Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  *Two years after the Battle of the Big Hole, when frontiersman Andrew Garcia and his Nez Perce wife, who had herself survived the battle, visited the Place of the Ground Squirrels, he stated in A Tough Trip Through Paradise, they located the grave of an Indian on the hillside where his wife reported No Heart was killed.

  *Campbell Mitchell, chapter 59.

  EPILOGUE

  AUGUST 10—11, 1877

  AT SUNDOWN THAT NIGHT OF 10 AUGUST, HUGH KIRKENdall’s wagon train rattled into the siege compound without any interference from the Nez Perce everyone believed were still in the area.

  It was accompanied by Captain George L. Browning and Second Lieutenant Francis Woodbridge, who, earlier that afternoon, had been directed by John Gibbon to lead twenty-five men up the mountainside and escort the wagons on down Trail Creek. Hours before at daybreak, the colonel had dispatched Sergeant Mildon H. Wilson of I Company and six men from K Company to reach the wagon corral and bring in the train. But as midday came and went Gibbon grew more apprehensive that Mildon’s small squad had been ambushed; he had dispatched Browning’s detail.

  Those wagons arrived about 6:00 P.M., carrying all the coffee and hardtack the ravenous men could eat, along with their wool blankets. At least this night would be a shade more comfortable for the survivors.

  “Wish we had some more of that bacon those two civilians brought in this morning,” said the colonel.

  “It didn’t last long, did it, sir?” asked Lieutenant Charles Woodruff.

  “A few bites for each man sure didn’t go far.” Gibbon sounded regretful.

  “There will be more coming when General Howard arrives.”

  The lieutenant prayed his words would come true.

  Earlier that morning Sergeant Oliver Sutherland had himself come on down the trail after spending most of the previous day at Kirkendall’s corral. He was carrying that message from Howard telling Gibbon how he was coming ahead with 200 horsemen and hoped to catch up to the infantry before Gibbon pitched into the Nez Perce.

  “Why did you end up staying with the wagon train instead of riding on down here to deliver your message as ordered, Sergeant?” Woodruff asked the question he was sure Gibbon wanted to have answered.

  “Made a try, sir,” Sutherland admitted. “I started out with eight or nine of the wagon guard you left—but we was met on the trail by a big war party and drove back. A damn lucky thing they didn’t follow us up the trail and find our wagons, Lieutenant.”

  That’s when Gibbon had proposed, “I’m going to send an escort back right now—and bring those supplies in.”

  Minutes later two of Kirkendall’s teamsters—Jerry Wallace and John Miller—rode in, having started down the trail right on the heels of Sergeant Sutherland. Hung from Wallace’s saddle horn was a grease-stained canvas bag that contained a side of bacon. It was promptly divided up among the famished men, disappearing down their gullets with an amazing speed. After suffering some thirty-six hours without anything more to eat than the pasty remains of hardtack scraped off the bottom of their haversacks and a few strips of raw meat butchered from Woodruff’s bloated horse, Gibbon’s compound was next to famished.

  While this one side of bacon had done little to fill their shrunken bellies that morning, it had nonetheless gone far to lifting their sagging spirits for the rest of that day.

  Not long after Kirkendall’s wagons rattled in, it began to grow dark on that lonely rectangle of rifle pits for a second night. Twilight was deepening when one of the civilians called out, asking the rest to look at the three dim, flickering lights he had spotted to the southeast. Woodruff saw them, all three slowly bobbing, wavering, either on or against the plateau rising beyond the flat where much of the Nez Perce village still stood.

  “What you make of that?” Charles asked the colonel.

  Gibbon shook his head. “Can’t be torches. Maybe they’re small fires where their sharpshooters huddle to warm themselves.”

  “I didn’t see any fires while they had us surrounded last night, General,” Woodruff had replied. “Why would they light those three fires way off over there tonight, and nowhere close at all—”

  Woodruff was interrupted with what he figured was the answer. A cluster of twelve distinct shots tore through their compound, some from each of the three sides. Then the echo of all that gunfire quickly faded, absorbed by the coal-cotton black of night.

