Great Warriors II

Sometime in the late 1880's, two old men who had once been bitter enemies sat down side by side to have their picture taken.  One was General John Gibbon, Commander of the Department of the Columbia, which included military operations for the state of Washington and Oregon.  The other was Chief Joseph, Chief of the Wallowa Band of the Nez Perce.  The first time these two met, circumstances had been much different.  It was Gibbon who led the ambush of the Nez Perce at the Battle of Big Hole in 1877.  Based on their mutual history, it would've been natural if these two didn't want to be in the same area together, let alone sitting for a photograph, but they had put the past away long enough to capture a piece of personal history together. John Gibbon was born in Holmesburg, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  The family later moved to Charlotte, North Carolina where his father was chief assayer at the U.S. Mint.  The Gibbon family was wealthy enou...

A fighting retreat while bein pursued by an enemy is an extremely complex and dangerous military maneuver.  Couple that with harsh conditions and a fighting force burdened with non-combatants and the task becomes even more complex.  Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce is often called the Indian Napoleon because his command of the retreat of his people toward Canada in 1877 resembles Napoleon's disastrous Russia Campaign in 1812-13.  Napoleon, though, had a fighting marshal and rear-guard commander in Michel Ney, Prince of the Moskowa.  Chief Joseph's Ney was Looking Glass, leader of the Alpowai band of the Nez Perce, who lived along the Clearwater River in Idaho. Looking Glass, 1832-1877, was the son of a Nez Perce chief, known as Flint Necklace or, in some translations, Looking Glass Around Neck, referring to a small mirror carried on a leather string around the neck.  His son, Looking Glass, inherited the name and proved his right to his father's chiefship....