Cries from the Earth: The Outbreak Of the Nez Perce War and the Battle of White Bird Canyon June 17, 1877 (The Plainsmen Series)

by Terry C. Johnston

  After setting what remained of last night’s coffee on the flames to reheat, Wilmot led the twenty-eight-year-old Ready out to the good grass where they brought in the horses they had hobbled at sundown. As an additional precaution, the wary Wilmot had side-lined the twelve animals for the night. What with all that talk of the Nez Perce bucks getting frisky, it simply didn’t make any sense for the two of them to make it easy for any youngsters who wanted to steal some white men’s horses.

  “Don’t think I got any decent sleep last night,” Wilmot admitted as they started leading the first of the teams back to the wagons.

  “You neither?” Ready asked. “I must’ve kept one eye open all night, Lew.”

  “I could swear that was gunfire I heard ’bout the time we was stretching out in our bedrolls,” Wilmot reflected.

  Ready was quiet a moment more as they started backing the first pair of horses into their traces on Wilmot’s wagon. “You figger Ben and them other folks run into some trouble on down the road after they left us?”

  He sighed deeply, thinking back on the faint rattle of gunfire they had heard about an hour after the Nortons and Chamberlins passed on by their camp. “Hope not.” Then he tried to shake off the cold gloom by proclaiming, “Hell, I can’t even swear what we heard was guns at all.”

  By the time they had hitched up the animals, drunk some coffee, and smothered their fire, the sky was starting to lighten just enough that a man could read the trail ahead of him. The teamsters rolled into the coming of that day.

  About the time the first of the sun’s rays were streaming on the Camas Prairie, they had put some three miles behind them—when the first shriek reverberated from the rolling hills that descended off Cottonwood Butte. Suddenly the air was filled with the yips and cries of festooned warriors erupting from the timber lining a dip in the trail ahead.

  Vaulting off their high seats onto the muddy, misty ground, Wilmot and Ready sprinted for the head of their teams, fumbling to unhitch those twelve horses. Dragging the trace lines back out of the iron rings, the teamsters bellowed at the animals, slapping and goading the horses into motion, driving them away from the wagons before the men leaped onto the bare backs of their faithful, steady lead horses.

  When Wilmot and Ready got started back down the trail for Cottonwood House, Lew glanced over his shoulder, finding the warriors less than a quarter-mile behind and closing fast atop their buffalo ponies. As he lay low over the neck of the tall, muscular animal, Wilmot began thinking of Louisa—how his heart burned with his deep love for her. Images of their four young children darted through his mind. A moment later as he chanced a look back at their pursuers, Lew Wilmot tried to conjure up an image of that child due any day now. Would it be a boy or a girl? Would this one look more like Louisa or like him?

  Wilmot had come here from Illinois when he was but a lad himself—his father moving the family to Oregon on that great Emigrant Road. Having grown up all those years in this country, he had never done a goddamned thing against these Cayuse or Palouse or the Nez Perce … so why the hell were they screaming for his blood?

  Wilmot had no idea how far they had been running after abandoning their wagons. A mile now, maybe a little more, on past the place where the two of them had camped last night. That would make it.… More than four miles they had run these sure-footed wagon horses as if they were long-limbed racing stallions.

  When Lew looked back now he found no more than two warriors still following them.

  A damned good thing too, because the animal beneath him wasn’t cut out for this sort of buffalo chase. It was built for slow-paced hauling power. He could feel the faint shudder in its lights as the critter heaved for air, every one of its massive muscles straining to carry the huge, big-boned body up and down the pitch and heave of the trail faster than those lean, grass-fed Indian ponies.

  “Lew!” Ready called from right behind his left knee.

  Wilmot turned, afraid the warriors were on them.

  But the moment Lew twisted around, Ready shouted, “I can’t see ’em no more!”

  Sure enough—as they continued that gentle climb up the Cottonwood Divide to the Norton place, the trail disappearing back through the trees was bare of horsemen.

  Starting to slow his exhausted animal, Wilmot prayed, “Maybe we outrun ’em, Pete.”

  Ready swallowed hard. “A good thing, Lew,” he admitted sheepishly. “I forgot to grab for my pistol when I come down off my wagon back there.”

