Lay the Mountains Low (30 page)

Over there in the canyons of the Clearwater, the Non-Treaty bands would take refuge with Looking Glass's people—themselves fleeing a band of soldiers. The night they had crossed the Salmon and were camped at
Aipadass,
word had come that the
suapies
had attacked the old peace talker, Looking Glass! Now even he was ready to join the other war chiefs and drive the Shadows from the land of the
Nee-Me-Poo
for all time.

Yellow Wolf felt strong in his heart.

Because of what the fighting men had accomplished that day, those
suapies
entrenched far up the Cottonwood would not dare leave their burrows to follow the village. And Cut-Off Arm was still far, far away on the other side of the Salmon, mired down in mud with his “day-after-tomorrow army.”

 

*
Charles Johnson, Alonzo B. Leland, and D. H. Howser (who subsequently died of his wounds).

J
ULY
5–7,1877

BY TELEGRAPH

—

General Grant Leaves England for the Continent.

—

Later Dispatches from the
Oregon Indian War.

—

OREGON.

—

Latest from the Indian War.

PORTLAND, July 5.—A courier arrived at Lewiston, July 2d, from Kamia, says Colonel Whipple and his command had an engagement with the Looking-glass band on Clear Water, to-day. Four Indians were killed and left on the field dead. Many others were wounded. The squaws and children took to the river and several were drowned. The fighting was still going on when the courier left. Looking-glass's band is estimated by scouts to number about 400. At three o'clock this morning a courier arrived, having left General Howard's camp on the night of the 29th. The troops had made a crossing that day, and scouts who had been out on the hills found stock but no Indians The latter are believed to have gone down toward the mouth of the Salmon, and to be making for Gray's crossing on the Salmon, thence crossing on Snake river at the mouth of the Grande Ronde. Dispatches were forwarded to Walla Walla, to be telegraphed, so as to apprise persons in Grande Ronde and Wallowapays.

H
IS FIRST LOOK AT A NEZ PERCE HAD BEEN FROM SOME
-what of a distance: across the Salmon River that is, back
three days and many, many miles ago, just before General Oliver Otis Howard had somehow willed his army column to this western side of the furious and foamy Salmon River.

An Easterner by birth and Harvard graduate by way of laurels, Thomas A. Sutherland had done a bit of traveling in Europe and the Middle East through the aid of some family money before he ended up in Portland, Oregon, working as an ill-paid stringer for the
Standard.
The very afternoon the newsroom was first abuzz with reports of the Nez Perce outbreak, the twenty-seven-year-old had abandoned everything else and marched into his editor's office, applying for this opportunity to march into the field when the army set off on its campaign to punish the hostiles, just as the army always had.

“Newsmen have always been along with the principal officer,” he had declared boldly.

“And who would that be now?” he was asked.

“Why, I suppose it would be Howard himself. A general, one-armed, lost it in the Civil War, you see. I've looked up what I can on him. General Oliver Otis Howard—I shall attach myself to him.”

“Just the way Mark Kellogg attached himself to Custer, will you?”

Sutherland had immediately reacted to the reference. He felt his face drain of blood as he remembered how Kellogg had gone in with Custer at the death. Two days later they had found the civilian's body among the butchered and mutilated dead.

“I don't think that has any way of happening,” he retorted, tugging at his collar in the editor's steamy third-floor office. “Those were the mighty Sioux, after all. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull—those Sioux. But these … these are the … well, they're just Nez Perce, sir.”

“Very well,” his editor had agreed. “I'll grant you a month's leave with the same rate of pay. Send in your dispatches by courier or telegraph if you can, but I'm not going to pay for anything extravagant from you, young man.”

His heart leaped in his chest. “No, sir. Nothing extravagant
at all!”

Thomas Sutherland wasn't dull-witted, either. He promptly sprinted down to the telegraph office and fired off several telegrams he sent speeding all the way across the continent, paying for the lofty charges out of his own pocket on the speculation that one of the newspapers would bite. Three days later, as he was making his final preparations to embark for Lewiston, Idaho, that very afternoon, Sutherland had received word from not only the San Francisco
Chronicle
but no less than the New York
Herald
itself! Why, he'd have eyes from coast to coast reading his copy written at the front.

He reached Lewiston the following evening, finding the town patrolled by eighty armed men under torchlight, ever watchful of any dark-skinned intruder. In the saddle before dawn the following morning, pulling his packhorse, Sutherland was bound for Fort Lapwai and points south where he could track down Howard's column.

While he soon found out he wasn't the only correspondent hurrying to the front, he alone enjoyed the élan and prestige of arriving with credentials from two of the most prestigious papers in the entire country.

“My editors wanted to assure themselves of a firsthand account for their readers on both coasts,” he had explained when first introduced to the general commanding.

Clearly, such status was not lost on the famous one-armed Union general and survivor of the scandals in the Freedmen's Bureau. Since that first day, the twenty-ninth of June, Sutherland had been messing with Howard and the general's staff.

“Extend young Sutherland here every courtesy,” Howard had told his headquarters staff and the officer corps that night before they made their first attempt to cross the Salmon after the Nez Perce. “See that he is not wanting for the details that will tell his readers just what a noble effort this army and its campaign is all about.”

Not that there weren't times when Sutherland didn't
wonder just what he had bitten off, slogging up the narrow trail toward the Seven Devils area, high into a country where nothing but grass grew and even the mules had trouble staying upright. The soldiers lost a few of the overburdened ones careening down the side of the Salmon River canyon, tumbling some two thousand feet to a rocky death below. Cold and wet nights, when it alternated between rain and snow, followed by foggy, drizzly days. And when the sun came out the men became even more miserable when their dampened clothing gave each one of them a steam bath in the saddle!

