Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  Howard and a handful of officers readily agreed as the storm softened into a steady, soaking drizzle. For some time they inspected the blackened timbers that had caved in, digging around near the charred river stones of the chimney and fireplace that remained standing despite the destruction of the rest of the cabin.

  “I found some bones, General,” Chapman suddenly reported.

  “The victims?”

  “Naw.” Ad shook his head as three of the civilians stepped over to expose more of the charred bones with the round toes of their tall boots. “Don’t think so. These here bones ain’t big enough to be human.”

  Howard sighed, arching his back in a stretch. “Look there. The Nez Perce raiders destroyed everything else … but that outhouse.”

  Chapman turned, chuckling to see his old single-seat outhouse still standing, sheltered back in the nearby timber. “Damn if that ain’t the strangest thing. I’d flggered they’d at least tip it over on their way out, since they burned everything else to the ground.”

  “Maybeso them dumb Injuns don’t know what a outhouse is for!” Bunker snorted.

  “Let’s go have us a look,” Ad suggested.

  Shearer and Bunker were already at the outhouse by the time Chapman and the officers had picked their way clear of the burned-out ruins of the Manuel house.

  “Chapman!”

  He jerked up to see Shearer frantically waving his good arm at the outhouse door they had flung open before them. As he watched, George and Bunker both bent to their knees in the open doorway, struggling with something.

  “An Indian?” Howard asked.

  “Ain’t likely, General,” Chapman replied as they both started trotting toward the nearby trees where the old structure stood all but surrounded by brush.

  “Then that must surely be one of your men, a survivor, Colonel Perry,” Howard said as the two civilians turned slowly, a third man suspended between them.

  “My gawd!” Chapman said as he jerked to a halt before the trio, reaching out to raise the barely conscious man’s chin. “It’s John Manuel!”

  “But his daughter said she saw him killed,” David Perry declared. “Shot from his horse. She was wounded in the same attack.”

  “John. John,” Chapman cooed, rubbing the man’s skeletal cheeks with both of his damp hands.

  The eyes fluttered, half-opening to stare at Chapman an instant before they snapped wide as twenty-dollar gold pieces.

  “Ch-ch-ch—”

  “Don’t try to talk,” Chapman reminded, still stroking the man’s face.

  “J-j-jen—”

  “We don’t know, John,” Shearer admitted. “Ain’t found Jennet’s body.”

  “So she might still be alive,” Ad said. “Maybeso your boy, too. Maggie’s alive.”

  “M-Maggie?”

  “She’s waiting for you in Mount Idaho.”

  About that time Chapman noticed the wounds in Manuel’s hips as the man’s feet scuffed along the rain-soaked ground. Howard sent one of his aides to fetch a surgeon as the half-dead man’s friends carried him toward a dry copse of trees where Shearer and Bunker eased Manuel to the ground. Over time that afternoon, with some hot coffee and a little salt pork fed him in small slivers, John J. Manuel told the story of his thirteen-day ordeal.

  “Thirteen days?” Howard asked.

  “This was one of the first places the bastards hit,” Chapman growled.

  With an arrow in the back of his neck, a bullet hole through both hips, Manuel had been hurtled off his horse into the brush where he lay still, feigning death as his wife and daughter attempted escape on foot. While he heard their screams and the war cries of the attackers, Manuel confessed there was nothing he could do. Unable to use his legs, he could only drag himself farther into the brush by pulling himself along with his arms.

  By sundown on the second day he had managed to inch himself to the outhouse and crawl inside, where he listened to the comings and goings of horsemen for days on end. The sun rose, and the sun set. Over and over again. In the meantime, Manuel had managed to use his folding knife to dig at the four-inch iron arrow point embedded in the muscles of his neck, eventually working the barb free. It still lay on the plank floor of the outhouse, along with the blood-crusted knife Manuel had used in the surgery.

