Lay the Mountains Low
Page 43
In a dispatch intended for all three of his newspapers, sent with a mail courier back to Lapwai and beyond, Sutherland wrote:
General Howard rode into Lapwai that night on special business … and returned the next afternoon with the face of his proposed campaign somewhat changed. He had learned at Lapwai that on account of the hounding of several influential papers, the Cabinet at Washington had been considering the feasibility of removing him from his command and appointing Crook in his stead. Hearing that the cause of dissatisfaction was want of activity—which is not only baseless but almost ironical, as we have been constantly on the go ever since the troops have been in the field—General Howard resolved to … start with the rest of his command through the impenetrable Lolo Pass, and follow Joseph to the very death.
In private circles, Major Edwin Mason was telling others that the plan for the command to take up the chase over the Lolo was his idea, preempted by the general commanding.
“No matter,” Mason grumbled to Sutherland, and in a letter to his wife as well, “my plan will tell in the end—if we keep after them we are bound to strike them sometime and somewhere.”
On the morning of the twenty-sixth of July, Howard led the short march from Lawyer’s Canyon to the subagency at Kamiah, where the command set about the laborious task of crossing the Clearwater with men and materiel, horses and mules, soldiers and packers, along with a contingent of Treaty scouts. The general paid a few of the Treaty men one dollar per head to swim the command’s stock over.
Early the next morning, 27 July, Howard dispatched two of McConville’s civilians, “Captain” James Cearly and “Sergeant” Joseph Baker—both Mount Idaho volunteers—each to carry a copy of his message for Captain Rawn. Should the pair run into trouble and have to split up, Howard was counting on one of them to make it through to Missoula City. But instead of setting off on the Lolo route Howard had chosen for his column, Cearly and Baker decided they would take what was called the Old Nez Perce Trail. Following the Clearwater to its source in the mountains, they would make their crossing of the southern pass,* then drop into the head of the Bitterroot valley, where they would finally point their noses north for that new army post being raised near Missoula City.
In his dispatch, Howard informed Rawn that the Nez Perce were demoralized, so he believed it wouldn’t take much to hold the Non-Treaty bands until the general could come up from the rear to take them in whole:
If you simply bother them, and keep them back until I can come close in, their destruction or surrender will be sure. We must not let these hostile Indians escape.
On each of those three laborious days of crossing and seeing to a thousand final preparations, Howard received a telegram from General McDowell back in Portland, besides a flurry of frantic messages from Governor Potts in Montana Territory, all of them relating the most current revelations about the Indians’ movement up the Lolo Trail, clearly intended to nudge the general into starting on his chase. At the bottom of every one of McDowell’s wires, the division commander had hand-written the same succinct postscript: “I most strongly encourage your rapid movement up the Lolo Trail.”
In the last few weeks Sutherland had come to know Howard as a man who held his emotions close to the vest, rarely allowing anyone to get a glimpse of who he was inside or what turmoil he was going through. All the correspondent could learn was that the general’s dispatches back to McDowell remained steadfastly upbeat day after day, repeatedly explaining to his commander and their superiors back east: “In another month I shall surely be able to make clean work of the whole field.”
Then early on the morning of the twenty-eighth, just as they were honing the final preparations to depart Kamiah the following day, some fifty packers—who had charge of more than 350 mules for the campaign—went on strike for higher wages.
In a spasm of anger, many of Howard’s officers threatened to commandeer the mules and assign their own men to duty as packers. But it did not take long for the general to realize what an impossible struggle greenhorn troops would have with the notoriously testy animals on that impossibly narrow and treacherous wilderness trail over Lolo Pass. Without making the slightest complaint or threatening the civilians with retaliation, Howard gave the Mexican head packer, Louis, and his civilians their due.
