Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  Two days back, the Frenchmen had taken refuge, hiding in a tiny abandoned cabin when they heard horses approaching outside, and were suddenly confronted with five warriors armed with rifles. The frightened Frenchmen quickly surrendered their three old shotguns. Before they rode off, the Nez Perce took more than one hundred dollars in gold and coin from the six miners—then told the Frenchmen to get away as far and as fast as they could from the country where no white man would be safe.

  William Hunter dragged the short stub of his fat stogie from his teeth and thoughtfully inspected the moist, much-chewed end of the cigar. Then he said, “Lost your bird guns to them red bastards, and all your money, too.”

  “They say they give us our lives in trade,” the French miner repeated.

  “Tell you what, fellas,” Hunter declared. “You talk it over together, because I’ll guarantee you boys one thing: If you throw in with us and Howard’s soldiers … you won’t just get back what guns and money is owed you, but a whole heap of revenge, too.”

  WHILE the suapies of Cut-Off Arm were struggling to maintain any momentum at all, the Non-Treaty bands were already more than twenty miles downstream, north along the Salmon at a traditional fording site known as Craig Billy Crossing. Joseph realized they had chosen well when they decided to follow the suggestions of Rainbow and Five Wounds, just returned from the buffalo country the afternoon of the fight at Lahmotta.

  “We cross the Salmon, wait for the soldiers to follow, then lose them on the other side,” Rainbow had advised.

  “And when we have lured the Shadows across, getting them snarled and lost in that rugged country, we will recross,” Five Wounds proposed. “That’s when we’ll be free to roam as we always have.”

  Days ago, the scouts watched two smaller groups of soldiers leave Cut-Off Arm’s massed army. One band took its empty pack animals and marched north for Fort Lapwai, clearly intending to bring back more supplies—which meant a longer effort on their part. An army so large surely needed a great deal of food. But that second band of suapies had marched directly for the settlements of Grangeville and Mount Idaho with a wagon gun, and from there they moved at night into the twisting canyon of the Clearwater, where the scouts lost track of the soldiers. None of the Nee-Me-Poo warrior chiefs could figure out where the suapies were bound or why.

  After three days of struggle, Cut-Off Arm’s foolish soldiers made it across the river—which meant it was finally time for the village to break camp where they had been waiting just north of the crossing, near the Deer Creek homestead of Larry Ott,* where there was a little level ground on which to pitch their lodges against the rainy sky. Now they must forge their way across the muddy, broken landscape, climbing toward the Doumecq Plain above that evil Shadow’s abandoned farm.

  But to make time and to assure that they would stay far enough ahead of the soldiers, they would not be able to take everything from this point. As the chief in charge of the women and children, overseeing the camp itself, Joseph ordered that every unnecessary item of food and clothing be buried in numerous caches dug near rocks they would mark for their return when the present troubles were over.

  And then he had turned to the young men not yet old enough to have fought against the soldiers at Lahmotta, youngsters nonetheless old enough to experience an eager enthusiasm. Their orders were to cull the old and the lame horses from their combined herds. These animals would be separated out from the stronger horses, then driven down their back trail where they would likely encounter the slowly advancing soldiers at some point in the next few days. It was a maneuver that might not necessarily retard the progress of the suapies but most assuredly would accelerate the progress of the camp in its march.

  In the two weeks since his brother had defeated the horse soldiers at Lahmotta, there had been much said about Joseph behind the chief’s back. None of it was good. Nearly all the talk was about his not taking up a weapon to fight off the soldiers, how he had not ventured out of camp to do battle even though Ollokot’s warriors were outnumbered two-to-one. For some time now the talk whispered and often laughed about behind the hands had not been good.

  But it was in these last few days that Joseph began to establish the reputation that would withstand the test yet to come. A legacy that would endure those terrible trials the Nee-Me-Poo could not even imagine at that moment. It was in this time that Joseph began to make decisions not having anything whatsoever to do with making war on some group of Shadow civilians or on that band of soldiers. No, without the showy fanfare of the war chiefs, Joseph had already begun to quietly reach decisions that—months from now and many, many miles away—would ultimately assure the survival of his people.

