Lay the Mountains Low (11 page)

By the time Ad's civilians had backtracked along the high ridge, then picked their way down the west slope into the valley to reach the site of the army's White Bird debacle, the clouds were noticeably lowering. Distant thunder suddenly reverberated off the surrounding hills. Its long-dying rattle bouncing off the nearby slopes compelled many of the edgy soldiers to duck and scramble for their rifles, preparing for an attack by the Nez Perce.

An occasional finger of lightning starkly split the darkness
with a brilliant display. As the civilians approached the first of the burial details, Ad noticed how the soldiers had tied bandannas over their faces, covering everything below their eyes as they tugged and rolled a bloated, distorted figure onto a gray army blanket, then dragged the corpse to the shallow trench they had scraped out of the rocky soil nearby. Hoisting up the four corners of the blanket, the four soldiers rolled the stinking remains into the hole.

One of the soldiers turned suddenly and fell to his knees, ripping off his bandanna as he violently puked into the grass.

Another soldier knelt over the sickened man, patting him on the back as the civilians rode up. He said to Chapman, “The critters been at this one.”

“Critters?”

“Wolves, coyotes maybe?”

Chapman crossed his wrists over the saddlehorn and hunched forward. “Likely not wolves. Used to live right down yonder, mouth of that little creek. Maybeso it was a coyote got to that dead soldier—I've seen a mess of coyotes around here in my time. Still, I'd wager it was small critters ate on 'im. Raccoons, maybe a badger. Chewed the poor fella up, did they?”

The soldier nodded as the first of the big drops started to fall out of the lowering sky. Then he gestured across the slope. “Some of the rest been et on, too.”

Giving the blackening heavens a sidelong glance, Chapman said, “Rain comin'—I figger your work for the day is 'bout over now.”

Gasping, the soldier on his knees replied, “Thank Jesus in Heaven for small b-blessings.”

The tall soldier patted the man on the shoulder, then looked again at Chapman as a roll of thunder faded on down the canyon. “Sounds just like God in Heaven is firing a burial volley to honor our dead.”

Sensing the hair rise on his arm with more than the dramatic electrical charge in the clean, damp air, Chapman gently nudged his horse away from the three soldiers.

He didn't know if he believed in God anymore. Not when such terrible things were happening to women and children, even to some men—folks who had never given hurt to any person. Couldn't be a God to his way of thinking.

Finding Howard taking cover temporarily beneath some streamside trees about the time the general was giving orders to suspend the burial duties with only eighteen of the dead interred, telling his officers that he intended for his command to return to Johnson's ranch for the night, Chapman and the volunteers reined up nearby and dragged out their rubber ponchos as the underbelly of the low sky opened up on them. While the rain grew serious, the small band of civilians dismounted to report sighting the warriors upriver, across the Salmon.

“They've crossed already,” Howard grumped.

“You can't spend much time here, General,” Chapman advised.

That made Howard's face go stony, cold. “These men deserve a decent burial, Mr. Chapman.”

“Meantime, your prey gonna waltz on outta sight.”

“I'll just have to take that chance, won't I?” Howard replied testily. Then he turned and pointed on down the narrow valley. “Whose place was that?”

“Used to be mine, General,” Chapman began. “Sold it to John Manuel.”

“Was he one of the victims of the Nez Perce depredations?”

“Him, and his wife, their youngest, a baby—all gone. No hide, no hair. Had a daughter, Maggie, too—”

“No, I saw her yesterday in Mount Idaho,” Howard stated sadly. “Claimed Joseph killed her mother and baby brother.”

Chapman regarded the heap of ruins, all that was left of the nearby buildings he had hammered together of a time years ago. “You wanna ride along, we go take a look for ourselves, General?”

Howard and a handful of officers readily agreed as the
storm softened into a steady, soaking drizzle. For some time they inspected the blackened timbers that had caved in, digging around near the charred river stones of the chimney and fireplace that remained standing despite the destruction of the rest of the cabin.

“I found some bones, General,” Chapman suddenly reported.

“The victims?”

“Naw.” Ad shook his head as three of the civilians stepped over to expose more of the charred bones with the round toes of their tall boots. “Don't think so. These here bones ain't big enough to be human.”

Howard sighed, arching his back in a stretch. “Look there. The Nez Perce raiders destroyed everything else … but that outhouse.”

Chapman turned, chuckling to see his old single-seat outhouse still standing, sheltered back in the nearby timber. “Damn if that ain't the strangest thing. I'd flggered they'd at least tip it over on their way out, since they burned everything else to the ground.”

“Maybeso them dumb Injuns don't know what a outhouse is for!” Bunker snorted.

“Let's go have us a look,” Ad suggested.

Shearer and Bunker were already at the outhouse by the time Chapman and the officers had picked their way clear of the burned-out ruins of the Manuel house.

“Chapman!”

He jerked up to see Shearer frantically waving his good arm at the outhouse door they had flung open before them. As he watched, George and Bunker both bent to their knees in the open doorway, struggling with something.

“An Indian?” Howard asked.

“Ain't likely, General,” Chapman replied as they both started trotting toward the nearby trees where the old structure stood all but surrounded by brush.

“Then that must surely be one of your men, a survivor, Colonel Perry,” Howard said as the two civilians turned slowly, a third man suspended between them.

“My gawd!” Chapman said as he jerked to a halt before the trio, reaching out to raise the barely conscious man's chin. “It's John Manuel!”