As the general walked away from that meeting with his mule skinners, Thomas Sutherland read the expressions of unvarnished satisfaction, happiness, and downright respect for this one-armed officer those half a hundred hard-cases wore on their faces. After those many muddy days tramping through the Seven Devils region of the Salmon River wilderness with this column, the correspondent was already impressed with this outfit of packers. When describing them in several of his dispatches, he referred to them as a splendid class of men physically, with just enough of an accent—since many possessed some degree of Mexican blood—to give proper pronunciation to the word aparejos or to swear in a most musical tone. Sutherland marveled how those crude, unlettered, and rough characters were always the first to build their campfires at night and the first to cook their meals. More important for what was yet to come, the packers had never faltered in battle or on long marches demanded of them.
Howard had not only done the just thing in giving those civilians their raise in pay—no matter that to some it seemed like a bold case of highway robbery since they were less than a day from embarking on their journey up the Lolo—Sutherland knew the general had done the right thing.
Now all this column had to do, come dawn, was finally get on the trail of those hostiles once more … before the Nez Perce had a chance to scatter all across the buffalo plains of Montana Territory.
Wreaking havoc and murder in their wake.
“DON’T shoot! Don’t shoot!” came the cry from that lone stationary horseman who continued to shout at his fighting men as the warriors turned aside, starting up that ridge less than a half-mile from the white man’s breastworks.
Captain Charles Rawn focused the field glasses on the Nez Perce riders as Pierre, the Flathead interpreter, quickly translated the horseman’s commands for every man, soldier or volunteer, who could easily hear the chief’s loud bellow, admonishing his warriors to protectively flank the column of women, children, and old ones.
“ ‘Don’t shoot,’ Looking Glass tells them,” Pierre explained. “ ‘Let those white men shoot first!’ ”
The vanguard of the fighting men had escorted their families and horses laden with baggage to within some eight hundred yards of the fortress before angling away to their left, starting up the ridge rising at the north side of the narrow canyon. For the longest time the white men did nothing but stare, dumbfounded at how they had been caught so flat-footed.
“White Bird told you he didn’t wanna fight if he didn’t have to,” reminded scout E. A. Kenney, breaking the uneasy silence. “I s’pose you can take ’em at their word about it now.”
Frustrated to the point of taking a bite out of his soggy slouch hat, Rawn stomped around the rifle pits, angrily keeping his soldiers and what few civilians were left at the barricades ready for an assault, watchful for anything that might prove this to be a ruse meant to conceal an attack by more of their warriors.
The captain hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before—what with all the clatter and chatter as more than a hundred of the brave Bitterroot valley volunteers abandoned the barricades and rode off for home. By dawn, the officer found he was left with less than eighty men all told: soldiers, civilians, and Chariot’s Flathead, too.
Two hours after getting the report that the Nez Perce were packing up for the trail, those men behind the barricades spotted the first warriors leading the women and children up the narrow ridgeline until they disappeared behind a tall, conical hill, completely hidden from view.
By 11:30 A.M., the captain ordered a mix of forty-five soldiers and civilians to accompany Lieutenant Tom Andrews on a mission downstream, where they were to guard the trail below the barricades and arrest any stragglers they could.
“Captain Rawn!” came the shout from the rifle pit nearest the steep slope to the north. “The Injuns coming our way! Coming for us!”
With a loud clatter of metal and wood, the squeak of leather, and the pounding of hundreds of feet, the soldiers, civilians, and Flathead warriors streamed toward that section of the barricades. As the men hunkered down in the dapple of overcast sunlight broken by the tall evergreens that towered over the canyon floor, the breastworks bristled with weapons trained on that small group of Nez Perce slowly advancing on the white men.
A civilian announced, “They got women with ’em, too.”
“What the hell they doing?” someone asked as the group halted two hundred yards from the muzzles of those rifles.
Before anyone could venture a guess, one of the riders at the front of that group of men, women, and children advanced a few more yards, then stopped before he shouted something in bad English.
“Pierre!” Rawn ordered. “Tell ’im to talk Nez Perce so we can understand him!”
After a brief exchange, the Flathead declared, “Old man’s name Amos. Friend of mine. Live for some winters near Missoula with his people. Eight lodges—men and women, children, too. They come surrender to you.”
