Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  Just about the time Woodruff was finding himself in awe that anyone could sleep in such conditions, a bullet smacked the dirt piled up beside the rifle pit, filling the snoring man’s mouth with soil and pine needles. Sputtering and choking, he flopped awake, spit, and wiped his tongue clean, then promptly rolled onto his side and fell right to sleep again.

  Sometime in the middle of the night he heard two of the civilians whispering in a nearby rifle pit.*

  “You wanna get out of this, Tom?”

  “Why, what the hell do you mean?”

  “Well, there’s several of us going tonight.”

  Tom asked, “All of you?”

  “No, just a few, it appears.”

  Then Tom prodded in a softer whisper, “What about the wounded? What’s to become of them?”

  After a long pause, grave with silence, the other man answered, “We’ll just have to let them go, Tom.”

  “That don’t set right with me. Them wounded have to be took care of. I ain’t going unless ever’body’s pulling out together.”

  “Suit yourself, Tom. I just wanted you to know we was goin’.”

  Later that dark night, Woodruff overheard the scuffing of boots as the unnamed civilian crawled out of his rifle pit to join the half-dozen who were intending to make their escape through the Nez Perce lines. For a time after they had gone, he was jealous of them and their freedom to make the attempt—while his would be a soldier’s fate.

  Woodruff would wait for dawn and see what the morrow held in store for the stalwart and steadfast who had remained behind.

  *This documented conversation took place at marker No. 7, hillside siege site.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  AUGUST 9, 1877

  “RIDER! LOOKEE—IT’S A GODDAMNED RIDER COMIN’ IN!“

  Henry Buck shook himself out of a fitful sleep with that yelp, instantly awake with the horseman’s whooping and hoofbeats, accompanied by a few scattered shots from the Nez Perce who still had them surrounded this gray morning.

  Buck got his knuckles out of his gritty eyes in time to watch the civilian’s horse skidding to a halt in the middle of their rectangle of rifle pits. Dawn was coming.

  “By God—is that you, McGilliam?” John Catlin roared as he leaped up to the side of the barely restrained horse.

  Around them, the survivors in the compound were cheering lustily, many of them barking their own questions at the newcomer.

  In the hubbub that lone rider held his hand down to Catlin and said, “Good to see you still standing on your pins, Cap’n Catlin. Where’s your general?”

  “Right over here,” Gibbon announced from the spot where he was dragging his good leg under him and struggling onto his feet. “Where the hell did you come from and just how in blazes did you get through?”

  “This is Nelse McGilliam, General,” Catlin introduced the civilian who had just dropped to the ground.

  “You come from Howard?”

  “Yes, General—”

  “So what do you know of our wagon train?”

  McGilliam shrugged. “Nothing. Never saw it comin’ through on my own.”

  “You’re alone?”

  “Yep.”

  “How do you come to be here?” Gibbon prodded.

  “I slept back up the trail last night, in my saddle blanket—no more’n a mile from here, out in the black of night,” the civilian explained as he swung out of the saddle. “I heard shooting now and again, so I didn’t dare come any closer till I had enough light to see my way on in here.”

  “Can’t believe the Injuns let you waltz on through ’em the way you did!” Catlin cheered, slapping McGilliam on the shoulder.

  “I didn’t see a damned Injun. Not one!”

  “But they’re out there,” Catlin argued. “You heard ’em shooting as you rode in?”

  “But I didn’t see a one—”

  “What’s Howard got to say?” Gibbon demanded the courier’s attention again. “When’s he going to be here?”

  “He’s on his way behind me, bringing more’n two dozen riders on their best horses.”

  “T-two dozen?” Gibbon echoed. “That’s all?”

  “There’s more coming up behind him, General,” McGilliam explained. “With them first soldiers Howard’s got some Bannock scouts, too. All of ’em riding hard. Should be here afore tomorrow morning.”

  It was easy for Henry Buck to see the disappointment from that register on Gibbon’s face.

