Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  If you weren’t as baffled or eager to find out as I was, you have no need of reading any further. The rest of this abbreviated afterword will deal with that little-known and heartrending tale of the Nez Perce War.

  The shedding of blood is always answered. Almost two decades of assault, robbery, rape, and murder committed against the Non-Treaty Nee-Me-Poo brewed the foul-smelling recipe that boiled over along the Salmon River, then spilled across the Camas Prairie in mid-June 1877.

  Blood cries out for blood. Following those outrages against innocent white women and children committed by drunken, revenge-seeking warriors from White Bird’s and Toohoolhoolzote’s bands (and I use the term warriors very loosely, because I prefer to call them criminals, if not thugs), young men who felt very brave sweeping down upon unarmed or outnumbered civilians in overwhelming force, this mystery revolving around Jennet Manuel came to captivate an entire region of our country during that bloody summer. The speculation continues to this day.

  Some of the contemporary testimony tells us that Mrs. Manuel, and perhaps her son, too, were taken along with the retreating warrior bands as they fled over the Lolo Trail to Montana Territory. Other reports have her being killed by a drunken and spiteful warrior just days after she was captured at her home (the former Ad Chapman homestead on White Bird Creek adjacent to the battlefield of 17 June). Some Nez Perce sources, who claim to have been at the scene, would have you believe mother and son were murdered and their bodies consumed in the fire that consumed the Manuel house—a few of the Indian stories admitting that Jennet Manuel was still alive and conscious when the drunken murderers set fire to the house—while other Nez Perce sources claim she was killed somewhere along the Lolo Trail.

  Let’s go back to chapter 18 in Cries from the Earth, when Maggie Manuel has crawled out of her house and into the timber, attempting to find either her maternal grandfather, George Popham, or a local miner, Patrick Brice. She finds the Irish prospector and relates her story of how she watched from hiding as Joseph (who was widely reputed to abstain from whiskey—a fact testified to by even his most ardent spiritual enemy, Kate McBeth, the Christian schoolteacher at Kamiah, when she wrote: “Joseph had one good thing about him. He was a temperance man”) and his drunken warriors clubbed both Maggie’s mother and little brother before dragging them off to finish the murders. The story Maggie later told with consistency has her watching Joseph stab her mother in the breast, as she is nursing the infant, before Maggie herself is taken to another room, where she falls asleep.

  This outrageous accusation that Joseph himself killed Mrs. Manuel simply refuses to die, especially among the Christian Nez Perce of today! Back in the summer of 1939, when Congress was considering a monument to Joseph, a Nez Perce from Lapwai, J. M. Parsons, wrote to U. S. Representative Usher L. Burdick to protest. Burdick had the Indian’s letter read in the chamber and subsequently entered into the Congressional Record:

  Chief Joseph was not the man which history would place before the educational institutions as has been suggested along with the erection of the memorial. He is guilty of wantonly killing a white woman, Mrs. J. Manuel, while he was under the influence of liquor. On June 15,1877, the chief and two companions, also under the influence of liquor, visited the home of the Manuels on White Bird Creek, where friendly Indians were keeping guard over the wounded Mrs. Manuel and baby with the understanding that the woman would be given aid in escaping to the white settlement. Joseph proceeded to wrangle over the succoring of the enemy white woman, and when the friendly Indians remonstrated, the chief reached out with a dagger and plunged it into her breast, killed her almost instantly … There is an old warrior living today who was present when the killing took place, and it has been generally known among the Nez Perce that Joseph committed the deed.

  Upon learning of this claim, Nez Perce supporter and writer L.V. McWhorter wrote to Parsons, demanding he produce the “old warrior” and all evidence leading to Joseph’s guilt. Parsons never answered any of McWhorter’s entreaties.

  In his book Chief Joseph—the Biography of a Great Indian, author Chester Anders Fee appears to have bought the whole of Maggie’s story of how her mother was killed when he writes:

  …Mrs. Manuel, and her ten months old child fell injured when their horse stumbled. She with her baby and daughter, who had also broken her arm in the fall, were taken back to the ranch house by the Nez Perce, who then told her they would take no more lives if she gave them Mr. Manuel’s rifle and ammunition. This she did, and the Indians left. But soon several others of the party returned and one plunged a knife into her breast, killing her, and later they also killed her baby.

