Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  As the sun had gone down yesterday, he and some other boys had been playing the stick game near a large clump of brush beside the creek. With the coming of darkness, they lit a small fire for light and warmth and continued to play happily. That was when one of his friends noticed two men stepping out of the nearby brush. Both were wrapped in gray blankets up to their noses, not Indian blankets at all. Suhm-Keen looked close and could see the men were not Indian. Frightened, the boys ran away.

  But rather than alarm the adults, one of the older youngsters said, “Leave it be. Our parents and the chiefs know we are being watched by spies. Leave it be.”

  “That’s right,” another boy said. “Awhile ago I saw a Shadow on horseback cross the canyon on the other side of the creek. No one was excited when they talked about it. Some of the adults think he must be a spy. But other men think he is a miner, working his mine somewhere close by. He might have quarreled with other miners and be looking for a new place to stay away from the other Shadows.”

  When the group came back to their little fire later, the strangers were gone—as if they never had been there. The boys returned to their play, and those two spies were quickly and completely forgotten.

  Until now. What if they had reported their news to the chiefs? he wondered. Would it have made any difference? Would the headmen have put out guards to watch for soldiers?

  As he fled, Suhrn-Keen found a depression in the ground not too far from the lodges and sank to his belly in it. Peering over the edge, the boy had watched the madness for the longest time when his attention was caught by one of the suapies who limped behind one of the lodges and settled against the buffalo-hide cover with a loud grunt. He took something large and flat from inside his blue shirt, then removed a small twig from somewhere else in his shirt. The youngster was mesmerized, watching the small soldier scratch on the thin, flat object with that twig* while the battle raged on around him.

  Not a lot of time passed before the suapie was hit by a bullet. His hands flew up—the flat white object flying one way, the small twig sailing in another. Suhm-Keen was even more astounded as he watched the white object slowly become many, all of them gradually scudding across the ground like the dance of swirling feathers with each gust of breeze.

  Suddenly he heard a man’s loud voice booming nearby.

  “Soldiers are right on us! They are now in our camp! Get away somewhere or you will be killed!”

  Breathless, but afraid to stop until he had scrambled to the top, Suhm-Keen raced to the base of the plateau and started climbing to the rim. Only then did he turn to glance over his shoulder, surprised to find so many other children right behind him, scratching up the side of the ridge to join him. Then he peered back at the village. Hard as he looked, he could not find his parent’s lodge at first, what with the gunsmoke, people scrambling here and there, and the dense ground fog.

  He squatted on the ripi of the plateau with the other children, watching, listening to the battle as the white-skinned suapies entered the village, spreading out to search the lodges….

  He managed not to cry until he saw the soldiers start to burn the first of those lodges. That’s when Suhm-Keen buried his face in his arms, realizing that first one had started to smoke, a greasy black tendril stretching to the sky.

  It was the lodge where his grandmother lay bleeding.

  AT this side of camp where the fiercest fight was raging, Yellow Wolf watched many things that he was certain would stay burned in his memory for as long as he lived.

  Somehow through the noisy din of battle he nonetheless heard the cries of a small infant. Turning in a squat to peer over his shoulder, he spotted the tiny child sobbing next to the body of its mother. The woman lay sprawled, blood on her leg and belly—unmoving and clearly dead. Then there was a rush of blurred motion, and a knot of soldiers appeared around the side of a lodge, yelling very loudly. Out of the lodge crouched an old woman, her hands held out in supplication. Yellow Wolf was afraid she was about to be shot….

  But instead, one of the suapies bent over the bawling infant and picked it up as if he was quite used to holding a baby. He patted its back a few moments, then passed the child to the startled woman and motioned for her to go. She stood there a breathless heartbeat longer, plainly baffled. He motioned again, yelling at her this time, pantomiming for her to run off. The soldiers watched her lunge away, then turned aside to another lodge, their rifles pointed and ready.

  This confused Yellow Wolf. Maybe not all Shadows were brutal and without feelings for people they did not understand.

