Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  Death while recapturing one’s horse would be preferable to leaving the fight without the animal!

  At first he started to creep through the trees; then he realized he wasn’t going to get there in time to rescue the pony if he did not run. The young warrior took off at a sprint, jumping low rocks and dodging around the pines until he reached the animal, yanked its lead rope loose, and hurled himself onto its back—no matter the whine and whiz of bullets coming into that stand of trees.

  Yelling at the top of his lungs, Yellow Wolf did his best to drive off the other horses, sweeping those that would be herded before him as he pressed low against his pony’s neck and followed the route taken by Toohoolhoolzote. Bullets sang past, striking the ground and singing off the rocks, smacking trees, as the horse carried him down one side of the wide ravine and desperately clawed its way up the steep side onto the plateau once more. He recalled the words of his uncle, Old Yellow Wolf: “If you go to war and get shot, do not cry!”

  Just remembering that admonition helped him be brave. Better to die with his horse than to turn away from the fight without it.

  In heartbeats the snarling of the bullets was fading behind him. The crack of rifles no more thundered about his ears. He had reached the timber on the south side of the saddle. Dismounting, he tied off his strong brown horse, letting it regain its wind and graze while he started toward the sound of firing on that south side of the fight. Near a copse of trees he came upon a stand of large boulders where many men—mostly older—had gathered to talk about the fighting, make plans, and catch their wind, too. To the Nee-Me-Poo this was a “smoking lodge,” where older warriors whose day had come and gone now passed their pipes around while discussing the fight others were making against the soldiers.

  The sting of the tobacco smoke stung his nose and made his eyes water as he hurried past. Yellow Wolf never had smoked. He did not like it, and it made his head sick when he smelled others burning tobacco. Moving into a lope, the young warrior hurried to the east where the sound of gunfire was the heaviest.

  At the edge of the timber he noticed how many of the finest warriors were flat on their bellies behind low boulders they had pushed before them, right out of the timber and into the tall grass, sneaking up on the soldier lines. They had good guns to use against the suapies this day! In little time they had captured more than three times the number of his fingers in new firearms from those soldiers dead or frightened and fleeing from White Bird Canyon. And the warriors took a dozen more from the men they ambushed some distance away from the soldier burrow holes at Cottonwood. This meant that now a good deal more than half of the Nee-Me-Poo warriors had guns to carry into this hot fight with Cut-Off Arm’s men.

  Many of those guns had been used most effectively against four, even five times their number, stopping the soldiers in their tracks and forcing them into that protective square while the rest of the warriors rushed out of the valley—once everyone realized the village would not be threatened—and climbed to the plateau to join the fight. Cut-Off Arm must surely be hiding somewhere in the middle of his suapies, concealed among the horses and mules at the center of the square in a low depression where he would be safe.

  There was no manhood in having others do your fighting for you like that!

  The young warrior spotted his uncle, Old Yellow Wolf, lying in the middle of those veteran fighters where the noise was the loudest and the shooting the hottest, firing his soldier gun at the enemy. Beside him lay another old fighter who refused to go to the smoking lodge. Fire Body, called Otstotpoo, had killed the first soldier at the White Bird Canyon fight—his bullet hitting a man who blew on a brass horn.* Tomyunmene was on Yellow Wolf’s uncle’s left side. The faces of all three were flecked with bloody scratches caused by flying rock chips as soldier bullets careened off the boulders they lay behind to take their shots.

  This had to be the most exposed part of the entire line of these patriots fighting for their country!

  Yellow Wolf plopped on his belly as the bullets hissed around him. There were no trees or shade here to hide within. Only these low boulders.

  “I see that hat again!” Fire Body announced in a raspy whisper.

  “Can you hit it?”

  “I did twice before!” the veteran warrior answered Old Yellow Wolf.

  He took careful aim through the long sight attached to the top of the rifle barrel and squeezed the trigger.

  Tomyunmene shouted, “You took off that Shadow’s hat!”