  Several discordant voices shouted at them from the river bottom—not in the manner of a war cry … but more so as a salutation.

  “I think we’ve just been told they’re leaving,” Gibbon commented quietly.

  Those mysterious lights, along with that final volley and farewell salutation, were just enough to keep Woodruff restless through that night. Despite his knotted belly finally being filled by hardbread and coffee and despite the warmth of a wool blanket to curl up inside, the lieutenant remained wary that the departure was all a ruse, right up till dawn on the eleventh of August.

  “That lieutenant’s in a bad way,” confided Tom Sherrill, a civilian who had a rifle pit right beside Woodruff, the moment the lieutenant stirred.

  First light was beginning to seep into the Big Hole.

  “You mean English?”

  Sherrill nodded, then whispered again. “Ain’t a man here can’t tell how bad he’s suffering. That back wound of his is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  “We’ll have a surgeon here soon, Tom.”

  “The lieutenant, he asked me to take his boot off and rub his feet—saying they was getting stone-cold on him,” Sherrill said in a hush. “But I couldn’t get ’em off, everything was so wet. I ended up cutting the stitches on one of his boots with my folding knife, right down the back. Got it off that way. Started rubbing his foot. Wasn’t long before he told me, ’It’s no use; I’m done for this time.’ “

  Woodruff nodded knowingly. “I’d consider it a personal favor to me, if not to General Gibbon, if you’d do all in your power to make Lieutenant English as comfortable as you can until a surgeon arrives.”

  “How long you figure on that?” Sherrill asked. “Till Howard gets here with them reinforcements?”

  “I’m praying they will show up tomorrow.”

  “IT’S Myron! My stars—it’s Myron Lockwood!”

  Lieutenant Woodruff looked up from an inspection of Private Edward D. Hunter’s wound to his right forearm. Both bones had been shattered by a Nez Perce bullet, and without proper bandages the gaping hole—like the rotting horse carcass—had become flyblown. Try as Woodruff might to protect the wound with strips of the soldier’s uniform these last two days, this morning it was a wriggling mass of maggots.

  Getting to his feet, Charles thought he recognized that civilian slung between the two Sherrill brothers, Tom and his older brother, “Bunch.”

  “How bad is he?” John Gibbon asked as he rolled onto his hip and struggled to rise, dragging that wounded leg of his.

  “He’ll live!” Bunch Sherrill bellowed enthusiastically. “If those Nez Perce couldn’t kill Lockwood in our attack and they never found ’im hiding in the bushes—by damn, this tough ol’ nail ain’t gonna die on us now, General!”

  Just before daylight the brothers had slipped down to the mouth of the gulch* to look for their Bitterroot friend, the same Myron Lockwood who had horses stolen from him and his house looted as the Nez Perce meandered up the valley.

  “I really ’spected to find ’im dead,” Tom Sherrill confessed as they dragged Lockwood up to the fire and eased him down between them, the trio hunkered close to the flames.

  To Woodruff’s way of thinking, for the moment Lockwood hovered a little closer to death than he clung tenaciously to life.

  “Found ’im sitting with his back against a wall of rock,”*

  Bunch Sherrill declared. “From the looks of ’im, he’s lost considerable blood.”

  “How is it he’s still alive and the Nez Perce killed every other one of our wounded they got their hands on?” Gibbon asked. �
��He tell you that?”

  Tom Sherrill shrugged. “Myron’s so damned cold and stiff after these last two days and nights—he ain’t been able to say a thing to us yet.”

  “Fortunate he kept that coat with him,” Woodruff commented as the damp wool of the man’s heavy hip-length coat steamed so near the warmth radiating from their fire.

  “This wasn’t his,” Bunch Sherrill admitted quietly. “We took the coat off Elliott.”**

  “He won’t mind now, Elliott won’t,” Tom assured the others as he kneaded one of Lockwood’s hands between his. “Man’s been dead for two days now.”

  “That’s a dead man’s coat?” asked Captain James Sanno.

