Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  When the oldest among the women determined the spot, she signaled the others to halt. There they quickly went to work scraping at the soft forest floor, gouging out a final resting place for this hero’s body.

  “I remember a time early this summer, when he showed me his shell necklace,” the dead man’s father said quietly, standing to the side with Yellow Wolf and his uncle, joined by the oldest woman in charge of the burial party. “He said his medicine would be strong when he wore it into battle.”

  “He was right,” the matriarch added, a slight lisp to her words due to the loss of so many of her front teeth. “Red Moccasin Tops was bullet-proof from the neck down when he wore it around his throat.”

  “Did you see how strong his medicine worked at that first battle against the soldiers?” Sun Necklace asked the woman proudly. “When the suapies attacked us in Lahmotta?”

  “I did see with my own eyes,” she replied, her old eyes filled with wonder. “After the fight was over and the soldiers all ran away … Red Moccasin Tops came back to the village and leaped off his horse in front of a big crowd of us who were singing the fighters’ praises. I noticed how many bullet holes punctured his red flannel shirt and the blanket around his neck, but not a single bullet wound in his flesh!”

  “After I gave him a hug of congratulation,” Sun Necklace explained, “he took off the gun belt he had strapped around his waist—”

  “Everyone standing there saw how many flattened, misshapen bullets fell from his shirt then,” the old woman concluded. “Because they were trapped beneath his shirt and spilled out when he finally took off his belt.”

  “The suapie bullet hit him many times that day, yet not a one of them penetrated his flesh,” his proud father remarked.

  Then Sun Necklace fell silent for some time as the women laid the shroud into the long, shallow hole and started to scoop dirt back into it with their hands. “Some soldier made a lucky shot this day, to kill my son with a bullet that struck him above his medicine necklace.”

  “And what of your promise, Sun Necklace?” Old Yellow Wolf asked the father.

  “Promise?”

  “To give the wolf hide away to the man who rescued your son’s body.”

  He nodded once. “Yes. I forgot about that. I will have to think about that—and talk to his mother, too.”

  “But that was a vow you made to those young warriors!”

  Sun Necklace’s face hardened like flint, his eyes glaring at Old Yellow Wolf and his nephew. “Why should I be held to a promise made in the heat of emotion—at the death of my son? His mother is a medicine woman. She made him that wolf-hide cape. It is she who should decide what becomes of her son’s talisman.”

  “But you offered it—”

  “That makes little difference,” Sun Necklace interrupted. “It was never mine to offer.”

  Yellow Wolf watched the father turn his back on them as he stared down at the last of the burial process. The old women laid some rocks and several logs on the site before they stood and dusted their hands on their clothing.

  This is not good, Yellow Wolf thought to himself. First we had Looking Glass denying the strong medicine of several warriors who had bad visions about this Place of the Ground Squirrels … and now this revered war chief, Sun Necklace—who led so many of the first attacks on the Shadows in the early days of this war—he is breaking a blood oath made in battle, when death hovers near every man.

  Even though the suapies were huddled in their burrows and Cut-Off Arm was still far away, Yellow Wolf shuddered with a chill of defeat.

  The white man had already defeated them.

  While the Nee-Me-Poo might run to the buffalo country, they would never be the same people they had been before these troubles. No longer were the chiefs listening to quiet voices of the spirits around them. No longer would those spirits guide the actions of chiefs who broke their vows to the people.

  How could such men of little honor ever hope to protect, much less lead, the Nee-Me-Poo… now that the People were running for their lives?

  HENRY Buck wondered if there would be anyone to bury him with such care and affection when he died.

  Watching a few knots of women and old men as they went about their grim business of burying their dead in the creek bottom brush or dragging the bodies away toward the eastern plateau on travois, the civilian wondered if he would be missed nearly as much when his name was called from the great beyond.

