Lay the Mountains Low (23 page)

K
HOY
-T
SAHL
, 1877

T
HIS WAS BUT HIS TWENTY-FIRST SUMMER, BUT HE HAD
himself killed four of the
suapies
who had come to attack their
Lahmotta
camp. Young though he might be, Yellow Wolf stood second in warrior rank only to
Ollokot
, Joseph's young brother.

Yellow Wolf had been the one who made the most noise out there in the grass below the boulders, jumping up to show himself here, then there. Never the same place twice as the others crept in, slowly, silently. This young warrior called
He-mene Mox Mox
made the noise in the grass, shouting and calling out to draw the horse soldiers' attention as Five Wounds led the others in for the kill.

Six of the
suapies
had fallen from their horses before the fight even began, hit during the last mad scramble. The other half barely made it to those low rocks before Yellow Wolf's friends got started on the serious killing. When the rest made the last rush, there was but one last shot fired from the white man. As their bullets struck that last Shadow, his rifle slowly spilled from his hands covered with those bloody gloves.

Yellow Wolf knelt before him, looking into the man's face, seeing how it was drenched with blood from that bullet hole almost directly between the soldier's eyes. Blinking repeatedly, the white man seemed to stare right through Yellow Wolf, his lips starting to move, sticky with the blood that drenched the Shadow. Yet all that came out of the soldier's mouth was a chicken sound …
cluck. Cluck. Cluck. Cluck
—

“Do you know what he is saying in the Shadow tongue?” asked Five Wounds as the older warrior knelt beside the inquisitive Yellow Wolf.

“No. I never learned any of the white man talk,” Yellow
Wolf replied. Then he looked deep into the man's eyes, saw the eyelashes coated thickly with blood that seeped from that bullet wound between the eyes. Noticed the way the soldier looked right on through him as if he weren't there. “Maybe,” he said to Five Wounds and the others who were starting to pilfer through the pockets of the other five soldiers, “this one is asking me to help him die quicker.”

“Perhaps that's true, that he cannot live,”
Wahlitits
said. “His body is too badly hurt.”

Red Moccasin Tops added, “But he still lives. He is a strong warrior, refusing to die. He is like
Nee-Me-Poo.”

Five Wounds shook his head. “No Shadow is like us. But, this one is strong enough to live if he wants to. But he has to want to live”,

Old
Dookiyoon
, known as Smoker, took his ancient flintlock horse pistol from his belt and wagged the muzzle near the soldier's left ear. That gun had belonged to his family for three generations—handed down from the early days of contact with the Boston Men.

“We cannot leave him like this,” Smoker said with a hint of sadness to his voice. “He will be too long in dying.”

“And he was a brave fighter,” Yellow Wolf asserted with a measure of respect. “He deserves to die quickly, this brave fighter.”

Suddenly Smoker said, “Yes. Die quickly, brave fighter.” And he immediately shoved the muzzle of his old pistol against the Shadow's chest, pulling the trigger.

The force of the big lead ball caused the white man to topple to the side, where he lay quietly, no longer clucking like a chicken scratching feed on the ground between lodges.

Yellow Wolf was just beginning to feel better about it when the body stirred and the soldier slowly, painfully, raised himself back to a sitting position there against the rocks splattered with some of the man's brain. Once the Shadow was upright, he began to quietly cluck again: his lips moving ever so slightly, the tip of his blood-thickened tongue appearing as he made his strange talking sound. Yellow
Wolf wished he knew the white man's language. Then the eyes rolled slowly around, as if looking over the half-dozen or so warriors gathered closest to him. Those eyes studied Yellow Wolf's friends as blood continued to ooze from the head wound, dripping over the eyelids and lashes.

“Ho, ho, Smoker!” Red Moccasin Tops snorted with laughter. “Your old gun—it is weak as a young foal's penis! It did not kill this strong, strong Boston Man, even up close!”

Just as Smoker was about to argue, wrenching up his pouch to begin reloading the old flintlock pistol, Two Moons stepped up, clutching his
kopluts
in his hand. Without a word, be swung it against the side of the soldier's head with a hard crack that knocked the dying man over again.