  “Y-you don’t have a gun?”

  The younger partner shook his head.

  “S’all right,” Wilmot reassured him as they slowed the horses to a walk, both men constantly twisting around on those bare, damp backs to peer behind them as if they didn’t really believe they were getting this reprieve from certain death. “Better we get off this road now and go across country.”

  “Where to, you figger?”

  “Grangeville. It’s still the closest.”

  Ready glanced at the lone pistol Wilmot had stuck like the hoof of a goat in his belt, then said, “Them Injuns gone back for the wagons, ain’t they, Lew?”

  Wilmot nodded.

  “We lost all them supplies Vollmer paid us for—”

  “But you got your hair, Pete,” Lew grumbled as he started his horse off the trail, reining into -the timber to begin their climb up the slope that would lead them over Cottonwood Divide and down to Threemile Creek. “Just remember that. You still got your goddamn hair.”

  * * *

  Jennie Norton sat clutching her nine-year-old son, Hill, against her, the other hand gripping the sidewall of the Chamberlin wagon. She was sure that she was digging her fingernails into the wood so fiercely that they must be bleeding. The wagon bounced and weaved down the rutted, rain-sodden road, racing to stay ahead of that pack of shrieking heathens who had suddenly appeared out of the black of night not very long after they passed by the teamsters’ camp.

  Beside Jennie sat her eighteen-year-old sister, Lynn Bowers, who wrapped an arm around the three-year-old Chamberlin girl. The pregnant Mrs. Chamberlin was pressed against the opposite sidewall, one arm holding her little toddler, another daughter. Behind the wagon galloped Jennie’s husband, Ben, their hired man, Joe Moore, and the wounded courier from Mount Idaho, Lew Day, the three of them atop straining, wide-eyed horses that dutifully followed the springless wagon as it shuddered and slid its way through every twist and turn in the dark ribbon that was taking them toward the Cottonwood Divide.

  For some time now—she didn’t have any idea how many miles—John Chamberlin had somehow managed to keep the light wagon ahead of the yelping savages. But gradually, the heathens drew near enough that they began to fire random shots at Ben and the other two horsemen.

  “Don’t you ladies fret none yet!” Chamberlin hurled his voice over his shoulder in the cold air. “Those Injuns aren’t near enough that you should worry! We keep ahead of ’em like we are … we’ll make it! We’ll make—”

  “Chamberlin, stop!”

  It was Ben who called out from the rear.

  Jennie watched her husband and Moore reining up. The saddle on that third horse was empty.

  “Stop, John! Stop!” Jennie hollered frantically, afraid they were going to leave the three men behind.

  Chamberlin jolted the wagon to a halt, then vaulted off the seat to run back toward Norton and Moore, who already had Lew Day suspended between them, his head sagging from his shoulders.

  “They hit him again!” Ben shouted as they reached the back of the wagon.

  Together with Chamberlin’s help, the two of them heaved Day over the back gate, where Jennie went to her knees. With some help from Hill, she managed to drag Lew toward the front of the bed while John Chamberlin clambered back atop the seat and slapped reins down on the backs of his two horses as he threw off the brake. Behind them, Norton and Moore lunged back into their saddles and were kicking furiously as the warriors appeared at that last bend in the road.

 
Closer than ever before.

  “Stopping for him may have just cost us our lives!” Mrs. Chamberlin scolded her husband and Jennie, pinning her daughter against her belly, swollen with another child.

  “You could run off and leave a man—a friend—to those devils?” Jennie demanded as she peered down at Lew Day with those eyes everyone said were soft and large, like an antelope’s.

  Jennie found Day’s eyes staring up at her, gratitude welling deep within them—at least when he didn’t clench his eyes shut with every rise and fall of pain as the wagon rumbled into a gallop. Then she noticed a fresh smear of blood about the size of her small hand. It glistened high on his belly.

  A gut wound, she thought. Painful as hell, and it would take an unmercifully long time for him to die.

  “Lookit ’em!” the Chamberlin woman shrieked. “They’re almost on top of us!”

