Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  But … maybe there’s a way to reconcile Maggie’s account that does not rely on having to ignore her testimony or call her account a “post-traumatic stress” hallucination.

  Clearly, Maggie saw some Nez Perce leader take a hand in the abduction of her mother. The fact that Joseph was the best known of the leaders in that locality and at that time must have played a major role in her testifying that Joseph was the murderer. Makes sense to me that a six- or seven-year-old girl could make such a claim and continue to believe it down to her dying day in Butte, Montana.

  And perhaps she did actually see that Indian leader “stab” her mother and brother. Or perhaps the truth is as I chose to write it: that they were clubbed and dragged off, because Patrick Brice never saw the bodies, nor did he see the “pool of blood” Maggie claimed her mother and brother were lying in. The flow of Maggie’s events is murky, but the truth may well be that the warrior who wanted Jennet Manuel for his own may have slashed her in a struggle over the infant she clutched in her arms. Then to subdue her, he or another of the attackers clubbed her over the head, as well as he or another warrior clubbing the child.

  Here’s where Maggie’s story gets really muddied. It’s entirely possible the drunken warriors left Jennet and baby John lying in a puddle of blood on the floor and departed, thinking them dead, when Maggie chanced to discover the bodies in the silent house—taking them for dead. As for me, I have a pretty good idea that Maggie found her baby brother in a pool of blood, but not her mother. Maggie concocted that part of the story.

  Why kill one and not the other? Because the war chief wanted only Jennet Manuel and had killed the infant child so that she would not be dragging him along and tending to his needs. There are cases known to Western historians of such infanticides occurring during the Indian wars on the central and southern plains. White woman captured, her infant child has its brains dashed against the trunk of a nearby tree …

  Perhaps some hours later when a little of the mind-numbing whiskey began to wear off, the raiding party returned for either or both of two purposes. First, to see about acquiring more whiskey. L. V. McWhorter, like many of the apologists, was well ahead of his time with what I will call “blame deflection.” It’s always good for someone who can’t take personal responsibility for himself to blame his divorced parents, an alcoholic father, sexual abuse, or absentee parents. In the case of these first raids on the Salmon and Camas Prairie, McWhorter points his finger of blame not at the thugs and criminals who committed the murder and mayhem, rape and arson … but at the white man and his terrible whiskey!

  It is only fair to the Indians to call attention to the fact that the outrages against women and children did not occur until after the raiders became beastly drunk on whiskey found by the barrel at Benedict’s store-saloon located on the lower reaches of White Bird Creek. That atrocities were committed by a few of the young Nez Perces, no one pretends to deny. But whiskey was at the bottom of all of them.

  Or perhaps the raiding party returned for a second reason: As the murderer brooded long and hard on what he had done, perhaps he decided his best course would be to destroy the evidence of his crimes of kidnapping and murder. To his way of thinking, if he burned down the Manuel house, with the child’s body therein, then the white man would think that both mother and child were burned—eliminating any need for the whites to pursue the war party to get the captive woman back.

  I’m of the opinion that the whites at the Slate Creek stockade were told Jennet was dead because the Nez Perce warriors did not want the white men to know she was still alive and in the possession of one of their petty war chiefs. What Harry Cone and others heard doesn’t serve as a discrepancy. I think it serves to prove that Jennet Manuel was still alive at the time.

  And the presence of those earrings found among the ashes of the house is the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. After all the time that had elapsed, and after what might have been the first stripping and rape of Mrs. Manuel there and then in her own house, the discovery of those earrings in the house proved one thing only—that some searcher found earrings belonging to Jennet Manuel in the ashes of the house where Jennet Manuel used to live. Nothing more.

  When all is said and done, I believe that baby John was dead the night of 15 June. It was his bones discovered in the ashes by Ad Chapman and James Conely. Bones they said were those of an animal. Why would they say that? Because they were too small to be Jennet’s? Could the bones have been those of baby John? But why weren’t there enough bones found together for a savvy frontiersman to realize he was looking at a human skeleton?

  And what of the stories left by Bird Alighting and Yellow Bull telling how Mrs. Manuel started the trip over the Lolo Trail with the Non-Treaty bands but either was killed in some sort of rage (according to Yellow Bull) or died of sickness, perhaps of exposure (according to Peopeo Tholekt)? It’s hard to believe that either of them would have reason to lie at such a late date, what with the many years that had elapsed, not to mention that each man knew he was nearing the end of his life. I can’t believe either man had anything to gain by concocting a bald-faced lie that many years after the crime. Especially after so many sources, down through the intervening years, had done their level best to convince journalists and writers that Jennet Manuel had died in her own house, where her body was consumed by the flames of revenge.

