Lay the Mountains Low (53 page)

Rainbow stepped deliberately to the wounded tracker rolling onto his back, his eyes flicking over his kinsmen as he coughed up blood from the hole in his chest. Sheared Wolf gazed up at the war party leader with a different look come over his face. Yellow Wolf saw how haunted and afraid was the light behind the eyes.

“S-spare my life, Rainbow,” the tracker begged, then coughed up a ball of blood again. “I am badly wounded and have … have some news for you.”

“I am not interested in your news, Sheared Wolf,” he said, stepping up to the tracker's shoulder. “But my news for you and the rest of your kind is that we have spared your lives too often already.” He pressed the muzzle of his Henry rifle against the Christian's head. “Now you can go to Heaven to tell your news to all your dead relations.”

Sheared Wolf's head barely moved as the bullet crashed into the man's brain. The eyes stayed open, still and lifeless, as Rainbow turned and walked toward the other Treaty men.

“Go on back to the Shadows now,” Rainbow said. “If you ever help the soldiers against your people again, you will have a bad end like Sheared Wolf.”

“We can keep our horses?” James Reuben asked.

“Go now,” Rainbow ordered. “Take your horses and go!”

“What about the other one we shot?” Yellow Wolf asked when the Christians were hurrying away on foot, leading their ponies.

“We will let him go tell the Shadows about us and what we do to those who betray us,” Rainbow said.

Two Moons grumbled, “We may as well go on back to our camp and take our families to the buffalo country. No use in staying here any longer now.”

“We must get farther back into the trees,” Rainbow warned. “The soldiers are close enough I can smell them already.”

BY TELEGRAPH

—

WASHINGTON.

—

Sitting Bull will Remain North.

WASHINGTON, July 14.—Major Walsh, of the Canada mounted police, visited Sitting Bull near the headwaters of French creek. Sitting Bull said he desired to remain with the Canadians during the summer; that he would do nothing against the law; he came there because he was tired of fighting, and if he could not make a living in Canada he would return to the United States. Spotted Eagle, Rain-in-the-Face, Medicine Bear, and a number of other chiefs of the hostile Sioux, were present, together with two hundred lodges. It is believed there must be some four or five hundred lodges of hostile Sioux now north of the boundary line, numbering at least 1,500 fighting men.

 

With Lieutenant Albert G. Forse of E Company guarding the rear of their withdrawal, Major Mason stopped his battalion every now and then on their retrograde march for the Clearwater that afternoon of the seventeenth, allowing Ad Chapman a chance to rest his two wounded trackers. While James Reuben welcomed every opportunity to get out of the saddle with his wrist injury, if only for a few minutes before
they pushed on, Abraham Brooks's shoulder wound prevented him from moving off his travois.
*

At their first stop, after posting some pickets, Mason assigned a few artillerymen to scrape out a shallow hole beside the trail. Here they laid the body of Captain John Levi, then dragged dirt back over the corpse before the battalion moved on into the late-afternoon light.

“Having accomplished all I desired in making this scout,” Mason had explained to his officers while the grave was being dug, “I have determined we won't pursue the Indians with my cavalry over a trail plainly impossible to handle a mounted force on.”

To Chapman's way of thinking, a double handful of Non-Treaty backtrail scouts had just succeeded in turning back Howard's army of half-a-goddamned-thousand!

As it fell progressively darker that evening, the going got slower and slower. They did not reach Lolo Creek until close to eleven o'clock. The volunteers led them across the stream to a small clearing on a gentle hillside, and Mason's command went into a cold bivouac.

Chapman himself didn't mind in the least. As soon as their wounded guides were made comfortable under a thin blanket, Ad curled up, the reins wrapped around his wrist, while his weary horse cropped at the nearby grass. Chapman figured the animal had to be more hungry than tired—while he himself was more weary than worried about his belly's gnawing emptiness.

Ad drifted off to sleep, thinking how lucky they'd been to lose only one in the ambush. If those warriors who had jumped their trackers had only waited, been patient a little while longer, letting Mason's battalion continue on up the trail into that dense maze of a forest where cavalry simply could not maneuver … why, he might well not be curled up here right now, missing the warmth of his wife's body
lying next to him in their bed, the coolness of his son's hand clutched in his as the boy learned to ride and to hold a carbine.

A nervous Mason had them up at first light and moving out as soon as it was clear enough to see the trail ahead, moving steadily down the slick, muddy slopes toward the Clearwater crossing. Chapman and his scouts brought the battalion to Howard's camp on the east bank of the river just after the main column had finished taking its breakfast and was preparing to recross to the south bank of the Clearwater in preparation for a march downriver to Lewiston.

As soon as he had turned over both wounded trackers to the army surgeons, Chapman walked into headquarters camp, tied off his horse, then settled on his haunches by the general's low fire. Within moments Howard had his cooks pouring coffee for Major Mason and the civilian, along with starting some bacon and hardtack frying in the grease already hardening on the bottom of the cast-iron skillets.

