Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

No men had a hotter time of it than Captain Charles C. Rawn’s I Company, detailed to lead the retreat—which as quickly became both confusing and terrifying to boot, with a little eye-to-eye and hand-to-hand fighting in the brush and tall willows as they vacated the village itself. Skirmishing for the contested ground with their firearms was so close that a few of the men were powder-burned by their enemy’s weapons; a warrior’s shirt was set on fire with a muzzle blast. Men on both sides fell noisily, calling out, beseeching their friends to help as the tide of battle moved past.

  Then men who had started their retreat in two lines, back-to-back, quickly began to drift apart as the fighting grew intense. Ordered to bring out their dead and wounded, many of the soldiers merely stopped long enough to pick up a fallen comrade’s rifle so it could be pitched into the deep water in their retreat and kept from falling into the enemy’s hands.

  With the death of A Company’s Captain William Logan, command had fallen to First Lieutenant Charles A. Coolidge, who had begun this Nez Perce War by scouting part of the Lolo Trail. In Gibbon’s retreat, Coolidge’s men were assigned to close the file.

  But just short of the boggy slough, Coolidge dropped before Rawn’s advance had even reached the bottom of the hill—wounded through both thighs in the nose-to-nose skirmishing the embattled A Company encountered in covering the rear of the retreat. Once more the command of A Company and responsibility for covering their retreat to the timber was transferred, this time to Second Lieutenant Francis Woodbridge, newly turned twenty-four years old.

  Under Gibbon’s orders, once the base of the timbered point of land was reached by Rawn’s advance, Woodbridge wheeled his men about and anchored them just above the creek—where they were to cover the retreat of the rest of the command scrambling up behind them. Spread out some three to five yards apart, wherever they could find a little cover on the hillside, Rawn’s foot soldiers watched the other infantrymen and civilians stream through the wide gaps in their line while they continued to lay down a hot covering fire, until the last man moving out of the slough had been accounted for. Only then did Captain Rawn cry out his order to about-face.

  Needing no more prodding than that, I Company bolted to their feet and resumed their retreat up the slope behind the rest.

  Henry Buck turned his head quickly, glancing over his shoulder as he made his climb into the timber, hand over foot, slipping and falling, then crabbing back into motion again. He thanked his lucky stars he wasn’t one of the stragglers slow in getting out of the village when the red sonsabitches came flooding back in. By that time the aim of those warriors had become deadly. At every crack of a rifle, it seemed, one of the white men fell somewhere in the retreat. Most of the wounded, and even a few of the dead, were promptly scooped up by the wrists or ankles and dragged along—those bleeding and unable to get out on their own begged not to be left behind, terrified those warriors and squaws would get their hands on them.

  Just inside the point of timber the first of the soldiers staggered to a breathless halt and started to regroup, many of Catlin’s civilians among them. They still were far from being safe. Bullets snarled through the trees, smacking trunks and branches, whining in ricochet as the lead hornets slammed against exposed rocks protruding from the loose soil. Henry’s eyes darted about. This spot was about as good as they were going to find on the side of this mountain.

  He sucked in a breath and flopped to his belly, clutching his carbine like life itself. Although it seemed like no more than mere minutes to the attackers, Gibbon’s assault on, and temporary possession of, the village had lasted a little less than two and a half hours.

  In bemused exhaustion, Buck watched several weary soldiers lunge right on past him and the others, running still farther up the slope—either terrified of the snipers already at work from the timber around them or frightened of those warriors herding the white men into this surround.

  “Don’t run, men!” Gibbon shouted as he limped into the timber, dragging his wounded leg, and started to collapse. “If you run away … I will be forced to stay right here alone!”

  Through their midst sprinted a young corporal, head down and legs churning, huffing up the slope in full panic. “To the top of the hill!” he screamed as he ran. “To the top of the hill or we’re lost!”

  “Corporal!” Gibbon shouted above the tumult. “By bloody damn, your commanding officer is still alive!”

  Henry watched that yank the corporal to a halt, wheeling around, his face flushed as he said, “General! We gotta get these men to the top of the hill! Only safe place—”

  “As you were, Corporal!” Gibbon snapped, then turned to the rest, balancing on his one good leg. “This is the place, men. Take cover and dig in!”