  In the predawn darkness of the following morning, he had crawled from the tiny structure, back into the brush where he gathered horseradish leaves he stuffed inside his shirt before dragging himself back to the outhouse. There, Manuel explained, he had chewed the pungent, bitter leaves, crushing them into a poultice he then applied to his angry, infected wound. His frontier medicine had worked. Over the past eleven days the herbal poultice had eased the infection, and Howard’s surgeon from Fort Walla Walla, George M. Sternberg, discovered that the once-ugly wound had begun to knit up nicely, without need for any sutures.

  At night Manuel had ventured out, dragging himself through the darkness to the creek bank, where he slowly gathered wild berries, one at a time, and sipped at water he dipped from the White Bird in his cupped hand. With so little to sustain him through his ordeal, Manuel had progressively grown thinner and weaker, unable to venture from the outhouse these past five days.

  Dr. Sternberg explained to the soldiers and civilians, “Chances are he would have died tomorrow, perhaps the next day, if we hadn’t found him when we did.”

  “This is truly good news!” Howard exclaimed.

  Chapman regarded the dimming light. “Too late now to start John back to the Johnson place. We’ll take him on in to Mount Idaho come morning.”

  “He still won’t be in any condition to ride,” Sternberg declared.

  “We’ll make us a travois to pull him out of here,” Chapman said as he stood. “George, you stay put with John. We’ll do what we can to keep him dry for the night right here.”

  Howard cleared his throat authoritatively. “For the time being, Mr. Chapman, once you’ve seen to Mr. Manuel here, I suggest you use the rest of what light is left in the day to take your volunteers and search down to the mouth of the White Bird. See if you sight any more than those warriors you spotted from the ridge above.”

  As the drizzling rain sluiced from his wide-brimmed felt hat, Chapman nodded before he turned on his heel. Without a word he moved to his horse and rose to the saddle, setting off in the mist alone.

  Even the sky was crying—either out of exultation at his finding an old friend still breathing … or out of some unimaginable grief for all those victims Chapman knew they never would find alive.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JUNE 27–29, 1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  —

  More Details of the Great Storm.

  —

  Causes of Idaho’s Indian War.

  —

  Facts Regarding the Late Indian Outbreak.

  SAN FRANCISCO, June 26.—A press dispatch from Boise City says that Rev. T. Mesplie, for thirty years a Catholic missionary among the Indian tribes of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and now stationed at Fort Boise as chaplain of the United States army, gives the following intelligence in regard to Indian matters: … In speaking of General Howard, Howlish Wampoo said the Indian laughed at the general and his fine speeches, saying he would never persuade them to give up Wallowa valley, which they were resolved to keep at every hazard. Father Mesplie says the chiefs and principal men who inaugurated this war are rich and influential, and that they will be able to draw to their support all the disaffected Indians belonging to the various tribes, and that these constitute a majority in every case. He is of the opinion that the war will be general and prolonged, as the Indians have been long deliberating and preparing for it, and have staked everything upon its issue. The father says the Nez Perces number in all about four thousand. Of this number about a hundred and fifty will remain friendly or inactive. He estimates the number of warriors which the Nez Perces can bring into the field at 1,000 … Besides these there are Flatheads and their confederates in Mo
ntana, with whom the Nez Perces are in close alliance … He obtains his data from accurate knowledge acquired by long residence among the Indians. He regards the liberty allowed the Indians to remain off the reservations and the unrestricted intercourse allowed between them and the whites as the principal causes of the present outbreak.

  Fort Lapwai

  June 27, 1877

  Dear Mamma,

  … Our little post is quiet today, but more troops will be here on Saturday. Major Boyle, Mr. Bomus, and Doctor, along with twenty men, are our entire garrison just now. All the rest are in the front. General Howard sent in dispatches last night hurrying up the troops. He wants to make an attack, and we all feel today that there may be a fierce fight raging and many poor fellows suffering not fifty miles from us. The Indians are in a horseshoe of the Salmon River, a place with the most natural fortifications, equal to the lava beds* of the Modocs, and we know them to be well provisioned. They have at least five hundred head of cattle in there, and quantities of camus root, which they use a great deal. We hear this place has only one trail leading into it. So you see the advantages they have. Oh, how I hope our commanders will be cautious and not risk anything. I suppose General Howard has out there now about four hundred men and some artillery, which I don’t suppose he will be able to use at all. Those four hundred men are nearly the entire body of troops from this Department. The army is so small at best, and the various companies are so small, that it takes five or six companies to make a hundred men. None of the companies, not even the cavalry, is full.

