Battle of Cottonwood: Buying Time for the Families
Idaho
Three days into July, eighteen seventy-seven, a series of skirmishes erupted near Cottonwood Creek on the Camas Prairie plateau of Idaho Territory. The engagements would last three days. When they were over, eleven American soldiers and six civilian volunteers were dead. One Nez Perce warrior had been killed. The Nez Perce had won, and more importantly, had bought their families the time they needed to cross the plateau and continue their flight east.
The Battle of Cottonwood was not a single clash but a running series of engagements fought July third through fifth. The Nez Perce force numbered roughly one hundred fifty warriors, but their main column was moving with hundreds of non-combatants, women, children, elders, whose safety was the whole point. Every skirmish was a delaying action, a rear guard fight to slow the army while the people moved.
The U.S. forces in the area numbered about eighty five soldiers and civilian volunteers combined, under Captain David Perry, drawn partly from the nearby settlement of Mount Idaho. Perry had already been badly mauled two weeks earlier at White Bird Canyon, where thirty-four of his men were killed in the opening battle of the war. At Cottonwood, his command struggled to coordinate and was pinned down at multiple points by Nez Perce warriors who chose their ground carefully.
One of the most dramatic moments came when seventeen civilian volunteers rode forward trying to reinforce the army position and were nearly surrounded. Only desperate fighting and the timely arrival of additional soldiers kept them from being wiped out. Three civilians died in that charge, and two more were wounded.
The Nez Perce victory at Cottonwood was tactical and moral. They inflicted serious losses on a larger combined force, maintained cohesion in their own column, and kept moving. It demonstrated the military capacity that would allow them to sustain a fighting retreat across more than a thousand miles, something no one in Washington or the army's western commands had anticipated possible.