But there were small victories as well, like the discovery two days ago of those caches left behind by the fleeing hostiles at Canoe Encampment some eight miles below Pittsburgh Landing on the Snake River—proof, so the officers claimed, that Joseph's Indians had grown desperate and were fully on the run now.

Still, it had been many days now since the army had struggled across the Salmon into this unforgiving wilderness, and the best scouting reports said the enemy was miles ahead of them. Then as the correspondent rode with Howard's advance on the afternoon of the fifth, word sent with friendly trackers from Captain Whipple at Cotton-wood relayed how Joseph's hostiles had recrossed the river up ahead at a place called Craig Billy Crossing, putting not only distance but also days between them and the army in striking across the Camas Prairie.

Sutherland could read the utter frustration and seething anger on the general's face as they descended to the mouth of Billy Creek—a canyon so narrow the command had to work their way down single-file—and these officers, proven veterans of the Civil War, all studied the snow-swollen torrent that was the Salmon River … wondering how the Nez Perce had gotten their horse herd across, how they had managed to negotiate their women and children and camp equipage across that river racing more than seven miles per hour, foaming and tumbling like a caldron. Wondering,
Sutherland knew, how they themselves were now going to effect this army's crossing, too.

That's when Christian tracker James Reuben demonstrated how Joseph's people had reached the far side by swimming his horse into the frothy current to the north bank, then returning in due fashion. But when one of the white scouts, Frank Parker, bravely attempted the same feat, he got no farther than a few yards from the shore before the mighty current made him think retreat was a far better choice. Then Reuben instructed Howard in the old craft of constructing bull boats—but this column had few buffalo hides!

After sending two volunteers, Jack Carleton and “Laughing” Williams, upstream to commandeer some boats the command could use in ferrying men and supplies across the Salmon, Howard learned that the pair of scouts had located a boat—but in coming downstream to Billy Creek they had encountered a series of turbulent rapids, capsized, and barely escaped the river with their lives.

That's when Second Lieutenant Harrison G. Otis, artilleryman, was bold enough to point out the poor cabin standing nearby and asked one of the interpreters to see if any of the friendlies along knew what the white owner's name was.

“Why is that of any import to our crossing?” asked the general's young aide, Lieutenant C. E. S. Wood.

“Because,” Otis suggested, “we could ask of the owner to disassemble it and construct a raft.”

“Capital idea, sir!” Howard roared, slapping his one glove against that left thigh in exuberance.

As it turned out, the poor hovel didn't belong to a white homesteader at all.

“His name is Luke Billy?” Howard repeated as Sutherland wet the end of his pencil on the tip of his tongue and scratched down the pertinent details in his small leather-bound field ledger.

“That's what the white men call him,” Ad Chapman said,
waving up one of the trackers from Lapwai. “He's a friendly himself.”

“This one?” Howard asked. When the interpreter nodded, he continued, “Ask him if we can dismantle his cabin—use it for a raft to cross the river here and pursue the Joseph bands.”

Without delay, Luke Billy readily agreed and even helped the young Otis and his soldiers tear down the roof and walls of his poor house here at the mouth of Billy Creek. At the same time, the cavalry was collecting all their lariats, those three-fifths-inch ropes each man was assigned to picket his mount each night, used in erecting company rows in bivouac. The logs proved to be no skimpy planks. Instead, they were at least a foot thick, measuring a foot wide by some forty feet in length. The sweating, barebacked enlisted men hauled the rain-soaked timbers down to the bank of the Salmon, where the engineers and artillery officers took over, supervising the assembly of that huge raft on which General Oliver Otis Howard's fortunes would soon sail some two hundred yards across the white-capped, wind-whipped surface of the Salmon, so he could continue his dogged pursuit of Joseph and his bloodstained henchmen.

God knows Howard had the manpower and the resources coming to crush the upstart rebels … if only the army could only get the hostiles to stop and fight. It seemed that not only the division commander, McDowell, but also the leaders of the army itself in Washington wanted to snuff out this little fire, and as quickly as possible.

To Sutherland's way of thinking, despite the general's numerous setbacks, Howard simply refused to regard the Nez Perce as a serious threat. What he was fearful of more than anything else was the possibility that Joseph's hostiles would form a junction with the Indians south in the valley of the Weiser River, or with the noisy renegades along the Columbia River, even the small bands of Spokanes and other inconsequential tribes to the north and northwest
who, while they were no danger of and by themselves, could make for a lot of trouble when confederated under Chief Joseph's bloody outlaw banner.

“You do realize there are some twelve thousand Indians residing in the Northwest, Mr. Sutherland,” the general declared. “If Joseph is able to score a decisive victory over our forces, why, the disaffected among those tribes would likely swell the ranks of Joseph's fighting men. Instead of us having to fight hundreds, my army would be pitted against thousands! I simply must stop them and stamp out this fire in the next few days.”

So as his troops sweated and groused constructing their huge raft of hewn timbers that fifth day of July, Howard disclosed to Sutherland the details of just what plans he had put into operation to counter such threats of a full-scale territorial outbreak.

“Counting what I presently have in this column, and what is already on its way to me,” Howard explained, “I'll soon have ten companies of cavalry—six hundred and seventeen men. In addition, Mr. Sutherland, I'll lead six companies of infantry, one hundred and seventy-seven men. Add to that five companies of artillery, more than one hundred and sixty-six men, and your final tally shows that I'll presently be leading an army of more than nine hundred and sixty soldiers drawn from two departments of the army. Once we catch up to the Non-Treaty bands, you can plainly see why this war will be brought to a swift and dramatic conclusion.”