  How glad I should be if I could pick up John and the babies and get out of this region. I feel that nothing else will let me feel calm and settled. My brain seems in a whirl, constantly seeing the distress of these poor women who have lost their husbands, and constantly expecting and fearing to hear from our friends in the front, and also sort of half afraid for ourselves here. I wonder if poor little Lapwai will ever seem peaceful and calm to me again.

  Do write soon … We all join in love, and I am glad you are safe.

  Your loving daughter,

  Emily F.

  MERCIFULLY, OVERNIGHT THE SOAKING RAIN HAD CLEANSED much of the stench from the air in that valley of death by the time Howard’s troops returned early the next morning.

  Second Lieutenant Sevier McClellan Rains had never been so happy to ride out of any place the way he had been happy to ride out of White Bird Canyon as the sun began to set yesterday. After a second night’s bivouac at Johnson’s ranch, the commanding general had everything packed up and ready to depart by 7:00 A.M. on the morning of the twenty-seventh. It continued to rain past dawn, a slow, steady weeping from a low gray sky. The young lieutenant dreaded ever returning to this valley of such unspeakable death.

  As they had on Tuesday, the various cavalry and infantry companies again worked over the battlefield in platoons, searching the ravines and the thickets for the remains of fallen soldiers. While the rain kept down the revolting stench, the unrelenting showers soon soaked every man through to the skin, making them all as miserable as could be. So it was with no little eagerness that Rains looked forward to taking his nine men for a ride back up a sidewall of the canyon to search a narrow ravine for any of Perry’s soldiers who might have fallen during their mad retreat back up White Bird Hill.

  Born in Michigan, this young officer had graduated from West Point only the year before, a mere ten days before the Custer massacre in June of ’76. Prior to graduation, Rains had applied for an appointment to the Fourth Cavalry, a move endorsed by the regimental commander, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie. Instead, Rains was assigned to the First Cavalry, disappointed that he would have to serve in the Northwest instead of on the Great Plains fighting the Sioux and Cheyenne. A cavalry officer by schooling, who now found himself thrust into a dirty little Indian war out here in Nez Perce country, vigorous and energetic, Rains was itching to show his superiors just what he was made of—

  His horse snorted. Almost immediately his nose had found them. Even before any of the men spotted the bodies.

  “How many of ’em are there?” one of the soldiers asked the other enlisted men arrayed behind Rains as they all scratched into their pockets for bandannas and handkerchiefs.

  “I count eight, soldier” the lieutenant answered. “Eight of them.”

  The bloated corpses were strewn at the head of a short dead-end ravine. Six of them clustered together in a bunch. One of them lay by itself out by the mouth of the ravine. And the last man sat up alone against the end of the ravine, propped with his back to the grassy wall. The end of the line.

  “Look there, sir!” exclaimed Private Franklin Moody, a member of Rains’s own L Company, First U. S. Cavalry. “He’s a lieutenant. Just like you.”

  “Hard to tell, but that’s Theller, soldier,” Rains replied quietly, looking down on his fellow officer, staring transfixed at the bullet hole between the eyes. “Lieutenant Edward R. Theller.”

  “I don’t ’member him, sir. He First Cavalry, was he?” asked Private David Carroll as he inched up to stop at Rains’s elbow.

  “No, soldier. Theller was detached from the Twenty-first Infantry to go along with Colonel Perry’s battalion when it marched away from Fort Lapwai.”

  Nearby, Private Otto H. Richter whistled in amazement. “Mein Herr—lookit the cawtridges.”

  “Das right, Otto. Dese fellas dun’t give up easy,” said Private George H. Dinteman in his stilted English. “Did dey, sir?”

