Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  “What about the other one we shot?” Yellow Wolf asked when the Christians were hurrying away on foot, leading their ponies.

  “We will let him go tell the Shadows about us and what we do to those who betray us,” Rainbow said.

  Two Moons grumbled, “We may as well go on back to our camp and take our families to the buffalo country. No use in staying here any longer now.”

  “We must get farther back into the trees,” Rainbow warned. “The soldiers are close enough I can smell them already.”

  BY TELEGRAPH

  —

  WASHINGTON.

  —

  Sitting Bull will Remain North.

  WASHINGTON, July 14.—Major Walsh, of the Canada mounted police, visited Sitting Bull near the headwaters of French creek. Sitting Bull said he desired to remain with the Canadians during the summer; that he would do nothing against the law; he came there because he was tired of fighting, and if he could not make a living in Canada he would return to the United States. Spotted Eagle, Rain-in-the-Face, Medicine Bear, and a number of other chiefs of the hostile Sioux, were present, together with two hundred lodges. It is believed there must be some four or five hundred lodges of hostile Sioux now north of the boundary line, numbering at least 1,500 fighting men.

  With Lieutenant Albert G. Forse of E Company guarding the rear of their withdrawal, Major Mason stopped his battalion every now and then on their retrograde march for the Clearwater that afternoon of the seventeenth, allowing Ad Chapman a chance to rest his two wounded trackers. While James Reuben welcomed every opportunity to get out of the saddle with his wrist injury, if only for a few minutes before they pushed on, Abraham Brooks’s shoulder wound prevented him from moving off his travois.*

  At their first stop, after posting some pickets, Mason assigned a few artillerymen to scrape out a shallow hole beside the trail. Here they laid the body of Captain John Levi, then dragged dirt back over the corpse before the battalion moved on into the late-afternoon light.

  “Having accomplished all I desired in making this scout,” Mason had explained to his officers while the grave was being dug, “I have determined we won’t pursue the Indians with my cavalry over a trail plainly impossible to handle a mounted force on.”

  To Chapman’s way of thinking, a double handful of Non-Treaty backtrail scouts had just succeeded in turning back Howard’s army of half-a-goddamned-thousand!

  As it fell progressively darker that evening, the going got slower and slower. They did not reach Lolo Creek until close to eleven o’clock. The volunteers led them across the stream to a small clearing on a gentle hillside, and Mason’s command went into a cold bivouac.

  Chapman himself didn’t mind in the least. As soon as their wounded guides were made comfortable under a thin blanket, Ad curled up, the reins wrapped around his wrist, while his weary horse cropped at the nearby grass. Chapman figured the animal had to be more hungry than tired—while he himself was more weary than worried about his belly’s gnawing emptiness.

  Ad drifted off to sleep, thinking how lucky they’d been to lose only one in the ambush. If those warriors who had jumped their trackers had only waited, been patient a little while longer, letting Mason’s battalion continue on up the trail into that dense maze of a forest where cavalry simply could not maneuver … why, he might well not be curled up here right now, missing the warmth of his wife’s body lying next to him in their bed, the coolness of his son’s hand clutched in his as the boy learned to ride and to hold a carbine.

  A nervous Mason had them up at first light and moving out as soon as it was clear enough to see the trail ahead, moving steadily down the slick, muddy slopes toward the Clearwater crossing. Chapman and his scouts brought the battalion to Howard’s camp on the east bank of the river just after the main column had finished taking its breakfast and was preparing to recross to the south bank of the Clearwater in preparation for a march downriver to Lewiston.

  As soon as he had turned over both wounded trackers to the army surgeons, Chapman walked into headquarters camp, tied off his horse, then settled on his haunches by the general’s low fire. Within moments Howard had his cooks pouring coffee for Major Mason and the civilian, along with starting some bacon and hardtack frying in the grease already hardening on the bottom of the cast-iron skillets.

  It had been more than twenty-eight hours since he had eaten last, so that breakfast beside the Clearwater in the shadow of the immense Bitterroot Mountains was just about the best Ad Chapman could remember eating in a long, long time.

