Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  Joseph and Mary—with them Injuns on the run, this war damn near has to be over now!

  HE was disgusted with the warrior chiefs. Disgusted with the other so-called fighting men, too. Still, Shore Crossing understood why they had decided to leave the soldiers behind and flee the camping place they called Pitayiwahwih. After two days of fighting, when no victory was in sight, it was better to leave so that a man could fight another day, in another place.

  As the white man’s big-throated guns sent the fiery balls into the camp, the women mounted up on their saddle horses and the young boys shooed the herds over the western hills, out of danger. At the edge of the timber west of the camp, Shore Crossing joined one of the knots of warriors waiting in the shadows for the first soldiers to come in pursuit of more than 450 fleeing women and children. But the suapies did not come racing in pursuit. It was easy to see how little the soldiers knew about crossing the river. The fast water would delay the white men long enough that the fighting men would not have to keep them busy while the camp escaped up the Cottonwood canyon.

  With a struggle the soldiers reached the village, where some of them spotted Ollokot’s fighting men in the timber. After making a few shots at the suapies, the chiefs gave signals with the wave of an arm. Most of the warriors slipped away through the hills to rejoin the rest of the people already on their way. By the time Shore Crossing and the others caught up to the frantic retreat, White Bird, Looking Glass, and Joseph had restored some sense of order to the line of march. No longer were they in mad retreat. Once more the warriors were positioned along the sides of the column as it emerged onto the edge of the Camas Prairie. As their hearts began to slow and their thoughts were collected, the chiefs, headmen, and warriors began to deliberate their options.

  Shore Crossing and the other Red Coats wanted all the young men to follow them and make one last, grand attack on Cut-Off Arm’s soldiers. Whoever was whipped, it would be the last fight. But most of the chiefs and warriors said that events did not warrant one last, suicidal fight.

  “Why all this war up here? Our camp is not attacked! All can escape without fighting. Why die without cause?”

  Which meant that if the chiefs of the Non-Treaty bands were not going to risk their women and children in one last deadly battle, then their only course was to fully commit themselves to a war of retreat and evasion. And that decision left but two options for the leaders.

  That night Joseph again proposed, “I want to return my people to the Wallowa. That is where we will make our stand, where we can die if we are to be wiped out.”

  But Looking Glass sneered, arguing, “To march back to that rugged country between the Salmon and the Snake would expose our families to danger on the open ground of the Camas Prairie. The suapie fort is on one side, and the Shadow towns are on the other. No. We must stay close by the Clearwater, for here the canyons are deep enough that Cut-Off Arm’s men become entangled as they cross back and forth. We can stay out of reach of the white men until we decide what to do, and where to go.”

  Shore Crossing did not like this Looking Glass. At first the Alpowai chief had turned his back on the warrior bands, calling the fighting men fools for making war and shedding the blood of white men. Then last night, Shore Crossing had seen Looking Glass for what he was. After the darkness deepened and the shooting stopped, the Clearwater chief had slinked back down to camp to eat and sleep—as if no fight was going on above them! To Wahlitits, what Looking Glass had done was nothing short of cowardice. The chief was running away from the war.

  In the end, the headmen elected to follow Looking Glass’s proposal. But this time when they took refuge, they would send out scouts to prowl the surrounding countryside.

  “Never again must we allow the white man to slip up on us undetected,” Shore Crossing told that large group of chiefs and fighting men.

  With a triumphant grin, Looking Glass said, “Perhaps we can leave this war behind here in the Idaho … and slip away to the buffalo country, where we will never have to worry again that we will be attacked while our village is sleeping.”

  There were many, many murmurs of agreement. Shore Crossing had to admit that it sounded seductive, safe, and luring. Could there really be a place where they would no longer be concerned with a blood-hungry army and Shadows crying for vengeance? But … was such a choice of running away from the enemy really the sort of decision a fighting man would make?