“But his daughter said she saw him killed,” David Perry declared. “Shot from his horse. She was wounded in the same attack.”

“John. John,” Chapman cooed, rubbing the man's skeletal cheeks with both of his damp hands.

The eyes fluttered, half-opening to stare at Chapman an instant before they snapped wide as twenty-dollar gold pieces.

“Ch-ch-ch—”

“Don't try to talk,” Chapman reminded, still stroking the man's face.

“J-j-jen—”

“We don't know, John,” Shearer admitted. “Ain't found Jennet's body.”

“So she might still be alive,” Ad said. “Maybeso your boy, too. Maggie's alive.”

“M-Maggie?”

“She's waiting for you in Mount Idaho.”

About that time Chapman noticed the wounds in Manuel's hips as the man's feet scuffed along the rain-soaked ground. Howard sent one of his aides to fetch a surgeon as the half-dead man's friends carried him toward a dry copse of trees where Shearer and Bunker eased Manuel to the ground. Over time that afternoon, with some hot coffee and a little salt pork fed him in small slivers, John J. Manuel told the story of his thirteen-day ordeal.

“Thirteen days?” Howard asked.

“This was one of the first places the bastards hit,” Chapman growled.

With an arrow in the back of his neck, a bullet hole through both hips, Manuel had been hurtled off his horse into the brush where he lay still, feigning death as his wife and daughter attempted escape on foot. While he heard their screams and the war cries of the attackers, Manuel confessed there was nothing he could do. Unable to use his
legs, he could only drag himself farther into the brush by pulling himself along with his arms.

By sundown on the second day he had managed to inch himself to the outhouse and crawl inside, where he listened to the comings and goings of horsemen for days on end. The sun rose, and the sun set. Over and over again. In the meantime, Manuel had managed to use his folding knife to dig at the four-inch iron arrow point embedded in the muscles of his neck, eventually working the barb free. It still lay on the plank floor of the outhouse, along with the blood-crusted knife Manuel had used in the surgery.

In the predawn darkness of the following morning, he had crawled from the tiny structure, back into the brush where he gathered horseradish leaves he stuffed inside his shirt before dragging himself back to the outhouse. There, Manuel explained, he had chewed the pungent, bitter leaves, crushing them into a poultice he then applied to his angry, infected wound. His frontier medicine had worked. Over the past eleven days the herbal poultice had eased the infection, and Howard's surgeon from Fort Walla Walla, George M. Sternberg, discovered that the once-ugly wound had begun to knit up nicely, without need for any sutures.

At night Manuel had ventured out, dragging himself through the darkness to the creek bank, where he slowly gathered wild berries, one at a time, and sipped at water he dipped from the White Bird in his cupped hand. With so little to sustain him through his ordeal, Manuel had progressively grown thinner and weaker, unable to venture from the outhouse these past five days.

Dr. Sternberg explained to the soldiers and civilians, “Chances are he would have died tomorrow, perhaps the next day, if we hadn't found him when we did.”

“This is truly good news!” Howard exclaimed.

Chapman regarded the dimming light. “Too late now to start John back to the Johnson place. We'll take him on in to Mount Idaho come morning.”

“He still won't be in any condition to ride,” Sternberg declared.

“We'll make us a travois to pull him out of here,” Chapman said as he stood. “George, you stay put with John. We'll do what we can to keep him dry for the night right here.”

Howard cleared his throat authoritatively. “For the time being, Mr. Chapman, once you've seen to Mr. Manuel here, I suggest you use the rest of what light is left in the day to take your volunteers and search down to the mouth of the White Bird. See if you sight any more than those warriors you spotted from the ridge above.”

As the drizzling rain sluiced from his wide-brimmed felt hat, Chapman nodded before he turned on his heel. Without a word he moved to his horse and rose to the saddle, setting off in the mist alone.

Even the sky was crying—either out of exultation at his finding an old friend still breathing … or out of some unimaginable grief for all those victims Chapman knew they never would find alive.

J
UNE
27–29, 1877

BY TELEGRAPH

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More Details of the Great Storm.

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Causes of Idaho's Indian War.

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Facts Regarding the Late Indian Outbreak.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 26.—A press dispatch from Boise City says that Rev. T. Mesplie, for thirty years a Catholic missionary among the Indian tribes of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and now stationed at Fort Boise as chaplain of the United States army, gives the following intelligence in regard to Indian matters: … In speaking of General Howard, Howlish Wampoo said the Indian laughed at the general and his fine speeches, saying he would never persuade them to give up Wallowa valley, which they were resolved to keep at every hazard. Father Mesplie says the chiefs and principal men who inaugurated this war are rich and influential, and that they will be able to draw to their support all the disaffected Indians belonging to the various tribes, and that these constitute a majority in every case. He is of the opinion that the war will be general and prolonged, as the Indians have been long deliberating and preparing for it, and have staked everything upon its issue. The father says the Nez Perces number in all about four thousand. Of this number about a hundred and fifty will remain friendly or inactive. He estimates the number of warriors which the Nez Perces can bring into the field at 1,000 … Besides these there are Flatheads and their confederates in Montana, with whom the Nez Perces are
in close alliance … He obtains his data from accurate knowledge acquired by long residence among the Indians. He regards the liberty allowed the Indians to remain off the reservations and the unrestricted intercourse allowed between them and the whites as the principal causes of the present outbreak.