“Stop!” Yellow Wolf yelled, waving his arms at the old warrior. “Get back, Two Moons! Get back from him!”

Five Wounds grabbed the young warrior by the elbow. “Yellow Wolf—it is all right what Two Moons does. He is doing what is best for this soldier now.”

For a moment, Yellow Wolf looked at Two Moons's face, then reluctantly nodded as he looked down at the soldier, watching how the man struggled to breathe. “Yes. I see. We have no healer with us. Poor, poor Shadow—he is suffering.” Then he drew in a long sigh. “All right. Maybe we should put him out of his trouble now.”

“You, Yellow Wolf?” asked Two Moons.

“Yes.”

The old man handed the young warrior his short-handled war club. Yellow Wolf gripped it securely, raised it over his shoulder, then drove it down into the top of the white man's head. The
suapie
grunted. Then he hit the soldier a second time. And the enemy made no more sound.

Bending on his knee, Yellow Wolf put his face down close to the soldier's, looking into those unblinking eyes, watching those bloody lips and tongue for any movement. There was none. And now he closed the eyes. They were no longer staring up at him, gazing into Yellow Wolf's soul and asking for assistance.

“You have helped him?” Five Wounds asked.

Rocking back on his haunches, Yellow Wolf handed the
kopluts
back to Two Moons. “Yes. The last one is dead now.”

“C
AN
you believe that?” asked Captain Henry Winters. “They're pulling off!”

Stephen G. Whipple nodded in disbelief. “Even though they outnumber us, we've driven them off.”

Minutes ago as he had listened to the faint, distant booming of the Springfield carbines, Whipple had been advancing with more than seventy of his enlisted, leaving their Cottonwood camp in the care of fewer than thirty soldiers and volunteers. Instead of riding to the sound of those guns, Whipple grew confused by the echo of that gunfire—halting his command on the eastern side of that low saddle while he studied the slope and timber above him.

Wondering why Rains had ridden out of sight. With that gunfire so near, Whipple surely expected to see the lieutenant and his detail come galloping right over the top of that ridge any moment now. He waited, waited … then the gunfire died off—

When suddenly a broad band of warriors arrayed themselves before his men at the top of the hill.

“Rains must have driven them off!” Whipple cheered to Winters. “He's driven them into us!”

Whipple dismounted the entire body and ordered horse holders to the rear, instantly reducing his tactical force by one-fourth. The rest he spread out on a wide front, double distances between each of the soldiers as more warriors appeared on the hillside, making bold and provocative movements along his skirmishers' front. Now there were more than a hundred of the enemy facing them, horsemen who occasionally fired their rifles and shouted at the soldiers.

It became painfully clear to the captain that Lieutenant Rains and his ten-man detail were not going to reappear, full of life, herding a small war party toward Whipple's seventy-man battalion. They were lost, swallowed up by these
Nez Perce who slowly advanced as Whipple prepared his men to withstand the charge … but that assault never came. Not in the two hours his battalion held their ground on the side of that hill. For some reason that Whipple and Winters could not fathom, the warriors—who clearly outnumbered their soldiers—never pressed their advantage.

He shook his head as the Nez Perce mounted up and pulled back late that afternoon. “Should we withdraw, Captain?” Winters asked.

“We should continue our search for Lieutenant Rains,” the captain replied. “But the enemy outnumbers us. I'm certain they will prevent us from advancing.”

Winters regarded the lowering sun. “Might I suggest that we countermarch to Cottonwood?”

Whipple sighed, “We'll search for the bodies come morning.”

Just before dusk, Whipple formed his battalion into a square around their horses, then slowly marched back to Cottonwood without having seen another Nez Perce throughout their retreat. As his battalion rode down into the wide gulch of the Cottonwood, he grew uneasy about their position, the fading light, and the close proximity of the enemy.

As night fell, he had his men establish a small defensive perimeter at the top of an adjacent hill where Whipple felt safer than down in the bottom with those gutted, abandoned, ghostly ranch buildings. Here at least they could command the high ground, able to see greater distances across the rolling Camas Prairie, too.

