Monumental struggle

Craig Bickerton's dying wish? To set record straight on Battle of Four Lakes

Dan Webster
Staff writer
August 13, 2006

It's a sunny Thursday afternoon in early August, and Craig Bickerton is having a good day.

He's pain-free, a condition he credits to drugs. With cancer eating his liver, the 61-year-old Bickerton has been told he has only a short time to live.

"They gave me two months," he says, his words slightly mumbled – not because of the pain-killers he's taking but because he's not wearing his teeth.

"It's a big old tumor on my liver," he says.

He reaches into a clear plastic trunk set at the end of his bed and pulls out a battered hardback copy of "Indians of the Pacific Northwest: A History," Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown's authoritative look at the region's indigenous peoples between the years 1750-1900.

And with a sense of renewed energy, Bickerton begins to read.

"On Sept. 1 at Four Lakes, about 20 miles southwest of Spokane Falls, 500 warriors readied themselves for Wright to attack," he says.

"Right there!" he says, stabbing at the page with a wrinkled index finger. "How clear can you be?"

It's a fair question, one that doesn't jive with an area monument that has perpetuated a myth for more than 70 years.

Let's rewind a couple of weeks. It's late June, and Bickerton – his cancer not yet diagnosed – is feeling poorly.

But he's healthy enough to take a road trip with his friend Dennis Held and a notebook-toting reporter to the community of Four Lakes, a spot on the map near the intersection of Interstate 90 and State Highway 904.

Held turns right off 904, which leads to Cheney, onto First Avenue. Then he hangs another right at Electric Avenue.

The car drifts for a few dozen yards and then Held parks in front of an imposing 15-feet-tall triangle-shaped tower of granite.

"Here we are," Bickerton says from the back seat.

He points to the words that have been carved into the stone. Under the title Battle of Four Lakes, you can read clearly:

"On this historic

ground, Sept. 1, 1858,

700 soldiers under

Col. Geo. Wright, U.S.A.,

routed 5000 allied Indians."

"Five thousand?" Bickerton says. "There probably weren't 5,000 Indians in the entire area, including women and children."

He squints up at the block of granite.

"It's an outright lie," he says.

It would be easy to doubt Bickerton.

He isn't a trained historian. He doesn't even have a college degree.

He's just a guy from Bellaire, Ohio – "Just across," he says, "from Wheeling, West Virginia." – who was raised in Lind, Wash. A guy who, sick as a kid, fell behind his schoolmates.

He was 21 when he graduated in 1965 from Lind High School.

He's never had what he would call a career, opting instead, he says, "to do a series of odd jobs."

"I taught myself how to do taxes," he says. "So I did some accounting and taxes for people. That's about it. I didn't do much."

But financial accomplishment is only one way to judge a life, and it's hardly the most accurate.

Bickerton loves to read, and he loves especially to read history.

Pacific Northwest history in particular.

The basic events surrounding the Battle of Four Lakes are generally accepted.

On May 17, 1858, Col. Edward Steptoe and a detachment of 155 soldiers (plus several Nez Perce scouts) engaged 800 to 1,000 (estimates vary) Indians from the Coeur d'Alene, Spokane and Palouse tribes.

In what has become known as the Battle of Steptoe Butte, Steptoe and his men were soundly defeated. They escaped during the night.

On Sept. 1, Col. George Wright, charged with punishing the tribes that had taken up arms against Steptoe, led a force of not quite 700, including cavalry, infantry and artillery, against another group of Indians at what is now Four Lakes.

After only a few hours of battle, the soldiers' rifles – which were accurate at long range – proved superior, and the Indians were defeated.

So this debate is over one simple question: How many Indians were at the Battle of Four Lakes?

Bickerton's interest in the Battle of Four Lakes began several years ago when he and a drinking buddy began making road trips to area historical sites.

They visited Rosalia, Wash., site of Steptoe's defeat. And they trekked through a weedy field just across from Fairchild Air Force Base's main gate to find the monument that commemorates the Sept. 5, 1858, Battle of Spokane Plains, which finished the fight Wright had begun four days before.

The more sites they visited, the more history they read.

"One day we were reading this book," Bickerton recalls. "It had picture of the (Four Lakes) monument. So we drove out there."

His buddy pulled up across the street, just as Held had done. By the time Bickerton had walked around the car to join him, his buddy was already laughing.

"I couldn't figure out what he was laughing at," Bickerton says. "He said, 'Look.' I did, and I couldn't believe it. I thought, 'Boy, what a mistake that is!' "

You can see photos of the monument online (see sidebar on cover).

David W. Wilma, deputy director of the Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History ( www.historylink.org), explained in an e-mail why his site – even though it does run a photo – doesn't estimate the number of Indians involved in the battle in any accompanying text.