  “Very well. We don’t have much to offer you in the way of anything to eat—except for some half-rancid horse.” Gibbon pointed out Woodruff’s partially skinned horse, the flies not yet buzzing in the chill dawn air. The decomposing carcass had stewed and bloated with gases to a point where all four of its legs stuck straight out grotesquely.

  “N-no thanks, General,” McGilliam responded with a shake of his head. “I’ll be fine—”

  A sudden volley exploded outside their lines, bullets smacking the trees and whining through the men. Luckily, no one was hit as they dived in all directions, flopping to their bellies. McGilliam struggled to hold onto the reins from where he lay, his horse fighting to break free.

  “May be some fresh horse meat soon, General!” the courier hollered.

  “Do what you can to protect that animal, mister!” Gibbon ordered. “We’re damn well gonna need it to ride out on before the day is out.”

  As that short summer night had worn on, more and more of Ollokot’s warriors had slipped away. But … their leaving was not a reflection upon their bravery.

  By the time the light turned gray and foretold of dawn-coming, perhaps no more than the fingers on both hands still remained with the war chief and Yellow Wolf. Nowhere near enough to try rushing the suapies. No, the white men were safely corralled in their dirt hollows.

  Besides, the families were a good distance away by now.

  There had simply been too many dead to try carrying them all away from the battlefield for burial. Instead, the women and old men had done the best they could with the bodies of those who would be left behind at this tragic place. Many of the dead were carried to the edge of the creek, where they were laid beneath an overhanging cut-bank before the earth was caved in over the bodies in a simple, but effective, grave.

  A few families nonetheless chose to drag a loved one from the scene on a travois as the village started south toward Horse Prairie and on to the far pass over the mountains.

  Whatever the sheer numbers of the dead—men, women, and children—Yellow Wolf realized that the loss of so many of their greatest warriors in this one fight was something that could never be measured in any terms.

  At this Place of the Ground Squirrels, the Nee-Me-Poo had lost the flower of its young manhood. Their finest had fallen.

  Rainbow.

  Shore Crossing.

  Five Wounds.

  Red Moccasin Tops.

  Five Fogs.

  Red-Headed Woodpecker.

  Black Owl.

  No Heart—

  And the list went on.

  No matter trying to put a count to them. The loss was great by any measure. From here on out, the People would never be as strong, never be as capable of defending their families, as they had been when they had marched over the pass to this peaceful valley where the women had time to cut lodgepoles and the children to laugh. The Nee-Me-Poo hadn’t had much of either lodgepoles or laughter since the war began.

  Perhaps the most tragic death was that of No Heart.

  In the very first moments of the fighting, Yellow Wolf had spotted Joseph and No Heart fording the stream and racing up the hillside opposite camp, making for the horse herd. How brave they were to assure that the white men could not steal the ponies. But because of a terrible rumor that the Flathead had come to steal the horses, one of Toohoolhoolzote’s men rushed across the creek and shot No Heart by mistake!

  Late in the afternoon when Yellow Wolf heard about the death of this good warrior, he crept around to the
hillside where the herd had been grazing, to see for himself this spot where No Heart was killed. To grieve where his friend had fallen. But he did not find the body where others said they had seen it during the fighting. For a long time while the last light remained in the evening sky Yellow Wolf had searched and searched, unable to find No Heart’s body or the warrior’s horse.

  “Perhaps he came back to life after the others left,” Yellow Wolf confided to Ollokot this gray morning.

  “Maybe he got on his horse and went somewhere else to die,”* the chief replied.

  Yellow Wolf shook his head sadly. “I think No Heart might still be alive—”

  He jerked up at the sound of a horse’s running hooves. Through the trees he saw a blur of movement, then heard cheering from the white man’s corral of rifle pits.

  Yellow Wolf thought that must mean it was a messenger coming in, breaking through their skimpy surround of the soldiers. With the sounds of those soldiers celebrating the man’s arrival, Yellow Wolf remembered how he had heard a Shadow voice in the dark of last night. A man apparently lost, calling for someone to answer. But no one responded and the voice eventually was heard no more. Had likely been this messenger, a rider who halted where he was until it was light enough to charge on in.

