And McCarthy thought he recognized the captain beside Parnell. They were waving wildly at him as they started their horses off that knoll, heading back toward his squad in the breastworks. The sergeant was about to rejoice when the pair of officers suddenly reined up only halfway there and stopped dead in their tracks. It appeared they dared venture no closer.
“Time to retreat, my weeds!” he bawled as he came off his knees and lunged toward their horses. McCarthy wasn’t about to wait for any more of an order to retreat.
For the most part his squad had come to the rocks well-armed, prepared to hold out if the bloody horsemen made a seige of it. Besides their Springfield carbines and those .45-55 cartridges each of them had thimbled in their heavy ammo belts, not to mention the extra ammunition still rattling around in their saddlebags, every last one of the men McCarthy had hand-picked for this crucial mission was packing a side arm: his .45 single-action army Colt’s revolver. While all of H Company’s sergeants and most of the corporals wore their pistols on that march away from Fort Lapwai … none of the other enlisted men brought their revolvers into this fight, save for a trumpeter or two. A side arm was nothing more than extra weight many cavalrymen grumbled over and left behind at the first opportunity.
They had remained well-protected behind that rocky outcrop … at least until McCarthy got his men mounted and they were on their way toward Captain Trimble now. As the seven horsemen kicked their animals into a lope, the sergeant made out both Trimble and Parnell as they gestured and bawled at the soldiers streaming past the two of them. Suddenly he could hear fragments of those two officers ordering the troopers to return to the rocks McCarthy’s squad had just abandoned.
“We can make a stand there!” the captain bellowed, his voice floating on the cool morning air littered with shreds of gray gunsmoke. “Back to the rocks with McCarthy, men! We can hold that high ground together!”
“Halt!” McCarthy shouted to his half-dozen, getting them stopped eighty yards shy of the officers. “The cap’m’s coming back to us! He’s bringing them others back to the rocks to reinforce us!”
Wrenching his reins to the left, he spun his mount and raced back for the breastworks they had just abandoned. Leaping to the ground once more, the sergeant realized that mindless panic had chopped his squad in half. Only three had followed him back to the rocks. The rest were just then streaking past Trimble, on their way out of the canyon.
After every shot, McCarthy and his trio of corporals would anxiously glance over their shoulders to look for those reinforcements the captain and Parnell had tried flushing back to the rocks. But in less than five minutes, after firing no more than a dozen more shots from his Springfield, Sergeant Michael McCarthy realized no one was coming to join them. There wasn’t a single man from H Company to be seen anywhere across that some 350 yards separating his squad from those who were retreating farther and farther toward the mouth of the canyon.
As his fingers went to the loops on his belt and searched for another cartridge, the sergeant was suddenly struck with just how few of them he had left. Quickly glancing at the belts worn by the others, McCarthy lumbered to his feet.
“Saddle up, you weeds!” he growled. “Make sure you got a cawtridge tucked under your trapdoor, for we’re riding out while we still can!”
En masse the trio rose and lunged in among their horses with their sergeant. Reining their mounts around even before they had stuffed their mud-crusted boots into the hooded stirrups, the four of them ripped away at a gallop even as the cries of the warriors flooded over those breastworks the soldiers were just abandoning.
If he and his trio of veterans didn’t make it across this open piece of ground, McCarthy knew they would be surrounded and overrun.
If he and the six didn’t get back across the next three hundred yards to rejoin the rest of H Company …
“Joseph and Mary!” he cursed.
He and the rest were cut off already!
Chapter 38
June 17, 1877
Drawn by the gunfire, Isabella Benedict herded her daughter alongside her as they descended the canyon trail, mysteriously drawn toward the clamor of battle. She had to see, to know for certain that it would turn out to be the massacre she had predicted.