  Rains shook his head, continuing to stare at Theller’s face, then at those copper cases scattered around him and the others, but always, always returning to that bullet hole in the middle of the lieutenant’s forehead where the flies had busily laid their eggs. Another day, two at the most, these bodies would be crawling with wormy maggots. Again, as always, he came back to staring at that single bullet hole.

  “We bury dem hare, zir?” asked Private Frederick Meyer in troubled English dripping with a thick German accent.

  The steady rain overnight had made the ground soft. Rains tore his eyes from that bullet hole for a moment while he screwed his boot heel into the soil. “Yes,” the young lieutenant told them. “Maybe one common grave is the best idea. Let’s do that—over there at the mouth of the ravine. Those two with their fatigue britches still on—check their pockets for personal effects that the surviving families might wish to receive from Colonel Perry. We’ll work in squads of three, spell each other like yesterday.”

  He went on to have the three Germans start: Richter, Dinteman, and Meyer. Good, solid men. Not particularly fast with any mental wizardry, but good, dependable soldiers. Not given to any complaining about this nasty work with the decomposing, stinking bodies. Once the three had started work on the mass grave for all eight men and the rest either started digging through the pockets of those two who still had some clothing on their bodies or simply plopped down in the wet grass to wait their turn at the trowel bayonets, the young lieutenant turned around once again to stare at the face of that other young lieutenant in this narrow ravine.

  And that single bullet hole between the eyes.

  Yes, indeed, soldiers, he thought in silence. Look at all those cartridge cases around them. These eight men sold their lives dearly that bloody Sunday morning. Retreating from the battlefield, they must have ducked up this short, narrow ravine to take some cover from the bare naked hillside—only to discover they were trapped in a box.

  “Private Carroll!” he called out, turning to speak over his shoulder. “I want you and Moody to begin gathering some stones.”

  “Stones, Lieutenant?” Franklin Moody asked.

  “Rocks. Anything small enough for you to pull out of the ground and carry over here.”

  David Carroll asked, “You gonna lay ’em on the grave, sir?”

  “Yes. Maybe they will keep the predators from digging up the remains once we’re gone,” Rains explained. “Once they’re left here … to lie alone for all eternity.”

  The two privates
shuffled off murmuring between themselves.

  How would it be, Rains wondered, to have been Theller in his final moments? To find himself trapped with his small squad of men, surrounded and outnumbered, with no way out but to make the Nez Perce warriors pay dearly … pay very, very dearly for each soldier they would kill that day?

  By the time the mist turned into a steady rain, falling harder, the men had begun to drag the first of the bodies into the long, shallow trench made big enough for eight bloated corpses. As all nine men in his burial detail began to quickly scoop the rich, damp soil back over the distorted remains, young Lieutenant Sevier M. Rains pulled off his soggy hat and stood above them on the side of that ravine—just over his nine muddy, soaked soldiers as they struggled with those eight dead, bloated victims—quietly murmuring his Presbyterian prayers, words he had learned by heart while still a boy in rural Michigan.

  As the strong-backed Germans and the wiry Irishmen stood, one by one, stretching the kinks out of their muscles there beside the bare, muddy ground, having placed a layer of rocks over the common grave. Rains began the prayer he hoped they all would join him in reciting.

  “… Forgive us of our trespasses … as we forgive those who trespass against us …”

  BY TELEGRAPH

  —

  MONTANA.

  —

  Reports in Regard to the Flat Head Indians.

  DEER LODGE, Montana, June 27.—To Governor Potts, Helena: I am in receipt of the following from Postmaster Dickinson, of Missoula, Montana: Monday, June 26.—Rev. John Summers and Mr. Wilkins, who have just arrived from Corvallis, report that a Nez Perces, who talks good English, came from Lewiston, and says the Indians are coming into Bitter Root, and will come into the head of the valley and clear it out, and if the Flat Heads don’t join them they will clear them out too. The Flat Heads have driven all their horses out of the valley, and the squaws and children are going up Lolo fork. A Nez Perces chief told Major Whaley that the Nez Perces were going to clear out the Bitter Root valley, and that the Flat Heads would join them on the 1st, as near as I can remember …