Lay the Mountains Low (51 page)

Howard nodded. “I appreciate your help and understanding, Mr. Sutherland.”

“No need to thank me at all, General,” the correspondent replied. “Only a blind man couldn't have seen that those two days on the Clearwater were the only fight Joseph's had where his ambition was victory … and its plain to see that, ever after, his highest aim will be simply to escape your army.”

 

*
As the years passed, ample evidence came to light to show that Joseph may have indeed been very interested in surrendering to Howard. Years after the war, Lieutenant C. E. S. Wood wrote that he had been told by an unnamed Nez Perce informant, “Joseph wished to surrender rather than leave the country or bring further misery on his people, that, in council, he was overruled by the older chiefs … and would not desert the common cause.” As late as 1963 Josiah Red Wolf stated, “… not only was Joseph hard to persuade to stay in the fight, but he tried to drop out after the [Clearwater battle].”

*
Which is just what happened. These men in chains, along with their women and children, were herded on foot through scorching heat and choking dust to Fort Lapwai, more than sixty miles away, then on to Lewiston, from there by steamer to Fort Vancouver, where they remained incarcerated behind walls and bars until the end of the Nez Perce War that winter.

K
HOY
-T
SAHL
, 1877

“I
AM NOT AFRAID TO SAY THIS
!”
WHITE BIRD EXCLAIMED AS
the twilight deepened, accenting his many wrinkles as the firelight played off his face. “There were too many cowards in our last fight with the
suapiesr!
”

Toohoolhoolzote
grunted his agreement just an arm's length from Yellow Wolf. “There was no convincing them to rejoin us in our fight. Cowards who fled to the smoking lodge. Some cowards slipped back down to the village while the rest of us held the soldiers away from our families!”

Looking Glass bolted to his feet, furious. “Because I came down from the ridge to see that my people were safe, does that make me a coward in your eyes?”

“Did you stay and fight through the cold night?”

Shaking his head, Looking Glass answered White Bird, “You do not understand. My people had been attacked and run off by the soldiers. More than any of you, I did not want to be chased away again, carrying only what we had on our backs.” He whirled on the
Wallowa
chief, pointing accusingly. “Joseph should have had the camp packed and ready to go before we were forced to fall back the second day. Joseph should have made more women tear down their lodges and pack their goods so that we would be ready.”

Yellow Wolf glanced over at his chief. It was true he had not played a major role in any of the fights against the
suapies
thus far. But Joseph had fought as a warrior with the other fighting men, returning to the camp only when it appeared the soldiers were about to roll over the entrenched warriors. There had been little time for the women to tear down the lodges and pack the travois before the warriors came boiling down to the river.

The sun had finally come out that morning, warming the
lush, grassy meadows where the thousands of ponies grazed after the last two days of intermittent rain that made for a muddy, slippery trail ascending from the Kamiah crossing. After breakfast the women scattered to dig what camas the Shadows' hogs hadn't already rooted out of the damp soil. The white men who had settled in the area had always been that way—turning those disgusting animals loose on the
Nee-Me-Poo
digging grounds. Many days ago the settlers fled the
Weippe,
so this morning the young men rode off to torch all the white man's buildings they could find in the area, shooting and butchering what cattle they did not want to steal but refusing to touch one of the white man's hogs. Instead, the warriors killed every one.

Now with the sun's setting, this momentous, solemn council had begun to air all the grievances among the chiefs and to determine the future of the Non-Treaty peoples.

“But instead of talking about what is behind us in the past,” Looking Glass growled, “I think we should be talking about what should be for the days ahead.”

“I agree,” said
Hahtalekin
, known as Red Echo or Red Owl. Earlier that afternoon the Palouse chief had come in with sixteen warriors. “Yesterday is behind us. Now we must think about what to do tomorrow. Where to go.”

“Why do you and Looking Glass say we have to go anywhere?” Joseph argued, having been silent for a long time. “Why can't we stay and fight, die if we must, in our own country?”

“Some of our leaders are giving us bad advice,” Shore Crossing said as he leaped to his feet near White Bird. “I think we should listen to Looking Glass and go to the buffalo country!”

White Bird shook his head, pointing at the young “Red Coat” warrior from his own band, one of three who had worn their famous red blankets tied at their necks while making the daring charges at
Lahmotta.
” Is this what you want to do now that we are gathered to fight the soldiers? You sons of evil started this war for all the rest of us. No,
you are not running away. You will stay with me and Joseph and fight till we kill all the white men, or die like
Nee-Me-Poo
warriors!”

“No, this cannot be so,” argued Looking Glass. “Don't we have enough friends and brothers dead already? And still the
suapies
and Shadows come after our trail. They seem like the sands in the riverbed. No matter how bravely we fight them, the more we kill, the more will invade our country.”

“Can't we make the best peace we can with Cut-Off Arm?” Joseph pleaded. “Think of our women and children—they will be left widows and orphans if we keep on fighting.”