  “It is better that he go on in, anyway,” declared Ollokot as he turned to his horse. “Now we will have some good idea what news he brought the other Shadows.”

  Such loud cheering that accompanied the messenger’s arrival could only mean one of two things. Either the man carried some more ammunition for the soldiers—which Yellow Wolf doubted; after all, how many cartridges could one man carry on one horse?

  Or the Shadow was bringing word of another army coming to their rescue.

  “I think more soldiers are coming,” Ollokot commiserated as he got on the back of his pony.

  “Perhaps we should look on their back trail to find those soldiers who are coming, maybe find their supplies to steal,” Yellow Wolf suggested.

  His chief agreed and that morning a handful of them moved up the trail, attempting to locate some sign of an advancing army. Hard as they scoured the hills on both sides of the creek, they discovered no sign, no wagons or horses, and no sighting of an army coming.

  But later that second afternoon of the fight, there wasn’t a man gathered around Ollokot near the south gulch who didn’t feel in his marrow that more soldiers were already on their way. Cut-Off Arm would be there eventually. Even if he and his men were the “day after tomorrow army,” they would get there soon.

  “I want to see to my wife,” Ollokot confessed to those faithful warriors who had remained with him even as their families had packed up and marched away a day ago. “Our people are buried, and our wounded are gone with the rest of the village. There is nothing more that we can do to these soldiers now.”

  “Do you want some of us to stay in the hills to watch for Cut-Off Arm and his soldiers?” Yellow Wolf asked. “To stay till we know the army is coming?”

  Ollokot’s eyes were as sad as any of them had ever seen the man. “Stay and spy if you want. As for me, I want to see my wife one more time before she dies.”

  BY now General Oliver Otis Howard was brutally aware that he should have pressed ahead more than a day earlier than he had when setting off from the Lolo hot springs.

  Instead of starting out at dawn on 7 August when he dispatched Sergeant Oliver Sutherland with his message for Colonel Gibbon as originally planned, the general chose to leisurely lead his entire command down the Lolo Trail another nineteen miles to Woodman’s Prairie, where they went into camp. It wasn’t until the following day that he finally set off at a rapid gait with his advance unit of 200 horsemen, yet he and his staff took time out from their pursuit for a lengthy inspection of Rawn’s barricades and rifle pits at “Fort Fizzle” before continuing down to the mouth of the canyon, where Howard again halted, this time for more than two hours, while he dictated several more dispatches he wanted carried north to Missoula City. It had proven to be a good road that eighth day of August—his advance group of 200 horsemen made at least thirty-four miles before sundown.

  But on the morning of the ninth, the strenuous pace of the previous day had told on the weakening horses. Howard’s advance made less than twenty miles that Thursday—the first day of Gibbon’s fight in the Big Hole. The following dawn, 10 August, Howard finally made the decision he should have back on the night of the sixth when Joe Pardee rode up the Lolo to the hot springs with the message that Colonel Gibbon was in pursuit of the fleeing Non-Treaty bands.

  That morning the general selected twenty of the best troopers, mounting them on the best of his horses, and prepared to push ahead with all possible dispatch, accompanied by seventeen of “Captain” Orlando “Rube” Robbins’s twenty Bannock scouts. Howard left the rest under the command of Major Edwin C. Mason of the First Cavalry to come along at all possible dispatch. With his twenty handpicked men under First Lieutenant George R. Bacon, and aide-de-camp Wood, Howard set off, accompanied by correspondent Thomas Sutherland and a rival journalist, Mr. Bonny, who was also serving the column as Quartermaster Ebstein’s clerk.

  They moved out in a trot, column of twos. After they kept that pace for fifty minutes, a ten-minute halt was called every hour. Ride hard, then rest the horses, and ride hard for another fifty minutes. They took a brief midday rest at Ross’s Hole; then both men and horses toiled up the steep, winding six-mile ascent to the top of the divide.