  From where Gibbon had sunk to the ground in utter exhaustion and pain, the south end of that enemy camp where the colonel had been wounded was no more than a half-mile away.

  “Is this our last horse, General?” shrieked Adjutant Woodruff as he lunged up through the timber leading his mount.

  “Get on the ground!” Gibbon hollered.

  A spray of bullets spit through that stand of timber. The lieutenant instantly flopped to the ground with no more urging. For a few heartbeats it seemed all those men hugging the forest floor were staring at that lone horse among them. It tugged and pulled at the young lieutenant lying on the ground gripping its reins, nearly stepping on several men as it pranced about in fright.

  “Sh-should I let go, General?”

  “No!” Gibbon replied sternly. “Long as it’s alive, we’ve got a chance to send a courier out on horseback.”

  After no more than the space of another heartbeat, Captain Rawn lunged into the grove, surrounded by what he had left of his skirmishers, dragging four of their wounded and one dead man slung between a pair of soldiers, the casualty’s boots bouncing loosely over the rough ground.

  “General Gibbon!” Rawn yelled. “Lieutenant English* is down, sir!”

  “Get in here, man! Get in here!” Gibbon hollered in a crimson frustration. “Keep your heads down! Company commanders, spread your men out! Firing lines, dammit! Form a skirmish formation and give them back what they’re giving us!”

  With agonizing slowness, the soldiers and most of Catlin’s volunteers did as Gibbon ordered—what good sense itself dictated. With the soldiers and volunteers bunched up the way they were, the warriors could slip in all the closer on them. So they began to spread out, forming a long irregular corral running, for the most part, up and down the slope, from east to west.

  “Dig in!” came the call from one of the captains as the men began moving apart.

  “You heard ’im!” a frog-throated sergeant bellowed. “Entrench, you goddamned buckos! Entrench afore they blow your bleeming brains out!”

  Those infantrymen equipped with the Rice bayonets tore them out of the leather scabbards hung from their prairie belts and put the small trowels to work. Those cavalrymen and volunteers who did not have the luxury of such a tool went to work with tin cups, belt knives, even folding pocketknives—anything they could use to scrape away at the loose, flaky surface of the forest floor. A few of the men slashed the wool covers off their canteens and started whittling at the thin bead of solder welding the two halves together. When finally pried apart, a half a canteen made an admirable entrenching tool. Around Henry it appeared about half of the men had started digging, while the other half worked to keep the warriors back from their lines. Looking around at their ragged oval, he thought that those who had been lucky enough to end up behind some downed timber or a tree stump were rich men by any measure.

  “You dig,” said the soldier beside him. “I’ll spell you later.”

  Buck snapped his pocketknife open and started digging. After a few scrapes with the blade, he pushed the loosened soil away from the hole he had started. More digging, followed by moving another handful of dirt, slowly beginning to build up a low mound in front of the long, shallow trench he was gouging out of the ground. Copyin
g the work of the soldiers who seemed to know what they were doing, no questions asked.

  A few of the soldiers and volunteers returned the enemy’s fire from time to time—if for no other reason than to keep the warriors honest, holding the enemy back from their ragged perimeter—while the rest continued to dig in for themselves and those wounded who could do nothing as the sun rose higher and the air got hotter. Shafts of hot, steamy light burned through the thick canopy of tree branches.

  “What you think of that, Henry Buck?” Luther Johnson called out a few yards away. He was consumed with scratching at a trench using his big belt knife. “You know I dug for gold on this very hillside back in the sixties, the angels’ truth it is. Never, Henry Buck, never did I figger I’d be back on this spot one day—not digging a shaft to find some gold … but digging a hole to save me life!”

  Henry saw how much soil those soldiers moved with their bayonets and realized how pitifully slow he was getting the same job done with his folding knife. But as long as he could dig for a while, then shoot every now and then, Henry Buck figured it would keep his mind off the fact that Gibbon’s attackers were now surrounded … maybe sixty or more miles from any assistance … without food or water … cut off from resupplying their ammunition.

