Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  When Yellow Wolf looked, he saw how the soldiers were crawling toward him in the grass, no more than thirty steps from him already, slipping up cautiously like a snake you could not see until it struck.

  It made the young man very angry to be left by so many to the soldiers. He did not care if he died; he was going to fight these suapies like a man. He had a reputation earned in the White Bird Canyon fight, and he would not lose it here.

  Unafraid of the soldiers, Yellow Wolf crawled against two boulders and placed his carbine between them. Quickly levering shells, he fired six shots, stopping most of the soldiers where they were.

  As the crack of that last shot faded, he heard heavy breathing behind him and immediately turned. Fire Body was grunting as he dragged his old limbs out of the brush in Yellow Wolf’s direction.

  “I just heard your bullets, so I realized you were alone, Nephew,” Fire Body said while he crawled up on his belly. “We are going to die right here! But remember: Do not shoot the common soldier. Shoot the commander!”*

  He understood exactly what the older man said. Fire Body had killed the trumpet soldier at the Lahmotta fight and stopped the soldiers from advancing any farther. Now Yellow Wolf looked at the nearby enemy and spotted the commander who knelt behind his soldiers.

  Yellow Wolf took aim, and his bullet struck that officer, knocking him back into the grass where others quickly dragged him out of sight. But it was not long before another commander took his place and hollered at the soldiers.

  Yellow Wolf shot at him, too. As soon as their second commander was hit, the soldiers promptly began to scoot backward, retreating. He wanted to cheer, for his bravery alone had caused that retreat.

  Wottolen pounded a hand on his shoulder. “That was good shooting, Nephew. I think the soldiers know to stay where they are for the rest of the day.”

  As twilight arrived and it grew darker, the heat escaped the earth and the air grew cold and damp. As the stars came out, only an occasional gunshot was heard.

  Through that evening, Yellow Wolf had stayed right where he had been when he shot the two soldier commanders. Even though he began shivering. Dressed only in his breeehclout, those two cartridge belts, and that pair of moccasins he had brought with him from the lodge, his body trembled. The night was clear and still. The earth’s warmth quickly sucked into the sky. Finally, after moonset, he could not stand the cold any longer and crawled back toward the timber and rocks.

  Back at the smoking lodge where the no-fighters had gathered during the afternoon’s battle to talk about the fight and other serious matters, Yellow Wolf found no one awake. At least ten men lay asleep, curled up on the ground of the smoking lodge, clutching their legs for warmth. He found that Looking Glass was not among them. Earlier in the day, talk was that the chief made repeated trips down to the village rather than staying put on the fighting lines with his warriors.

  Yellow Wolf did not tarry at this place of the no-fighters but crept on for the place where many of the ponies were tethered. He remembered how when the sun was high Tee-weeyownah, the old warrior called Over the Point, came among the ponies tied in the trees, clearly angry. Here and there this member of White Bird’s band had selectively turned some of the horses loose. When those young men finally emerged from the safety of the smoking lodge, they were furious to find their ponies gone.

  “Where is my horse!” Alahmoot growled. He was called Elm Limb.

  Over the Point admitted, “I let them go.”

  “You have no right to turn our horses loose!” Elm Limb blustered.

  “You go too often to camp,” the older man explained as more warriors gathered to watch the argument. “We are here to fight.”

  “I came to fight!”

  “No, Elm Limb—you came to smoke and make others think you were fighting,” Over the Point protested. “All you young cowards,* I will die soon. But you—you will soon see hardships in bondage to the Shadows. Your freedom will be gone, liberty robbed from you. Our people will be slaves for all days to come. Now, go fight and die for your families!”

  Yellow Wolf crabbed into the grove, finding a few ponies still tied there, thinking hard on the old man’s strong words. It was hard not to feel deep rage for those who did not help in that first day’s fighting, leaving it to the few who did put their bodies on the line. Even Joseph, the village chief, climbed up to the bluffs to take part in the struggle. Shame was, only half of the men of fighting age showed their faces in the ravines or the snipers’ grove: ten-times-ten against four, maybe five, times as many soldiers! Eeh, he thought, no matter that the warriors were outnumbered—they still managed to keep all of Cut-Off Arm’s suapies pinned down without any water!

