Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  Despite the blunder with those opening shots from the overeager volunteers and despite the momentary delays of some units charging across the creek and into the village … the surprise had nonetheless been sudden and utterly complete.

  The only drawbacks were that their twelve-hundred-yard front had not been long enough to completely encompass the southern end of the village. That and the northern end, too—where the attack completely stalled.

  Despite all these failures, the Nez Perce had been caught sleeping!

  The men, women, and children, too—all came tumbling from their beds partially dressed, if not naked, ill-prepared to mount a momentary defense. Watching from the side of the hill across the creek, he waited until the bulk of his troops were across the slough before he gave his big gray charger the spur and moved toward the seat of the action. Gibbon hadn’t been in the village very long when the first report arrived, accounting the high rate of casualties among his officers.

  Lieutenant Bradley was dead almost from those first shots. Captain Logan had also fallen among his men, shot by a woman.

  “A woman?” Gibbon had asked for clarification.

  “Yes,” replied Lieutenant Charles Woodruff, his aide-decamp, who rode back and forth carrying messages in that first desperate hour. “Seems the women and young boys are fighting as hard as their men, General.”

  “It’s difficult to tell the fighters from the innocents in this melee, Mr. Woodruff,” he told the soldier. “Some accidents are unavoidable.”

  “The women—they’re fighting like she-cats on the other end of the village, General.”

  That caused him to look at the far northern flank of their line, off to the left side of the assault. There on the hillside above Bradley’s initial position he had hoped to find the Nez Perce herd under control of Catlin’s civilians, perhaps even started away on their back trail already. Instead, some of the volunteers were trading shots with more than a dozen of the half-naked warriors crouched on the fringes of the herd while nervous ponies reared and jostled one another.

  He had to find a way to drive off that small band of warriors and seize their herd. Those horses must not fall into the hands of the enemy, now that it was painfully clear his men had failed to seal the trap around the village.

  WHEN Yellow Wolf saw his chief, Joseph of the Wallowa, for the first time that terrible morning, the leader was crossing the creek bare-legged with No Heart—both of them barefoot. Joseph had a shirt on, and breechclout, too, but instead of leggings Joseph wore half a blanket belted around his waist as he clambered out of the water, onto the bank, and lunged up the slope toward the horse herd. At first Yellow Wolf thought it might be Ollokot—the two looked so similar in many ways—but after a moment he was sure it was Joseph.

  After all, going for the horse herd was something a camp chief was sure to do, while staying in the village to fight the soldiers was what a war chief would do. Joseph had gone to secure the herd so the People could make good their escape on this awful morning.

  Before everything had come undone in a noisy instant, Yellow Wolf recalled awakening to the sound of a horse crossing the stream. After a long night of singing and dancing, he had gone to sleep in his parents’ lodge erected right against the creek bank. At the time he heard the hoofbeats, Yellow Wolf wondered if the man was crossing to his horses on the west side. But later he came to think it must have been one of the white spies: riding his horse close to the sleeping village before the attack was ordered.

  At the first shots he had bolted out of his blankets there in his parents’ unfinished lodge. They hadn’t put up the heavy lodge cover. Instead, they had roped together the cone of freshly peeled poles, then draped part of some old hides over the lower part of the framework to give them a little privacy when they all trudged off to bed after a late night of celebrating their escape from the war in Idaho country.

  Sleeping in his parents’ dwelling meant Yellow Wolf was caught away from his rifle, too. When the fight started, he had nothing more than a war club handy. Grabbing the kopluts, Yellow Wolf dashed into the fray.

  A woman stood near the edge of the village, scolding in a shrill voice, “Why aren’t you men ready to fight? You sing and dance all night—so you are slow to fight these attackers! Get up and do not run away from this battle!”

  Her stinging words made a lot of sense as so many of the young men stumbled from the lodges, rubbing the sleep from their bleary eyes, shaking their groggy heads, ill-prepared to turn away this challenge from the soldiers.

