Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  “I’ll go, too,” W. J. Stephens said.

  Barbour turned around and looked over the group. “Enough of us thrown in with Captain Rawn here, we just might have what we need to keep Joseph’s warriors out of the Bitterroot.”

  More of the civilians started to volunteer then.

  Finally, Barbour suggested, “Captain, I figure we ought to ride into town and spread the word. I know we’ll enlist more volunteers soon as the folks know what’s coming our way.”

  On 25 July, after only one day of preparation, Rawn left behind a skeleton force of ten men and started his command of twenty-five regulars away from the unfinished walls of his new post, accompanied by more than twenty heavily armed Montana citizens, all of whom had volunteered to stop the Nez Perce from bringing that Idaho war into their valley.

  At the mouth of the Lolo they ran into thirty-five civilians from Fort Owens, near Stevensville in the Bitterroot valley. It was here that the nominal commander of that volunteer militia told Rawn he doubted they had enough manpower to turn back the Nez Perce. Refusing to be cowed by civilian naysayers, Rawn told the valley men to go back to their homes and he forged ahead. The thirty-five reluctantly followed.

  Sixteen miles from Missoula, only five short miles up Lolo Creek from the mouth of the canyon, the mountainsides narrowed to less than two hundred yards, with a rugged, precipitous wall closing in on the south—both sides of the trail bordered by thick stands of timber, the forest floor cluttered with deadfall.

  It was here that the cautious captain’s slow-moving skirmish formation took its first fire from a few Nez Perce outriders. Both soldiers and civilians quickly scurried for cover and had themselves a short, ineffectual exchange with those Indian riflemen seen only from the puffs of gunsmoke dotting the canyon vegetation.

  “My intentions are to compel the Indians to surrender their arms and ammunition, and to dispute their passage, by force of arms, into the Bitterroot valley,” Rawn explained as the Nez Perce fire noticeably trickled off, then—for some reason—disappeared entirely.

  “This is the place,” Rawn determined as he peered from side to side, studying the site he had chosen, which occupied a bench north of Lolo Creek. “Steep as that slope is, they can’t get around us to the south. Even though that north side isn’t near so treacherous, I don’t think even a mountain goat could pass, much less a tribe of Indians with all their impedimenta. So unless they disarm and dismount, we’ll give them a fight right here. Let’s dig in.”

  He now put some his soldiers and volunteers to work scratching out a line of rifle pits in a lazy L shape, one leg stretching to the north from the bench, the other roughly to the west. The rest of his command Rawn ordered to drag up deadfall and to cut down more, all of it to be laid horizontally atop the dirt excavated from those trenches at the rear of the log barricades. To top off their fortifications, the men dropped what is called a head log on top of the walls, shoving a short limb under it at intervals, which opened a space large enough to get the muzzles of their rifles through.

  While he got these labors under way, the captain sent local E. A. Kenney to ride on up the trail and attempt some contact with the Nez Perce camp. Early that evening of the twenty-fifth, the scout, who had been elected as “captain” of the Missoula volunteers, returned with an Indian he declared had the Christian name of John Hill.

  “This one’s been sent to you by Joseph hisself, Captain,” Kenney explained.

  “Those warriors we skirmished with got back and told him we’re here?”

  “The whole camp knows,” Kenney said. “Four scouts was left behind to keep an eye on us when three of ’em headed back with the news. This fella Hill was one of ’em waiting along the trail to keep an eye on us. When he spotted me coming up the road on my lonesome, he come out of hiding. He led me to their camp this side of the hot springs.”

  “How far’s that?”

  “Less’n a handful of miles from here,” Kenney answered.

  “How many? Two or three?” and Rawn’s eyes narrowed, the skin between his eyes wrinkling with worry.

  “No more’n that,” Kenney said with a shrug, chewing on the side of his lower lip. “Lemme tell you—them chiefs and all their bucks was painted up and ready to wrassle when they surrounded me! I figger they mean to strut and crow up a storm in front of us so we’ll just step aside for ’em when they come on down the trail.”

  The captain asked, “You get a chance to tell the chiefs we’re here to turn them back from entering the valley?”