  “Don’t appear it’s making a damn bit of difference to Myron that’s he’s wearing a dead man’s coat,” Tom grumbled. “After them red bastards run off with his horses a few days back, sacked his house, and stole everything of value from him. Then this poor son of a bitch almost died down there in our attack on that village. That should show you Myron’s a hard piece of iron. He ain’t the sort what’s easy to kill.”

  After sunrise, Colonel Gibbon asked Woodruff to select one of their best riders and put him on the strongest horse. “I have a sinking feeling that Mr. Edwards didn’t get through the Nez Perce gauntlet when they had their noose tightened around us the other night.”

  “You’re afraid he could be dead, sir?”

  “Or worse,” Gibbon admitted in a whisper. “A captive, tortured like the rest we heard being butchered down in the river bottom the day of our fight.”

  Sergeant Mildon H. Wilson was again the man for the assignment: a ride of more than eighty miles. While Gibbon completed another set of dispatches, Woodruff had the courier select his mount and saddle from what had been brought down with Kirkendall’s wagons the afternoon before. When Wilson began to knot two small leather satchels behind his saddle, each one carrying an extra pistol and some ammunition for his Springfield, the lieutenant was struck with a sudden impulse.

  “Sergeant, I want you to wait a few minutes before you ride out of here.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve got something to write,” he explained in a hush. “A letter I want you to see gets started back to Fort Shaw from Deer Lodge for me.”

  The older man nodded, his eyes crinkling with warmth. “Of course, Lieutenant. Something for your missus.”

  At the edge of his rifle pit, Lieutenant Charles A. Woodruff propped his dispatch ledger on his knees and began to scratch out a heartfelt communication to his wife, hopeful it would reach her at Fort Shaw before word of their terrible fight reached the telegraph keys of the outside world. Hoping to reassure her that he was alive, and whole.…

  Camp on Ruby Creek

  Aug. 11th 1877

  My darling Louie:

  I wrote you a note day before yesterday and will write to-day as we send out a courier.

  I am getting along well, our train came up last evening and we expect Genl. Howard today. The Indians have all left

  We had a hard fight lost 2 Officers Killed 10 Soldiers and 6 citizens, Wounded 5 officers 34 soldiers and 2 citizens. “K”. Co., Sergt Stortz Private Kleis (the Carpenter) and Mus. Steinbacker were Killed.

  I was shot in the heel of the left foot and in both legs above the knee, fortunately no bones broken, the Genl. and I were the only ones mounted, both our horses were shot, I got mine into camp and he was shot again, we ate some of him yesterday.

  I left the gun* back the night we struck the village it started up at daylight and was attacked, one of the horses was shot and fell on Bennett, lamed him some, and of the three men with the gun one was killed and two wounded.

  Our men charged the village in fine shape and the reason we didn’t hold it was there was so much brush and high bluffs that we couldn’t occupy all the places at once The Indians suffered severely, I think their loss cannot be less than seventy-five or a hundred. We killed them right and left. Hurlburt of “K” killed the Indian that shot Bradley. Jacobs Killed three. Rawn two Hardin & Woodbridge one each, I didn’t get a chance to Kill any of them I was carrying orders &c. The General and I were all over the field and were lucky to come off as well as we did.

  The officers and men behaved well and gave the Indians the worst handling they ever seed before.

  Bradley and Logan were both Killed dead.

  It looked blue for us here on Thursday afternoon, the Indians set fire to the forest and kept up a fire from the brush and the hills, their idea was to follow up the fire and charge us when it reached us, I began to fear I should never see you again, some of the wounded covered up their heads and expected to be killed, I got my two revolvers said my prayers thought of you and Bertie and determined to kill a few Indians before I died, Our Heavenly Father was on our side and the wind changed and blew away from us.

  I didn’t know how much I loved you until I thought we would never see each other again.

  We shall start this afternoon or tomorrow for Deer Lodge, I expect to get home in about ten-days…

  Your loving husband,

  Charles

  *Today’s “Battle Gulch.”

  *Stake No. 50, Big Hole National Battlefield.

