The Son of Charlo:

How a Montana Salish Marine Helped Open the Path to Iwo Jima’s Summit

Origins: A Name Heavy with History

Louis Charles Charlo was born on September 26, 1926, in Missoula, Montana, the son of Mary and Antoine Charlo of Evaro, a small community just north of Missoula near the southern entrance to the Flathead Indian Reservation. He grew up along a stretch of Highway 93 that his family had known for generations, in country bounded by the Mission Mountains to the east and the forested ridgelines of the Rattlesnake range to the south. It was, as his younger brother Victor would recall decades later, the place where the boys roamed the mountains freely — their playground, their home ground (Charlo, Victor, qtd. in Yost).

The name Charlo carried weight in Montana well before Louis was born. His great-grandfather was Chief Charlo — known in the Salish language as Slem-hak-kah, or Little Claw of a Grizzly Bear — who served as head chief of the Bitterroot Salish from 1870 to 1910. Chief Charlo had been the central figure in one of the most protracted and painful episodes in Montana’s tribal history. After the Hellgate Treaty of 1855, federal authorities pressed repeatedly for Salish removal from the Bitterroot Valley to the Jocko Reservation to the north. Charlo resisted for two decades. Though he never signed the removal agreement — indeed, published versions of the document fraudulently included his mark — the federal government proceeded regardless. Finally, in October 1891, Charlo led his remaining followers in a three-day march to the Flathead Reservation, an event that historians have likened to Montana’s own Trail of Tears (Montana Historical Society, “Charlo, Salish Patriot,” mhs.mt.gov). Chief Charlo died on the reservation in 1910, having spent his last years attempting to hold the government accountable to its promises.

Louis Charlo was also a direct descendant of Chief Three Eagles, who had met the Lewis and Clark Expedition when it passed through the Bitterroot Valley in September 1805. The Salish people fed the explorers from their own scarce provisions, an act of hospitality that would later be invoked with bitter irony by commentators reflecting on how the United States ultimately treated the Salish people (McNeel, Indian Country Today). The lineage connecting Louis Charlo to those encounters was not merely genealogical. It was, for his family and tribe, a statement about where the Salish stood in relation to the American nation — a nation they had fed, guided, and accommodated, and which had repaid them with dispossession.

Louis attended schools in St. Ignatius and Polson on the Flathead Reservation. According to family testimony preserved in subsequent news accounts and the legislative record of Montana House Bill 717 (2019), he was a young man who would, had he lived, have been considered the hereditary chief of his people (Montana HB 717, 2019 Legislature, archive.legmt.gov). He was 17 years old when he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

Training and Deployment: From Montana to the Pacific

Charlo enlisted in the Marines in 1943 and served with the 2nd Battalion of the 28th Marines, stationed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. The battalion later went to Hawaii in September to begin combat training against Japanese forces in the Pacific.  The 28th Marine Regiment was part of the 5th Marine Division, a newly formed unit activated at Camp Pendleton in February 1944. Its personnel included veterans of the disbanded 3rd and 4th Parachute Battalions, hardened men who had already spent time preparing for amphibious operations in the Pacific theater.

On January 27, 1945, Charlo’s battalion joined the 5th Marine Division on the USS Missoula. They left Hawaii for the planned invasion of Iwo Jima. After stopping at Saipan to relay with other ships, the USS Missoula arrived February 16 at Iwo Jima.  The coincidence was not lost on those who knew his background. By a remarkable coincidence, the ship that carried him to Iwo Jima was the USS Missoula.  The vessel, named for his home city, would carry all the men who participated in both of the flag raisings on Mount Suribachi (Missoulian, “Veterans of Iwo Jima,” 2008).

Iwo Jima was a volcanic island roughly eight square miles in area, located 750 miles south of Tokyo. The Japanese had transformed it into a fortress. The island was fortified with hidden artillery positions, land mines, camouflaged machine gun positions, and 11 miles of tunnels. There were 22,000 Japanese on the island when the battle started on February 19, 1945.  American military planners knew it would be costly. What they could not fully anticipate was quite how costly: by the time the island was declared secure 35 days later, American forces had suffered more than 26,000 casualties and nearly 7,000 dead.

On February 19, the battalion disembarked on landing boats on the island’s beaches.  The Marines of the 28th Regiment were assigned to isolate and capture Mount Suribachi, the 546-foot dormant volcano at the island’s southern tip, which served as the main Japanese observation post and a fortress in its own right. For four days the regiment fought through barbed wire, artillery fire, and the constant threat of hidden positions. The ground gained was measured in yards.