  Suddenly spotting a man lying on the ground, curled up against some brush, Yellow Wolf asked the stranger, “May I sleep with you, on account of the cold?”

  “Yes,” the man answered. “We can share our heat.” As Yellow Wolf knelt beside the man the stranger said, “Yellow Wolf, it is you!”

  “Cousin!” Yellow Wolf said with no small joy. His heart was very glad to see Teminisiki again. They had known each other from the time when they were both small children just learning to walk.

  “There aren’t many here now.”

  “I know,” Yellow Wolf replied. “Where did they go?”

  “Ollokot tried to stop them, telling all the fighters that they should stay and keep the soldiers away from the water.”

  “Someone told them different?”

  Teminisiki nodded in the dark. “Looking Glass. He did not like Ollokof’s plan to keep the soldiers from the spring, so most everyone else left for the camp with Looking Glass.”

  “I am glad you stayed,” Yellow Wolf said as he eased himself down to the earth. “It is good to know my cousin is a fighting man.”

  Just as he was lying down with his back against Teminisiki’s, they heard soft footsteps and a woman’s voice whispered from the darkness.

  “May I stay the rest of the night with you? I have no blanket and I am cold.”

  Without any hesitation Teminisiki said, “Come on! Get in here between us! You will keep warm that way!”

  The woman quickly did as he suggested, scooting down between the two young men. As they lay there those first few minutes, Yellow Wolf felt her quivering between them, and it made him all the colder for it. He thought how good a woman felt, with her many curves and soft places. … Then he thought of the young woman who had touched his hand as this fight had started that afternoon. How he wanted to find her now—

  But suddenly Yellow Wolf remembered what was taught him by the old ones, people who were no longer alive now—the wise warriors who had gone to the buffalo country many times, fighting the Lakota and others in that faraway land.

  They had always said: In wartime a man cannot sleep with woman. He might get killed if he does.

  “Where are you going, Yellow Wolf?” Teminisiki asked as his cousin stiffly got to his feet.

  “I will go somewhere else to sleep. You two keep each other warm for tonight.”

  He went off a little ways and found a low boulder where he could get out of the blustery wind that was growing cold. Whenever the breeze died, he could hear his cousin and the woman talking low. Despite the cold, Yellow Wolf was sure the two of them would couple that night.

  But he did not want to take the chance. He wanted instead to believe in the ways of the old ones he had been taught summers ago.

  Yellow Wolf shivered all night long, until it grew light enough for the fighting to start again.

  *”This characteristic of the Nez Perce’s combat methodology was to singularize their performance in subsequent engagements with the army.” Jerome A. Greene, The U. S. Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis of 1877.

  *In Nez Perce culture, cowards or laggards in battle were rarely, if ever, shamed or ostracized.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  JULY 12, 1877

  Thursday, July 12, 1877

  Mamma,

  I wis
h I could talk to you this morning instead of writing. One of the things I meant to tell you yesterday was the active part the Indian squaws take in these fights our soldiers have had. They follow along after the men, holding fresh horses and bringing water right into the midst of all the commotion. Colonel Perry says that in that fight of White Bird Canyon, he saw one Indian (one buck, as they speak of them here) have as many as three changes of horses brought him by his squaw. See what an advantage that is to them. As soon as their horses are a little blown, they take a fresh one, and our poor soldiers have perhaps ridden theirs fifty or sixty miles before the fight begins. In their efforts to get at the Indians, they do their fighting on their tired animals. Then, in the fight, the soldiers fall scattered in all directions and the bucks can’t stop to plunder in the midst of the fight. So, wherever a man falls, they set a squaw to watch him. I do hope their successes are at an end.