  There was no country better suited to ducking and dodging than this between the Snake and Salmon Rivers. And while Cut-Off Arm got bogged down in the mire of crags and rain-slickened trails, the Nee-Me-Poo would leap back across the Salmon, across the Camas Prairie, and on to the deep canyon of the Cottonwood that would lead the bands all the way to the Clearwater. Because this hard country lay in an arduous maze, few of the individual family groups or clans wandered away on their own. Fear of what followed them bound the many together and kept them moving north.

  At one point they came across a large herd of cattle that Joseph’s Wallamwatkins had been forced to abandon weeks ago when they crossed the Salmon at Rocky Canyon to join the last ever of the celebrations at Tepahlewam—just before the first settlers were murdered. After stopping here for most of a day, just long enough to butcher a few of the cattle, the village pushed on, leaving the lion’s share of the beeves behind in the hills to graze until a better day when Joseph’s people hoped to return here, when they could gather up their herd to take it back to their beloved Wallowa valley. But at this point in their flight they could ill afford the snail’s pace burden of the white man’s beef.

  “Eeh! Look below!” one of the riders near the front of the march hollered out in unbounded joy.

  Joseph smiled at his wife, then put heels to his pony as he sped along the column. Reining up beside Ollokot and Yellow Wolf, he gazed down the steep slope of the canyon.

  “Our ford across the Tahmonah, * Brother,” Ollokot announced as they paused to gaze down at their traditional crossing.**

  “Now that we’ve left Cut-Off Arm behind to struggle through these mountains,” Joseph said quietly, “we can start across the prairie, where we’ll rejoin Looking Glass’s people.”

  “Once we reach that valley of the Clearwater,” Ollokot agreed, “the soldiers won’t know where to find us. And if they do come looking for our camps, the dark canyons east of Kamisnim Takin* are good places for our people to hide. Cut-Off Arm will never find us there.”

  As for his own wound, Bird Alighting counted himself fortunate.

  It could have been far, far worse for the rest of Looking Glass’s band. Good that the Shadows were such poor shots when they became excited or angry or frightened. All those soldiers and the Shadows had managed to shoot only one Nee-Me-Poo, the young pony herder—named Nennin Chekoostin, called Black Raven—who had been caught in some cross fire before he could escape as their horse herd was captured. The other two deaths the enemy had caused only because of the terror the Shadows had created when they opened fire, without warning, on the sleepy morning camp. That young woman and her little infant—both of them drowned in Clear Creek—their bodies unclaimed until the white men left and the Looking Glass people could slip back into their devastated camp to look for what they could salvage.

  A few of the women and one old man burned their hands putting out the smoldering fires of those two lodges the suapies had managed to destroy, hoping to save anything that hadn’t yet burned. Oh, there were a few scrapes and cuts from running through the brush or stumbling among the rocks as the men, women, and children scrambled out of camp, fleeing beyond the hill just behind the village.

  While the sun went down and the stars came out that day, Looking Glass and what warriors hadn’t already gone off to j
oin White Bird’s and Toohoolhoolzote’s fighting men gathered in the descending darkness and talked of what to do and where to go now that Cut-Off Arm had made war on them. It had served no purpose for their chief to stay neutral, many argued! The white man had attacked them. Even a neighboring chief camped nearby, the Palouse Hatalekin, was as homeless as they. Now they must choose.

  “Even though we are already on the reservation,” Looking Glass protested, “our feet must take one path or another from this moment on.”

  “We must drive the suapies from our country!” shouted Arrowhead, the warrior woman.

  “The enemy will keep looking for our camps, which means the women and children will continue to suffer,” argued Hatalekin, the Palouse chief. “See how the soldiers came looking to attack White Bird.”