  There on the Cottonwood the head of the march came back around on its tracks, starting east once again, looping for the Clearwater once more. As the sun began to settle atop the far mountains, those in the lead angled north, following the river bluffs downstream. Those warriors riding far out on the flanks stopped on the heights where they could once more look down on what had once been their camp of celebration and joy. The ground of Pitayiwahwih crawled with soldiers like a nest of spiders while spires of oily black smoke rose in the hot afternoon air. In huge bonfires the suapies were destroying everything the People had left behind. Sadly, the Non-Treaty bands dropped behind the bluffs, continuing downriver for Kamiah, where the Dreamers sometimes visited the Christian Indians who tended their fields there.

  If little else was clear, Shore Crossing knew that Cut-Off Arm’s soldiers had no intention of chasing them this night. The white men believed they had won a great battle. Even though the suapies had managed to kill only four warriors* while three times as many whites were dead, the soldiers would think they had won! Even though the village had escaped, even though the Nee-Me-Poo still had their great herds of horses and cattle … the white man would make much of that fight on the Clearwater.

  From experience, the chiefs knew Cut-Off Arm would make much of a few tired, old horses they had abandoned to the suapies. He would make even more of all the lodges the women had been forced to leave behind—even though the women could eventually cut more lodgepoles and the men could hunt more hides, once they were gone to the buffalo country.

  So how was it that the white men could turn an ignominious defeat for them into such a glorious victory over the Nee-Me-Poo?

  “How the hell old do you think she is, Lieutenant?” Thomas Sutherland asked the general’s aide just after sunset.

  It was nearing 7:00 P.M. Melville Wilkinson shrugged as General O. O. Howard came up to a stop in that narrow gauntlet made by the Treaty Nez Perce who served as his trackers. The lieutenant whispered to the newsman, “From the looks of her, my guess is she’s close to a hundred!”

  Sutherland figured that wasn’t far off. The old woman had to be no less than ninety, frail and wrinkled and so slow to move that she had been waiting for the soldiers to find her propped against this tree on the outskirts of the abandoned village. While soldiers and civilians alike were gallivanting around camp, showing off their buckskin clothing and moccasins they had saved from the burning lodges, the correspondent had trotted over as soon as he heard the call for some of the Christian Indians to help interpret the gap-toothed woman’s garbled talk.

  Now that Howard was here, the trackers began to string together broken words in English, a few phrases, for the white men, explaining what she had told them in their native tongue.

  “Where is the camp going now?”

  She didn’t know for sure. Just getting away from the soldiers. They wanted to be left alone, and the chiefs were arguing about how best to leave all the trouble in Idaho behind.

  Howard inquired, “What will it take for Joseph to surrender his people and come on the reservation?”

  She gazed up at the one-armed general long and steady with her rheumy, watery eyes, then informed the translator that Joseph was not the chief of that village. There were five bands. Five chiefs. And Joseph was too young to be a chief over them all. Older men had the wisdom to assume that sort of leadership in emergencies such as this. Men like Toohoolhoolzote, White Bird, and especially Looking Glass.

  “Toohoolhoolzote,” Howard echoed with an angry growl. “I put that old man in jail months ago. Should have
kept him there.”

  “No, he will never lead the camps,” she replied, folding her arthritic hands across her lap. Toohoolhoolzote was too unstable, too fiery, too harsh to reign as chief over all the bands together.

  “White Bird? If Joseph isn’t leading them, is White Bird?”

  Again she stared the general in the eye and told the Christian trackers that the only one who seemed to have enough power to hold all five bands in his hand was her chief.

  Howard looked quickly at the trackers. “Who the blazes is her chief?”

  “Looking Glass.”

  Sutherland watched Howard wag his head, realizing the general must suddenly be considering how Whipple had botched his mission to arrest the chief and hold him for the duration of the hostilities. Had that sad little debacle been handled better, Howard might well have deprived the warriors’ bands of that one chief they were now rallying behind.

  “General, sir?”

  Howard turned with the rest of them as Lieutenant Parnell rode up on horseback, accompanied by another of the Christian trackers.

  “This one just came back from seeing things to the north, General,” Parnell explained.