  “I told ’em that’s why you’re digging in here,” the civilian sighed. “Explained how folks here in Montana didn’t want ’em bringing their Idaho war over here.”

  “So what’d Joseph have to say for himself?”

  “He sent this Injun back with me to ask the soldier chief if you’re gonna let his people leave the pass, let them go on by way of Missoula City for the buffalo country.”

  “That almost sounds like a man who doesn’t figure on making trouble,” Barbour piped up scornfully.

  “How the hell we gonna trust that red son of a bitch after he’s been killing men and ruining white women over there in Idaho?” Amos Buck shrieked.

  His brother Fred Buck chimed in, “I say we hold this here redskin as our hostage while we explain to the rest of them savages what’s gonna happen to ’em if they come on down the trail!”

  “Hold on,” Rawn soothed, then turned back to Kenney. “Does Joseph sound to be peaceable to you?”

  The scout nodded. “The chiefs said they would go their way peacefully if you let ’em pass.”

  Rawn sighed, studying his boot toes a long time before he looked up at the civilian to say, “All right, Mr. Kenney. We’ll hold this Indian here with us for safekeeping while you go back up the road.”

  “Go back up the road, Captain?”

  “I’m sending you to tell Joseph I want to talk with him myself tomorrow,” Rawn explained for the hearing of them all. “Tell him to come to our camp in the morning and we’ll have a talk about where his people can go now.”

  *The Lolo Hot Springs made famous by Lewis and Clark on their journey west in 1805.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  JULY 26, 1877

  “WHICH ONE OF THESE IS WHITE BIRD?” CAPTAIN CHARLES C. Rawn quietly asked of volunteer leader E. A. Kenney as the white men brought their horses to a halt a few yards from the two Nez Perce.

  “The oldest one there on your left,” indicated the civilian as the two chiefs looked over the line of white men.

  “Looking Glass is the other,” Rawn surmised with much disappointment, glancing at the decorated mirror hanging from the chief’s neck. “Which means that Joseph didn’t come.”

  “Right.” Kenney pointed beyond the pair. “I figger he’s back with the rest of their chiefs—in that group you see waiting at them trees.”

  “If he’s the leader of the whole band of hostiles, do you suppose he sent these two other chiefs out simply to toy with me?”

  Kenney didn’t speak immediately. Instead, he looked over that group waiting well behind the two delegates, searching for Joseph. Finally he shrugged and said, “Maybe he’s over there. Hell, I don’t have no idea why Joseph ain’t here.”

  It was late Thursday afternoon, 26 July, when Rawn, accompanied by Captain William Logan, Chief Chariot, and the newly arrived Montana governor, Benjamin F. Potts, along with more than a hundred soldiers and “irregulars,” moved out from behind their log-and-pit barricades under a white handkerchief tied to the barrel of a Long-Tom Springfield rifle and rode up the Lolo Trail toward Woodman’s Prairie, where Joseph’s village was now camped. Upon spotting the big gathering of warriors drawn up on a ridge and displaying themselves in an intimidating manner, the white delegation had stopped just beyond the range of the Nez Perce rifles.

  “Let’s begin with the point you need to impress upon them about disarming, Captain,” prodded Potts, ever the politician.

  Over the last few days the gover
nor of Montana Territory had hustled down from Helena by stage. Leading a group of some fifty volunteers from the territorial capital, Potts and his civilians had reached Missoula City a little past three o’clock that very morning. As soon as he had acquired three horses at a livery, Potts and two of his staff immediately led their volunteer brigade south for the Lolo Trail, reaching the barricades just before noon.

  Sizing up the situation as only an elected official could, the governor told Rawn, “It would be madness for us to attack their camp with an inadequate force. The only thing that can be done is to hold these Indians in check until such a force arrives that will compel their surrender.”

  Hell, that was the same damn thing the army itself was asking the captain to do with his two forlorn, outgunned companies! Hold these savages who had butchered or eluded the best Howard’s department could throw at them—and Rawn was expected to nail their moccasins to the ground until help arrived? Even though a hundred more Bitterroot volunteers had drifted in throughout the previous afternoon and that very morning, the captain fretted that he wouldn’t have enough men to actually block the Nez Perce if it came to a showdown.