February 23, 1945: The Ascent of Suribachi

By the morning of February 23, four days into the fighting, American forces had pushed to the base of Suribachi. Intelligence suggested that the summit might be reachable, but no one knew how many Japanese defenders remained in the mountain’s network of caves and tunnels. Lieutenant Colonel Chandler W. Johnson ordered two four-man reconnaissance patrols to search for a route to Mount Suribachi’s summit. 

Private Charlo was a BAR man — a Browning Automatic Rifle operator — with F Company of the 28th Regiment of the 5th Marine Division.  He was assigned to one of the two reconnaissance patrols. The patrol led by Sergeant Sherman Watson included Corporal George Mercer of Iowa, Private First Class Ted White from Kansas City, Missouri, and Private First Class Louis Charlo of the Bitterroot Salish Tribe from Montana. They reached the top and returned without incident.  The other patrol took a route that proved impassable. Of the two groups sent up that morning, only Charlo’s made it to the summit and back.

The patrol’s safe return was the signal Johnson needed. A second, larger group — approximately 40 Marines — was organized and sent back up the mountain. Once at the top, the platoon found a 20-foot pipe and used it to raise an American flag taken from the USS Missoula, which had transported the Marines to the island.  The flag was small, measuring 54 inches by 28 inches. When it went up, the reaction from below was immediate and powerful. As radioman Raymond Jacobs recalled nearly six decades later, the Marines still fighting on the beaches raised a spontaneous roar, and the ships offshore sounded their horns and whistles (Jacobs, qtd. in McNeel, Indian Country Today).

What happened next would define how this moment entered American memory — and how Louis Charlo was all but erased from it. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who was observing the battle from offshore, saw the first flag and asked to have it as a souvenir. Marines flew a replacement flag, captured in the famous photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal. Charlo was among the perimeter security team during the second flag raising.  Rosenthal’s photograph of the second, larger flag going up with six Marines straining against its weight became one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century. It was the photograph — not the first flag raising — that defined Iwo Jima in the public imagination.

The controversy over exactly what role Charlo played in the first flag raising has persisted for decades. Charlo was initially believed to have helped raise the first flag on Mount Suribachi, but a Marine Corps review concluded he had been misidentified. The Corps noted Charlo was a member of the reconnaissance team that led the path to the site and that he later provided security during the raising of the second flag.  James Bradley’s widely read account, Flags of Our Fathers (2000), lists Charlo as one of the men in Watson’s reconnaissance patrol. Montana HB 717, passed by the state legislature in 2019, recognizes him as having conducted route reconnaissance and determined enemy disposition on the summit before the first flag raising. Whatever the precise details of his role in the flag raising itself, the record is clear on this: Louis Charles Charlo ascended Mount Suribachi with three fellow Marines on the morning of February 23, 1945, to conduct route reconnaissance and determine enemy disposition on the summit prior to the first flag raising.  Without that patrol, the flag raising would not have happened as it did.

Death at the Meat Grinder

The capture of Suribachi did not end the battle. For the Marines of the 5th Division, the worst fighting still lay ahead. After Suribachi fell, the regiment wheeled north and pressed into the island’s central plateau, where the Japanese had constructed their most elaborate defensive positions. The Marines called one sector of this terrain the Meat Grinder, a name that required no explanation from the men who fought there.

Louis Charles Charlo was killed as he was attempting to rescue Private Ed McLaughlin, a wounded soldier stranded in an area of the Iwo Jima battlefield known as the Meat Grinder. Louis Charles Charlo was carrying McLaughlin on his back and both were killed just a few feet from safety. Both men were killed by a Japanese sniper a few feet from safety. The date was March 2, 1945. Louis Charlo was 18 years old.

Louis Charles Charlo earned the Presidential Unit Citation Ribbon with one bronze star, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Ribbon with one bronze star, the World War II Victory Medal, and the Purple Heart. He is buried at the Old Catholic Cemetery in Saint Ignatius, Montana. His remains were returned to Montana in 1948.

The Question of Recognition

The contrast between Louis Charlo’s obscurity and the fame of Ira Hayes — the Pima Marine from Arizona who appears in Rosenthal’s photograph of the second flag raising — is instructive and troubling. Hayes returned from the war a celebrated figure, toured the country in war bond drives, and was played by Tony Curtis in a 1961 film. He also struggled with alcoholism and post-traumatic stress, dying of exposure in 1955. Charlo, who died in battle, was largely forgotten.

Why Ira Hayes is an internationally known hero and Louis Charlo has been lost to history is a story that traces back to the fog of war, the shrewd manipulations of public relations, and a ruthlessly efficient bit of mythmaking. The answer lies partly in the photograph itself. Rosenthal’s image was a visual event of enormous power, and the six men in it became, by virtue of their appearance in that frame, the faces of Iwo Jima. Charlo did not appear in any comparable image. His role — the reconnaissance that made everything else possible — was essential but invisible, the sort of thing that does not lend itself to a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph.