  Despite their efforts at speed, these forty-some men managed to cover no more than twenty-five miles that day, beginning their climb over the divide to the Big Hole.

  As grueling as the climb had been and as weary as the horses had become, they went into camp that Friday evening—10 August—far up on the eastern slope at the head of Trail Creek, where Howard sent frontiersman Robbins ahead, along with his Bannocks, to do some scouting while a little light remained in the sky. Just past dark a dozen of the Bannocks came back at a trot, escorting seven dismounted civilians.

  “My God—you men are on foot!” Howard exclaimed as the Indians brought the exhausted volunteers huffing up to the general. “Where are your horses?”

  “S-shot, most of ’em.”

  Another citizen confessed, “Rest of ’em got run off by the Injuns.”

  Howard tingled with the old excitement, mixed with a little envy. “Then Gibbon’s had a fight.”

  “Oh, we had a fight, we did!” another one grumbled.

  “What have you got to tell us?” the general prodded.

  “General Gibbon pitched into them Injuns yesterday morning,” began one. Said another, “Lost half his men by the time the sun come up.”

  “They was having a hard go of it when we left.”

  Concern crossed the general’s face. He asked, “You—you ran off and left the rest behind?”

  The man looked at Howard as if the general were daft. “ ’Course we did. We was gettin’ whipped something terrible—gone with no sleep and nothing to eat in two days now…. You got something to eat here, don’cha, General?”

  Howard looked aside at his aide, saying, “Lieutenant Wood, see that these men are given some bacon and hard-bread. Bring them some cups for coffee, too.” Then he turned back to the civilians warming their hands over the headquarters fire as the temperature dropped and the light drained from the sky.

  “Your supper is coming,” the general explained while Robbins and the last of the Bannock rode into camp. “Now, tell me everything.”

  They did, slowly, a bit here and a fragment there—at least what the seven had seen from their vantage point of things. After giving a graphic account of the early-morning assault and the capture of the village, they told of how the chiefs and their warriors had rallied to regain the camp and driven the white men to the hillside siege area. One of the seven, a civilian from the Bitterroot valley settlement of Corvallis, even had a brother* who had been wounded and forced to go into hiding near the boggy marsh when the r
est failed to take him along with them in their retreat to the hillside.

  Howard found himself repulsed that this volunteer had abandoned his brother in that escape to the timber, and again when he fled Gibbon’s siege, apparently without suffering any shame or disgrace whatsoever. And now at the fire, the general discovered that no amount of money, not even the attraction of a brother wounded and sorely in need of rescue, could induce one of these seven brave citizens to guide Robbins and the Bannock to the battlefield!

  Brave citizen militia indeed!

  After they had wolfed down their dinner, even to licking the grease from the tin plates, the seven continued with their tales of Gibbon’s fight up to the night they had slipped away through the warrior lines, enumerating the casualties and repeatedly expressing how gallantly the colonel and his soldiers had given back a struggle in their desperate fight, even though heavily outnumbered by the Nez Perce.

  “How far do you figure you’ve come from where you left General Gibbon?” Howard asked as the stars came out.

  One of the civilians dragged the back of his hand across his greasy lips and said, “Fifteen, no more’n twenty miles, General. But them are hard, hard miles gettin’ down there from here.”

  Oliver Otis stood at last, his back kinked with knots from the hard riding along with sleeping on the cold ground. He knew the exhausted horses would not last another league that night.

  “Lieutenant Bacon, have your men start and feed several fires here; scatter them across this clearing. Then barricade the best you can with what we have for saddles and baggage,” Howard explained. “In case Joseph has his spies out in these hills, I want it to appear we are a much larger force than we are.”

  Bacon asked, “We’ll push on at first light, General?”

  “We’ll move out as soon as we have enough light to see the trail ahead,” he told his soldiers gathered close. “By the Almighty—we’ll lift that siege and drive the warriors off.”

  As he turned aside to drag a trail-worn Bible from his haversack, Howard’s mind began to turn upon an offer he now made to God: praying they would find some of Gibbon’s soldiers alive.