  Shit, this was just the sort of assignment that could make a man a hero … or a goddamned martyr.

  Yesterday afternoon he had written a dispatch to Fort Shaw on the Sun River, addressing it to Colonel Gibbon’s aide, Lieutenant Levi F. Burnett.

  Up the Lou-Lou Pass

  July 25th, 1877

  3:00 o’clock P.M.

  Am entrenching twenty-five regulars and about fifty volunteers in Lou-Lou canyon. Have promises of more volunteers but am not certain of them. Please send me along more troops. Will go up and see them tomorrow and inform them that unless they disarm and dismount, will give them a fight. White Bird says he will go through peaceably if he can, but will go through. This news is entirely reliable.

  The captain was so certain of this development simply because a half-breed named Delaware Jim had brought him word only minutes before he sat down to write out his dispatch.

  Having just gotten back from the Nez Perce camp, this mixed-blood Salish, given the right proper and Christian name Jim Simonds, lived with a Nez Perce woman as part of Eagle-from-the-Light’s band, who themselves had moved in with Chariot’s Flathead people and adopted the Bitterroot south of Missoula City as their own.*

  When Chief Chariot had led more than twenty of his fighting men up to the barricades earlier that morning of the twenty-sixth, volunteering to help the soldiers against the Nez Perce, Delaware Jim promptly offered to ride on to the hostiles’ camp because he could speak a passable Nez Perce. He had had himself an audience with the venerable old White Bird.

  And now Rawn was standing before the chief himself.

  “Don’t forget what I told you,” Potts whispered out of the side of his mouth as the Nez Perce held out their hands and there was a lot of shaking all around. “You must stand fast. Don’t budge a single inch on your demands—the safety of our communities depends upon it.”

  “That’s right, Cap’n,” Kenney reminded at Rawn’s other elbow. “You can’t let these here Injuns buffalo you and walk right over the U. S. Army.”

  “Not like they’ve done in Idaho,” Potts hissed assuredly.

  Once the introductory preliminaries were out of the way, Rawn began explaining his demands to the two chiefs, attempting to make his voice strong enough, loud enough, that it would reach the clutter of warriors embraced by the trees in the mid-distance. Chances were the ringleader himself, Joseph, was among them. If not him, then at the very least every other renegade Nez Perce warrior who wore the blood of innocent white people on his hands.

  “By order of the Indian Bureau of the United States of America,” Rawn began, pausing for the first time to allow for Delaware Jim’s halting translation, “you and your people are hereby ordered to halt, and cease your approach into Montana Territory.

  “With the authority of the U. S. Army,” he continued, “I order you to surrender your weapons and ammunition immediately. Then your warriors will have to dismount and turn over your horses to me.

  “When that is done, then your people can turn around and return to Idaho, where you have been ordered upon your reservation.”

  “Chiefs says the reservation is not theirs,” Delaware Jim interpreted. “That it belongs to Lawyer’s people.”

  “If they have a grievance about their reservation, they should take it up with their agent and the Indian Bureau,” Rawn said firmly. “I am a soldier, so I’m here to stop them entering Montana Territory.”

  The translator did his best to listen to the talk going back and forth between the two chiefs until he finally could tell Rawn, “White Bird says they’ll give you their cartridges, but they won’t let go none of their guns.”

  Rawn wagged his head emphatically, uneasiness swelling in him like a hot, festering boil. The tension in the other white men around him had suddenly grown palpable as well. He knew both sides were watching for any sign of treachery. “Tell the chiefs that’s not good enough.”

  “They say what you ask is not something they can decide for themselves,” Simonds interpreted. “To give up their guns and horses—that is something every man must decide for himself.”

  “That means this will take more time?” Rawn asked, a dim flicker of hope warming his breast. “Perhaps a day or two so they can deliberate?”

  “Maybe so,” Delaware Jim admitted, then listened to more of White Bird’s talk.

  Rawn drew himself up, feeling a bit more confident that he was not about to be bullied and shoved aside by these Indians. “Tell them they must make their decision no later than midnight.”

