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

  It grew so unearthly quiet, with nothing else to do but think.

  Just about the time Hill was beginning to figure Lew Day must have finally bled to death, thinking that his own father must have lost so much blood that he was no longer conscious, Benjamin Norton’s eyes fluttered open and he spoke to his son.

  “Hill … you gotta try to get away.”

  “I won’t let him go!” Jennie Norton disagreed, trembling like a dried cottonwood leaf in an autumn gale while she clutched Hill to her as if he were still a babe.

  “Woman,” Norton whispered, “the boy’s gonna be killed here with the rest of us if he stays. Let him and your sister go. Least they’ll have some chance of living.”

  For several minutes Hill’s mother didn’t speak, staring at the ground, making no sound but her labored breathing. Then she relented, tears glistening on her cheeks as she turned to her sister and told her to take off her heavy wool skirt, shimmy right down to her petticoat and bloomers so she could run faster and maneuver through the brush and timber.

  That’s the moment it finally struck Hill that they were going to make him leave them behind. His protests did no good. And when they made him see that someone had to go for help or they’d all perish right there … then Hill took a deep breath and squeezed his eyes to shut off the tears.

  More scared than he had ever been, Hill leaned over and hugged his father before he wrapped his arms around his mother and pressed his head against her breast for what he knew was going to be the last time he would ever hold his parents.

  Reluctantly he pulled away from her, quickly turning to slip his hand inside his aunt’s trembling fingers, and together they stole into the night.

  * * *

  When her boy and sister left, the night seemed to close in all the tighter around Jennie Norton.

  Her husband was the first to lapse into a deep and merciful sleep. Only once did she think about how much blood Ben had lost from that second terrible leg wound, only once did she wonder if he would ever awaken again … and then she thought no more about it.

  It was much later when she realized that Lew Day wasn’t begging for water anymore.

  When Jennie worked up nerve enough to call out to the hired man, she asked, “Is … is Lew still alive, Joe?”

  There was nothing but silence for a moment, long enough that Jennie began to worry that Moore had himself been killed during one of the intermittent exchanges of gunfire. Then just as she was about to give up and figure she was alone—

  “I heard him breathing, Mrs. Norton,” Moore replied with a hush that nonetheless seemed to split the stillness of the night.

  “The Indians…,” she wondered out loud, “you suppose they’re still out there?”

  “I reckon they are—”

  When their question was answered as more than a dozen shots rang out, bullets hissing past, clanging against iron fittings on the wagon, or splintering the box timbers.

  “You got any bullets left you over there, ma’am?” Moore asked her a while later when the Nez Perce stopped shooting again.

  Jennie dragged herself over to her husband’s body and collected what cartridges she could scrounge from his pockets. Then she pulled herself back around the other side of Ben Norton’s legs. “I got some, Mr. Moore. But I don’t think I can get ’em to you—”

  More gunfire shattered the rest of her explanation.

  “I’ll come for ’em, Mrs. Norton,” Moore offered when the noise died away. “You’re hurt worse’n me. Stay put where you are.”

  Before Moore returned to his shelter between the two big carcasses of the Chamberlin team, he scrounged through every pocket for cartridges, even dared to take a peek in the wagon box for another weapon. That’s where he found an old hunting pouch filled with a horn of powder and some wadding. And in the dark, the nimble fingers on his good hand touched the trigger guard and stock of a weapon.

  “It’s a shotgun, by damn!” he said in a joyous whisper.

  “Ben’s,” she explained. “He brung it along in the wagon.”

  Digging through the pouch, Moore stopped to look into Jennie’s pretty face and said, “But your mister didn’t bring no shells. Just powder and wads.”

  Her short-lived hope was all but dashed. Looking away, she admitted, “It doesn’t matter, Mr. Moore. Those Injuns gonna figure out soon that there’s only one of us still shooting back.”

  The hired man affectionately cupped her chin in the hand missing those two fingers and said, “Ma’am, long as there’s a few bullets for my carbine and some powder for Ben’s ol’ shotgun … Joe Moore’s gonna keep the sonsabitches off the rest of us. You trust to that, Mrs. Norton.”