  Shot Leg laughed and said, “But see what good it did those soldiers!”

  “Yet other soldiers came looking for another village to attack, and this time it was ours!” Black Foot continued the lament.

  “There really is little choice,” Looking Glass interrupted the heated discussion minutes later. “Do we want to become Christian Indians like Lawyer’s or Reuben’s people?”

  “No!” Arrowhead growled throatily. “Tananisa! Damn them! Let the Kamiah people believe in the white man’s god. We are Dreamers!”

  “Or,” Looking Glass continued, “do we join the fight to hold onto this land of ours?”

  “As for me,” Black Foot said, “there is no choice in what options the Shadows have handed us.”

  Slowly the chief looked over that suddenly hushed gathering. A small child whimpered from the dark. Then it was quiet, so deathly quiet, again. The summer night held its breath around them.

  When he finally spoke again, Looking Glass said, “We will leave as soon as our women have everything packed on what horses we managed to save from the enemy.”

  “Where is it you would have us go?” Hatalekin asked as the black of night seemed to swallow all their hopes of staying neutral in the struggle.

  “We will go in search of the fighting bands,” the chief answered. “Our only strength now lies in fighting the white man together.”

  The moon had just made its appearance at the horizon, its creamy yellow color illuminating the underbellies of some scattered clouds by the time Looking Glass and two old men started the village downstream for the Clearwater. From there they would strike upstream for the mouth of the Cottonwood. It was that creek and its canyon they would follow up and onto the Camas Prairie in the dark of this night.

  How noiseless they made that march. The children who had been wrapped in arms or carried on backs had surely fallen asleep. No one talked but some headmen who spoke in low voices of hearing reports of the few warriors who rode both flanks, out there in the dark. From time to time Bird Alighting and the other young men came in to report their news on what lay ahead upon the route Looking Glass had chosen for them all.

  In the first, early light of the sun’s coming Bird Alighting saw the smudge along the western horizon of the prairie. He rubbed his eyes again, blinked, and stared. He had never been one of those far-seeing men who had the ability to find distant objects without the far-seeing glasses of the Shadows. So he did his best to determine what the smudge meant.

  “Is that dust?” Arrowhead asked in almost a whisper as she rode up and came to a halt beside Bird Alighting.

  “I cannot tell if it is dust … or maybe smoke.”

  The warrior woman asked, “Where is it? Can you tell that?”

  “Far up Cottonwood Creek,” Bird Alighting said. “Perhaps as far away as that Shadow settlement on the road to the soldier fort.”

  “I think it is dust,” Arrowhead asserted. “That much dust … cannot be Cut-Off Arm’s suapies. He has his army far to the south of here. No, Bird Alighting, that can only be some of our own people.”

  How he wanted to smile, his heart wanted to hope. But his head would not let him. “Let’s hope your eyes are right, Etemiere. I pray those are not soldiers barring our way.”

  *Cries from the Earth, vol. 14, the Plainsmen series.

  *The Salmon River.

  **While the white men would come to know this as Craig Billy Crossing, to the Nee-Me-Poo this was “Luke’s Place,” named after Pahka Yatwekin, one of their people who was called Luke Billy by the Shadows, a man who had a poor cabin standing on the south bank of the Salmon River.

  *The Camas Prairie.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JULY 3, 1877

  IT HADN’T TAKEN VERY LONG FOR FIRST SERGEANT Michael McCarthy to figure out that Trimble’s H Company should have stayed at Slate Creek with the civilians huddled there. Far, far better than what they had been forced to endure as they slogged along after those damned fleeing Indians.

  From downriver at the crossing General Howard sent orders by “Colonel” Edward McConville and his Mount Idaho volunteers that Captain Trimble’s outfit was to rejoin him on the west side of the Salmon. In company with that band of volunteers, they had made their own crossing right there at the mouth of Slate Creek in a driving rain, then marched down the west bank until they reached a house said to belong to a Mr. Rhett. While Trimble’s horse soldiers began to take cover out of the soggy weather, Rhett showed up and angrily ordered the men out of his cozy cabin. McConville’s men shared their meager canvas shelters with the cavalrymen that stormy night of 1 July.