  But minutes later, not far away at that same end of camp, he and two others came to the birthing lodge … where they discovered the wife of Sun Tied had been shot in her bed. Beside her lay the body of the older midwife, a woman named Granite Crystal, who had helped the young mother deliver a child. She, like the young mother, had been shot.

  Clutched in the birth nurse’s arms lay the still form of the newborn, its tiny skull brutally crushed with either a boot heel or a rifle butt. In Sun Tied’s lodge nearby, Yellow Wolf and his friends found the woman’s two older children, both of them shot with soldier bullets.

  Looking at those little bodies, he felt the sting of gall rise from his belly, and with it a deep and unsettling anger. While there might well be a few Shadows who could commit acts of kindness and generosity that might come close to rivaling the humanity of the Nee-Me-Poo, most white people were simply a dark-hearted race intent upon taking everything they coveted, killing everyone who stood in their way. A black and shadowy race.

  Then he remembered Ollokot’s words spoken to his warriors after they fled the fight on the Clearwater.

  “Fear can be a potent killer in battle—paralyzing those it strikes—but anger is the greatest killer of all,” the war chief had declared. “Anger always assures that the warrior consumed with rage will not be thinking clear enough to be wary of every danger.”

  Sucking in a deep breath as he stared at the bodies of these children, Yellow Wolf vowed he would not let anger eat away at his common sense. No, he vowed to see this day out, alive.

  “My brothers—see how they set the first lodge on fire!” he heard Kowtoliks* shouting, “Make a good resistance! We are here today for that reason!”

  Around the young Kowtoliks—no more than sixteen summers old—rallied some warriors, their guns-firing. They were all whooping together as Yellow Wolf spotted movement from the corner of his eye. He whirled, ready to shoot, when he saw it was an older man emerging from his lodge pitched upriver toward the south end of camp. He had a white King George blanket belted around his waist, covering only his legs, while his upper chest and shoulders were bare.

  It was Pahka Pahtahank, who was called Five Fogs—a man of middle age who had never learned a thing of the white man’s firearms. He was one of the very best among Yellow Wolf’s people at using a bow.

  Five Fogs held his short, sinew-backed bow at the end of his outstretched arm, firing steadily at the wave of soldiers near the riverbank. Not running away from his home, the warrior stood his ground, methodically shooting one arrow after another at the white men who were aiming their rifles at him. He moved slightly from side to side after every shot, then aimed and freed another arrow. A volley of bullets clattered against the lodge behind him, then a second burst of gunfire. Then a third time after he shifted and loosed two more arrows at the advancing soldiers.

  But a fourth, massive volley struck Five Fogs and the brave Nee-Me-Poo bowman fell beside the door to his home.*

  Uttering a quick prayer to Hunyewat for the spirit of Five Fogs, Yellow Wolf had just started around a lodge, ready to make for the far end of camp, when he suddenly slid to a halt, unable to believe his eyes!

  Not far away a very, very old man sat outside his lodge** apparently calm in the midst of the frantic fighting, warriors and soldiers running here and there, horses rearing and racing about, smoke and fog roiling along the ground. Yet this ancient one sat and smoked his pipe as if i
t were a quiet autumn morning in an abandoned camp.

  Wahnistas Aswetesk sat upon a small rug cut from a buffalo robe, his tobacco pouch beside his knee, puffing calmly on his pipe as the first bullets began to fall about him.

  Yellow Wolf started for the old one—to drag him to safety—but the fury of the soldier guns drove him back. Instead, he had to take cover beside a lodge, where Yellow Wolf could only watch what he was sure would be a quick and terrible end for the pipe smoker.

  The first time a bullet hit the ancient one, his body jerked, but still he did not topple to the side. Two and then a third struck him. He simply did not move to safety or collapse from his terrible wounds. More bullets rattled the lodge cover and poles around him. To Yellow Wolf it sounded like the battering of hailstones—but the ancient one did not budge. As if the bullets were nothing more than harmless drops of rain!