Recognition came slowly, piecemeal, and largely through the persistence of his family and tribe. Louis Charlo, a Salish Indian and product of St. Ignatius and Polson schools, died on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima in the last months of World War II. It was just a week after he and three other Marines became the first foreign invaders in four millennia to lay claim to Japanese territory.  His younger brother Victor, who was six years old when Louis went to war in November 1944 and who would grow up never knowing him as an adult, became one of the primary voices keeping Louis’s memory alive. Decades after the war, Victor Charlo wrote poetry about his brother and read it aloud at public commemorations.

In 2019, the Montana Legislature passed House Bill 717, formally naming a stretch of U.S. Highway 93 between markers 7 and 9, near the entrance to the Flathead Reservation, the Louis Charles Charlo Memorial Highway. The stretch is the same land Louis Charlo grew up on. “This whole area was our playground,” Victor Charlo said.  The dedication ceremony was held on September 26, 2019 — what would have been Louis’s ninety-third birthday. A crowd of nearly 100, including state representatives and a tribal councilman, watched as the highway memorial to Louis Charlo was unveiled. 

Legacy

The story of Louis Charles Charlo is, in part, a story about how official memory is constructed and who gets left out of it. The men who appear in Rosenthal’s photograph are enshrined in bronze at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, and in the public consciousness of the nation. The men who made that photograph possible — who climbed an unknown mountain and came back down to report what they found, who provided security while the flags went up and then went back into combat and died — received less durable forms of commemoration.

But Charlo’s story is also something more particular: it is the story of a young man who was the direct descendant of people who had fed Lewis and Clark, who had refused to be removed from their homeland for twenty years, and who had finally been forced north to the Flathead Reservation in one of Montana’s most dispossessing episodes of the nineteenth century. That young man then enlisted in the military of the nation that had dispossessed his family, served with courage and skill in one of the most ferocious battles of the Pacific war, and died trying to save the life of a wounded comrade from Nebraska. The act, as Blackfeet poet and historian Jack Gladstone has observed, echoes the hospitality of the Salish toward Lewis and Clark 140 years earlier — the willingness to give what one has, including one’s life, for a stranger in need (Gladstone, qtd. in Missoulian, “Song Honors Soldier,” 2010).

Louis Charlo left behind no letters, no memoir, no recorded words. He was 18 years old when he died, and the historical record of his inner life is thin to the point of near-absence. What remains is the outline of his actions, the testimony of his family, and the words of Montana HB 717, which concludes that he deserves to be remembered not only for his role at Suribachi but for the manner of his death — carrying a wounded man on his back, a few feet from safety, until a sniper’s bullet stopped them both.

Works Cited

Gladstone, Jack, qtd. in “Song Honors Soldier Who Raised Iwo Jima Flag.” Missoulian, 26 Feb. 2010, missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/song-honors-soldier-who-raised-iwo-jima-flag/article_62a2de5a-2034-11df-902e-001cc4c002e0.html. Accessed 18 June 2026.

McNeel, Jack. “American Indian Marine Was Part of Iwo Jima, But Kept Out of Spotlight.” Indian Country Today, 7 Nov. 2011, ictnews.org/archive/american-indian-marine-was-part-of-iwo-jima-but-kept-out-of-spotlight/. Accessed 18 June 2026.

Montana Historical Society. “Charlo: Salish Patriot.” Montana Historical Society Education Resources, mhs.mt.gov/education/Montanans/charlo.pdf. Accessed 18 June 2026.

Montana Legislature. House Bill 717. 66th Legislature, 2019 Regular Session. Montana Legislative Services, archive.legmt.gov/bills/2019/BillHtml/HB0717.htm. Accessed 18 June 2026.

United States Department of Veterans Affairs. “VeteranOfTheDay: Marine Veteran Louis Charlo.” VA News, 20 Nov. 2020, news.va.gov/79585/veteranoftheday-marine-veteran-louis-charlo/. Accessed 18 June 2026.

Yost, Pete. “Unknown No Longer: Stretch of U.S. 93 Named for Louis Charlo.” Missoulian, 26 Sept. 2019, missoulian.com/news/local/unknown-no-longer-stretch-of-u-s-named-for-louis/article_748febad-d54c-5af8-b39e-77e08c95c68a.html. Accessed 18 June 2026.

Wright, Evan. “The Two-Flag Raisings on Iwo Jima.” Defense Media Network, 29 Apr. 2020, defensemedianetwork.com/stories/the-two-flag-raisings-battle-of-iwo-jima-marine-corps/. Accessed 18 June 2026.