  The Indians must have heard him crawling off, because they fired a few more shots their way. But Jenny stretched out flat on her belly, draping her arm over Benjamin as if the two of them were at home in the bed they had shared for some thirteen years. She clenched her eyes shut and listened as the hired man fired his rifle.

  Then she heard the boom of that shotgun and looked up in surprise.

  A few minutes later Joe Moore fired his carbine again. She was watching now, her chin resting on the ground, her arm laid across Ben’s chest, when the shotgun went off again: its long, bright tongue of yellow-orange flame sharply defined against the paling of the sky far, far away to the east at the edge of the Camas Prairie.

  She started to weep, almost wanting to laugh for joy—maybe out of sheer madness—because Joe Moore was shooting nothing more than powder and wads at the night. Laugh crazily because those goddamned Indians wouldn’t know any better, but the warriors did understand the big noise of that deep-throated shotgun, and they damn well must respect the way the weapon spit out flames every time the hired man fired it in a different direction.

  Keep the red sonsabitches honest, she thought.

  Then she suddenly felt self-conscious, sorry that she had cursed even in her thoughts. Jennie glanced at her husband’s pale, ghostly face and was relieved that he could not hear what was in her mind, could not hear it cursing the savages.

  Looking out from where she hid under that wagon, Jennie noticed something different about the distant horizon as she lay there with her chin on the damp ground, a cheek resting against her Ben’s chest. The sky was changing, the stars no longer bright and sharp. Then she realized that she must be looking east. That the sun would be rising soon.

  Jennie Norton began to cry silently again, lying there listening to her husband’s feeble heartbeat. Trying her best to remember how to pray—for her son.

  Pleading that the red sonsabitches wouldn’t get him and Lynn on their way to fetch up some help.

  Praying God would save some of them.

  Chapter 21

  June 15, 1877

  Hill Norton was certain the toes of his boots were all but rubbed clear through. Sore as his feet were, and blistered for all the chafing they had endured through the countless soakings in every little stream and creek he and his aunt were forced to cross, unable to dry his wool stockings before they scurried on through what was left of that terrible night. Somehow they managed to cross the far edge of the Camas Prairie in the dark.

  His Aunt Lynn didn’t say much except to encourage him when his will to go on seemed to flag. Hill was glad she never sounded gruff. He was doing the best he could, and any scolding from her sure didn’t help get him up and down these rolling hills on his weary legs any faster, his lungs burning for want of air, his cheeks whipped by the clumps of spindly brush, his knees scraped and bruised for all the times he had stumbled in the dark as they trudged overland, making for the tiny community of Grangeville. Always staying well clear of the road where the Indians might be lying in wait for them.

  Only once during their harrowing journey did Lynn Bowers tell her nephew, “You must do your best to keep up, Hill. We’ve gotta reach Grangeville before sunup.”

  “If we don’t?” he had asked as he wiggled his toes in his soggy socks, feeling the sole on one wet boo
t working itself loose of the stitching.

  “We’ll have to hide back in the trees till dark again,” she explained dourly. “Can’t take the chance the savages will find us in broad daylight.”

  That explained it. How Hill Norton and Lynn Bowers crossed that rugged piece of open, rolling prairie overrun with wild-eyed warriors just the way red ants would boil out of their hill he had poked a stick into. All those miles in the dark, stopping only twice to catch their breath before struggling on.

  Make it to Grangeville before first light … or sit out another day. And that would mean that they wouldn’t get any help back to his mother and father until the following morning. Unaccepting of that possibility, Hill Norton thrust himself against the unmovable granite wall that was the last of his endurance, and somehow, he kept on.

  Only once did he tell his aunt, “What about the Chamberlins? They run off, Lynn. Ain’t it likely they got some help coming already?”

  “We can’t slow down,” she had chided him that one time he felt his spirit sagging beyond redemption. “We can’t count on nobody but us, Hill. Your mother … and specially your father, too, they’re counting on us.”