  “The middle of the night?” Potts echoed with disbelief.

  Rawn turned slightly and flashed the governor a knowing wink. “And, interpreter—be sure to tell these two chiefs that I’m making them responsible for the actions of their warriors. I don’t want any of their young men roaming about or attempting to sneak around our fortified barricades.”

  The white men waited while those two prickly topics of contention were relayed to the Nez Perce, then for Delaware Jim to absorb what he was told in response to Rawn’s stern ultimatums.

  “Chiefs vow not to fight the valley settlers, if the white men with you don’t shoot at them. The Nez Perce are friends with those white men, and do not wish to have trouble with the settlers in the Bitterroot valley since they have been friends for many years.”

  Rawn glanced over the faces of those volunteer leaders, studying the effect the chiefs’ word had on men like Potts, Kenney, and newspaperman Barbour, too. Then he asked, “What about my soldiers?”

  The Salish interpreter said, “White Bird says if your soldiers force them to fight, they will ride over you to get to the buffalo country.”

  Just then a figure on horseback appeared through the center of those warriors waiting back among the trees. But he did not stop there. The closer he came, the more Rawn found the man remarkably handsome. His approach toward the parley was causing quite a stir among the warriors and headmen.

  “Captain Rawn?” whispered William Logan, captain of A Company. “Do you recall how Captain Jack’s Modocs ambushed General Canby at the Lava Beds?”*

  Rawn tore his attention from that solitary horseman to study the rest of those eighty-some warriors plainly growing more restless, if not belligerent. “I remember, Captain. Send one of the men back to pass word to the noncoms that the units should be ready to advance at once should anything untoward happen up here with us.”

  Logan turned and whispered to Lieutenant Coolidge, directing the young officer to turn about for the rear.

  That’s when Rawn peered again at that handsome horseman and asked, “So who is this coming to our conference?”

  “He’s the one you been waiting to meet,” Kenney said before Delaware Jim could get the words out. “That’s Joseph hisself.”

  When the chief came up to dismount among the others, Looking Glass and White
Bird began relating to him what they had discussed with Rawn. In a matter of moments, Joseph made only a simple gesture with his hand to show his token assent to the plans of those other chiefs, but he did not utter a word.

  That gave the captain a sudden overwhelming sense of relief: to think that he might be able to stall the hostiles and thereby delay the inevitable clash until either General Howard made it over the Lolo Trail or Colonel Gibbon got down from Fort Shaw with reinforcements. Even with the growing number of civilian riflemen and Chariot’s Flat-heads augmenting his paltry twenty-five foot soldiers, the captain was not at all eager to plunge headlong into a scrap with some two hundred resolute warriors fresh from Idaho and their stunning battlefield victories scored against numbers far stronger than his.

  “So,” Rawn sighed, trying to appear as if he were disgruntled with the news, “these leaders are telling me they can’t make a decision on their own right now?”

  “Yes,” Delaware Jim replied with some visible measure of his own relief as the three chiefs began to turn away for the trees.

  “So they’ll let me know by midnight?”

  “No,” the interpreter admitted as they watched the backs of those three leaders returning to their lines. “But Looking Glass claims they will come back to talk with you again sometime tomorrow morning.”

  BY TELEGRAPH

  —

  The Strike Subsiding—Bummers Still Rioting.

  —

  More Indian Massacres in the Black Hills.

  —

  BLACK HILLS.

  —

  Indians Murdering Near Deadwood—A General War.

  CHEYENNE, July 26.—A dispatch from Deadwood, dated yesterday, says: James Ryan, a resident of Spearfish City, just in, states Lieutenant Lemly, with his company of soldiers augmented by a dozen civilians, left this point Sunday morning with two days’ rations, and have not been heard from since … Two large bodies of Indians were seen yesterday morning on Red Water, about five miles from Spearfish … Intense excitement prevails throughout Deadwood. At short intervals since yesterday morning, horsemen have been arriving from the different towns and hay fields in this vicinity, bringing details of fresh murders and outrages by the savages, who seem to have broken loose from the agencies in large numbers and are infesting the country in all directions …