  Twenty bullets—a full two-times-ten—must have entered his body as Yellow Wolf counted, amazed.

  Then as suddenly as the shooting had converged on the old man, the soldiers moved on past, running into camp, either satisfied they had killed the ancient one or deciding they never would.

  When Yellow Wolf slid up beside him and crouched over the wrinkled face, he was surprised to find Wahnistas breathing. “Are you alive?”

  The creased eyelids fluttered open. “You go fight, young man. Do not worry about an old man like me. I have seen many days and if this is to be my last—then I have had my smoke to the new sun. Go now, and fight for those you can save.”

  The young warrior said, “You are brave to look at the face of death so calmly—”

  “Eeh-heh, Yellow Wolf!”

  The young man turned to look over his shoulder and spotted Seeskoomkee propped against a nearby lodge. This one called No Feet was leaning against some poles to hold himself and his soldier rifle in place while he fired with the one hand left him.

  “Do you need my help?” Yellow Wolf yelled at the former slave, who had brought the warning of soldiers advancing the morning the Nee-Me-Poo had their first battle with the suapies at Lahmotta.

  “Do you have any bullets for my gun?”

  Yellow Wolf saw No Feet was using a lever-action repeater. “I don’t have any bullets that will fit your carbine!” he replied.

  Seeskoomkee laughed boldly as he pointed at Yellow Wolf’s rifle. “I will see what I can do to kill a soldier so you can have more bullets to use!”

  “I will kill some soldiers myself.”

  “There, young man,” the old one said, tapping Yellow Wolf on the forearm. “Look there.”

  When he turned around to see where Wahnistas pointed, Yellow Wolf spotted his chief again. Joseph had returned from the horse herd where Yellow Wolf had first sighted him and No Heart early that morning at the beginning of the fight. Now the chief stood in the midst of some warriors at the center of camp, cradling his two-month-old daughter within one arm while directing action with the other arm.

  When he had spotted Joseph on the hillside in those first moments of battle and now, too—neither time was the chief holding a gun. He was not a fighting man, not a fighting chief like his younger brother. Instead, Joseph was assisting the flight of the innocent women and children caught sleeping in the village.

  “There, you see, young man?” Wahnistas asked. “Do not waste your time here with me! I am old and will die soon. So go give a good fight like our chiefs—save the little ones, and our people, for tomorrow!”

  * Was this the long-lost Jennet Manuel from the Salmon River valley?

  * It was not until some years later, when Suhm-Keen was able to understand that the white man wrote his language down, using a pen and paper, that he was able to explain to others what he had watched the soldier doing in the village that morning. So who was this soldier? Whom was he writing to? Because Suhm-Keen’s testimony states that the soldier was already wounded when he got behind the lodge, did the white man sense he was about to die, and was he attempting to write down some last words for his loved ones back home?

  * This name has no definitive translation but refers to the hair and bones of human dead that are scattered by wild predators.

  * Stake No. 50 designates where his lodge stood, and Stake No. 49 shows where this bowman died. His quiver and bow are in the Big Hole National Battlefield collections.

  ** Stake No. 24, Big Hole National Battlefield.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  AUGUST 9, 1877

  BY 8.:00 A.M. JOHN GIBBON WONDERED IF HE SHOULD HAVE ordered his men to set fire to the lodges or not.

  That simple command ended up taking a good number of his men off the firing line and prevented them from keeping the pressure on the Nez Perce fighting men. But he had already committed his manpower, so he would follow through with his original battle plan … even though some doubt still nagged at him—causing him more than a little concern that perhaps he should have pursued the warriors until they were completely driven off, away from the lodges, far enough from his perimeter that they could not cause his lines any real worry.

  He had remained on the hillside across the stream from the camp for some time, watching from that elevated vantage point that soon showed him that the attack on the left side of his line had faltered under Bradley. It wasn’t until Lieutenant Woodruff galloped up carrying the news that the lieutenant had been killed that Gibbon suffered his first apprehensions, misgivings that he might have blundered in his planning, if not in his plan’s execution.