Her arms ached with the weight of the little one as they emerged from the brush at the mouth of the canyon. Here the air began to smell of sulphur. Gunsmoke, she thought. And gray-white tatters of it hung like torn lace curtains over the creek bottom where horsemen swirled. For the most part the soldiers were hidden from view: a knot of them here or there on the crest of the distant knoll. Then closer and closer she heard the hammer of hoofbeats, the grunts of huffing men—
Figures in blue suddenly boiled over the gentle swale right before her, most on horseback, but some labored up the trail on foot. Among them were some civilians. She thought she recognized a face or two among them. The first were approaching at a gallop when Isabella started to yell.
“Stop! Stop, please!” she begged. “Don’t you know me? Give us your horse!”
One after another she pleaded with the soldiers as they bolted past her alone or in pairs, a few in small bunches of no more than four at a time. Not a one of them appeared to pay her any heed, much less slow their wide-eyed, heaving horses as they thundered into the narrowing canyon. She trudged up to the top of the slope the soldiers had just crossed.
Upon that crude crescent of a ridge not far from where she herself now stood, Mrs. Benedict could see no more than a third of the soldiers holding their position—some atop their mounts, covering the methodical retreat of the rest slowly backing up the slope on foot. Then of a sudden something strange and evil seemed to sweep over those diligently holding back the Nez Perce horsemen: they turned and started for her, seeking escape in the canyon as if all hope was lost.
It was like a flood, she thought, watching how the horses bounded past her with their loud, labored breathing, flecks of whitish foam grown gummy around their nostrils, yellowish bubbles lapping at their bits. And she was yelling again, trying to make one of the soldiers stop to help her daughters.
Stepping into the open, Isabella was forced to weave from side to side, pulling her oldest girl out of the way to left, then right, as they leaped from the path of the mindless retreat—crying out piteously to the unheeding soldiers.
“In the name of God, please stop for my children!”
At the last possible moment Mrs. Benedict lunged out of the way, that horse passing so close her cheek was stung with the hot foam flying from its lathered jaws.
“Damn, woman!” a soldier shouted at her as he raced past, his face clayish with fear, cheeks so pale below those liver-colored bags of fatigue hanging beneath his eyes.
“Whoa-a-a!”
The instant she turned, Mrs. Benedict confronted the wide nostrils of the horse a middle-aged civilian1 struggled to bring to a halt—mere inches from her forehead.
“What the hell?” growled a young soldier2 as he skidded to a halt beside the volunteer and leaped from his horse. He grabbed her upper arm and roughly shoved her to the side of the trail as more horsemen shot past.
“You’ll get yourself kill’t—”
“Please, sir! Your horse for me and my daughters.”
Releasing his tight grip on her arm, the man turned to gaze up at the civilian still mounted, his skittish horse prancing sideways as the retreat washed by them.
“There’s loose horses comin’, Schorr,” the mounted volunteer grumbled as he peered back downtrail. “Catch one of ’em for the woman so we don’t hafter ride double.”
“You heard ’im, ma’am,” the soldier said as he dragged his horse around and stuffed the reins into her hand.
In a crouch he leaped into the middle of the trail just when at least a half-dozen riderless horses were straining up the slope into the narrowing mouth of the canyon, following their four-legged kind in the mad retreat.
The moment the soldier dove and snagged the reins of
one of those racing horses, he was yanked off his feet. But he dug in with his heels and managed to whip the animal’s head around, forcing it to a halt.
“Lady! We ain’t got all morning to get outta here!” he bawled at her as he dragged the fractious animal toward Isabella. The moment he halted, the soldier grabbed hold of the off-hand stirrup and held it steady for the woman.
“Here, hold her,” Isabella ordered, handing her youngest to the soldier.
Having to drop the stirrup so that he could maintain his hold on the reins in his left hand, the soldier accepted the tot into the crook of his right arm as Mrs. Benedict clambered into the saddle. As soon as she settled, the man turned and passed the youngest child up to the civilian, where that man settled the girl in front of him, tying the toddler against his chest with Isabella’s shawl.
The instant the soldier leaped back into his saddle, leaving the older of her daughters alone on the ground, Emmy began to wail, holding her arms up for her mother.