  We are waiting anxiously for news from General Howard who is about 50 miles away from Lapwai. A young man named Rains was killed last week. It was his first fight. He was a lovely boy. Mrs. Theller felt dreadfully about his death. He was the officer in charge of the party that found and buried Mr. Theller’s body. Rains had so marked Theller’s grave that he would have no difficulty finding it again, and now we don’t know that it can be found. Mrs. Theller is so anxious to have the body. Poor woman … it was two weeks after the fight before they were able (from the small number of men and the large number of Indians) to go out to bury the men killed in that first fight, and Mrs. Theller used to say, “If he was only buried. Oh my poor Ned, lying there with his face blackening in the sun.”

  … Last Sunday night, an Indian (friendly) came in and told that he had seen Joseph’s men and they were coming to “clean out” the post that night. “Maybe in the night. Maybe in the morning,” they said. “Only little bit of soldiers here. Is good time. Plenty muck-a-muck (food) and plenty gun.” The Indian is a reliable one, as the good ones go, so every precaution was taken to guard against the surprise. Everybody at the post slept in one house, and the men slept in the breastworks … They did not come, but we have many such alarms … I am so tired of all this excitement, but the children seem to thrive on it. They look neglected but happy as clams at high tide.

  Your loving daughter,

  Emily F

  THROUGH THE LONG, COLD, BLACK HOURS OF THAT NIGHT, First Sergeant Michael McCarthy listened to the groans of the wounded gathered at the hospital behind the lines in the dark—their cries fading time and again into eerie echoes that stole through the awful suffocating stillness.

  At least the wounded were lucky—they had been picked up off the battlefield and hauled back to the hospital in the wagons, where they lay under awnings erected for shade and waited their turn under the surgeon’s knife and saw. The dead, all those dead, still lay where they had fallen.

  Those cries of the wounded mingled with the harangues of the enemy chiefs as they exhorted their warriors in the still, gray hours hovering just before first light, while the clear, starry sky gradually faded far to the east.

  Yet what nettled him most were the soft, sad whimpers of the women as they keened and mourned for their fallen warriors. Ghostly tatters of their pitiful wails drifted up from the valley below. Enough to make a man give up even the thought of a belly-warming drink … if he’d been lucky enough to have himself a flask here on the line this bloody black night.

  Hell, to have anything to drink would have been a boon through that first, long day.

  When the soldiers went in search of water around midday on the eleventh, a few got close to a spring* tucked up in the head of a timbered draw. But close was all they got. Every time some daring trooper attempted to cross from the cover of trees to the brushy spring, swaybacked under a clattering load of wool-covered canteens, Nez Perce sharpshooters drove him back. It was here “that Private Edward Wykoff was killed and another infantryman was wounded. As the hours dragged on and on, their horses and mules suffered every bit as much as the men hunkered down on that thin crescent moon of a battle line.

  From time to time the enemy’s leaders had signaled an attack or change in strategy to their warriors by emerging on some prominent point where one of them came out, jumping around as he waved a red blanket or circled a pony in some significant manner. At times, McCarthy even spotted blinding flickers of mirrored light and realized some war chief was sending a secret code to his men. Within minutes of every signal, a small group of four, perhaps five, warriors suddenly burst from hiding to make a noisy charge on a weak spot along the line, singing, chanting, screeching all the while. When they tore past his end of the line, it was enough to make even a brave man pucker. After all, Sergeant Michael McCarthy had been left for dead on the White Bird Battlefield. He knew firsthand what fear could do to a man.

  And when the momentary terror had passed and the rush was over, it came to the sergeant that the Nez Perce had not dared press their case against the center of Howard’s big square. That’s when it came to him: how the general had posted his artillery and infantry, with their long-range rifles, at the center of this broad square, positioning the cavalry with their shorter carbines on the two flanks. The goddamned warriors had less respect for the horse soldiers’ guns.*

  That afternoon as the sun reigned supreme in its sky, McCarthy had stripped out of his dark navy blue fatigue blouse trimmed with tarnished brass buttons, he was sweating so. But now, in the coldest part of the day, he was shivering, his teeth threatening to rattle like ivory dice in a bone cup. He struggled to keep them under control, lest any man mistake the cold for fear.