  Howard studied him a moment. “Reuben. That’s your Christian name?”

  “James Reuben,” the man said in passable English. “News for you.”

  “Out with it,” Parnell nudged.

  “Kamiah,” Reuben began. “Warriors go to Kamiah—”

  “Seems the hostiles aren’t fleeing onto the Camas Prairie like we figured they would when we spotted ’em running west,” Parnell declared impatiently. “They’re scampering north instead, downriver.”

  With a lunge, Howard came up to Reuben’s knee, staring up at him in the evening twilight. “That’s a Christian settlement, isn’t it?”

  Reuben nodded. “I come back with word of the burning and stealing.”

  “Joseph’s warriors are already destroying Kamiah?” Howard asked.

  “They come to cross the river at the Kamiah ford,” the tracker explained, his eyes shifting anxiously. “They cross the river there to burn houses of James Lawyer people, or … or—”

  “Or what?” Howard snapped impatiently.

  “Kamiah is the end of the road.”

  Now Howard grabbed Reuben’s reins. “End of what road?”

  “End of the Lolo. Kamiah begin the road to the buffalo country.”

  *Going Across or Wayakat, Grizzly Bear Blanket or Yoomtis Kuunin, Red Thunder or Heinmot Ilppilp, and Whittling or Lelooskin. Both Wayakat and Lelooskin fell so close to the soldier lines they had to be left where they lay in the retreat from Battle Ridge.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  JULY 13, 1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  —

  OREGON

  —

  Joseph Apparently Getting Away.

  SAN FRANCISCO, July 12.—A Portland press dispatch telegram received to-day at military headquarters, dated Cottonwood, July 8, says that all of Joseph’s band have crossed the Clear Water, supposed to be heading for the Bitter Root country. Should this be true, the fight will prove a running one. The infantry will prove comparatively non-effective. Decisive work will have to be done by the cavalry.

  Fort Lapwai

  July 13, 1877

  Dear Mamma,

  I hurriedly finished up a letter this morning, as John came in and told me a mail would leave in five minutes. I did not say half I wanted to, and I will begin this and write a page a day.

  … The news we were all expecting from General Howard came. There has been a fight, a very severe one. Our loss was 11 killed and 26 wounded. Two of the officers, Captain Bancroft and Mr. Williams, are wounded. We know both of them well. The Indians must have lost heavily. They make desperate efforts to carry off their dead, and 13 dead Indians were left on the field … This is our first good news and we all feel thankful. I hope the end of the war is near, but John and other officers think that after more troops come the Indians will get out of the road, and there will have to be a winter campaign organized to finish them up … Two of the medical officers now in the field are not in good health, and I am dreading daily that they will give out and be sent back here to look after the hospital and supplies, and John will be sent out in their place. In case he should go, he would not like me to stay here, as his movements for the entire campaign would be uncertain …

  Before I forget it, the jack straws came. The children have had two or three nice plays with them. I meant to speak of these things long ago, but indeed I have forgotten everything I ought to remember for the last month.

  Your loving daughter,

  Emily F.

  IT HAD ALMOST BEEN A MONTH SINCE CAPTAIN CHARLES C. Rawn and his small infantry detachment put Fort Shaw and the Sun River behind them on 9 June. His own I Company, along with Captain William Logan’s A Company—a total of forty-five men—had come here to this valley of the five rivers with orders to purchase supplies and hire quartermaster employees, who would help construct a small post* some four miles southwest of Missoula City, Montana Territory. Back in May, Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan requested an allocation of $20,000 from the secretary of war for this post that would police intertribal conflicts over hunting grounds. The citizens on this side of the Bitterroot, on the other hand, wanted Colonel John Gibbon’s Seventh U. S. Infantry to make a firm show of protecting the settlements.

  After all, from here the Nez Perce War was no more than a mountain range away.