“Surrender?” Rawn asked dubiously. “What the blazes were they doing up here with the hostiles if they’ve been living friendly near Missoula City?”
Pierre shrugged. “Amos says he heard the Looking Glass people were coming. He was once a Looking Glass Injun. So he took his families up the Lolo to visit old friends. But when he saw there gonna be trouble, Amos want no part of it. Want to come in and give up to you. But Looking Glass and White Bird, they keep warriors close by Amos people so they don’t surrender.”
“But they’re surrendering now?”
“Looking Glass let them go this morning because the village go on by your log soldier fort.”
“All right. Captain Logan, go out there with Pierre and a squad of men. Quickly disarm those warriors.”
“You want us to dismount them, Captain?” William Logan asked.
“No. Just take their weapons for the time being.” Rawn turned to gaze down the valley where the Nez Perce camp was migrating at a leisurely pace. “We’ll find out if they’re all that friendly soon enough.”
Fifteen minutes later the captain was leading out the rest of his force, turning east down Lolo Creek. Instead of hurrying to catch up to the tail of the Indians’ march, Rawn had his men cautiously probing forward in a military formation, with flankers to the sides and a number of civilian skirmishers arrayed in advance of the main body.
It wasn’t long before those volunteers grew increasingly bold and eased up much too close on the end of the column—where the Nez Perce fighting men suddenly whirled about on their ponies and stopped in their tracks, bringing their weapons up, ready to fire on the white men. For a moment there was an anxious clamor as the civilians skidded to a halt there on the banks of Lolo Creek and turned around, bumping into one another to be the first out of danger and rifle range.
“What the devil’s going on?” Rawn bawled at the first of those retreating volunteers galloping back to the main group. “I didn’t hear any damn shots—have you been fired on? Did you take any casualties?”
Alfred Cave, a settler from the Bitterroot valley, yanked back on his reins and stopped near the officer, breathlessly explaining, “They made a show to shoot us then and there! Bastards gotta be setting up an ambush for us right ahead, Captain! They was drawing us in closer and closer, just the way they would afore they’d close the trap!”
“Trap?” Rawn echoed skeptically. “How the blazes can those Indians lay a trap for us when we know right where they are?”
Without a word of reply, Cave sheepishly turned aside, rejoining the rest of those who had fled from the advance without uttering a word.
“Mr. Matte!” he called over to the older, French-blood half-breed from the valley.
Alexander Matte moved up on his horse, followed by a half-dozen Flatheads, all of whom wore strips of white cloth around their heads, another strip tied around one upper arm so that, should a fight erupt, soldier and civilian alike would know who was a friendly, who was not.
“Take your trackers and go up the line,” Rawn ordered. “Keep your head down and find out if the Nez Perce are laying an ambush for the rest of us.”
*Near present-day Bozeman, Montana.
*Today’s Lost Trail Pass in extreme southwestern Montana.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
KHOY-TSAHL, 1877
WITH BRAZEN BRAVADO, THE SOLDIER CHIEF HAD YELLED angrily at Ollokot’s warriors as the horsemen drifted down into the valley of Lolo Creek, ordering the Nee-Me-Poo fighting men to dismount, to give up their horses and weapons.
“Is the man crazy with whiskey?” Yellow Wolf asked some of his fellow riders.
Many of them laughed at such Shadow arrogance now that the village had made it all the way around the north side of the suapies’ log-and-burrow fortress.
Ollokot asserted, “Does this little chief honestly think the Nee-Me-Poo would go on to the buffalo country without our horses and rifles?”
“How foolish he is to be a chief for the suapies at all!” snarled Shore Crossing. “That one is not even smart enough to be a horse holder for a Nee-Me-Poo war party!”
“Even if he had returned our weapons to us after we left the Bitterroot valley as he promised he would do,” Yellow Wolf said, fixing his eye on those white men keeping their distance back in the trees, “how can any man actually think we would let him keep our cartridges?”
