Lay the Mountains Low (57 page)

“Where are those two Shadows of yours, Sun Necklace?” someone called out in the middle of the hubbub.

The older man, and his son, too, turned this way and that as they searched the trees on three sides of them.

“Ha!” another man laughed at them. “Did your prisoners get away from you while you were getting your manhood soaked?”

Red Moccasin Tops angrily slapped the surface of the steamy pool as the clamor continued to grow down in the meadow around those three horsemen.

But it was Shore Crossing, his older cousin, who snarled like a dog restrained too long on a short rope, “We will find them for you, Sun Necklace. Your son and I are good at finding runaway Shadows—”

A loud yell arose from many throats in the meadow as more than two hundred men and women cried out in unison—a sound that raised the hair on the back of Yellow Wolf's neck as he stood, the hot water sluicing off his sinewy muscles, down his bony shoulders and boyish hips. Through the midst of the cries and keening, he heard
Ollokot
calling his name as the war chief loped toward him on foot.

“Yellow Wolf!”

“I am ready,
Ollokot
!”

With an impish grin the
Wallamwatkin
war chief skidded to a halt and peered at this naked young warrior. “You better put on your clothes before you cause a stir among the young women in the camp! I want you to come with me.”

“Come? Where?”

“Even though we have left Cut-Off Arm's
suopies
behind,”
Ollokot
began as a serious expression came over the
Wallowa
war chief's face. He pointed to the east, in the direction the Lolo Trail took into the Bitterroot valley, then finished, “it seems there are some Montana soldiers waiting down below to make new trouble for us now.”

* * *

R
EINFORCEMENTS
were coming, but—at best—they were more than a hundred-fifty miles and a week away. Back when the captain in charge of building the army's newest post four miles southwest of Missoula City came asking for volunteers to ride up the Lolo Trail with one of his lieutenants in a search for an overdue reconnaissance party, Chauncey Barbour volunteered right there and then. Even though he was editor of the
Weekly Missoulian,
putting out a newspaper would have to wait, and folks might just have to miss an issue for the first time in many years—because settling these Indian troubles was that much more important.

Besides, those oncoming Nez Perce had made themselves the biggest news of this summer.

Along with a handful of other local citizens, Barbour had climbed toward the pass with Lieutenant Charles Coolidge of A Company, Seventh U. S. Infantry, hoping to run across another officer named Woodbridge. They ended up finding the lieutenant's party coming down the trail, at which point Coolidge's detail turned back for town themselves. Woodbridge's men would spend one more day taking a more leisurely pace down to the valley.

But Woodbridge had hurried back to the unfinished post by midday with two hard-used Bitterroot civilians, both of them reporting to Captain Rawn—along with every one of his quartermaster employees helping in the fort's construction—that the Nez Perce had reached the hot springs!

The warrior bands who had chopped up Perry's First Cavalry at White Bird Canyon, the butchers who had wiped out Rains's eleven-man scouting detail, then went on to play cat and mouse with Randall's seventeen civilians before killing two of them … the very same bunch of Joseph's henchmen who had stood off more than half a thousand of General Howard's finest troops were now thundering down the east slope of the Lolo Trail and heading right for the Bitterroot valley!

“I need your help, more than ever,” Charles Rawn
had proposed to his eager civilians. “I don't think I can stare down seven hundred and fifty Nez Perce with only the thirty-five soldiers I can muster in my command.” His intense eyes started to rake over the civilians slowly.

“Count me in, Captain,” Chauncey Barbour was the first to declare.

“If any of you volunteer,” Rawn offered the rest, “I'll do my best to provide you with ammunition and rations.”

“Sounds fair 'nough to me,” responded E. A. Kenney.

“I'll go, too,” W. J. Stephens said.

Barbour turned around and looked over the group. “Enough of us thrown in with Captain Rawn here, we just might have what we need to keep Joseph's warriors out of the Bitterroot.”

More of the civilians started to volunteer then.

Finally, Barbour suggested, “Captain, I figure we ought to ride into town and spread the word. I know we'll enlist more volunteers soon as the folks know what's coming our way.”

On 25 July, after only one day of preparation, Rawn left behind a skeleton force of ten men and started his command of twenty-five regulars away from the unfinished walls of his new post, accompanied by more than twenty heavily armed Montana citizens, all of whom had volunteered to stop the Nez Perce from bringing that Idaho war into their valley.

