Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Who is this?” shouted Weesculatat, that older warrior who had urged Yellow Wolf to come along for the fight. His pony pranced up, boldly making a target of its rider.

  “A Shadow friend of ours!” Yellow Wolf shouted, waving his arm emphatically for Weesculatat to dismount. “Get down! This Shadow who was a friend is shooting right at us!”

  A bullet suddenly sang through the grass between the pair hiding in the grass, a bullet from John-son’s location. Weesculatat dropped to the ground, kneeling as he held onto the long single rein knotted around his pony’s lower jaw.

  “See, Weesculatat? This Charley John-son is shooting at us now!” Wemastahtus cried.

  “I cannot see this friend of yours,” Weesculatat said as he turned, studying the white men scattered across the slope. “Which one is he?”

  A bullet from one of the white man guns struck the older man’s horse, causing the frightened animal to rear and hop in pain and fear. Weesculatat bolted to his feet, yanking on the long rein, doing what he could to gain control of the frightened animal as Shadow bullets snarled around them.

  “Get down!” Yellow Wolf shouted as he started to reach up an arm to pull Weesculatat down.

  But the older warrior was twisted away by the spooked pony—

  Yellow Wolf flinched the instant he heard the slap of lead against flesh. Weesculatat let out a little groan as he collapsed forward into the grass, clutching at his knee. Blood was seeping between the fingers of both hands, but he was an older man, a proven warrior who had control of his voice, so he did not cry out when he was hit by Charley John-son’s bullet.

  Instead, he looked up at the other two and said, “Time for us to go from here.”

  “I can help you,” Yellow Wolf offered.

  “I think I can make it on my own, brother,” Weesculatat explained, using that familial term to honor a friend.

  The moment Yellow Wolf turned his head to look back at the young white man who was shooting at them, the older warrior pushed himself up from the grass. A puff of smoke immediately spurted from the muzzle of John-son’s gun and another bullet hit Weesculatat, this time in the back, throwing him face-down into the grass but not blowing out a hole in his bare chest.

  “This Charley John-son,” Yellow Wolf yelped in confusion. “I thought he and his father were our friends!”

  As Wemastahtus started to crawl toward Weesculatat, more bullets snarled into the grass and he stopped where he lay. He and Yellow Wolf could both hear the older man’s loud breathing, coming hard and wet.

  “I will come get you!” Yellow Wolf said. “Wait for me to come!”

  “N-no,” Weesculatat replied, his voice no longer strong as it had been only moments ago. “I can still get away on my own. The bullet did not come out …”

  Weesculatat slowly rose to his hands and knees in the grass, his head slung loosely between his shoulders like that of a weary dog as he wobbled, eventually pulling himself up to a squatting position, where he looked down at his chest again.

  Then he turned to peer back at the two warriors nearby. “See, the bullet that hit me in the back did not come out—”

  Another shot from John-son’s gun slammed into Weesculatat from the side, driving him off his knees, where he skidded in the grass a foot, then lay still, gasping louder and louder, his fingers clawing up a handful of the green shafts.

  He was barely breathing when Yellow Wolf reached him. Three bullets. The first would have made him lame, if only he had stayed low. It made Yellow Wolf angry in his belly, very mad to think that an old friend of theirs had done this to Weesculatat. Yellow Wolf knew most of the other young men had refrained from shooting at this Charley John-son because his family were old friends of the Non-Treaty bands. But—hard as it was for Yellow Wolf to consider—maybe no white man would ever be a friend to the Nee-Me-Poo again.

  Not long after Yellow Wolf reached the older warrior, many of Two Moons’s warriors started to drift back toward their herd and migrating village, breaking off the surround in favor of putting themselves between the white men and their families once more. He could not blame the others—none of them had any idea when the soldiers would emerge from their hollows or what they would do when they got brave enough to make a fight of it while the camp was in the open and vulnerable.