  “Three times now!” Old Yellow Wolf cried, slapping his bare thigh in joy as his nephew crawled up beside him and took a place behind the low boulders.

  “Welcome, young one!” cried Howwallits, the one called Mean Man, sometimes referred to as Mean Person. “I see you brought your rifle today. You will see lots of game to hunt out there in the grass. Look carefully and you won’t fail to find yourself a target—”

  A bullet smacked the edge of the rock to Yellow Wolf’s left, knocking off a large chunk, then ricochetting off to strike his uncle just above the eye, driving the older man’s head backward. Old Yellow Wolf grunted as he flopped onto his side … then lay still.

  “Uncle! Uncle!” Yellow Wolf shouted far too loudly as he brushed the bright, gleaming blood from the older man’s face.

  Bullets immediately followed the noise, forcing the warriors to hug the ground for a few moments.

  When the soldier fire lessened, Mean Person suggested, “See if breath comes from his mouth, or the nose.”

  Yellow Wolf laid his ear against his uncle’s face, trying to hear the movement of air. But with so much yelling coming from both sides of the fight, he could not tell.

  “Lay your head over his heart,” Fire Body ordered. “Press your ear tightly and feel for the life.”

  After what felt like a long, long time, his uncle’s chest moved a little, and Yellow Wolf believed he heard a little flutter of the old man’s heart.

  With great joy, he shouted, “I think my uncle will live again!”

  * This battle site, located on private land, stands on what is today called Battle Ridge, just above the present-day community of Stites, Idaho.

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

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  JULY 11, 1877

  THEY HAD BEEN FIGHTING THESE REDSKINS FOR MOKE than three hours by the time Howard ordered Captain Evan Miles to take some of his infantry in a charge on the ravine lying at the northern extreme of the battlefield—a patch of grassy prairie that extended a scant mile and a half wide north to south and a couple of miles long east to west—where the troops, both foot and horse, were forced to fight in the open, their only protection the tall grass just starting to turn with these last few days of searing heat.

  While the first few weeks of this campaign, indeed the beginning of summer itself, had been cool and rainy at best, the past handful of days had turned unmercifully hot as storm clouds disappeared from the sky and the sun reemerged with a vengeance—seeming to burn like fire right through an enlisted man’s flannel and wool.

  First Sergeant Michael McCarthy had first unbuttoned his tunic, praying to the Virgin Mary for a breath of air to stir; just a little breeze it could be. Then he had pulled off the tunic completely, stripped down to his sweat-drenched gray undershirt like most of the other men in Trimble’s H Company.

  He and the rest, too, were all beginning to dwell more and more on the subject of water. Was there a pond of it back in that center of their perimeter with the supplies? Or would there be a cool spring or gurgling creek somewhere in those trees currently held by the enemy? Where in blazes would his next drink of water come from?

  Miles’s attack on the northern ravine had been so successful that by 3:30 P.M. Howard had ordered Captain Marcus P. Miller to take his artillerymen and launch the same offensive against the timber west of their enclosure. Breveted a colonel during the Civil War, Miller was an 1858 graduate of the U. S. Military Academy and a workhorse who had spent
his entire career in the Fourth U. S. Artillery. Having fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, he came west to battle Captain Jack’s Modocs. It was Miller’s leadership of an artillery battery that rescued the survivors of Canby’s peace commission after the general was brutally assassinated.*

  But today Miller’s charge bogged down when the resistance proved fierce and the warriors would not be moved. The rest of that afternoon and into the long summer evening, the battle settled into a sniping match between the two sides as both the Nez Perce and the soldiers devoted time between shots to scratching at the hot dirt, attempting to hollow out a shallow rifle pit—the infantry using their trowel bayonets, the cavalry having to plow with their belt knives and scrape with tin cups.

  With the sun having slid off midsky, the hottest part of the day had come as it slowly sank to the west, baking this plateau of drying grass and parched soldiers.