  Fort Lapwai

  July 18, 1877

  Dear Sallie,

  Mamma said she had sent a letter of mine to you, so I need not explain what a commotion we have been in. This morning our first warriors arrived, the first officers that have come in since the battle of the 11th and 12th, and they brought such good news. We have had, at least I can answer for myself, a very thankful day. Several officers came in early this morning and brought news that the Indians in bands have been giving themselves up for the last two days. Quite a number of Joseph’s band came in, and they say Joseph himself wants to come in, but White Bird won’t let him. The cavalry are out after those that are still hostile, but our officers think the war is practically over and that there will be no more fighting. They say that the fighting up to now has been horrible. They never saw such desperate fighting as these Indians did.

  We are all pretty well but tired, and even though the war may be over, the fuss for this little post will not be. Eleven companies are on their way here from California, will be here this week, and will go into camp until things are settled. A whole regiment of infantry is also on the way. As soon as matters are a little more settled out in the front, General Howard intends leaving the cavalry to follow up the scattered bands out there, and bring the rest of [the] command in here …

  One of the officers, a nice fellow, walks in his sleep. He was unfortunate enough to get up in the night in camp and shoot the picket outside of his tent (one of his own men) and killed him instantly.

  … Mrs. Perry and Mrs. General Howard are coming to Lapwai tomorrow … In a few days all the wounded are to be brought in here, nearly thirty poor fellows. They say there are some awful wounds.

  Affectionately,

  Emily F.

  “You understand your orders, Lieutenant?” Charles Rawn asked the youngest officer in the Seventh Infantry, who stood stiffly beside his horse.

  At attention a few yards in front of the four members of his small scouting party, who were already mounted, Second Lieutenant Francis Woodbridge said, “Yes sir, Captain. I’m to look over the trail ascending into the mountains, get up to a point where I can look six or eight miles into Idaho, and determine if the Indians have passed or if they are coming up the far side.”

  “Very good,” Rawn replied. “You have rations for four days, but I am expecting you back on the twenty-first.”

  “Three days from now.”

  “That’s right, Lieutenant,” Rawn emphasized. “It’s no more than thirty miles from our end of the trail up to the pass itself. See what you can of the far side—looking for those Nez Perce said to be fleeing from Idaho—then get on back here to help us finish building this post.”

  Woodbridge saluted and without a word he mounted. Taking up the slack in his reins, the bright-eyed lieutenant, fresh out of West Point, said his farewell: “We’ll be back by supper on the twenty-first, Captain.”

  Rawn watched those five backs disappear through the trees, riding south up the Bitterroot valley where they would reach the end of the Lolo Trail. He sighed, hoping the young lieutenant would not put his small scouting detail in harm’s way. He really needed the muscle of those five men if he was going to get these quarters and storehouses finished and sealed off before another Montana winter blew in.

  *Perhaps it's named this for the many switchbacks climbing up from Lolo Creek?

  *Horse Blanket claimed the white men, soldiers and civilians both, abandoned their Nez
Perce scouts and he was compelled to carry Brooks with him on his horse, getting soaked with blood during the long ride.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  JULY 19–20, 1877

  NOW THAT HE KNEW WHERE THE NON-TREATIES WERE headed, Oliver O. Howard felt more uncomfortable sitting on the horns of this dilemma than he did sitting in one of those damnable instruments of torture the army called a McClellan saddle!

  Once Joseph’s warrior bands crossed from Idaho into Montana, they would no longer be Howard’s Indians to chase and pacify. Then they would belong to Brigadier General Alfred H. Terry and his Department of Dakota. With the Nez Perce already well started on the Lolo Trail across the Bitterroot, Howard had begun to think it didn’t make any sense for him to go traipsing along in their wake—although he had received orders from McDowell that he need not be mindful of division boundaries in pursuit of the Non-Treaty bands.