  The other warriors under Ollokot did what they could to keep lots of pressure on the outnumbered Shadows with their loud guns—repeating weapons the warriors respected, like the rifle Yellow Wolf himself owned, a lever-action carbine his mother held in safekeeping for him back in Looking Glass’s village. More than the single-shot soldier guns, these warriors had a healthy respect for the Shadows’ rapid-firing repeaters.

  Into the afternoon Ollokot’s men wondered if the suapies would ever emerge from their hollows. That did not happen until the sun was halfway down in the sky toward its evening set. And then they came out in that opening made when Two Moon’s fighters drifted away, soldiers advancing with a big, many-noises gun that rumbled right in the front of some walking soldiers.

  “Let us quit for a while!” Ollokot shouted as he raced past on his horse, the fringes sewn at the heels of his moccasins flying in the hot breeze like the mane and tail of his pony.

  His first horse had been shot out from under him in the early stages of the fight, but his youngest wife, known as Aihits Palojami, known as Fair Land, had been watching from a nearby hilltop and quickly brought him another good fighting horse as the bullets landed around them both.

  Two others came to join Yellow Wolf and Wemastahtus, helping to drag Weesculatat back from danger. In a grassy depression they laid the older man over the back of a horse and started with him to the village that would be making camp this afternoon in the canyon of the Cottonwood at Piswah Ilppilp Pah, the Place of Red Rocks. Another man had been wounded, but not nearly as bad. Sewattis Hihhih, the warrior known as White Cloud, was a half brother of Two Moons. A man of short stature, White Cloud was nonetheless a very brave fighter, shot from his pony during a daring charge on the Shadows.

  Despite the rescue of those white men by the suapies, the fighting chiefs had accomplished what they had set out to do. If that small war party of Shadows had reached the soldier camp that afternoon, the chances were good the white men would have believed themselves strong enough to leave their camp and venture onto the prairie, where they would have attacked the village then migrating to Cottonwood Creek. The women and children would have been threatened, havoc caused by the Shadows.

  As it was, the young men had prevented any interruption in the camp’s march. The white survivors of the fight limped back with the soldiers to their hollows, and the village was able to reach Piswah Ilppilp Pah without any trouble. Now the mouth of the Cottonwood at the Clearwater was no more than a matter of two marches, three at the most, away. They were not running. No, they were in full control now. Cut-Off Arm and his big army were many days and far, far away across a turbulent river. The warriors had neutralized the only possible threat from the burrow soldiers and now were in the clear.

  Over there in the canyons of the Clearwater, the Non-Treaty bands would take refuge with Looking Glass’s people—themselves fleeing a band of soldiers. The night they had crossed the Salmon and were camped at Aipadass, word had come that the suapies had attacked the old peace talker, Looking Glass! Now even he was ready to join the other war chiefs and drive the Shadows from the land of the Nee-Me-Poo for all time.

  Yellow Wolf felt strong in his heart.

  Because of what the fighting men had accomplished that day, those suapies entrenched far up the Cottonwood would not dare leave their burrows to follow the village. And Cut-Off Arm was still far, far away on the other side of the Salmon, mired down in mud with his “day-after-tomorrow army.”

  *Charles Johnson, Alonzo B. Leland, and D. H. Howser (who subsequently died of his wounds).

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  JULY 5–7,1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  —

  G
eneral Grant Leaves England for the Continent.

  —

  Later Dispatches from the

  Oregon Indian War.

  —

  OREGON.

  —

  Latest from the Indian War.

  PORTLAND, July 5.—A courier arrived at Lewiston, July 2d, from Kamia, says Colonel Whipple and his command had an engagement with the Looking-glass band on Clear Water, to-day. Four Indians were killed and left on the field dead. Many others were wounded. The squaws and children took to the river and several were drowned. The fighting was still going on when the courier left. Looking-glass’s band is estimated by scouts to number about 400. At three o’clock this morning a courier arrived, having left General Howard’s camp on the night of the 29th. The troops had made a crossing that day, and scouts who had been out on the hills found stock but no Indians The latter are believed to have gone down toward the mouth of the Salmon, and to be making for Gray’s crossing on the Salmon, thence crossing on Snake river at the mouth of the Grande Ronde. Dispatches were forwarded to Walla Walla, to be telegraphed, so as to apprise persons in Grande Ronde and Wallowapays.