  When darkness fell, orders came round for them to hold their position on the line, the men spaced more than five yards apart, with instructions to improve their defenses by making their breastworks taller where they could find rocks or digging their rifle pits deeper on that part of the line where there were no stones to hunker behind. And McCarthy had his men bunkie-up so one man might try to catch a little shut-eye while the other kept watch.

  Twice during the night, H Company had been resupplied with ammunition from the quartermaster’s stores. But there was no food for those on the firing line. Didn’t matter after awhile: It would’ve been damned near impossible to swallow the crumbly hardbread and salted beef without some water to wash it down anyway. Earlier in the afternoon as the temperature soared, McCarthy heard of an officer who had been driven so mad from thirst that he had lapped at the muddy water in a grassy mire where the mules and horses had been trampling the ground. By moonrise the man was taken sick, doubled over with terrible cramps at the field hospital back among the pack saddles and apishamores.

  Hours of darkness, during which the sergeant and others listened to the sounds of the Nez Perce working on their barricades—rocks scraping together as one was piled on top of the other for the fight they knew was to come with the rising sun. That night General Howard approved a few sorties against the enemy, small squads of soldiers sent out to probe the edges of the timber, hoping to outflank the Nez Perce snipers. Wasn’t long before each bunch came crawling back. What with the darkness and getting strung out far from their lines, the soldiers needed very little excuse to turn back after encountering the first stiff resistance.

  A time or two even McCarthy had heard noises from the night that caused him to think the Indians were attempting to penetrate what they hoped would be a weak part of the army’s lines through the night.

  “Cap’n Trimble says these here Nez Perce are no despicable foe,” Lieutenant William Parnell repeated quietly as he eased down beside his sergeant in the cold.

  “They’ve fit us good this second time,” McCarthy groaned. He was so thirsty, it even hurt his tongue to wag. “Leastways, we didn’t have to run this time, Major.”

  Parnell nodded. One of the few survivors of the British army’s “Charge of the Six Hundred” at Balaklava during the Crimean War, this large man sighed, “The cap’n and me was talking about how these Nez Perce were such pacifists—co
uldn’t be goaded into a fight—before a few of ’em started murdering … and now we’ve seen ’em put a courageous defense of their homeland. This shaped up to be a beautiful battle, didn’t it, Sergeant: all of Joseph’s reds against all of Howard’s soldiers.”

  “I ain’t never heard of no Injuns digging in and holing up the way this bunch has,” the Irishman commented. “Always figured they’d be running off once their women and children was safe.”

  “For a second time, it strikes me these warriors aren’t the running kind.”

  McCarthy studied the big lieutenant in the dark. “You givin’ these redskins their due?”

  Grudgingly Parnell said, “I told the cap’n there never was a tribe more worthy of my respect, Sergeant.”

  A rustle of grass and an angry grumble from men disturbed in their sleep caused them both to look over their shoulders. Out of the darkness came the soft clatter of those wool-covered canteens slung around the neck of a young hospital steward.

  “Hold up there, bucko.” Parnell put out his beefy hand. “Where you think you’re off to in the dark?”

  With a gulp, the young soldier said, “Surgeon Sternberg sent me, sir. Crawl over to get some water at the spring yonder. The wounded are begging for it something awful.”

  “The spring’s yonder,” McCarthy said, pointing with his outstretched arm into the gray light at that ground halfway between the lines.

  “T-that far?”

  “And them Injuns gonna see you comin’ every step of the way,” McCarthy advised.

  With a rapid, anxious shake of his head, the steward shrank to the ground and groaned, face in his hands. Finally slipping the canteen straps over his head, the soldier turned to his left, finding an open spot behind a low pile of rocks, then crabbed over to join some of McCarthy’s men behind the breastworks.