  A pretty convoluted explanation of how suddenly well mannered were that gang of murderers, while they were seizing everything and anything that suited them—including guns, ammunition, and white women. Mr. Fee simply can’t have it both ways.

  To continue with young Maggie’s rendition of her story: When she awakens, the house is filled with an ominous silence. Opening the door to the main room, Maggie finds her mother’s naked body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. That “blood oozed between my toes.” Near her mother’s head lay her baby brother, John. In her version of the story, when she located Brice outside in the woods, she took him back into the house to view the bodies before they both returned to the timber.

  Although Brice would never confirm that part of the girl’s story—he stated that when he went back to the house he found it empty—Maggie Manuel remained consistent with every other detail of that night, right on into her adulthood.

  First of all, let’s lay to rest her allegation that Joseph killed her mother. Aside from whether or not Maggie herself had ever seen Joseph, chief of the Wallowa band, and would be able to identify him, the simple fact is that he could not have been in the White Bird Canyon the night of 15 June 1877. He and his brother, Ollokot, along with their families and the rest of the Wallamwatkin, were far, far to the north, sleeping in their camp near Cottonwood Creek after fleeing Tepahlewam at news of the murders and outrages against the whites on the Salmon.

  When Brice left the White Bird Creek area with Maggie, he said the house was still standing. Later when the Irish miner was reunited with George Popham in Grangeville, Popham told him the house was burned to the ground. There should have been charred bodies, if not human skeletons, among the ashes as forensic evidence. When two local frontiersmen, Ad Chapman and James Conely, raked through the cinders of the Manuel place, they found some bones—but both men remained convinced the charred bones they discovered belonged to an animal.

  But there were those who disagreed with this assessment. Writing a letter to the editor of the Lewiston Teller on 19 July, local resident J. W. Poe stated: “It was currently believed that Mrs. Manuel and the child were still alive until I had examined the ruins and found positive evidence to the contrary.” On his journey back to his own looted store along the Salmon River after Howard’s army marched into the area, H. C. “Hurdy Gurdy” Brown visited the Manuel homestead and declared his certainty that Jennet and little John had perished in the fire. However, historian Jack Mc-Dermott could not locate what “evidence” led Poe and Brown to unwaveringly declare both mother and son had died in the flames.

  Perhaps it was nothing more conclusive than the jewelry someone unearthed in raking through the ashes of the Manuel home … earrings Maggie stated unequivocally that her mother was wearing the day of the attack.

  The certainty that mother and son had been killed at their home was further solidified when local trader Harry Cone recorded his reminiscences as one of the settlers who took shelter behind the stockade at Slate Creek (see chapter 46 in Cries from the Earth). Cone remembered how one of the Nez Perce horsemen who came to the stockade wall to settle accounts with trader John Wood disclosed to an old Nez Perce woman, Tolo, who was in the stockade with the whites, how Mrs. Manuel was killed by a fellow warrior under the influence of whiskey: “She [Tolo] began to talk, upbraiding them for killing their friend
s and hers, and Mrs. Manuel, who, we learned from them, one of them had killed, who was full of bad whiskey.”

  Yet on 28 July, more than a month later, the Lewiston Teller stirred things up anew by announcing: “Squaws still report that Mrs. Manuel is living and a prisoner.”

  Additionally, here in Lay the Mountains Low we told you Henry Buck’s story” of seeing a blond-haired white woman among a small group of squaws he saw fleeing from the Nez Perce village at the time of Gibbon’s attack at the Big Hole. But it wasn’t until years later that a settler in the Bitterroot valley finally reported that he had spotted a blond-haired white woman with the Non-Treaty bands as they made their way to the Big Hole.

  Two independent, and highly intriguing, sightings far, far from the charred remains of the Manuel house on White Bird Creek.

  This story refused to take an entirely straight and uncompromising path, just as much of history itself refuses to do. A hint of something stuck its head up here, a rumor was reported there—and that’s the way the mystery rested for almost a quarter of a century.