  Through division headquarters in San Francisco, Howard had received General William T. Sherman’s instructions to ignore such geographic boundaries on 26 June, and McDowell had again reminded him of Sherman’s orders three days ago on 16 July when it appeared Howard was putting an end to his direct pursuit of the hostiles. What gave Oliver pause was the fact that according to settlers in the area and reports from Christian trackers, the terrain of the Lolo Trail was even more rugged than what his men had encountered on the far side of the Salmon River back in June.

  At this point, 19 July, Howard was staring at an exhausted command, weary of almost a solid month of campaigning: breaking trail and fighting Indians both. Hacking their way through another two hundred miles of even rougher terrain was far from appealing.

  Then there was his guarded concern that if he did follow the retreating Indians, that would leave this region of Idaho devoid of enough soldiers to handle the eventuality of neighboring tribes rising up in revolt. Made bold by the Nez Perce successes, the other tribes in the Northwest had white settlers uneasy for hundreds of square miles. But Howard had more troops on the way: Colonel Frank Wheaton was on his way from Atlanta with infantry, and Major John Green was marching north from Fort Boise with more horse soldiers. They would reach Lapwai within the week. Then, Howard convinced himself, he would feel a lot more secure about pursuing the Nez Perce out of Idaho.

  At that point, it didn’t take long for him to devise a plan that should carry him over the next several weeks and on to putting an end to this outbreak. He would push downriver for Lapwai, on to Lewiston for resupply. Then he would march his column north for the Mullan Road. Although this route would be more than double the distance of the one-hundred-fifty-mile Lolo Trail, the fact that this freight route extending between Missoula and Spokane Falls was no more than a narrow wagon road did not deter his thinking. The Mullan was undeniably the best means for his command to reach western Montana.

  His plan was as ambitious as it was daring—hoping to, be in position south of Missoula when the Nez Perce finally debouched from the trail in the Bitterroot valley. Over the last few days Oliver Otis had come to realize he could not afford to rest on the laurels of what he had won at the Battle of the Clearwater. That faint praise sent his way in the Western papers was already beginning to fade. He needed to keep the pressure on if he was going to blunt the criticism coming from both the civilian press and the highest echelons of the army.

  In the last month the Nez Perce had killed nearly ninety people and done close to a quarter-million dollars in damage, a monstrous sum in a day and time when the average laborer made no more than seventy-five cents at the end of his dawn-to-dusk workday. To put the very public humiliation of the scandal at the Freedmen’s Bureau behind him, to blunt the unseemly reputation he suffered among his army colleagues, Howard had to press forward with his plan without delay.

  But, right from the start, the general’s hopes began to suffer one wounding after another.

  Just yesterday, on the morning of the eighteenth, his men had discovered three Non-Treaty warriors hiding among the ruins of the agency buildings on the east side of the Clearwater. Two of them were wounded, in all likelihood left behind when the rest of the village fled toward Weippe Prairie.

  After stationing a token force—Throckmorton’s battery of artillery, Jocelyn’s company of infantry, and Trimble’s troop of cavalry—at the Kamiah crossing on the nineteenth and directing McConville’s volunteers back upriver to finish destroying the last of the caches at the enemy’s Clearwater camp, Howard set off with the rest of his command for Lewiston. He got no farther than the halfway point when a courier reached him with the news that hostiles had doubled back, slipping out of the hills, and had the soldiers pinned down at Kamiah—stealing more than four hundred of the Christian Indians’ horses, killing what cattle they could not drive off, and diligently burning houses of Lawyer’s Indians.

  Leaving his infantry and artillerymen there at Cold Springs, Howard ordered his cavalry back to Kamiah before he and a small headquarters group rode on to Fort Lapwai with Captain David Perry’s escort. At the post he intended to make arrangements for the supplies required by the next phase of the war.

  When they were finished with their destruction on the Clearwater, McConville’s militia was under orders to drive several hundred head of captured ponies past Mount Idaho and Grangeville, into the head of Rocky Canyon, where they were to be slaughtered, in hopes of eliminating any reason the warrior bands might have for returning to central Idaho. That done, McConville and his men were to station themselves in the area, protecting the settlements should Joseph and his henchmen slip back out of the mountains and make a wide sweep for the Salmon River.