“I can’t leave her!” Isabella shrieked with terror that she would be forced away without her child.
“We ain’t going ’thout her!” the soldier hollered above the noise of snorting horses, cursing men, and gunfire gradually drawing closer and closer.
She watched him lean off the left side of his horse and hold down his long arm.
“Grab me!” he ordered.
The moment Emmy put her little hand up, the soldier latched hold of it and with a mighty heave swung the youngster onto the horse’s rump behind him.
“Snug up here, child!” he commanded as he pulled her against his back. “An’ hold on for your life!”
Mrs. Benedict watched her oldest daughter lock her blood-streaked arms around the soldier’s waist and stuff them into the man’s coat pockets.
“Ma’am—you hold on tight yourself and let the horse run fast as he’ll go!”
And with no more warning than that, she watched both men bolt away with her two children.
Slapping the reins against the horse’s neck and kicking it with her scuffed, muddy boots, Isabella thrashed the lathered, weary beast into an uneven lope. But from its very first steps she sensed something wrong with the saddle. With every uneven lunge it took in crossing the broken ground, the army saddle beneath her began to shift more and more from side to side until the cinch eventually gave way completely and catapulted Isabella into the brush at the side of the trail while the noisy, mindless retreat swept on past her.
Scratched, bruised, and bleeding, she lay there in the willow, catching her breath while she tenderly brushed a fingertip across the new gash a branch had opened in her cheek. Isabella rolled onto her hands and knees, slowly getting to her feet. Shaking her head groggily, she shoved her way out of the brush that refused to let her clothing go. And from the middle of the old wagon trail she watched the last few soldiers goad their horses farther and farther away, accompanied by that horse with its loose saddle slung under its belly: swaying crazily, swaying—
Aware that hoofbeats were approaching, Isabella lumbered around, her shoulder crying out in pain from her fall. She gazed back down the trail, hoping she could find another soldier, praying she could get the man to halt so she could climb up behind his saddle and flee the valley with him. Find her daughters …
But there were no more soldiers to race past her. Over there on the slope more than a quarter of a mile away to the west, the last handful were racing toward the mouth of the canyon. Already too far away to help. Thank God the girls were on their way to safety.
With all the soldiers gone into the canyon, the only horsemen stabbing up the trail in her direction were those red-skinned bastards.
Isabella opened her mouth to scream … but no sound came out.
The only horses coming at her carried warriors. Shrieking, grimacing warriors who had spotted her standing there in the open, helpless as could be.
She felt her heart go cold, certain one of the devil’s whelps would recognize her for the store man’s woman.
* * *
By the time Wounded Head reached the top of White Bird Hill, he could see how the others were right on the heels of the frightened soldiers, driving them like those docile cattle the white man had transplanted here to the land of the Nee-Me-Poo.
Proud of his new gun and cartridge belt, Wounded Head turned aside to join some others who were gathering up the loose soldier horses. As he leaned over to grab up the reins of one of the animals, Wounded Head heard a strange sound. Two others heard the noise too and came up to investigate.
It did not take long to find two wounded soldiers who had dragged themselves back into the brush. While Wounded Head stayed on his pony, the others stepped over to the groaning Shadows and bashed in their heads. The warriors stripped the dead men of their weapons and bullets, then started back for the village with Wounded Head and their horses.
They hadn’t gone very far when some men farther down the slope called out Wounded Head’s name, flagging their arms to get his attention.
“Look above you!” they cried.
He scanned the hillside; then his eyes spotted the figure lumbering up the trail that led out of the canyon. It wasn’t a man, not hard to see that for the seafoam wave of a long dress making it extremely difficult for the woman’s legs to flail step by clumsy step in her strenuous climb.
This confused Wounded Head: why had these white men brought along one of their women to the fight? The Nee-Me-Poo were far wiser than that! These Shadows were a simple-minded lot to needlessly put their women in danger just to have someone warm to sleep with on the war trail.
“Take my horses to camp,” he asked of the others.