  “Ukeize!” a woman cursed at Yellow Wolf, reaching out to grab his arm and stop his dash. “Rainbow is dead! Rainbow is dead!”

  This is unbelievable, his mind raced. The Nee Me-Poo had three great warriors: Ollokot, Rainbow, and Five Wounds. Now one of the bravest was killed!

  Sprinting as fast as he could through the first bullets, Yellow Wolf started for the far northern end of camp where Joseph’s lodge was standing. Near the middle of camp he encountered Jeekunkun, called Dog. This older man was bleeding badly from his head and stumbling along, plainly unable to use the rifle he dragged along the ground.

  “Give me your gun!” Yellow Wolf demanded. “You have plenty of bullets on your belt and I have nothing but this kopluts. Trade me now so you can get away from danger and see to your wounds!”

  “No!” Dog growled angrily, clumsily swinging the rifle’s muzzle at Yellow Wolf, forcing the young warrior to back away. “I must keep my gun. I don’t want to die with no way to fight back!”

  Yellow Wolf pushed on. Close by he came across a younger warrior, this one wounded more severely than Dog. “Red Heart,” he called out to Temme Ilppilp. “Trade me your carbine so I can fight the soldiers who have hurt you!”

  But Red Heart would not let go of his gun even though he had a very serious stomach wound and could not straighten up, as he walked bent over in a crouch.

  Of a sudden Yellow Wolf heard some Shadow cursing. A grin began to grow on his face. Creeping around the side of a lodge, he spotted a soldier crawling on his hands and knees, wobbling side to side like a man with too much whiskey in his belly, as he dragged a rifle along. The white man did not hear Yellow Wolf approaching until the last minute, when the soldier looked over his shoulder, eyes growing big as brass conchos to find the kopluts swinging down at his head. The white man’s teeth loosened in his mouth as he fell.

  Bending over the dead man, who had blood seeping from both his ear and the splintered bone on the side of his head, a curious Yellow Wolf pushed on the loose teeth with two fingers. All the teeth moved together. He pulled on them, finally freeing those at the upper part of the mouth, then those from the bottom. Now the white man had no teeth and Yellow Wolf had an extra set!

  A bullet whined past his head. He scolded himself for being so heedless in his curiosity. Tossing the false teeth into the brush, he swept up the dead man’s rifle.

  Yellow Wolf now had a soldier gun and a cartridge belt, nearly every one of its loops filled with shiny bullets. He immediately turned to go in search of Ollokot.

  With bitterness he recalled how the head chiefs had given orders to the bands not to harm any Shadows in Montana as they started away from the Idaho country.

  “No white man must be bothered on the other side of the Lolo!” Looking Glass had commanded.

  “We will only fight the enemies here in our old homeland,” White Bird had emphasized. “Trouble no white people after passing over the mountains. Montana people are not our enemies. Only the Idaho people.”

  “Do not kill any cattle across the mountains,” Looking Glass had warned. “Only if our women and children grow hungry will we take cattle or any food we need to feed our people.”

  Those were strong laws made by their leaders—laws that must not be broken for the sake of all the Nee-Me-Poo, since they were leaving the war behind by crossing the mountains.

  Now it was clear the Montana whites did not think the same way as Yellow Wolf’s people.

  Eve
n though the warriors had taken precautions not to injure any of the soldiers and Shadows at the log barricades, even though the People had been scrupulous in their dealings with the Bitterroot settlers … the Nee-Me-Poo had been betrayed. At first the angry warriors were confused, baffled how Cut-Off Arm could have gotten his slow-moving soldiers up the trail so fast as to catch them here at the Place of the Ground Squirrels.

  Then Ollokot startled them all with his assertion right in the midst of the fighting.

  “These are not Cut-Off Arm’s Idaho soldiers!” the war chief declared. “They are Montana soldiers!”

  “The suapies who tried to stop us with their log fort on the Lolo?” Yellow Wolf asked as he chambered another round into his soldier gun.