Not long after moonrise, the captain dispatched two couriers to carry word of the Rains affair to General Howard—the second leaving a half hour after the first.

Cottonwood, 10:30
P.M.

(Tuesday)

Joseph with his entire force is in our front. We moved out at 6
P.M.
to look after the Indians reported. Rains, with ten men moved on ahead about two miles. We heard
firing at the foot of the long hill back of Cottonwood, and mounting a slight elevation saw a large force of Indians occupying a strong position in the timber covering the road. Nothing could be seen of Rains and his party and we fear they have been slaughtered. We moved up close enough to see we were greatly outnumbered by enemies strongly posted. Night was approaching and after a consultation of all the officers it was decided to return to this place and hold it until Perry … should arrive. There was no diversity of opinion in this case, and there is no doubt that the entire command would have been sacrificed in an attack. We shall make every effort to communicate with Perry to-night and keep him out of any trap …

Whipple, Cmd'g
Cottonwood Station

 

That done, Whipple had just begun to fitfully doze a little after midnight when a lone Christian tracker rode in, slipping down from the north.

“I'm amazed you got through from that direction!” the captain exclaimed as the friendly handed Whipple a folded letter. “That country was swarming with warriors earlier today.”

In his dispatch, Captain David Perry informed whomever the courier would find in command of the closest outpost that he would be setting off from Fort Lapwai before first light with his supply train, moving south under a twentyman escort.

“With the Nez Perce crawling across the countryside, we desperately need those supplies and especially that ammunition,” Whipple told his officers he had called together in the starry darkness.

Lieutenant Shelton said, “I feel a bit uneasy about Colonel Perry, sir.”

“To tell the truth, so do I,” Whipple admitted. “Captain Winters, our entire battalion will depart at first light and march north to meet up with, and provide protection for,
Colonel Perry's supply train.”

“I'll see the men are awakened at five.”

After his two army couriers returned after becoming lost in the darkened and unfamiliar terrain, Whipple himself spent the rest of that sleepless night waiting out the coming of the time when his noncoms would move among the enlisted, jarring them awake. No fires and no pipes. Which meant no coffee or fried bacon. Just a few crumbly bites of the inedible hardbread washed down with water from the Cottonwood before they moved out in the waning darkness of that morning, the anniversary of the nation's independence.

After crawling little more than two miles in the gray dawn, they stumbled across the remains of yesterday's massacre—at least, they found twelve of the thirteen bodies.

From their positions it was clear to see how the brief, hot fight had progressed. One body—of the civilian named Foster—was found in the tall grass, far out from the others. Then five more, soldiers all, scattered between the scout and those rocks where they located the last five, men who had attempted to sell their lives dearly. Empty copper cases glittered around them. But the weapons, gun belts, and their clothing were gone. And though the bodies had been stripped, none were mutilated or scalped.

“That's the lieutenant there, Captain,” announced First Lieutenant Edwin H. Shelton. He would know. He and Rains were officers together in Whipple's L Company, First U. S. Cavalry.

Nonetheless, it was hard for the captain to believe that the disfigured body was that of young Rains.

“Appears the lieutenant really made the bastards angry,” Whipple said quietly. “Look how many times they shot him before they finally caved in his skull.”

“Shall we bury them here, sir?” Shelton asked.

Whipple regarded the climbing sun a moment, then answered, “No, Lieutenant. We can't help them now—but we must see what we can do to help Colonel Perry's escort. We'll push on.”

Marching beyond the hillside where the Rains dead had taken refuge among those low boulders, Whipple's men spotted a solitary horse silhouetted atop a knoll, off to their right. Even with his field glasses, the captain was unable to determine if it was an Indian pony or one of the army horses claimed by those warriors who had committed the butchery on Lieutenant Rains.

“It could be one of ours, sir,” Shelton reminded.

“I don't want to take the chance that it's a decoy,” Whipple argued. “We won't be lured into an ambush as easily as others might.”