  As I sit here on the hillside above the Big Hole Battlefield this cold, cold dawn in May of 1999, I ask myself again: Why am I so consumed by this mystery? Is it only because I sit here in the remnants of last night’s crusty snow, staring down on the cones of skeletal lodgepoles erected where the Non-Treaty village once stood, thinking of that young blond-haired white woman Henry Buck glimpsed for two fleeting instants as she fled the pandemonium and terror in the camp, protectively surrounded by other squaws? If it was Jennet Manuel, and she did turn to look directly at the white civilian—why in hell didn’t she cry out to him, yell something, anything, to beg for help?

  Could it be that she had long ago decided she was already dead? Jennet had seen her husband fall from his horse, her young daughter, too. Although she would have known Maggie was going to survive her wounds, Jennet had to believe her husband dead. Then the young mother had watched the murder of her son, perhaps even witnessing the first flames starting their destruction of her home. After unimaginable abuse at the hands of some unnamed petty chief, could it be that Jennet believed nothing would ever be the same again, that she could never return home, that she was … as good as dead already?

  Where did she go after the Big Hole? I brood on that simple mystery this subfreezing morning as the wind picks up and the sun finally emerges, briefly bubbling into that narrow ribbon of sky between the far mountains and the low gray hulking clouds that betray the reputation of this Big Sky Country.

  There never was another report of the mysterious blond-haired woman spotted with the Non-Treaty bands. Did she live to make it to the Camas Meadow fight? And did she last out their perilous passage through Yellowstone National Park? The Canyon Creek fight? Cow Island? … And was Jennet Manuel still with the Nee-Me-Poo when they reached the cold, windswept hills at the foot of the Bears Paw Mountains when both a winter storm and Miles’s Fifth Infantry caught them just short of the Medicine Line and the sanctuary of the Old Woman’s Country?

  Was Jennet Manuel still alive then?

  Blood always answers blood.

  This battlefield is like a lonely, hollow hole in the heart of the earth, especially now as I remember that all-too-quiet cemetery on a shady hillside back at Mount Idaho where stands a tall marble headstone erected for Jennet Manuel. I remember how I paused there, gazing down at that patch of ground, knowing hers was an empty grave … this silent haven adorned with a simple, beautiful piece of marble. If her body could not be laid to eternal rest, then I figure some of this war’s survivors sought to put Jennet’s soul at peace.

  In a very real sense this morning, I feel a palpable connection between these
two places—both sites are cemeteries. In both I sense the death of some innocence. You only have to walk among the tombstones and marble markers at the Mount Idaho cemetery to realize this was not a war between fighting men. In both places—the quiet cemetery and here at the hallowed Big Hole—lie the innocents: the women and children who gave a lie to the belief that this was a war between soldiers and warriors.

  Right from the-outbreak on the Salmon River, and on into Montana Territory, this was a dirty war that recognized no gender, nor youth.

  The wind comes up as the sun disappears behind the low clouds, and I feel even colder than before. In chasing down the Nez Perce, Sherman and Sheridan once more had their “total war.”

  But blood will always demand more blood.

  The great and deep wound Gibbon’s men inflicted at this place of tears will now be answered in a frenzy of murder, an orgy of senseless killing that will mark with shame the return of the Nee-Me-Poo to Idaho and their migration through Yellowstone Park—pausing only when they discover that their old friends the Crow won’t join them in a war against the soldiers.

  I wipe the moisture from my eyes and stand, hoping I have what it will take to finish this sad story many months and many, many miles from here among the cold hills at the Bear’s Paw. Blood always answers blood.

  It has always been that way. I doubt anything man can ever do will change that.

  Blood cries out for blood.

  Terry C. Johnston

  Big Hole National Battlefield

  13 May 1999

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TERRY C. JOHNSTON was born on the first day of 1947 on the plains of Kansas and has lived all his life in the American West. His first novel, Carry the Wind, won the Medicine Pipe Bearer’s Award from the Western Writers of America, and his subsequent books have appeared on best-seller lists throughout the country.