  HIS FIRST LOOK AT A NEZ PERCE HAD BEEN FROM SOME-what of a distance: across the Salmon River that is, back three days and many, many miles ago, just before General Oliver Otis Howard had somehow willed his army column to this western side of the furious and foamy Salmon River.

  An Easterner by birth and Harvard graduate by way of laurels, Thomas A. Sutherland had done a bit of traveling in Europe and the Middle East through the aid of some family money before he ended up in Portland, Oregon, working as an ill-paid stringer for the Standard. The very afternoon the newsroom was first abuzz with reports of the Nez Perce outbreak, the twenty-seven-year-old had abandoned everything else and marched into his editor’s office, applying for this opportunity to march into the field when the army set off on its campaign to punish the hostiles, just as the army always had.

  “Newsmen have always been along with the principal officer,” he had declared boldly.

  “And who would that be now?” he was asked.

  “Why, I suppose it would be Howard himself. A general, one-armed, lost it in the Civil War, you see. I’ve looked up what I can on him. General Oliver Otis Howard—I shall attach myself to him.”

  “Just the way Mark Kellogg attached himself to Custer, will you?”

  Sutherland had immediately reacted to the reference. He felt his face drain of blood as he remembered how Kellogg had gone in with Custer at the death. Two days later they had found the civilian’s body among the butchered and mutilated dead.

  “I don’t think that has any way of happening,” he retorted, tugging at his collar in the editor’s steamy third-floor office. “Those were the mighty Sioux, after all. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull—those Sioux. But these … these are the … well, they’re just Nez Perce, sir.”

  “Very well,” his editor had agreed. “I’ll grant you a month’s leave with the same rate of pay. Send in your dispatches by courier or telegraph if you can, but I’m not going to pay for anything extravagant from you, young man.”

  His heart leaped in his chest. “No, sir. Nothing extravagant at all!”

  Thomas Sutherland wasn’t dull-witted, either. He promptly sprinted down to the telegraph office and fired off several telegrams he sent speeding all the way across the continent, paying for the lofty charges out of his own pocket on the speculation that one of the newspapers would bite. Three days later, as he was making his final preparations to embark for Lewiston, Idaho, that very afternoon, Sutherland had received word from not only the San Francisco Chronicle but no less than the New York Herald itself! Why, he’d have eyes from coast to coast reading his copy written at the front.

  He reached Lewiston the following evening, finding the town patrolled by eighty armed men under torchlight, ever watchful of any dark-skinned intruder. In the saddle before dawn the following morning, pulling his packhorse, Sutherland was bound for Fort Lapwai and points south where he could track down Howard’s column.

  While he soon found out he wasn’t the only correspondent hurrying to the front, he alone enjoyed the élan and prestige of arriving with credentials from two of the most prestigious papers in the entire country.

  “My editors wanted to assure themselves of a firsthand account for their readers on both coasts,” he had explained when first introduced to the general commanding.

  Clearly, such status was not lost on the famous one-armed Union general and survivor of the scandals in the Freedmen’s Bureau. Since that first day, the twenty-ninth of June, Sutherland had been messing with Howard and the general’s staff.

  “Extend young Sutherland here every courtesy,” Howard had told his headquarters staff and the officer corps that night before they made their first attempt to cross the Salmon after the Nez Perce. “See that he is not wanting for the details that will tell his readers just what a noble effort this army and its campaign is all about.”

  Not that there weren’t times when Sutherland didn’t wonder just what he had bitten off, slogging up the narrow trail toward the Seven Devils area, high into a country where nothing but grass grew and even the mules had trouble staying upright. The soldiers lost a few of the overburdened ones careening down the side of the Salmon River canyon, tumbling some two thousand feet to a rocky death below. Cold and wet nights, when it alternated between rain and snow, followed by foggy, drizzly days. And when the sun came out the men became even more miserable when their dampened clothing gave each one of them a steam bath in the saddle!