“Because that’s what Looking Glass told the little chief we would do,” Ollokot argued sourly.
“But Looking Glass said that only to buy us a little time while the women made ready for our trip down to the valley,” Red Moccasin Tops spoke up.
Yellow Wolf thought that was a good idea to fool the soldier chief. Any soldier chief.
Like Looking Glass had just done with the little soldier, so, too, Zya Timenna had made a prank on Cut-Off Arm back at the Clearwater many suns ago. It was good to laugh after all … but—he stopped to think for the first time. Now the Nee-Me-Poo had hurt Cut-Off Arm’s pride. When you hurt a man’s pride, you make him angry.
To fight a stupid soldier was one thing. But to fight a stupid soldier you have made angry was a pony of an entirely different color. Stupidity made a soldier merely a nuisance. But anger could now make Cut-Off Arm a real danger. Yellow Wolf found himself hoping that Howard and his soldiers would indeed remain in Idaho country.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said to Red Moccasin Tops. “None of our leaders want us to fight the soldiers in this country, to fight these settlers in the Bitterroot.”
“So we let them fire a few shots at us?” Shore Crossing snapped. “To let the Shadows feel some pride in fighting our warriors? I think our chiefs shame us when they even talk of giving up our cartridges to the suapies! When they keep us from shooting back at the white men!”
There had been a little gunfire from the fighting men after the suapies and Shadows let go with a few arrogant shots. Yellow Wolf knew the white men had aimed their bullets high, none of them made to land anywhere near the column of women and children. Those silly whites fired only to make themselves feel better since they were being made to look the fools!
“Yes—why should we start a little war here in Montana?” Yellow Wolf declared, watching a change come over Ollokot’s face of a sudden. “Now that we are safe and getting that much closer to the buffalo country.”
This part of his argument made the most sense to Yellow Wolf. After all, why had most of the Shadows chosen to slip away in the dark last night if it wasn’t because of the Lolo treaty Looking Glass had struck with the soldier chief? All those white men abandoning their barricades and heading ba
ck to their homes just went to prove that the Nee-Me-Poo had indeed left the war behind in Idaho country. It was clear the Montana whites did not want to see the army make war on their Nee-Me-Poo friends.
Turning his gaze to his war chief, Yellow Wolf continued, “The trek over, the Lolo Trail was the hardest part of our journey—but it is behind us now! Why should we start a war, even if it means a little lying to that soldier chief?”
His eyes narrowing with distrust, Ollokot declared, “I think Looking Glass will say or do anything—even if it is not the truth—to get this village through to the buffalo country without trouble. His reputation, his very honor, is at stake now.”
Yellow Wolf watched Ollokot rein away, kicking his pony into a lope, sweeping toward the front of the long column as it neared the mouth of Lolo Creek, where its waters tumbled into the Bitterroot River flowing north through the last miles of that long, narrow valley. Shoulders squared, Ollokot was a fighting man by any definition, Yellow Wolf thought. Yet, this Wallowa war chief had been forced into a new role of late. Because his older brother had been shamed and shoved aside, time after time in the council meetings of the chiefs, Ollokot had been compelled to step forward and take up more and more of the duties for the Wallamwatkin as the silenced Joseph slipped further and further into the background. Ever since Looking Glass had consolidated his control over the warrior bands, even Joseph’s stature among his own people had been compromised.
Especially when Joseph had lobbied to have the Non-Treaties turn around for the Salmon, where they would make a stand in their own country rather than risking everything they had ever known on a life none of them knew anything about … the rest of the fighting men voted to leave the traditional Nee-Me-Poo homelands under Looking Glass’s leadership, to abandon the bones of their ancestors, to leave behind the good memories their children and grandchildren would never share.
But last night a few of the fighting chiefs had begun to mutter among themselves that Looking Glass was wrong to even talk to the little chief about giving up their ponies and guns. When the headmen met to discuss those talks held with the soldiers, Red Moccasin Tops shouted at them.