  The hottest fighting of the battle was yet to begin.

  FROM time to time the suapies turned their big-throated gun on the timber where so many of the warriors had taken up positions after they rode up from the valley floor. Most of the time the noisy charges overshot the horsemen who had followed Ollokot out of the village, but every now and then an explosion showered the men with dirt and tree branches or wounded some horses.

  “We must take that big gun!” Ollokot exhorted the men from the many bands who had shown up to fight on this west side of the ridge.

  Their first three charges at the gun emplacement and those soldiers hunkered down there were as unsuccessful as the quick dash they had made among the pack train earlier that afternoon. Each time Ollokof’s warriors were driven back … but each time his men managed to get a little closer, a little closer to the big-throated gun. Withdrawing with his warriors, Ollokot vowed with the failure of each charge that their next attempt would bring them success. But a fourth and fifth assault only got them to within two long horse lengths of the weapon.

  A final attempt might just force the soldiers back enough that Ollokof’s warriors could seize the powerful weapon, when they could turn and use it upon the soldier lines.

  As he dashed back and forth along his wavering lines of naked warriors, Ollokot watched a soldier crawl out through the tall, dry grass until he lay directly beneath the cannon. From that position the suapie could load the weapon without exposing himself any more than he had to. As the white man started to slide backward in the grass, Ollokot realized the soldier was about to fire the gun. And had to be stopped before he touched fire to the back of the long weapon.

  “Come on, all you men who would rather die than give up your country!” Ollokot cried, streaming out in front. “Do this for the graves of your ancestors! Do this for the weak and the small ones! Do this so your children will live free!”

  In a screeching red wave they broke from the shadows, swarming across the tall grass as the soldiers immediately began to fall back. Of a sudden there was a soldier chief among the suapies, then a second, both of them yelling their orders, mingled perhaps with their own encouragement. The fleeing soldiers stopped, turned, and started back toward the gun. On either side of it they were thick as summer wasps now.

  Closer and closer both sides advanced, the bullets like clouds of noisome flies, the gunsmoke gagging the fighters. Three arm lengths, no more, Ollokof’s warriors got away from the gun and those soldiers protecting it with their bodies. Three arm lengths: close enough to stare into the sweating faces of those frightened soldiers. Three arm lengths and both lines were preparing to fight by hand …

  Then the first of the warriors fell and two of his companions started pulling him back.

  A soldier collapsed, close enough that Ollokot recognized some of the Shadow words the man shouted in pain. Others dragged him back from the fighting.

  Too many of the warriors were backing up instead of following their leader into the breach.

  The soldier guns were too intense that final charge. Three arm lengths … close enough for this war chief, brother of the Wallamwatkin leader Joseph, to see that the soldiers would not prevail. Yes, they would fight to protect their little square of ground—but they would not succeed in attacking the village of women and children.

  The warriors had stopped Cut-Off Arm in his tracks.

  EVEN before the Non-Treaty bands migrated upriver to this camp at the mouth of the Cottonwood, every day saw a great number of Treaty people coming in from Lapwai, especially from Kamiah, to join the disaffected ones. With that string of successes in those early weeks of their war against the Shadows and suapies, many of the once-steadfast Christians and old Chief Lawyer’s Treaty supporters had begun to waver in their loyalties.

  Indeed, over the last few days the desertions had become so apparent that the government agent named Monteith had threatened banishment and exile to Eeikish Pah, the Hot Place,* for all those he caught supporting the hostiles. Why was it still so hard for the white men to see that things were not black or white, that you stood squarely on one side of this agony or the other?

  And why did the Shadows fail to realize that many of the Treaty people had family among those bands now taking a stand against the government?

  In this distinction, Joe Albert was not alone.

  This young warrior named Elaskolatat was only one of many who had answered Chief James Reuben’s call for volunteers to scout for and guide the soldiers in their chase after the Non-Treaty bands…. Although Joe Albert had family among those fleeing camps.