  As he sat alone with his thoughts, he brooded on how many of those victims were women and children—realizing now in the fading light of dusk that Gibbon had unleashed pent-up men on a sleeping village where shadowy figures darted from lodges in all directions, where every Nez Perce was a potential enemy. In the heat of that sort of warfare and battle, chances were more than good that many of those half-naked, blanket-wrapped forms hadn’t been warriors at all.

  But then … was anyone in that village entirely innocent of what outrages of murder and rape, theft and arson had been committed back in Idaho?

  They were all guilty to one degree or another, he decided. Man, woman, child.

  Henry tried to convince himself that the reason he suffered such gloomy thoughts was only because he had gone without sleep for so long. Because he was sitting here, pinned down without any food or water, surrounded by an enemy that might well kill him before sunrise, now that dark had come to bring an end to that bloody day.

  Every time he tried to convince himself that Gibbon and the others were right in punishing these Nez Perce, some tiny hairline fractures began to splinter his certainty. All he had to do was watch the women, little ones, and old men go about their grim burials on the outskirts of that village for Henry Buck to finally realize this never had been a war of warriors. Right from the beginning of the troubles over on the Salmon River and the Camas Prairie, too, this hadn’t been a story of men making war on men.

  No, right from the first spasm of violence this had been a drama that swept up the women and children, a tragedy that made all the innocents not only unwitting victims but unwilling participants, too. The Nez Perce had started this tragedy by making war on all whites—not only men. So to Henry, it stood to reason that the army and its civilian volunteers made war on all Nez Perce … wherever they could find them.

  The Indians gave the first hurt, attacking homes and families. The white man struck back, attacking homes and families.

  Why had he ever thought that war was an honorable profession practiced between warriors? To consider it a noble art—practiced by fighting men, by those who truly understood its deadly risks? With this bloody day everything he had once believed had been turned on its head, his whole world yanked out from under him.

  As the hours of siege had dragged by that afternoon, he kept reminding himself that once their families had cleared out of the village, the warriors would in all likelihood end their sniping and pull back. And once that red noose was loosened, the soldiers and Catlin’s civilians could slip down to the creek to fill what few canteens they had among them, splash some cold water on the backs of their necks, and … and hell—he didn’t know what the blazes any of them would do next.

  But he watched those last three women attack a lodge cover together in the half-light of dusk, tearing it down, then tying all the belongings onto a travois suspended behind one of the ponies, many other pony drags already bearing what Henry took to be the wounded, slowly angling up the side of that plateau east of camp. At the top they struck out across the prairie.

  South, he thought. Back for Idaho. Perhaps they were making for their homeland after this battle had proved so disastrous for both sides.

  Home. It sounded damn good right then.

  Then his heart clutched as he realized those Nez Perce never would have their old homes again—no matter how long they fought or where they ran. That was all a matter of long ago now. There could never be any heading home for them.

  As the sun sank behind the mountains and threw an immediate darkness on th
e Big Hole, the night sounds began softly, slipping out of the forest around them, the slough somewhere below. Not just the chatter of the animals out there in the night, not only the frightening war cries and death oaths of the warriors who still made their presence known from time to time … but the whimpering sobs of a few of the soldiers and civilians as the cold black blanket of night settled over the hillside and a man felt much more anonymous, far more alone.

  Many of the wounded begged for water. Some pleaded for a doctor. A few anguished for a bite of food when all any of them had to chew on was some raw, stringy horse that had been lying out in the sun all day, bloating and flyblown. To Henry’s way of thinking, there were a thousand good reasons for any of them to cry.

  No food but raw, rancid horse. No water, neither.

  And precious little hope for what the new dawn would bring.

  IT seemed as if daylight never would come to Lieutenant Charles Woodruff. Nights in the mountains were always cold, even at the height of summer.

  Before dawn that morning the men had abandoned their heavy coats, leaving them behind with the bedding and supplies back in Kirkendall’s wagons. Woodruff wondered once or twice about those seventeen soldiers and three civilians left up the trail at the wagon camp. Had the same warriors who overran the howitzer grown curious and back-trailed to overwhelm the wagon guard?