“Surrender?” Looking Glass snorted. “Those of our fighting men the soldiers do not kill in battle Cut-Off Arm will hang.”

“This is true,” White Bird agreed begrudgingly. “I remember what the
suapies
did to Captain Jack and his Modocs when he surrendered to the Shadows. They died at the end of a rope!”

“If our men are either killed by the soldiers in battle or hanged,” Looking Glass argued, “then who will care for our women and children, Joseph? How can you say we should stay when our brothers from Lapwai and Kamiah have turned their backs on us and are helping the Shadows like snakes?”

Joseph turned to White Bird, saying, “Perhaps some of the Shadows' wrongs against us have made a few of our young men do bad things. Because of that you are saying we must now give up the land of our fathers and follow Looking Glass into the land of the buffalo far away from the place of our birth?”

“Yes!” Looking Glass cheered. “The white men there are not like the Shadows in this Idaho country. They trade with us. We leave our lodges and poles and many horses with the Shadows and the Flathead every hunting season when we visit them on our way home from the buffalo country. Rainbow and Five Wounds are just back, so they
will tell you: The
E-sue-gha
say they are willing to go on the warpath against the white man with us!”

“But what of Cut-Off Arm?” White Bird wondered.

Rainbow stepped forward to say, “If we follow Looking Glass, we will put the Idaho soldiers behind us. Cut-Off Arm will not follow us with his army over the mountains.”

“Joseph,” White Bird persuaded, apparently won over, “perhaps we can leave the war here. The Shadows will not remain angry with us for long. If some of your people want to come back, they can return to their old homes in a few summers; maybe even by next spring everything will be back to the way it was before.”

But the tall chief of the
Wallamwatkin
band prodded the other leaders by saying, “What are we fighting for? Is it for our lives? No. It is for this land where the bones of our fathers lie buried. I do not want to take my women among strangers. I do not want to die in a faraway land. Some of you tried to say once that I was afraid of the whites. You evil-talkers stay here with me now and you will have plenty of fighting at my side! We will put our women behind us in these mountains and die on our own fighting for them. I would rather do that than run I know not where.”

Toohoolhoolzote
, that stocky firebrand, now said in a calming tone, “Joseph, I know you think only of the families, those who do no fighting. Now it is time for you to think of the good we will do for them by no longer fighting, by going over the mountains away from the soldiers.”

“Joseph?” Looking Glass prodded impatiently.

He wagged his head. “I don't know—”

Suddenly the canny Looking Glass was moving around the circle, gesturing grandly. “The rest of you? Do you want your families to die here like Joseph does? Tell me how many more of your young warriors do you want to bury before you will see we can make a new life for ourselves on the plains of the buffalo country?”

White Bird laid a hand on Joseph's shoulder. In a soft, fatherly voice, he said, “Joseph, we must take our bands across the mountains.” Then he promptly turned to the
crowd and loudly proclaimed, “I vote with Looking Glass! We take our people east from this trouble.”

Looking Glass literally bounded around the fire with youthful exuberance, shouting out a song of victory as he whirled and stomped in the dancing firelight. “To the buffalo country!”

Then more than seven hundred voices—warriors, women, and children, too—were raised to that summer sky, to the very stars hung over that ancient camping ground of
Weippe
.

“To the buffalo country! To the buffalo country! To the buffalo country!”

A
D
Chapman was ready to ride.

The last four days of sitting around on his thumbs with these soldiers who dillydallied in this direction, then hemhawed in the other had just about driven him crazy! But late last evening Major Edwin C. Mason, Howard's former inspector general, came round to the bivouac of McConville's volunteers, whistling Chapman up to ride out this morning so he could lead and sometimes translate for the half-dozen Nez Perce trackers the major was taking along under James Reuben.

They weren't all Presbyterians or Catholics, Ad knew. At least one of them, a fella called Horse Blanket, claimed he had no religion of any kind. He hadn't cut his hair like his Christian companions. Chapman knew Horse Blanket kept his hair tucked up under his white man hat.

Chapman was up by three-thirty on the morning of the seventeenth. Mason had the scouting detail moving out less than an hour later when it grew light enough to see the trail as it wound into the hills away from the Kamiah crossing. What with Mason being an infantry commander, Chapman thought it a mite strange that Howard had assigned his newly appointed chief of staff to command a battalion of five companies, both cavalry and a detachment of artillerymen, including their mountain howitzer, along with more than twenty of McConville's citizens, to reconnoiter beyond the junction of the Lolo and Orofino Trails to the
Weippe
Prairie. It had taken the command all of yesterday, the sixteenth, to get itself across the Clearwater—no more than ten soldiers at a time in that single boat they could find and put in service.

Then, too, Chapman thought it strange that General Howard had picked the major to lead this scouting detail, because in the last few weeks Mason hadn't lost an opportunity to show just how much disdain he held for horse soldiers. In fact, it was plain to everyone who had ever listened to the man talk that Mason viewed the fighting abilities of the First Cavalry with nothing less than an undisguised distrust, if not an outright contempt.