  By then her two young girls were screaming, goaded to a frenzy by their mother as John Chamberlin repeatedly shouted for his daughters to be quiet. No matter that the woman was right, Jennie thought—they had indeed put their lives in danger to stop for Lew Day when he was knocked from his horse. Every jolt made the wounded man grunt where he lay groaning in her lap.

  “Jennie!”

  It was Ben shouting. She looked up to find her husband barely staying atop the saddle, clutching the back of his left thigh, weaving now.

  “John!” she yelled at the driver, twisting away from Lew Day for the tailgate. “Benjamin’s hit!”

  As Chamberlin began to pull back on the reins, another bullet smacked into the side of Norton’s horse. When his animal pitched to the right, Ben started to dismount onto his injured leg. She watched that leg give way under him as Norton spilled into the middle of the road. Joe Moore had his horse beside the crumpled man in a heartbeat, leaning off to grab that hand Norton held up as he got to his knees. Snatching Moore’s wrist in one hand, clutching the stirrup with the other, Ben managed to lurch toward the wagon as the screeching got louder than it had ever been.

  Jennie peeled her legs from under the wounded man so that she could scramble to the back of the wagon to help pull her husband in.

  “Damn,” Lew Day growled as he sat up and propped himself against the sidewall, “now they got Ben, too.”

  Reaching the rear gate, Norton was barely able to start over the gate before Chamberlin slapped the horses into motion again. Jennie managed to reach out and snag her husband’s hand, heaving backward with all she had to yank him over the gate and into the wagon box before he fell off.

  Suddenly Chamberlin’s horses were screeching with that shrill, eerie, humanlike cry that made the hair on her arms prickle. The wagon lurched to the side, tilting slightly on two wheels as one of those horses stumbled forward onto its front knees and promptly went down in a heap.

  Thrashing in terror, the other horse attempted to hurtle around the fallen animal, lunging against the singletree and nearly tipping the wagon filled with screaming women and children as they collided with one another. Clattering back onto all four wheels, the wagon slammed to a halt against the dead horse.

  Painfully rolling himself over the sidewall, Lew Day flopped to the ground with a grunt and crabbed behind the horse carcass just as Joe Moore’s animal was hit, screamed, and flung its rider into the middle of the road. Another shot split the darkness. Disbelieving, Moore stared down at his left hand, finding that a bullet had clipped off two of his fingers—then he, too, dove for cover behind his own fallen horse. He and Day quickly began to return the warriors’ fire, holding the Nez Perce off as Chamberlin helped the wounded Norton get the three women and all the children over the sidewall and under the wagon box as a bullet brought down the second of Chamberlin’s noisy horses.

  Jenny clutched young Hill against her as Lynn sobbed with a wheeze each time she dragged in a breath.

  In a matter of seconds the Nez Perce had dropped every one of the animals. Three of the four men were badly wounded.

  And these horrible, bloodthirsty savages likely had them surrounded already.

  Chapter 20

  June 15, 1877

  Hill Norton gazed into his mother’s pretty face, not believing the fear he found reflected there, refusing to believe what she was demanding of him.

  “I ain’t going without you!” he protested.

  She seized her son’s arm, yanked him close, and embraced Hill. Then Jennie Norton held him away from her and gazed squarely into the youth’s eyes while she said, “You and Lynn, I want you both to run for it while you still can.”

  Lynn Bowers started to argue, “Jennie, I can’t—”

  “You’ve got to do this for me, Sister,” Mrs. Norton pleaded in a husky whisper. “Get my son out of here before the end comes to us all.”

  Hill could feel the tears welling up in his eyes, and he angrily swiped them away with the backs of both hands. He didn’t know if they were tears of terror or sadness or if they were tears of fury that he felt for the Indians, for his family’s plight, maybe even for his mother ordering him away into the black of night and the unknown.

  How could she ask him to leave her and his father, both wounded the way they were? How could she expect that of him after what had happened to the Chamberlins when they had tried to slip away?

  From that moment when he had crawled under the wagon with his parents and the others once the horses were dropped, Hill had listened to the steady crackle of the enemy weapons, hearing every bullet slam into the wagon box or ricochet off an iron wagon tire or moistly slap into one of the dead horses. He could tell the warriors were moving about, inching closer and closer out there in the dark—just from the telltale cracks of those carbines.

