men.

Besides, it is said that Joseph carried away with him a number who were
so seriously wounded that they died on the trail. He is said to have
admitted, after his final capture, that 208 of his people were killed
in the Big Hole fight. If this be true, then there were a larger number
of Indians killed than of white men engaged. It is a well-known fact,
that only about one hundred warriors finally surrendered to General
Miles, and that only about one hundred escaped to the British
Possessions at the time of the surrender. Hence the conclusion seems
just, that 200 or more must have been lost in the fight with Gibbon.

How skillfully General Gibbon planned his attack on the Nez Perces; how
quietly and stealthily he moved his little army down Trail Creek and up
along the side of the bluff; how carefully he formed it in line of
battle within a stone's-throw of the hostile camp without alarming it,
and all in the dead of night; how gallantly his men charged through the
jungle, waded the river, swept through the camp dealing death to its
fleeing occupants; how the men subsequently took and held their
position in the mouth of Battle Gulch under the galling fire of these
trained warriors, are facts which no one can properly realize and
appreciate save those who were there.

But the battle-field tells its own mute story even now. As I walked
over it and saw the hundreds of bullet marks on trees, rocks, and logs,
and thought of the thousands of other missiles that entered the earth
and left no abiding marks, I was impressed with the remarkable accuracy
of the shooting done by the Indians. Nearly every tree and every object
in the valley and in the mou