  It wasn’t until 1900 that the first Nez Perce account of the raid and abduction was given to a white man. Yellow Bull (who was called Sun Necklace at the time of the war) told his story to C. T. Stranahan—Nez Perce agent at the time—swearing the white man to keep his story secret until after Yellow Bull’s death (which did not occur until July of 1919). According to the war chief, Mrs. Manuel was captured and kept a prisoner by an Indian Yellow Bull refused to name. Some time after the Non-Treaty bands had crossed the Lolo Pass into Montana Territory, Yellow Bull continued, her captor and another warrior began to quarrel over the white woman. The bickering escalated until friends had to keep the two apart.

  As the village was preparing to march the morning after the heated argument, Yellow Bull and others discovered Mrs. Manuel missing. The war chief told Stranahan he believed she had been killed and her body hidden in the brush, somewhere off the Lolo Trail.

  Around this same era on the reservation, one of L.V. McWhorter’s informants said that Red Wolf (this is not the same “Josiah” Red Wolf who was but a young child at the time of the Big Hole fight, so the Red Wolf referred to might well have been the child’s father or an uncle) attempted to abduct Mrs. Manuel from her ranch, riding with her on horseback, “when she snatched the knife from his belt and attempted to kill him. He struck her, felling her to the ground, and she died from the fall.”

  To that testimony McWhorter adds: “Presumably she was carried back to her home and the house then set afire.”

  Which, at least to me, is a convenient and blameless way to deflect a certain guilt for the murder—after all, the woman was “threatening” her kidnapper with his own knife—as well as a means to conceal the fact that Mrs. Manuel had started over the Lolo Trail with the Non-Treaty bands. Why are there so many different stories if every one of McWhorter’s informants is telling the truth? There are so many attempts to have Jennet Manuel killed in her own home and her body conveniently consumed to ashes so the hunt for her would end.

  Including the journalist who rendered a questionable version of Patrick Brice’s story in 1911. Charles S. Moody chronicled the miner’s experiences in an article for Century Magazine, “The Bravest Deed I Ever Knew.” Brice carried the wounded Maggie Manuel back to her home, Moody writes, which was “only a heap of smoldering ashes. Among the embers lay the charred body of a woman and her infant. The Indians had taken Mrs. Manuel and her baby back to the house, killed them, and then fired the house.”

  Trouble is, Brice had testified that when he left the White Bird Canyon the Manuel house had not been destroyed.

  It took nearly fourteen years after that before there arose any corroboration for Yellow Bull’s account to Nez Perce agent Stranahan. Enter a young Treaty or Christian Indian named Many Wounds, who had taken the white name of Sam Lott. He approached an old warrior, who was embittered by the decades of struggle as he had watched the Nee-Me-Poo lose their land to white gold seekers and settlers. Peopeo Tholekt, known as Bird Alighting, had survived the many battles the Looking Glass band suffered during the war—a struggle that many of their people considered both their finest hour and their worst calamity.

  Arriving at Bird Alighting’s poor shack at the appointed hour on the appointed day, Many Wounds decided to begin their discussions by having the old warrior talk about many of the relics and artifacts Bird Alighting had in sight there at his tiny cabin. One of the very first Many Wounds took in hand to ask about was a blond scalp lock,

  “Hair of white woman,” Bird Alighting explained. “Mrs. Manuel.”

  He went on to relate how the woman was taken prisoner in the first raids and was subsequently taken with them as they started toward Montana Territory. On the way she took sick and died. The men buried her under some rocks beside the Lolo Trail. Bird Alighting related how Joseph took the woman’s scalp after she was dead.

  “The hair was beautiful,” Bird Alighting explained the chief’s motivation.

  Years later, Bird Alighting somehow had fallen heir to the blond scalp lock. To Many Wounds he explained how sorry he was, how sorry Joseph himself was, for the woman’s capture, her plight, and her death far from loved ones.