It had been more than twenty-eight hours since he had eaten last, so that breakfast beside the Clearwater in the shadow of the immense Bitterroot Mountains was just about the best Ad Chapman could remember eating in a long, long time.

“You understand your orders, Lieutenant?” Charles Rawn asked the youngest officer in the Seventh Infantry, who stood stiffly beside his horse.

At attention a few yards in front of the four members of his small scouting party, who were already mounted, Second Lieutenant Francis Woodbridge said, “Yes sir, Captain. I'm to look over the trail ascending into the mountains, get up to a point where I can look six or eight miles into Idaho, and determine if the Indians have passed or if they are coming up the far side.”

“Very good,” Rawn replied. “You have rations for four days, but I am expecting you back on the twenty-first.”

“Three days from now.”

“That's right, Lieutenant,” Rawn emphasized. “It's no more than thirty miles from our end of the trail up to the pass itself. See what you can of the far side—looking for those Nez Perce said to be fleeing from Idaho—then get on back here to help us finish building this post.”

Woodbridge saluted and without a word he mounted. Taking up the slack in his reins, the bright-eyed lieutenant, fresh out of West Point, said his farewell: “We'll be back by supper on the twenty-first, Captain.”

Rawn watched those five backs disappear through the trees, riding south up the Bitterroot valley where they would reach the end of the Lolo Trail. He sighed, hoping the young lieutenant would not put his small scouting detail in harm's way. He really needed the muscle of those five men if he was going to get these quarters and storehouses finished and sealed off before another Montana winter blew in.

 

*
Perhaps it's named this for the many switchbacks climbing up from Lolo Creek?

*
Horse Blanket claimed the white men, soldiers and civilians both, abandoned their Nez Perce scouts and he was compelled to carry Brooks with him on his horse, getting soaked with blood during the long ride.

J
ULY
19–20, 1877

N
OW THAT HE KNEW WHERE THE NON-TREATIES WERE
headed, Oliver O. Howard felt more uncomfortable sitting on the horns of this dilemma than he did sitting in one of those damnable instruments of torture the army called a McClellan saddle!

Once Joseph's warrior bands crossed from Idaho into Montana, they would no longer be Howard's Indians to chase and pacify. Then they would belong to Brigadier General Alfred H. Terry and his Department of Dakota. With the Nez Perce already well started on the Lolo Trail across the Bitterroot, Howard had begun to think it didn't make any sense for him to go traipsing along in their wake—although he had received orders from McDowell that he need not be mindful of division boundaries in pursuit of the Non-Treaty bands.

Through division headquarters in San Francisco, Howard had received General William T. Sherman's instructions to ignore such geographic boundaries on 26 June, and McDowell had again reminded him of Sherman's orders three days ago on 16 July when it appeared Howard was putting an end to his direct pursuit of the hostiles. What gave Oliver pause was the fact that according to settlers in the area and reports from Christian trackers, the terrain of the Lolo Trail was even more rugged than what his men had encountered on the far side of the Salmon River back in June.

At this point, 19 July, Howard was staring at an exhausted command, weary of almost a solid month of campaigning: breaking trail and fighting Indians both. Hacking their way through another two hundred miles of even rougher terrain was far from appealing.

Then there was his guarded concern that if he did follow
the retreating Indians, that would leave this region of Idaho devoid of enough soldiers to handle the eventuality of neighboring tribes rising up in revolt. Made bold by the Nez Perce successes, the other tribes in the Northwest had white settlers uneasy for hundreds of square miles. But Howard had more troops on the way: Colonel Frank Wheaton was on his way from Atlanta with infantry, and Major John Green was marching north from Fort Boise with more horse soldiers. They would reach Lapwai within the week. Then, Howard convinced himself, he would feel a lot more secure about pursuing the Nez Perce out of Idaho.

At that point, it didn't take long for him to devise a plan that should carry him over the next several weeks and on to putting an end to this outbreak. He would push downriver for Lapwai, on to Lewiston for resupply. Then he would march his column north for the Mullan Road. Although this route would be more than double the distance of the one-hundred-fifty-mile Lolo Trail, the fact that this freight route extending between Missoula and Spokane Falls was no more than a narrow wagon road did not deter his thinking. The Mullan was undeniably the best means for his command to reach western Montana.

His plan was as ambitious as it was daring—hoping to, be in position south of Missoula when the Nez Perce finally debouched from the trail in the Bitterroot valley. Over the last few days Oliver Otis had come to realize he could not afford to rest on the laurels of what he had won at the Battle of the Clearwater. That faint praise sent his way in the Western papers was already beginning to fade. He needed to keep the pressure on if he was going to blunt the criticism coming from both the civilian press and the highest echelons of the army.