  “Where’s that howitzer?” Gibbon wondered aloud. He slammed a fist into an open palm angrily.

  “The gun crew should have had that twelve-pounder here by now,” Rawn complained.

  “Not just the howitzer,” Gibbon muttered with a barely bottled frustration. “We’re damn well gonna need those two thousand extra cartridges they were bringing us, too.”

  WITH Looking Glass slinking back from the front lines, aware of the new anger and undisguised contempt most of the Nee-Me-Poo now held for him, White Bird—oldest chief among the Non-Treaty bands—now assumed the ascendancy. Hard as he was on all the fighting men, he was even more brutal on his own young warriors.

  “Ho—Red Moccasin Tops! And you there, Swan Necklace! See how your friend Shore Crossing is already dead!”

  Yellow Wolf, like many of the other fighting men, turned his attention away from those soldiers retreating from the village, curious to watch White Bird scold the two surviving members of those first raids along the Salmon River that had ignited this wholesale war.

  “Look at these suapies and Shadows, Red Moccasin Tops!” the old chief chided the two young men. “Swan Necklace—see how these enemies are not asleep like those you murdered back in Idaho country!”

  Lumbering up to the front lines in the village, old White Bird shrieked right into the face of Red Moccasin Tops, “This is battle against an enemy who can defend themselves! Now is the time to show your courage and fight!”

  Without a word, but plainly smarting from the chief’s public rebuke, both of the young warriors led the charge into the willow, sprinting ahead along the path the retreating soldiers were taking—beginning to lay down a deadly fire into the white men as the soldiers scattered through the brush, racing madly for the hillside across the stream.

  “I would like to ride them down on horseback!” Old Yellow Wolf suggested as he came up to grab his nephew’s elbow. “Come with me!”

  Yellow Wolf agreed. He spotted a brave warrior coming toward the village from the willow. It was Weyatnahtoo Latat, the one called Sun Tied. Yellow Wolf’s eyes immediately darted to the birthing lodge as he sadly remembered the brutal death he had seen inside earlier that morning, the man’s wife and newborn daughter savagely killed.

  “Sun Tied!” he called out. “Catch up a horse and come with us to kill the stragglers running for the hillside!”

  The warrior looked over the uncle and nephew quickly and agreed with a harsh grin. “A fine idea! We can shoot them like ducks on a pond!”

  Three more* joined the trio, and all six sprinted away to locate any ponies still tied to lodges, horses that hadn’t been killed or hadn’t bolted off with the noise, gunfire, and confusion.

  Once they were mounted, the small war party raced their ponies south, to the upper end of camp, heading for a shallow crossing, where they would double back on the other side of the creek and launch their mounted attack on the last of the retreating soldiers—

  Yellow Wolf and the other fighters jerked with the loud, shrill whistle as the cannonball hissed overhead on its way toward the village. They waited, watching the last of its flight—fully expecting the ball to explode the way such singing balls had at the Clearwater fight when Cut-Off Arm’s soldiers used just such a cannon. As their eyes followed the descent of the black ball; it landed just beyond the easternmost lodges but failed to detonate.

  Sun Tied turned, a smile widening on his powder-grimed face. “Yellow Wolf—I would like to see these soldiers who have brought this big gun that shoots twice. Maybe we can capture it for ourselves.”

  “Eeh-heh!” Yellow Wolf exclaimed, spotting the puff of powdersmoke clinging to the hillside. “We must do everything we can to keep any more of the big bullets from reaching our village!”

  The six set off at a gallop, their horses splashing across the shallow ford and onto the grassy slope, angling southwest as they climbed toward that place where he had seen the curl of gray gunsmoke.

  A second roar belched from the wide throat of that cannon on the hill as the horsemen entered the timber just north of the big gun’s position. Ahead through the labyrinth of trees, Yellow Wolf spied the six mules and the big gun’s wagon those mules were hitched to. He and Sun Tied immediately reined to the right, moving uphill through the trees to come around on the soldiers, when a single shot rang out from the forest, followed by a rattle of gunfire from those huddled around the cannon.