  Most, if not all, of the men in the compound began shivering as the night deepened and temperatures slid lower and lower. More than twelve hours ago they had all waded through that creek below, some of the men forced to make a crossing in water that lapped up to their armpits. In a wild retreat, they had splashed and slogged their way back through that deep creek and boggy slough to reach this hillside. So once the sun’s relentless heat dissipated with the coming of night, the men began to tremble and quake in their damp clothing.

  He did not want his thoughts to drift to his three wounds. So Woodruff willed his mind to busy itself with other things as the darkness deepened and some of the more than forty wounded men whimpered, sobbed, or outright cried for water, food, and a merciful relief. He knew that several of the men even suffered from more than one wound.

  The rest of Gibbon’s command put their anger, frustration, and fears into work: doing what they could in the dark to make their breastworks a bit higher, digging their rifle pits a little deeper. As the stars came out and a sliver of moon arose from the far horizon, he could hear soft scraping sounds of rocks being piled one on the other and the scratch of bayonet and knife where earth was slowly separated from itself at this corner or that of their little corral.

  Charles wondered if these men who were still whole in body were soldiers and citizens who had never claimed to be totally without fear—merely men who struggled to keep their fear from paralyzing them as he did.

  Of those one-hundred-eighty-three men who had pitched into the Nez Perce at dawn that morning, seven of Gibbon’s seventeen officers were either dead or wounded … twenty-nine of the rank and file were dead, and forty more had suffered wounds—two of them mortal.

  From time to time when the quiet of that night grew heavy, Woodruff even heard a man digging his fingernails across the bottom of his haversack, doing his best to peel free every last pasty residue of the hardtack he had packed into battle, his ration of tasteless crackers having suffered two unavoidable soakings. It was that or the flesh of the lieutenant’s horse. Without the benefit of fire to roast a stringy strip he hacked from a rear flank, the lieutenant found he couldn’t choke down the raw meat. One of the old files suggested they pry the bullets off their cartridges, the way some had done to cauterize a few of the most terrible wounds, using the powder now to season the uncooked raw meat … but Gibbon promptly issued an order against the wasting of even one of those precious cartridges.

  Shortly before midnight three of the men, all recruits from G Company, came to the colonel and declared their willingness to make an attempt at bringing back some water from the creek below their plateau. As soon as they began to crawl out from the lines, each of them dragging four canteens strapped over his shoulders, the Nez Perce hollered their warnings to one another. Gibbon ordered a half-dozen volleys fired in the direction of the stream, in hopes of clearing a way for the water carriers. As the echo of those army guns faded, a few random Nez Perce carbines began to make some scattered noise. For those left behind in the compound to wait and wonder, intent upon every distinct sound the darkness brought to them, it was an eternity until they heard a lone white man cry out to the others that he was hit, but could still crawl.

  By the time all three had slithered back in with one minor wound and their canteens refilled, one of the astonished trio announced that he had been so scared he forgot to get himself a drink at the stream while he was filling the canteens hung around his neck!

  “I know it was only a hunnert yards, Lieutenant,” exclaimed Private Homer Coon, “but it sure as hell seemed like a hunnert miles to me! An’ lemme tell you—I never had no idea how much a canteen can hold while you’re waiting on ever’ one. Why, I thought them four’d never fill up!”

  Woodruff figured it would have been a merciful death if any of the Nez Perce had caught those water carriers down by the stream in the dark: a bullet ending things quickly—before the warriors, or their squaws, scrounged through the brush to find him where he lay wounded and helpless. Better to go fast without any pain …

  Not the way First Lieutenant William L. English was suffering with increasing agony from his numerous wounds to the wrist, the ear, the scalp, and a major penetration of his bowel. He was the worst of any, and Woodruff feared his fellow officer would not last out the night.