  “Yes, those soldiers and settlers, too,” Ollokot answered angrily as he shook his rifle in the air, leading his band of young men southward toward the brush where they would pitch themselves into a close, hot fight with the double-talking white men.

  “And many, many more who have come from far away to catch us sleeping here,” Ollokot explained. “These soldiers and settlers of Montana betray the trust we put in the people on this side of the mountains!”

  *Under tribal practice, he would not actually receive this name until he had reached manhood, at which time he began to tell his remembrances of this Big Hole fight. I was unable to locate any reference to what this child’s name was at the time of the Nez Perce War.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  AUGUST 9, 1877

  HENRY BUCK HAD BEEN WITH CAPTAIN RAWN AT THAT barricade the newspapers in the region had already christened Fort Fizzle. Later he and his two brothers had watched the great Nez Perce village drag its horse herd past Fort Owen and go into camp, then mosey into Stevensville the following day for some trading—flour and cloth were all the Buck brothers would sell at their store, even though other merchants had traded whiskey and cartridges.

  Well, now them chickens was coming home to roost!

  Following in the wake of the Nez Perce, this Colonel Gibbon had taken his pitifully small bunch of soldiers and licked out after the Indians. When the valley’s leading citizens issued a call for volunteers, forming militia companies of their own, Henry Buck offered his services to John Catlin of Stevensville. Their bunch caught up with Gibbon’s men just shy of Ross’s Hole—more than half turning back for home with “Captain” Humble, while the rest ended up pushing over the divide in the advance with Lieutenant Bradley to find this enemy camp.

  That march seemed so damned long ago now—thinking how them warriors drank up all that whiskey, every last one of them redskins wearing a full cartridge belt around his waist, the whole of this foolishness made possible by those traders … more correct to call them traitors, Henry Buck brooded the moment Lieutenant Bradley’s charge faltered at the far northern end of the village, positioned at the extreme left of Gibbon’s line.

  Not one of the men, soldier or civilian, had been told to ask any mercy of, or to give any mercy to, this enemy that had blazed a wide swath of murderous destruction through central Idaho. Now the time had come for those Injuns to pay the piper, the officers had told their men in those last hours before the attack.

  “When you get within firing range of the village,” explained one of the cavalry sergeants who had crawled over from Bradley’s company to relay the message to the volunteers, “fire low into the tepees. That’ll scare the bejesus out of ’em, and kill a bunch, too.” Then the trooper paused a moment before adding, “The general, Gibbon I mean—ain’t said it right out … but we all been told he don’t want no prisoners.”

  Some of Catlin’s men laughed at that, buoyed up by bravado and feeling this would be a quick, easy fight as they waited restlessly to start the advance.

  Then that old man had to show up on his horse and all hell busted loose. Catlin finally barked the order for a half-dozen of them to fire. The ball was opened and Bradley led the whole outfit toward the north end of the camp … where things stalled and turned ugly.

  “Bradley’s dead!”

  Another claimed, “Shot in the head!”

  And by then, there were a couple of dozen warriors with carbines—not just those old muzzleloaders but good repeaters probably bought off some low-minded trader, if not taken off some white man they’d killed. Those warriors had that north end of things snarled up and bogged down just across the creek. Even before the civilians and soldiers got anywhere close to the village.

  Natural was it that those men around Henry Buck drifted to the right, making for the two companies already pressing against the village and having a hot time of it: Hell, so hot a time that Gibbon hadn’t held any companies in reserve but ended up throwing every man right into the fray as soon as their advance stalled, his advance moving slower than he had a liking for.

  “Give it to ’em!” shouted one of the officers in those companies at the center of the line, prodding his soldiers forward. “Push ’em! Push ’em hard now!”

  A sergeant was bellowing, “Shoot low! Shoot low! Into the lodges, boys!”

  Henry had levered another round into the chamber of his Winchester carbine and was preparing to fire at a group of warriors making from right to left, frog-hopping from lodge to lodge, when he suddenly realized they weren’t warriors at all. A small knot of women and children, all of them running hunched over, arms looped protectively over the little ones.