  Someone was shooting at the suapies from above, and the soldiers were firing back.

  Then Yellow Wolf heard gunfire coming from the direction his uncle had taken to launch his attack. That meant they had the soldiers wrapped up on three sides now! As he and Sun Tied reined their horses to the left and started downhill toward the gun crew, Yellow Wolf watched two of the suapies bolt from the ground and take off at a dead run into the trees. He fired his rifle at the pair, the exact moment one of the frightened mules reared in its harness—a soldier clinging to its back. The bullet struck the mule and it crumpled on all fours, crying out almost humanlike in its noisy bawl.

  As the animal fell, it caught the soldier beneath it, pinning the man’s legs beneath its heavy bulk while the mule shuddered, dying slowly.

  Quickly dismounting so that he would do better with his aim, Yellow Bird sighted another warrior on the far side of the white men. Seeyakoon Ilppilp, known as Red Spy, was the one making things hot for the suapies from above. The moment one of the cannon men popped up to make a shot, Red Spy was already aiming and fired his gun. His bullet struck the soldier in the back and he crumpled over the gun’s wagon, then slumped to the ground.

  In the next heartbeat, Dropping from a Cliff fired at the other lead mule. The animal kicked twice, then went down in a heap. That’s when Stripes Turned Down stepped from the edge of the trees and bravely aimed his rifle at the last of the handful of soldiers still huddled around their gun. His bullet struck one of them, causing the rest to suddenly bolt, turning tail and dashing into the timber, heading up the hill, away from their back trail.

  Earth Blanket, the one named Wattes Kunnin, surprised Yellow Wolf by bursting into the clearing from the south-western side of the hill, his face flushed with excitement. He did not carry a firearm in his hands.

  “Where is your rifle, Earth Blanket?” Yellow Wolf asked.

  “I have none!”

  “You do now,” and Yellow Wolf pointed to those rifles abandoned by the fleeing soldiers.

  With a big gulp of air, the breathless Earth Blanket nodded, saying, “I came to tell you of more soldiers coming!”

  Sun Tied looked at Yellow Wolf and asked, “Could it be Cut-Off Arm and his suapies?”

  “No,” and Earth Blanket wagged his head. He was a half-Umatilla who had been born
on White Bird Creek but had nonetheless joined Joseph’s Wallowa band. “Only the fingers on my two hands, maybe less. All but one riding horses. That black-painted Shadow man walking on foot is leading a mule—and it carries a heavy load: four boxes on its back.”

  “Four boxes?” Old Yellow Wolf repeated. “Those boxes must hold something very, very important for that mule to have so many soldiers to tend to it!”

  “Come with me to see what surprise we can make of this!” Sun Tied suggested.

  “Horses and guns!” shouted Dropping from a Cliff in excitement.

  At the same time they sighted the oncoming riders and the black-skinned man on foot with his single pack mule, Yellow Wolf also spotted his mother’s brother, Espowyes, called Light in the Mountain, another relation of Joseph of the Wallamwatkin band. He was without a horse, crouched near the side of the trail where he was about to ambush the suapies.

  Light in the Mountain stood and fired at the lead soldier who held the rope to the pack mule in his hand. When the bullet whistled past him, the soldier jerked backward, twisting to the side in his saddle, immediately freeing the rope as he spurred his horse in the flanks and reined it back up the trail.

  Instantly Yellow Wolf and the others kicked their horses into a gallop, every one of them yelling his loudest, their shrill war cries ricocheting off the side of the mountain. As that lead soldier wheeled and bolted his way back up the trail, the rest of the suapies scattered like a flock of frightened quail, turning to flee in a wild dash to safety.

  “Cut those ropes!” Sun Tied ordered.

  The four boxes clattered to the shady ground as Light in the Mountain crouched over the first one and hollered, “Bring me a rock for my hand!”

  Slamming the rock down on the wooden crate again and again, he finally succeeded in busting it open about the time more of their number started work on the other three crates. Inside were small boxes made of hard paper. And inside each one stood as many bullets as Yellow Wolf had ever seen on a cartridge belt!

  Old Yellow Wolf laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Nephew, come with me.”