  Not long after the water carriers returned, Gibbon called his officers together to assess their situation. Accounting for the expenditure or loss of more than nine thousand rounds, their desperate need for ammunition rested alone at the top of the list.

  “One of the civilians, a half-breed named Matte,” the colonel explained, “came up to report he knows the enemy’s language. Said he overheard some of the Nez Perce talking out there in the dark. One of the chiefs was urging their men to be ready for a morning attack—because the white man’s ammunition had to be nearly done for.”

  “We don’t get more cartridges soon,” Captain Rawn said, “they’ll overrun us in one swift rush, sir. What can we do to assure the survival of the command?”

  Reminding his officers that this very day, the ninth of August, commemorated his thirtieth year in the army, the colonel prepared to dispatch a runner, who would slip off through the dark, ordered to find the supply train and bring through the much-needed cartridges before their tiny compound ran out, making them helpless before a concerted charge by the Nez Perce come morning. Once he had started the train on its way, that courier was to continue on his way to next find General Oliver O. Howard—likely somewhere between them and the end of the Lolo Trail.

  By pale starlight Gibbon wrote a brief message to Howard, penciling his words on a square piece of paper no bigger than a calling card:

  GENERAL: We surprised the Nez Perce camp at daylight this morning, whipped them out of it, killing a considerable number. But they turned on us, forced us out of it, and compelled us to take the defensive. We are here near the mouth of Big Hole pass, with a number of wounded, and need medical assistance and assistance of all kinds, and hope you will hurry to our relief.

  GIBBON,

  COMM’DG

  Aug. 9, ’77

  In addition, the colonel readied another two men—civilians both—to sneak off for the settlements, striking out to the east for Deer Lodge via Frenchman’s Gulch, both to carry messages requesting food, ammunition, and medical supplies.

  “My boots ain’t worth a damn no more, Lieutenant,” grumped William H. Edwards as he prepared to slip away in the darkness.

  Woodruff looked down at the man’s footwear. “You think we’re about the same size?”

  Edwards nodded. “Worth a try, Officer. If you don’
t mind, I got more’n sixty miles to walk to French Gulch, and these ol’ boots of mine won’t make it all that way.”

  “A noble donation to the cause,” Woodruff announced, painfully dragging off one boot at a time to make the exchange with the civilian. “Besides, with these holes in my legs, I’m not fit to do much walking for the next few days anyway. Part of that leather heel got shot off.”

  Peering closely at the back of the fractured heel, Edwards said, “There’s still enough here to hold me up till I get to Deer Lodge.”

  The civilian had stood, working his toes around in the unfamiliar boots, when Gibbon came up to stop in front of Edwards.

  “I want you to remember, we need an escort sufficient to protect the wagons they’ll send to relieve us,” the colonel impressed upon his messenger. “Load the wagons as light as possible—for speed, you understand. Tell them how the Indians have cut us off from our own supply train. And take this message with you.” He handed Edwards a folded paper.

  The civilian said, “General?”

  “At the first telegraph key you reach, it’s to be wired to my commander, General Alfred Terry, headquarters in Minneapolis.”

  Big Hole Pass, August ninth

  Surprised the Nez Perces camp here this morning, got possession of it after a hard fight in which both myself Captain Williams and Lieuts Coolidge, Woodruff and English wounded, the last severely.

  Gibbon,

  Comm ’dg

  Aug 9, 77

  For a long time after the two couriers melted away into the dark, each taking his separate direction, those left behind listened to the night for some idea as to the success of their escape. Only an occasional shot whined into their dark compound. Just enough gunfire to keep Woodruff rattled, even more jealous of a civilian who continued to sleep nearby. The young volunteer lay on his back, hip-to-hip beside another citizen in their shallow rifle pit. His mouth had gone slack, and he began snoring loud enough that it eventually attracted the attention of an Indian sniper.