  “Not a good goddamned reception from one of our own citizens!” McCarthy grumbled, wishing he could pry the wet boots off his feet.

  “Sorry that son of a bitch ain’t got a touch of hospitality in his soul,” McConville apologized. “Some folks don’t give a damn what the army’s here to do for ‘em.”

  Ascending Deer Creek the next morning, Captain Trimble had started them into the rugged hills, following the route taken by the fleeing Nez Perce.

  A perfect sea of mountains, gullies, ravines, and canyons.

  Each day’s march of ten miles seemed more like a march three times as far made on level ground. What had been merely difficult terrain before the incessant rains had now become treacherous as the slopes turned into rivers of mud. With the cavalry assigned to lead the way, that first afternoon they had reached the top of a small plateau just at dusk, turning in their saddles to peer back at that long line slowly snaking its way up the precipitous mountainside. Trimble ordered a bivouac made near some stunted pines, and the men did what they could to make it a cheerful camp. Still, most everything, tents and rations included, was back with the pack train and infantry, neither of which would likely catch up to the advance until midday tomorrow. So all these troopers had was what little coffee, hardbread, and bacon remained in their saddlebags.

  To add to the misery of their bivouac at the summit of Brown’s Mountain on the evening of 2 July, a cheerless camp made in the open without much in the way of supper, just after dark a hard and icy rain began lancing out of the sky. Most of the officers ended up crowding into the general’s headquarters tent, leaving the noncoms and enlisted to fend for themselves around those sputtering fires whipped by the stormy gales, that tortured the top of this high, barren plateau. Howard’s aide, First Lieutenant Melville C. Wilkinson, graciously named this spot “Camp Misery” in his daily report.

  The following morning, 3 July, the advance command awoke to find that a dense fog had descended upon the mountaintop. While they remained in camp, recuperating and waiting for the pack train and infantry to catch up, the general dispatched Trimble’s company and McConville’s volunteers to search the trail ahead as far as they could march and still return by dusk. Late in the morning the patrol found the Nez Perce trail had split into two, the troopers following one branch, the civilians following the other. By late in the afternoon Trimble’s patrol bivouacked where those two fresh trails rejoined—a place where Canoe Encampment and Rocky Canyon trails intersected. From all the sign, it appeared the last Nez Perce camp was at least three days old.

  This meant that here late on
the afternoon of 3 July Howard’s column was now something on the order of four or more days behind the hostiles.

  With little food and not a swallow of coffee to speak of—but with all the rain, fog, and wind an Irishman from Nova Scotia could ever hope for—on top of everything else now they knew just how far ahead the enemy was. McCarthy was afeared the hostiles never would stop and give an accounting of themselves—so he could get in his licks for all those comrades who had fallen at White Bird.

  Blessed Mary and Joseph! Oh, how Sergeant Michael McCarthy prayed those goddamned heathens would stop running away and give this army a fight to decide the matter, once and for all.

  “CAPTAIN Whipple!” Lieutenant Sevier M. Rains called out as he stepped up to his company commander. “I brought those two civilians you asked for.”

  Whipple turned on his stool, positioned behind his field desk standing just outside his tent, and gave his second lieutenant a salute that early chill morning. “Very good, Mr. Rains. Please stay. I want you in on this.”

  Rains nodded. “Very good, sir.” He pointed to the closest of the two Mount Idaho volunteers. “This is Foster, and this is Blewett.”

  “Your nominal leader, Captain D. B. Randall, said I could depend on you to get me some intelligence.”

  “Intelligence, Captain?” William Foster repeated.

  “We need to know what we’re facing here,” Whipple explained. “What bands are in the area. If there are war parties prowling the nearby Camas Prairie. That sort of thing. Captain Randall claimed you two know this area better than the others.”