  Not until the Nez Perce launched a fierce counterattack, lodge by lodge near the center of the village, did he decide to venture across the boggy slough to get a closer look for himself. No sooner had he emerged near the south end of the camp among the units attempting to set fire to a seventh and eighth lodge than Gibbon realized he made a pretty target of himself perched high upon this nervous horse he was repeatedly having to rein up, as it clearly wanted to bound away, what with all the gunfire and yelling going on around them.

  “Horseback’s not the healthiest position for a man in battle,” he said to his aide-de-camp as he landed on the ground and snubbed up the reins of the nervous animal.

  Lieutenant Woodruff turned to say, “While an officer might stay mounted to rally his troops, sir, you can look around you and see your men already have reason enough to fight off the hellions who are trying to make a counterattack of it—”

  “General Gibbon!”

  He wheeled at the call, finding a sergeant hurrying over.

  “General, sir—did you know that your horse is wounded?”

  “N-no,” he muttered as he went to his knee beside the sergeant, immediately finding the animal’s front leg broken. It wobbled nervously on the other three, unable to put any weight on that bleeding leg. “A stray bullet, damn,” Gibbon muttered. “Must’ve happened just now when I entered the village—”

  “You’re bleeding, too, sir!” Charles Woodruff announced with a little fear in his voice. “My God!”

  Peering down at his calf, just above the top of his boot, Gibbon saw how the sky blue of his wool britches was generously stained with a circle of blood surrounding a small black hole. Curiously detached, he bent over to study the wound, amazed that he felt no pain from it.

  “The bullet came out the back, sir,” the sergeant offered.

  Woodruff wagged his head. “Maybe even the same bullet hit you somehow came out to break your horse’s leg.”

  “I doubt that,” Gibbon replied. “Been a tough angle.”

  “We don’t have a surgeon along,” the sergeant said.

  “I don’t need a doctor, Sergeant,” the colonel argued. “I’ll walk down here to the stream to wash it out myself, then tend to it better later on in the day when we’ve tied up everything here.”

  Waving off Woodruff’s offer to help him clamber down the short, but steep, cutbank, Gibbon stood a moment, watching how the sergeants and their details were working over the lodges.

  To expose any possible snipers who could be hiding wi
thin a lodge, several of the soldiers tore at the buffalo-hide covers while others stood back at the ready, prepared to shoot anyone who might be flushed from within. Now that Gibbon’s men were discovering how difficult it was to torch a dew-damp buffalo hide, they were content to throw lariats over the uppermost lodgepoles, toppling the cones with the power of a horse or with a squad of men all pulling together.

  Gibbon turned away for the creek bank, even more amazed that the double wounds did not give him any complaint at all. Squatting on the grassy bench next to the stream, he pulled off his boot and stocking, then tugged at the leg of his britches until he could begin to bathe the wounds with the cold water. Some movement at the corner of his eye caught his attention and he looked up—

  To find a large number of warriors having crossed the stream opposite the village to the west side, where they were making their way through the brush toward the horses and the timber. Several of the Nez Perce were already skirmishing with a few of Gibbon’s men, those warriors succeeding in driving off the herd by waving pieces of blanket at the animals, shooing them north along the grassy hillside, eventually sloping back into the valley once they were away from the soldiers and the fighting.

  But even more of the warriors streamed into the trees on the hillside directly above the enemy camp, taking positions above his men at work in the village.

  It was not only as clear as the coming sun that his men had just lost any crack at those horses Bostwick hadn’t wanted to drive off in the early-morning darkness because of possible horse guards … but also clear that some troublesome warriors were about to flank his men—securing the hill behind and above his line, where they could do a lot of damage.

  Of a sudden he became aware of a growing clamor—voices and gunshots quickly and steadily rolling his way from the village he thought his men had secured. Gibbon scrambled up the bank to find the Nez Perce darting this way and that on both sides of his men. Try as they might, his companies hadn’t been able to hold the warriors off those units assigned to torch the lodges.