  Oliver knew it would be a tiring ride for his old bones, pushing those long hours in the saddle, but three days ago he had received word that his wife would be arriving by steamboat in Lewiston that very night. Oliver managed to make it in time, but when the steamboat was moored at 10:00 P.M. his sweet Lizzie was not on board. However, Mrs. Perry was on board. And upon spotting her husband among those welcomers on the dock, she went into a fit of theatrical hysterics, a display that totally disgusted Howard.

  In town for the night, he picked up the first newspapers he had seen in weeks—finding he was under personal assault from the normally conservative San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Herald. But the sharpest attacks were those of the local papers like the Lewiston Teller, whose editor, Alonzo Leland, lost no opportunity to write about how poorly Howard had done with the campaign so far. His brutal words cut Oliver to the marrow.

  “The sheep is a very pleasant and amiable animal and has none but sterling qualities,” Leland had written in the most recent editorial, perhaps still furious over his own son’s reports on the poor showing the army made at Cottonwood, “but we do not expect him to chase wolves and coyotes; we assign the task to the dog—also an amiable brute, but better adapted to the purpose.”

  Leland broadcast that General Crook was a better man to send against the wolves and coyotes: “He sticks his breeches in his boots, keeps his powder dry, eats hardtack, and goes for ‘em…. But Howard regards the army as a kind of missionary society for the Indians and holds himself as the head of a kind of red freedman’s bureau.”

  While Crook was a first-class Indian fighter, as proved down in Arizona and during the Sioux campaign, if Howard continued to lead the chase of the Nez Perce, the war would be a six months’ campaign, hunting the enemy in the mountains.

  Summoning up from inside him his reservoir of fairness in the face of brutal assault, Oliver sighed and folded the paper before handing it off to Lieutenant Charles Wood, his aide-de-camp.

  “How wonderfully news can be spread,” he began with a cool, even detached, air so unlike what he had boiling inside. “It is like the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, when it leaves us, it is magnified several times before the journals at Lewiston and Walla Walla have put it into type, and by the time it has reached Portland and San Francisco it has become a heavy cloud, overspreading the whole heaven.”

  “
It’s those civilian volunteers, General,” Major Edwin Mason grumbled. “They play at citizen militia when they’re nothing more than a worthless set of trifling rascals! Utterly worthless, a cowardly pack of whelps, sir!”

  Captain Birney Keeler jumped in, saying, “Many times I myself have explained to General McDowell how he should not give a grain of credence to any of the civilian accounts of our campaign, sir. Time and again I’ve informed the division commander that such news reports and editorials are nothing more than wanton, systematic lies. I’ve even told him that to continue employing civilians of such low character would be worse than useless in ending this war.”

  “Yes, well,” Howard replied to McDowell’s aide, sent by the department commander to have a look at the campaign for himself. He cleared his throat of the ball of fury just then rising. “I’d like to put a few of these dishonest enemies attacking me far from their warmth and safety of the rear out on those mountain trails of the Salmon, or march them dawn to dusk and order them to fight under a broiling July sun.”

  By the following morning, Oliver Otis Howard had changed his mind. It was to be one of the most crucial decisions he made in his life. Turning his back on his initial plan to loop north to the Mullan Road, then sweep down on the Non-Treaty bands emerging from the Lolo Trail just south of Missoula, the general had now committed his men to pursuing the fleeing camp across the Lolo itself. While awaiting his reinforcements in Lewiston, he polished the details of his three-column strategy.

  Upon his arrival at Lewiston with his ten companies of the Second Infantry, Colonel Frank Wheaton would start north to the Mullan Road, accompanied by F and H Companies, First Cavalry, along with two companies of mounted volunteers mustered from the eastern regions of Washington Territory. Inspector Erwin Watkins of the Indian Bureau, on the scene with Agent Monteith, had proposed this march of thirty-six officers and 440 enlisted men through the Coeur d’Alene country to blunt any rising zeal the disaffected tribes in the area had for joining up with Joseph’s Nez Perce.*