  He gulped a deep breath, glad he hadn’t fired—then blinked his eyes, startled.

  Right there in the midst of those women and children was a blond woman!* Her waist-length honey-colored hair whipped this way and that. There was no mistaking its color among those squaws and children. She glanced Henry’s way, gazing at those soldiers and civilians they were racing past; then she was gone behind another lodge.

  “Did you see that?” he asked, turning quickly to the man on his right.

  Tom Sherrill was struggling over the action of his rifle, intent on the weapon he held in his hands. “See what, goddammit?”

  “N-nothing,” Henry murmured and looked back at those lodges where she had disappeared, the open ground between him and the camp littered with a clutter of fog and a little gunsmoke.

  Suddenly he caught a glimpse of the group as it reappeared for an instant among more of the stacks of lodgepoles and the last few tepees at the far northern end of the village … but he never saw the honey-haired woman again.

  Squeezing his eyes shut, then opening them quickly, Henry Buck wondered what the hell a white woman was doing with all them squaws—and dressed just like them, too.

  “Give ’em hell, boys!” an officer bawled near his shoulder, moving up behind the volunteers.

  “You heard ’im!” Catlin cheered. “Shoot anything what moves afore it shoots you!”

  Henry Buck brought that carbine to his shoulder, sighting down the barrel, looking for a target as they continued for the creek bank.

  Then he glanced one last time between those northernmost lodges where she had disappeared. Wondering if he really had seen her at all.

  HIS uncle was Joseph, chief of the Wallamwatkin band from the Wallowa Valley. Ollokot, the great war chief of their people, was his other uncle.

  But he wasn’t old enough to talk in council or to become a fighting man—not yet he wasn’t. Because Suhm-Keen was barely ten summers old. He lived with his parents and his father’s parents in a small lodge after leaving their old homes west of the mountains to come to the buffalo country. Here at the Place of the Ground Squirrels, their lodge stood in the midst of those erected at the far southern end of camp.

  As had been his grandfather’s practice for many years now, early every morning, the old man would leave to go check on the horses or walk off by himself to watch the sun come up. That’s when his grandmother, Chee-Nah, would softly whisper for Suhm-Keen to come join her beneath her buffalo robe, where he would drift back to sleep beside her warmth.

  Many rifleshots had startled him just as he was drifting back to sle
ep that morning, curled against her soft bulk. Many horses tied outside the lodges were calling out, neighing in fear. His father grabbed up his rifle and dived out of the door, closely followed by his mother. Now the boy was alone with Chee-Nah in the shattered grayness of that dawn yet unborn.

  “Grandmother!” he cried when she brushed by his shoulder and started for the door.

  “I must see for myself,” she said, then knelt at the opening and peered out as bullets came thick, like summer hail rattling on the taut hides.

  Chee-Nah had no sooner settled to her haunches when she was driven back into the darkness near the firepit, a soft whimper escaping from her throat.

  “You are hurt!” he cried, frightened, as he vaulted to her.

  Although blood streamed from the wound in her left shoulder, the old woman firmly grabbed hold of his bare arm and pushed him toward the side of the lodge, where she quickly jabbed a knife through the pliant, fog-dampened buffalo hide.

  “Get out, Suhm-Keenr she ordered. “Run to the trees and hide! Run as fast as you can!”

  As he stood frozen, staring at the blood oozing from her wound, his grandmother had to nudge him one more time before he turned and did as she instructed. Stretching apart the sides of that slit, he jumped free of the lodge and started running, barefoot and naked but for his little breechclout.

  He dived to the left out of a horse’s way, then scrambled to the right as two fighting men sprinted around a lodge, headed for the gunfire that was rising steadily, grown almost deafening … except for that pounding of his heart. Already there were other children, some younger than Suhm-Keen, some older, too, all dashing for the brush on the south where the low plateau bordered the valley. Bullets clipped the branches and rustled leaves on either side of him as he clawed his way up the slope—more frightened than he had ever been.