  **Lynde C. Elliott, Stevensville volunteer.

  *Howitzer.

  AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

  As I began collecting my thoughts to write this wrap-up to Lay the Mountains Low, I discovered I had more than two dozen subjects I originally wanted to discuss here at the end of this second novel on the Nez Perce War. Trouble is, I feel compelled to pare away at that list of topics, because this has been the longest, most complex, book I’ve ever written.

  While there are lots of interesting subjects I would like to tell my readers after researching and writing this dramatic, and ultimately tragic, story, Lay the Mountains Low is a big book to begin with. After muddling over every one of those two dozen topics I wanted to write about, I came to believe that while most are interesting at the very least, what I should do here in these next few pages is deal with only one of those subjects—a topic most compelling, downright intriguing. An unfinished story I promised you more about in the last book, Cries from the Earth.

  Even though I am omitting the rest of those two dozen historical topics for now, I plan to eventually discuss the most important of them in a final author’s afterword, the one I’ll write at the conclusion of this trilogy on the Nez Perce War. For any of you who want to read about my ongoing research travels along this second segment of the Nez Perce Trail, I’ll refer you to my annual news magazine, WinterSong, in every edition of which I recount my journey to go where this Indian Wars history actually happened. For more information on this publication, please see the “About the Author” section that follows this afterword.

  Rather than reprinting the long list of titles I relied upon while researching and writing Cries from the Earth as well as the story you have just read, I will refer you back to the listing I gave in the Author’s Afterword at the end of that previous book. Additional sources I have used for telling this second tragic tale in Lay the Mountains Low are:

  An Elusive Victory—the Battle of the Big Hole, by Aubrey L. Haines

  A Sharp Little Affair: The Archeology of the Big Hole Battlefield, by Douglas D. Scott

  “Battle of the Big Hole” by General C. A. Woodruff, Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana 7 (1910)

  “Chief Joseph’s Flight Through Montana: 1877,” by Verne Dusenberry, The Montana Magazine of History 2 (October, 1952)

  Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891, by Robert M. Utley

  “Review of the Battle of the Big Hole,” by Amos Buck, Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana 7 (1910)

  Before jumping any further, I want to acknowledge the immeasurable help of two people, without whom this book could not have been written. The story you have just read is a chronicle, a rendering of the latest, most up-to-date research into the Nez Perce War.

  I co
uld not have researched this story over the past twenty-seven months without the assistance of my longtime friend Jerome A. Greene of the National Park Service’s Rocky Mountain Regional Office. A few years ago Jerry began compiling his research for a soon-to-be-published volume on the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis, for the most part relying on primary accounts rather than secondary sources, along with his own intimate travels through Nez Perce country. His efforts serve as the framework for my three-book chronicle of the Nez Perce struggle: a trilogy of gut-wrenching novels that recount a five-month, fifteen-hundred-mile odyssey from tribal greatness to the “Hot Place” in Indian Territory. My hope is that Jerry’s newest book, to be published by agreement between the National Park Service and the Montana Historical Society, will be available to the general reader sometime in the year 2000.

  Since his work is not yet available to the public, I relied upon the kindness and generosity of both Jerry Greene himself and the research librarian at the Nez Perce National Historic Park in Spalding, Idaho, Rob Applegate. With Rob’s timely assistance, I got my hands on a copy of Jerry Greene’s monumental manuscript, which is undergoing a final copyedit at this time. After I met Rob on his first day at Spalding back in 1998, it wasn’t long before I found him to be a real asset to the National Park Service—always cheerful and helpful with my obscure and ofttimes troublesome requests.

  Again I want to emphasize that Lay the Mountains Low could not have been written without both Jerry and Rob being in the background to answer my questions and give me their support. If you find you’ve had some of your questions answered on this part of the Nez Perce War story or you simply enjoyed this captivating tale, then you must surely appreciate the efforts these two fine employees of the National Park Service gave to see this novel written.

  Were you as tantalized as I was with the mystery of what became of Jennet Manuel and her infant son at the end of Cries from the Earth?