  Back in April a large band of Looking Glass’s people—returning from a successful buffalo hunt on the northern plains—camped with Chief Chariot’s* Flathead, still residing south of their reservation and Missoula City in the Bitterroot valley. For generations it had been a common practice for the Non-Treaty bands to spend a little time with their acquaintances in Montana Territory, both Flathead and white. Later, in mid-June, an additional thirty-some lodges of Nez Perce stopped in the Bitterroot on their way home to Idaho Territory, just about the time the wires began to hum with news that war had broken out. Because a growing number of his citizens were becoming nervous that trouble could boil over into Montana Territory, Governor Benjamin F. Potts began raising hell with the army and officials back in Washington City, asking permission to raise a state militia. He was turned down at the highest levels.

  Instead, the army said they had already dispatched this detachment of two companies west to Missoula City, there to establish a presence in the Bitterroot valley, where the Nez Perce were often seen coming and going, as well as trading, during the hunting season.

  A Civil War veteran, with sixteen years in the regiment, Captain Rawn didn’t know what more he could do to quiet the inflamed passions of the settlers in this country. Upon his arrival, valley locals recommended he place an outpost somewhere up the Lolo Trail because of the threat and the Nez Perce tradition of traveling to and from their home through the Lolo corridor. Rawn agreed, if the citizens would provide his detachment with horses. None of the civilians would, so things quieted down somewhat when the locals went back home, grumbling and disgruntled at the army’s inaction.

  Which gave Rawn the opportunity to pay a call on Peter Ronan, newly appointed agent to the Flathead. Together they had gone to see Chief Chariot, securing his promise that, should the hostiles spill over into Montana, the Flathead would remain neutral but nonetheless provide intelligence of Nez Perce movements to the white man.

  “You feel like you can trust this Chariot?” Rawn had asked as they rode back toward the agency.

  “I’d like to think I could,” Ronan admitted. “But something tells me we’d better keep an eye on him.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking” Rawn replied. “There are simply too many of these Flatheads for a right-thinking man not to be wary and mistrustful of them catching this contagion if it spread from Idaho. Something in my gut is telling me I better not be too trusting of that Indian. His eyes shift a little too much.”

  Maybe it was nothing
at all to worry about, but some time back a small band of eleven Nez Perce lodges under Eagle-from-the-Light had already joined Chariot’s Flathead, more or less permanently, erecting their camp circle just south of the exit from the Lolo Trail, declaring they wished to stay in Montana despite the fact that Howard and agent John B. Monteith had ordered them back to Idaho and a life on the reservation.

  Just last week Eagle-from-the-Light had come to Ronan requesting permission to camp right on the reservation just north of Missoula City itself, in his people’s attempt to stay out of trouble should the hostile bands invade Montana Territory. But the Flathead agent refused, saying he did not want to provide a haven for Indians illegally off their reservation. In the end, those eleven lodges stayed where they were near the terminus of the Lolo Trail in the Bitterroot valley.

  Even though Governor Potts made his second request of the army to form a citizen militia this very day, the thirteenth of July, for the time being Captain Rawn felt like everything was under control. Word was, General Oliver Otis Howard had a column of some six hundred men, both soldier and civilian, about to crush the upstart Nez Perce. It was an Idaho war. Bred, born, and fanned to a white-hot heat over there in Idaho.

  So the kettle would have to boil with a mighty tempest for those troubles to erupt across these mountains.

  Despite the constant rains that early summer, Rawn kept on chopping, hauling, and stacking logs as the walls of a few sheds were completed and he surveyed the site for the larger buildings. So much for the unbounded excitement and romance of a frontier officer’s life.

  AFTER Captain Robert Pollock’s men buried the blackened bodies of their twelve* dead comrades in temporary graves at dawn on the battlefield plateau where the soldiers had given their lives, full military honors given over a mass grave dug just behind the field hospital, and Captain Henry Winters’s E Troop of the First U. S. Cavalry started Surgeon Sternberg and twenty-seven wounded** for Fort Lapwai in dead-axle wagons and crude travois at 9:00 A.M. that Friday, the thirteenth of July, General O. O. Howard’s command set off on that trail leading them down the Clearwater after the retreating Nez Perce.