  To his way of thinking, this reality was nothing of great note, because there had always been, and always would be, a great measure of tribal pride, if not outright solidarity—no matter if a man were Christian or Dreamer, no matter if his heart came down on the side of the struggling soldiers or those victorious warriors. It was the white man—his ways, his words, and those land-stealing treaties—who had caused the fractures in ages-old loyalties. The Shadows and their soldiers were to blame for chipping away at the cohe-siveness of Albert’s people.

  And now that these Non-Treaty bands were steadily giving back to the Shadows a small dose of the pain that had been inflicted upon all of the Nee-Me-Poo over many years, even those who made their home near Lapwai or over at Kamiah could take some degree of satisfaction. Perhaps Albert, like others, hoped the old ways of their people would not be crushed by the white man. Hoped that now, in this season of Khoy-Tsahl, these Non-Treaty bands would somehow hold the strong white culture at bay … if only for a few more winters, a few more joyous summers.

  As the summer had warmed, Joe Albert gradually found himself losing what hope he still clung to that his people could be healed. The fractures went deep—especially in his own family—for his own parents were with these Non-Treaty bands camped below on the Clearwater. His father, Weesculatat, was a veteran warrior, who had steadfastly refused to give himself over to the white man. Father and son had argued many times, but in the end Joe had walked his own road and converted to the Christian faith, while Weesculatat had stayed with the Dreamers.

  When Cut-Off Arm first ordered his soldiers to bombard the Non-Treaty village down below in the valley of the South Fork, Albert felt his heart rise to his throat in fear. Not for himself, but for his relations. His parents surely had to be among those scurrying among the lodges at this moment, herding ponies out of the camp, streaming off toward the western plateau. But it wasn’t long before he found himself able to think of little else but this dirty fight, what with the Non-Treaty snipers firing from the timber, shouting encouragement to one another as the few pinned down the many—

  Of a sudden the hot air caught in his chest, burnt gunpowder stinging his nostrils as he listened intently. It was a Nee-Me-Poo voice he thought he recognized as it cheered the others each time a suapie was hit or encouraged the Non-Treaties to inch a little closer to the soldier corral.

  “Pahkatos Owyeen!” Albert cried out from behind the low shelter he had constructed of thin rock slabs like the soldiers around him.

&n
bsp; Of a sudden, most of the Non-Treaty voices fell silent, and their guns ceased roaring, too.

  “Five Wounds! Answer me! It is your friend!”

  “Who calls me?” came the loud demand from the timber. “Who dares call me a friend when he lies among the soldiers come to kill my people?”

  “Elaskolatat is my name!” Joe shouted.

  From the timber a new voice asked, “The son of Weesculatat?”

  Albert recognized that throat, too. It was Rainbow, the best friend of Five Wounds. “Is that Wahchumyus?”

  “Yes—you are really Elaskolatat?”

  Just then a bearded soldier crawled up and tugged roughly on Joe Albert’s elbow. “Tell them redskins now’s their chance to give up peaceable, or we’ll chew ’em up with lead the way we’re gonna do to their village and their relations. You tell ’em that now!” Albert’s eyes narrowed at the harsh look crusted on the soldier’s face. He had no intention of saying anything of the kind. Instead, he turned back to face the timber and shouted in his native tongue, “I am Elaskolatat! Son of Weesculatat!”

  “Why have you have brought these soldiers to attack our camp?” Five Wounds asked.

  “They would have come anyway, even if I did not bring them here,” Joe Albert explained what he knew to be the truth, listening to the rustle of talk and unconnected words drifting in from the timber where the snipers lay.

  “Elaskolatat, your father—”

  “My father?” Albert interrupted. “Is he with you? Father? Father, talk to me yourself!”

  Rainbow spoke now. “Weesculatat is not here.”

  “Then it’s as I feared,” Joe said. “He is down in the village, protecting my mother?”

  “Your father is no longer with us.”