  Personally, I don’t know how much credence to put into the second part of this story, concerning Joseph scalping a dead woman on the Lolo Trail because he wanted to keep her blond locks. With what I know of the band structure at that time, it doesn’t seem feasible that Joseph, a leader of the Wallowa people, would pass down such an important memento to an unrelated person like Bird Alighting, who was a member of Looking Glass’s Alpowai band—especially when they were living apart on different reservations (remember, Joseph never was allowed to return to his homeland, living out his final days at the Colville agency). Perhaps that second part represents a little embellishment, while the kernel of the story remains intact and truthful.

  A year after the Nez Perce War, Duncan McDonald undertook a journey to visit White Bird and those Nez Perce who made it across the Canadian border at the time of the Bear’s Paw fight. A half-breed (McDonald’s mother was Nez Perce and his father a factor with the Hudson’s Bay Company), he served as the agency trader for the Flathead tribe at Jocko. He wrote a series of articles that appeared in the Deer Lodge, Montana, newspaper, the New North-West, adding a colorful dimension to the entire story on the outbreak and war, including this confusing and controversial subject of Mrs. Manuel’s disappearance.

  McDonald muddied the waters about Joseph in specific, and this incident in general, even more than they already were when he wrote:

  It seems that at the earliest commencement of the Nez Perces war there were two white women murdered. One of them was murdered by an Indian who was drunk. The other white woman was burned in a house with her child. When her husband and others were murdered by the Nez Perces, she went upstairs. The Indians say they did not see her at the time of killing the men. When the Indians got possession of the house, Joseph, Jr. was present. He was sitting at one side of the place smoking his pipe. He was asked by the warriors what should be done—whether they should set fire to the house or leave without destroying it. All this time the woman and child were upstairs, but the Indians say they did not know it. Young Joseph answered, “You have done worse deeds than burning a house. You never asked our chiefs what was best to be done. You have murdered many men and not asked advice of your chiefs. You can do as you please about the house.”

  Some of the young men lit a match and set fire to the building. They then went back a little and sat down to watch it burn. They were suddenly startled by the piercing screams of a woman in the second story of the house. Young Joseph ordered them to put out the fire. The young Indians ran down to the water, filled their hats, threw it on the flames, and tried every way they knew to extinguish the fire and to save the woman. But it was too late. She and her child perished.

  The same young warriors who were with Joseph, Jr., at the time told me that when he left the
place, Joseph held down his head for a long time and, at last looking up, he said they had done very wrong in burning the woman, that he was very sorry, that he had believed the house empty.

  The burning of this poor, harmless woman looks very bad for the Indian side. Still there is some blame should attach to the white man. The white man does wrong in allowing the Indian to have whiskey. It is easy to reply that the Indians take the whiskey away from them by force, but there are many whites who are ready to sell whiskey to them in time of Indian Wars.

  Both Duncan McDonald and L. V. McWhorter lived in and wrote about the final days of an intensely racist era in the American West. Since we know of their passionate support of the Nez Perce, is it reasonable to assume that they would do everything in their power to deflect blame from the raiders and murderers, but to place it instead on the white victims? Blaming them for bringing on themselves their own brutal deaths?

  Neither George Popham (Jennet’s father) nor Patrick Brice was a witness to what happened to Mrs. Manuel, so they can’t be considered as anything resembling reliable witnesses. Nor was her husband, John, who had been left for dead out by the White Bird Road as told in Cries from the Earth; then we learned he had miraculously survived here in Lay the Mountains Low. John Manuel rarely, if ever, made any statements about the disappearance of his wife and son—but on one of the few occasions he ever talked about the tragedy, Manuel only said his family had been captured by the Nez Perce and “doubtless killed as they were never found afterwards.”

  As Jack McDermott sees it, John Manuel clearly harbored his own doubts about Maggie’s and George Popham’s cremation theory.

  Friends and associates of the family throughout central Idaho refused to question Maggie’s version of the story or her integrity. Everyone who ever talked to the child came away asserting, at the very least, that Maggie believed her own tale. Years later, some historians even purported that the girl must have suffered some traumatic hallucination—a reasonable assumption given the fact that she was a very young and impressionable child at the time of the brutal attack and had witnessed the killing of “OF man” James Baker, the murder of her father, and the long hours of terror that followed, culminating in what she claimed was Joseph’s murder of her mother and brother before the warriors set fire to the house in an attempt to destroy evidence of their dastardly crime.