Then he started for the woman. The farther he followed her up the slope, the quicker he closed the gap between them. Suddenly one of her feet slipped and she tumbled into a clump of low willow.
The woman was just clambering out of the brush and grass at the side of the trail when Wounded Head reached her. She must have heard him coming, because the woman whirled around—her muddy, red face went white, her eyes filling with terror. Her mouth flew wide open as if to scream, but he was surprised when no sound came out. Her jaws moved, and her tongue wagged, but no sound.
Only tears streamed down her dirty face, making tiny tracks like claw marks on her grimy cheeks.
“I will not harm you,” Wounded Head told her in his tongue.
She closed her mouth, staring at him dumbly, almost as if he had clubbed her on the side of her head.
Then he repeated that he would not hurt her and laid his new carbine across his thighs so that he could make signs with his hands—some signal or gesture that would tell her she did not have to fear him killing her.
Dragging a hand beneath her runny nose, the woman bobbed her head twice, as if she understood.
He held down his arm, offering his open hand. “Get up behind me.” And he gestured with a sweep of that arm, patting the rump of the pony behind him. “Get up now, woman.”
She reached out and grabbed his left forearm with both hands, then kicked her legs as he hoisted her onto the pony that shifted sideways in protest of the sudden additional weight.
Slowly turning the horse, Wounded Head started back down the trail with his prisoner. No telling how much she might be worth if the Nee-Me-Poo had to barter for the return of prisoners when making peace with the Shadows after this fighting. This frightened, blood-splattered, mud-coated white woman might be worth something after all. He was anxious to show her off to others. Not only had he earned himself a rifle and bullets, but he had earned himself a prisoner too!
“Wounded Head!”
He turned, saw the five women who were calling to him as his pony carried the two of them onto the creek bottom. They waved him over, so he reined the horse in their direction.
“What is this you have, Wounded Head?” an old woman sang out as he pulled back on the reins.
“See my prisoner! She is mine,” he boasted, chest swelling. “And look at my new rifle
—”
“What are you going to do with her?” another woman interrupted.
He was very confused. The five women pushed close around his pony, appearing angry with him. He thought they should be proud of him, envious of his new treasure.
“I—I will keep her,” he sought to explain. “She will be mine as long as there is a war with the Shadows—”
“No, you can’t keep her,” a third old woman snapped at him.
Then the first ancient one declared, “That is something the Shadows do. We do not take prisoners of our enemies. We do not own slaves like other tribes. You must turn her loose.”
Now he was really growing bewildered, “T-turn her—”
“Yes. Let her go!” grumbled another, much bigger and very round, balling her fists on her hips.
“She is mine to do with—”
“But she will only bring us trouble, Wounded Head,” the second woman argued more softly. “Get rid of her now. Let her go back to the soldiers so they will not be any angrier with us for keeping their woman.”
“Let her go?” he squeaked in dismay, wagging his head.
And he turned to peer over his shoulder at the woman, then gazed beyond her, across that slope leading up the canyon. For a moment he watched the last of the fleeing soldiers and those warriors in furious pursuit—the Nee-Me-Poo fighting men striving to make escape as hard as possible for the white men, striving to inflict even more loss on these soldiers come to attack their village.
“She will only bring us more trouble,” the first woman protested. “Let her go so we can leave with our village when we travel to the buffalo country.”
The big woman said, “That way the soldiers won’t follow us looking to get their woman back.”
“All right,” he agreed reluctantly. With a sigh he turned slightly to shrug a gesture for the prisoner to get off.
But she did not understand at first. Only when the ancient one and the big woman stepped over to hold their arms up to her did the prisoner slide off the back of the pony. For a long moment the white woman just stood there as the women stepped back a bit, everyone staring intently at her—so much so that the white woman’s eyes filled with fear again.
Cries from the Earth: The Outbreak Of the Nez Perce War and the Battle of White Bird Canyon June 17, 1877 (The Plainsmen Series) Page 37