  He could not deny that. After all, just about the only thing that stuck in his mind throughout the entirety of that long and dangerous journey for the nine-year-old boy was his remembrance of those two faces. How his father’s had grown so white in pain, so pale with the inexorable loss of blood. And his mother’s: how those soft, doelike eyes still pleaded with him even as he stumbled on.

  With nearly every step, his fears swelled along with his aching feet—afraid not of the Indians, not of failing to reach Grangeville by dawn. More so it was his fear that his mother and father had sent him away to save him. He convinced himself that they knew help would not arrive in time to save them … so he figured they must have ordered him away simply to spare him the horrible death they might already have suffered.

  Then after all those hours and miles, somehow in the black of that night, he and his aunt got separated. How he had wanted to holler, to scream for her. But instead he had stopped and strained his ears … and heard nothing. For the longest time he stood absolutely motionless, thinking he might well be dozing with his eyes open: standing on his feet, dead asleep.

  Eventually he set out again, alone this time, determined to make it across this rolling prairie by himself, guided by nothing more than the bright dusting of stars far overhead. Those stars might just as well be on the outskirts of Grangeville, the place seemed so far away. On into the night … hour after hour, mile after grueling mile—

  He blinked and blinked again, then realized it must be some hot tears in his eyes. Hill realized he smelled that smoke he’d suddenly spotted rising in columns just beyond the fringe of trees. Down the slope below him lay the muddy ruts. And around the next bend in that wide wagon road lay the few scattered buildings of Grangeville. He’d recognize that final curve in his sleep.

  Everything was gray and moist and misty, too, with the coming of the sun’s first light while he lunged down the side of the gentle slope now, taking huge leaps. Hill could feel his lungs filling to bursting, so much that he wanted to yell out his joy, his relief, finally to bawl with all that he had kept bottled up all night long—when he struck the rain-soaked road and suddenly heard the sound of approaching horses.

  Hill Norton froze, turning back to his right—staring, waiting for the approaching danger from out there on the prairie. He could feel the blood drain out of his head. Hoofbeats from the direction of Cottonwood House meant only one thing: Indians coming after him, maybe even Indians come to attack this tiny settlement of Grangeville.

  But then he realized the echo of the hoofbeats had fooled him. Hill turned left, saw the bobbing movement of riders—a half-dozen horsemen headed his way, the six of them emerging around that last bend before he could find sanctuary in Grangeville.

  And just as young Hill Norton started to shriek and dart back into the brush at the bottom of the slope, one of those horsemen called out to him.

  “Ho there!”

  He jerked to a halt, spinning on his heel. That wasn’t no Injun!

  The boy stood there quaking with pent-up fear as the riders came up and one man dismounted.

  “Hill? That you, Hill Norton?”

  He tried to speak but couldn’t. So he only nodded.

  All of them were studying his torn, muddy clothing, his bloodied hands, the scratches marring his face. “What you doing out here all by yourself?”

  Then he was gushing, like someone had pulled a cork out of a tavern-keeper’s beer keg, telling the story of the teamsters and Lew Day, the wagon race from the Indians, and how the warriors had killed them one by one.

  The man slowly sank down on one knee in front of Hill and opened his arms, enfolding the boy into a fierce hug that made Hill Norton want to bawl right there. “You ’member me, don’t you, young man? I’m Mr. Fenn. Frank Fenn.”

  “M-Mister Fenn, yes. I do ’member you.”

  The man held Hill out at the end of his arms. “My bunch, we’re from Mount Idaho. We come to spread the word there might be trouble brewing.” Fenn stood, dusting off the knee he had stuck in the damp soil between the wagon ruts. “But from what you just tolt me … it’s plain that trouble’s already boiled outta the pot and spilled into the fire.”

  “My … folks. I-I promised ’em—”

  “First thing the six of us gonna do, young man—is get you back to town and put some food in your belly,” Fenn explained. “And while you’re doing that, we’re gonna go … go find your people, Hill. I promise you that. We’ll find your people.”