  But there were small victories as well, like the discovery two days ago of those caches left behind by the fleeing hostiles at Canoe Encampment some eight miles below Pittsburgh Landing on the Snake River—proof, so the officers claimed, that Joseph’s Indians had grown desperate and were fully on the run now.

  Still, it had been many days now since the army had struggled across the Salmon into this unforgiving wilderness, and the best scouting reports said the enemy was miles ahead of them. Then as the correspondent rode with Howard’s advance on the afternoon of the fifth, word sent with friendly trackers from Captain Whipple at Cotton-wood relayed how Joseph’s hostiles had recrossed the river up ahead at a place called Craig Billy Crossing, putting not only distance but also days between them and the army in striking across the Camas Prairie.

  Sutherland could read the utter frustration and seething anger on the general’s face as they descended to the mouth of Billy Creek—a canyon so narrow the command had to work their way down single-file—and these officers, proven veterans of the Civil War, all studied the snow-swollen torrent that was the Salmon River … wondering how the Nez Perce had gotten their horse herd across, how they had managed to negotiate their women and children and camp equipage across that river racing more than seven miles per hour, foaming and tumbling like a caldron. Wondering, Sutherland knew, how they themselves were now going to effect this army’s crossing, too.

  That’s when Christian tracker James Reuben demonstrated how Joseph’s people had reached the far side by swimming his horse into the frothy current to the north bank, then returning in due fashion. But when one of the white scouts, Frank Parker, bravely attempted the same feat, he got no farther than a few yards from the shore before the mighty current made him think retreat was a far better choice. Then Reuben instructed Howard in the old craft of constructing bull boats—but this column had few buffalo hides!

  After sending two volunteers, Jack Carleton and “Laughing” Williams, upstream to commandeer some boats the command could use in ferrying men and supplies across the Salmon, Howard learned that the pair of scouts had located a boat—but in coming downstream to Billy Creek they had encountered a series of turbulent rapids, capsized, and barely escaped the river with their lives.

  That’s when Second Lieutenant Harrison G. Otis, artilleryman, was bold enough to point out the poor cabin standing nearby and asked one of the interpreters to see if any of the friendlies along
knew what the white owner’s name was.

  “Why is that of any import to our crossing?” asked the general’s young aide, Lieutenant C. E. S. Wood.

  “Because,” Otis suggested, “we could ask of the owner to disassemble it and construct a raft.”

  “Capital idea, sir!” Howard roared, slapping his one glove against that left thigh in exuberance.

  As it turned out, the poor hovel didn’t belong to a white homesteader at all.

  “His name is Luke Billy?” Howard repeated as Sutherland wet the end of his pencil on the tip of his tongue and scratched down the pertinent details in his small leather-bound field ledger.

  “That’s what the white men call him,” Ad Chapman said, waving up one of the trackers from Lapwai. “He’s a friendly himself.”

  “This one?” Howard asked. When the interpreter nodded, he continued, “Ask him if we can dismantle his cabin—use it for a raft to cross the river here and pursue the Joseph bands.”

  Without delay, Luke Billy readily agreed and even helped the young Otis and his soldiers tear down the roof and walls of his poor house here at the mouth of Billy Creek. At the same time, the cavalry was collecting all their lariats, those three-fifths-inch ropes each man was assigned to picket his mount each night, used in erecting company rows in bivouac. The logs proved to be no skimpy planks. Instead, they were at least a foot thick, measuring a foot wide by some forty feet in length. The sweating, barebacked enlisted men hauled the rain-soaked timbers down to the bank of the Salmon, where the engineers and artillery officers took over, supervising the assembly of that huge raft on which General Oliver Otis Howard’s fortunes would soon sail some two hundred yards across the white-capped, wind-whipped surface of the Salmon, so he could continue his dogged pursuit of Joseph and his bloodstained henchmen.