"The number of 5,000 seemed to us to be wildly inflated, perhaps by a factor of ten or more," Wilma wrote. "Military leaders across the ages often overstated the size of their enemies in order to make their victories look better or to excuse their defeats, and U.S. Army commanders in the Far West were no exception."

Wilma added this note: "Since Native Americans did not keep rosters of their forces, the exact number will never be known." What do other experts say?

Lawrence Kip, an officer in Wright's command who was at the battle, wrote a journal that was later published under the title "Army Life on the Pacific."

"On our way up," Kip wrote, "Colonel Wright received a message from Major Grier, stating that the Indians were collected in large numbers (about five hundred it was thought). …"

Ruby, a retired Moses Lake physician and author of nearly a dozen books on Indian history, agrees with Kip's estimate.

"I would say that the person that made that monument was just too generous with his zeroes," Ruby said over the phone. "It would be closer to 500."

Paul D. McDermott, professor emeritus of geography at Montgomery College in Rockville, Md., coauthored an article on Gustavus Sohon for Columbia Magazine, which is published by the Washington State Historical Society. Sohon was a German-born artist who served with Wright at the Battle of Four Lakes, and drew maps of the site.

"The sign is incorrect," McDermott said over the phone. "If the combined native force was that large, Wright would have lost the battle. … The number of Native Americans involved in the Battle of Four Lakes was probably not greater than 700."

Rick Sprague, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Idaho, taught courses on Northwest Indians and did his dissertation on the Palouse tribe. He cites another original source, the famous road-builder John Mullan, who also was part of Wright's forces.

In a report that Mullan wrote in 1863 titled "Report on the Construction of a Military Road from Walla Walla to Fort Benton," Sprague said by e-mail, "Mullan on page 49 … lists the total populations of the Palus, Spokan and Coeur d'Alene as 200, 500, and 300 respectively for a total of 1000.These were the only tribes well represented with only a few young warriors from the Colville and Yakama areas. Half of the 1,000 were women and another quarter were too young or old to fight leaving a generous 400 'combatants' in modern terminology or 'warriors' as was the popular term at the time."

From the native point of view, in his book "Children of the Sun: A History of the Spokane Indians," author David C. Wynecoop says only, "The Indian force outnumbered the soldiers, but had far less in arms and ammunition."

The book "Saga of the Coeur d'Alene Indians: An Account of Chief Joseph Seltice," edited by Edward J. Kowrach and Thomas E. Connolly, is as specific as it gets: "Against Colonel Wright's army of a thousand well-armed men, there were only 467 mounted Indians: some 100 disobedient Coeur d'Alenes, 172 Yakimas, 150 Spokanes and some 45 Palouse."

And Cliff SiJohn, cultural awareness director at the Coeur d'Alene Casino, cites his tribe's oral history, which puts the number at "800-900," half Coeur d'Alenes and Spokanes "and some Palouse."

The reason for the discrepancies, he says, "is because they never had a head count, and in the swirling movements (of battle) they would intermix and go between clumps of trees and pick up more warriors. So I would suspect that the soldiers, or those who were charged with the observation of it, would see one large swirl of Indian people."

So the estimates vary. But this much is clear: There weren't 5,000 Indians at the Battle of Four Lakes.

Back in Bickerton's apartment, the conversation turns to cancer.

"(T)hey said they can't operate, won't do any good," Bickerton says. "They can't give me chemo, won't do me any good. The only other option is just to continue on and take these (shakes a bottle of Hydrocodone) for pain."

Then we return to the monument at Four Lakes and the legacy it fosters.

"It was on the main highway for 20 or 30 years," Bickerton says. "People would stop there and read. They didn't know a thing about it. They walked away thinking, 'Those damn Indians. Can't they fight fair?' Five thousand Indians, 700 soldiers. Hooray for our boys.' "

If there's one thing he'd like to see before he dies, it would be a correction placed on or near the monument itself.

"Just for the sake of being right," Bickerton says, "put a little explanation there that people were a little overzealous back in 1935. And they did overextend the number of the participating Indians."

Question is: who would make the correction? The three groups that sponsored it – the Spokane County Pioneer Society, the Medical Lake Commercial Club and the Four Lakes Grange – no longer exist.

And even though the monument was listed on the Washington State Heritage Register in 1970, no one seems to know just who is responsible for it. Not the state, not Spokane County, not the cities of Spokane, Cheney or Medical Lake.

Whatever happens, if anything, Bickerton isn't interested in criticizing the original sponsors.

"Just do it friendly," he says. "You don't have to put them down or anything. They just overestimated it."

What surprises Bickerton is that no one, not even the experts, has called for something to be done before now.

"It's amazing that no one's stood up and said, 'Hey! Wait a minute! Shouldn't that last zero be puttied over?' " he says. "It'd be a lot more accurate."

Not to mention fair.