  It wasn’t long before the messenger from Mount Idaho was hit again—then hit a fourth and fifth time too. After they had been forted up here for better than two hours, Lew Day started begging for some water. Hill’s father whispered to his son, explaining that was what happened to a man who was bleeding out: he got real thirsty. So it came as no surprise later when Lew Day began whimpering, pleading for someone to bring him anything to drink from the wagon, anything at all, because he couldn’t move for all his wounds.

  “I can’t stand him moaning over there no more,” grumbled Ben Norton as he started to scoot backward from beneath the wagon box. “He keeps on crying like that, he’s gonna draw more of their fire.”

  “Don’t leave us, Ben!” Jennie Norton begged.

  Nonetheless, Hill’s wounded father crouched at the side-wall for a moment, then stood suddenly, hurriedly peering into the wagon box for one of their canteens.

  The boy heard the two sharp cracks of the Indian carbines, saw the muzzles spit fire in the black of that night. The first bullet clanged against a piece of the iron furniture somewhere on the wagon. But the second smacked into his father’s good leg.

  Ben Norton collapsed, spinning to the ground in a heap as the canteen flew from his grasp and he gripped his right thigh with both hands. Hill stared transfixed at the gleaming patch of blood appearing on his father’s leg as Mr. Chamberlin dragged Norton beneath the wagon box once more. Not hard to see that black ooze seeping up between his father’s fingers, even in the dark.

  “They got you bad,” Chamberlin whispered.

  “May—maybe you oughtta take Jennie and the rest and get the hell outta here while you can, John,” Norton advised grittily.

  Even in the shadows beneath the wagon box, Hill could still see how white his father’s face had become. More than anything else, the boy was afraid he was going to have to lie here and watch his father die.

  “I’ll go and ask them to let us go, Ben,” Jennie Norton offered.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Norton snapped at his wife.

  “I can’t let you bleed to death here,” she argued. “We gotta get you to some help.”

  “No!” Ben Norton growled, clenching his eyes and gritting his teeth for the pain. “You go out there, you’re good as dead, Jennie … that, or worse—when
they grab you and drag you off. I ain’t watching that happen to you—”

  “All right, Ben,” she relented softly. “I thought it would be worth a try. Maybe they won’t hurt women and children.”

  For a moment Norton looked at Chamberlin, then into his son’s face. And finally he said, “Awright, Jennie. S’pose you give it a try. Ask ’em to let you go, but don’t go out there far enough for ’em to grab you. If they do anything funny, I want you close so you can get back in here quick.”

  Hill wanted to cry out at that moment, to scream that they hadn’t asked for his arguments against sending his mother out there in the open to beg for their lives. As he watched his mother crab her way around the side of the wagon in a crouch, the boy figured they could have stayed right there for the rest of the night, holding the warriors off just the way they had been—

  —when the bullet struck his mother, slicing through both her calves. As she collapsed in a ball, screeching in pain, Jennie Norton slammed the side of her leg against a wagon wheel, dislocating her ankle.

  It wasn’t very long after John Chamberlin dragged her back under the wagon that the neighbor told the others he was leaving, going to make a run for it with his family. Scooping up both of the sobbing children, the parents shushed their daughters, then slipped away into the brush at a crouch.

  For some time after that Hill did what he could to help his father and mother with their wounds. When his father’s hands began to cramp more than the man could bear, Hill interlaced his own fingers over the wound that continued to ooze no matter how much pressure any of them applied to it.

  Then off in the distance, the boy heard some screaming, at least two different voices shrieking out there in all that black—followed by several gunshots … when everything went quiet in that direction and for a long time the night fell silent. Except for a final crack from one of the guns that surrounded them.

  As the following minutes snailed past, Hill came to understand just how critical their situation was if no one could slip away to bring help back. None of the five adults uttered a thing for the longest time, but the boy figured that was because they were all brooding over the screams and the gunshots, too. Like me, the grown-ups must figure the Injuns got the Chamberlins, he thought.