  * * *

  Another day was coming, hinted at behind the hills to the east, when Sun Necklace shouted that they were giving up their chase after the pair of wagon men the war party had bumped into not all that long after they broke off their siege of the white people the warriors had surrounded for most of the night, abandoning that one wagon and all those dead horses by the side of the road.

  It was too dangerous, Sun Necklace explained to the grumbling warriors. To approach close enough to the wagon in the dark was far too risky for what rewards they might find. Not with that loud gun spitting fire into the night. After all, the war chief rationalized, there couldn’t be much in that little wagon that had been more filled with women and children as it tottered down the road attempting to flee Shore Crossing and the others.

  Earlier, in the dark, some of the Shadows had stumbled right into a few of Sun Necklace’s warriors as they attempted to flee the wagon.

  Later on, Stick-in-the-Mud reported that he and some others had killed the white man with bullets from their guns, stabbed both of the children, then held the woman down as they took their pleasure and vengeance on her, one after the other until they were tired. Only then did they decide not to leave the woman alive, Stick-in-the-Mud boasted. So he shot an arrow into the woman’s breast and they left her for dead near the bodies of her man and the two children.

  “Sun Necklace is right,” Shore Crossing agreed now as some of the other warriors griped about giving up the chase. “Leave these two wagon men be and let’s go in search of something worth our while. If we are to waste bullets killing these Shadows, then we should at least get some plunder for our trouble.”

  Sure enough, that’s what the war party found in the two wagons the wagon men had abandoned on the trail that led back toward the crossing of the Cottonwood. Because those two Shadows were too frightened to put up a fight, they had ridden away on two of their horses, leaving behind the rest of their teams and a pair of wagons.

  So Shore Crossing was more than jubilant when Sun Necklace finally broke off the chase, admitting that those two wagons filled with plunder were worth far more than the lives of two frightened Boston Men.

  Morning was on its way by the time they returned to the high-walled white man freight wagons. Warriors leaped from their ponies and swarmed over the green and red sidewalls, slashing the rope
s tying down the canvas covers stretched across the beds.

  Shore Crossing was the first to vault up the tall wheel and fling back one of the tarps to peer at what treasures waited inside. He had had enough experience at the white man’s stores to know good plunder from so-so squaw goods. And he knew enough to recognize the potent liquid in those colored bottles he spotted now. With the fiery liquid’s own sort of wyakin power, Sun Necklace’s war party would be re-fortified to go in search of more victims who had wronged the Nee-Me-Poo!

  Reaching down into a wooden case as several others were clambering up and over the side of the wagon like a swarm of hornets on a puddle of sugar-water, Shore Crossing grabbed a bottleneck in each hand and brandished them aloft with a roar.

  Rejoicing, he announced that they had captured a case filled with twelve bottles of thick, sweet-smelling, syrupy brandy, along with another dozen baskets filled with bottles of fizzy champagne.

  Red Moccasin Tops pulled out one of those dark glass bottles, studied the paper glued on it a moment, then whacked the end of its long neck over the sidewall. White foam and liquid spewed like a geyser from the broken glass. Handing one of his unopened bottles to Red Elk, Shore Crossing snatched the broken one from Red Moccasin Tops and held it a few inches from his lips as he tilted his head back.

  The rush of foam and bubbles poured into his mouth, over his nose and chin in a happy, fizzing torrent.

  Blinking his eyes, Shore Crossing pulled the bottle away from his face and sputtered, coughed, and almost gagged with the way the bubbly liquid tickled his nose and throat.

  “Here,” he said, handing it back to his young cousin and holding up the unopened bottle. “I will drink this instead.”

  Everyone roared when Red Moccasin Tops sputtered and spit out his first drink of the foamy liquid, just as Shore Crossing had done. But he tried again and started guzzling, then kept on drinking until he had emptied the bottle in one long, gasping series of deep swallows. Inside and around both wagons the two-times-ten were yelling and laughing together again. Shore Crossing realized they hadn’t been this happy since the war party left the dead man’s store where they had discovered that first keg of whiskey.