At the mouth of the Lolo they ran into thirty-five civilians from Fort Owens, near Stevensville in the Bitterroot valley. It was here that the nominal commander of that volunteer militia told Rawn he doubted they had enough manpower to turn back the Nez Perce. Refusing to be cowed by civilian naysayers, Rawn told the valley men to go back to their homes and he forged ahead. The thirty-five reluctantly followed.

Sixteen miles from Missoula, only five short miles up Lolo Creek from the mouth of the canyon, the mountainsides narrowed to less than two hundred yards, with a
rugged, precipitous wall closing in on the south—both sides of the trail bordered by thick stands of timber, the forest floor cluttered with deadfall.

It was here that the cautious captain's slow-moving skirmish formation took its first fire from a few Nez Perce outriders. Both soldiers and civilians quickly scurried for cover and had themselves a short, ineffectual exchange with those Indian riflemen seen only from the puffs of gunsmoke dotting the canyon vegetation.

“My intentions are to compel the Indians to surrender their arms and ammunition, and to dispute their passage, by force of arms, into the Bitterroot valley,” Rawn explained as the Nez Perce fire noticeably trickled off, then—for some reason—disappeared entirely.

“This is the place,” Rawn determined as he peered from side to side, studying the site he had chosen, which occupied a bench north of Lolo Creek. “Steep as that slope is, they can't get around us to the south. Even though that north side isn't near so treacherous, I don't think even a mountain goat could pass, much less a tribe of Indians with all their impedimenta. So unless they disarm and dismount, we'll give them a fight right here. Let's dig in.”

He now put some his soldiers and volunteers to work scratching out a line of rifle pits in a lazy L shape, one leg stretching to the north from the bench, the other roughly to the west. The rest of his command Rawn ordered to drag up deadfall and to cut down more, all of it to be laid horizontally atop the dirt excavated from those trenches at the rear of the log barricades. To top off their fortifications, the men dropped what is called a head log on top of the walls, shoving a short limb under it at intervals, which opened a space large enough to get the muzzles of their rifles through.

While he got these labors under way, the captain sent local E. A. Kenney to ride on up the trail and attempt some contact with the Nez Perce camp. Early that evening of the twenty-fifth, the scout, who had been elected as “captain” of the Missoula volunteers, returned with an Indian he declared had the Christian name of John Hill.

“This one's been sent to you by Joseph hisself, Captain,” Kenney explained.

“Those warriors we skirmished with got back and told him we're here?”

“The whole camp knows,” Kenney said. “Four scouts was left behind to keep an eye on us when three of 'em headed back with the news. This fella Hill was one of 'em waiting along the trail to keep an eye on us. When he spotted me coming up the road on my lonesome, he come out of hiding. He led me to their camp this side of the hot springs.”

“How far's that?”

“Less'n a handful of miles from here,” Kenney answered.

“How many? Two or three?” and Rawn's eyes narrowed, the skin between his eyes wrinkling with worry.

“No more'n that,” Kenney said with a shrug, chewing on the side of his lower lip. “Lemme tell you—them chiefs and all their bucks was painted up and ready to wrassle when they surrounded me! I figger they mean to strut and crow up a storm in front of us so we'll just step aside for 'em when they come on down the trail.”

The captain asked, “You get a chance to tell the chiefs we're here to turn them back from entering the valley?”

“I told 'em that's why you're digging in here,” the civilian sighed. “Explained how folks here in Montana didn't want 'em bringing their Idaho war over here.”

“So what'd Joseph have to say for himself?”

“He sent this Injun back with me to ask the soldier chief if you're gonna let his people leave the pass, let them go on by way of Missoula City for the buffalo country.”

“That almost sounds like a man who doesn't figure on making trouble,” Barbour piped up scornfully.

“How the hell we gonna trust that red son of a bitch after he's been killing men and ruining white women over there in Idaho?” Amos Buck shrieked.

His brother Fred Buck chimed in, “I say we hold this here redskin as our hostage while we explain to the rest of
them savages what's gonna happen to 'em if they come on down the trail!”

“Hold on,” Rawn soothed, then turned back to Kenney. “Does Joseph sound to be peaceable to you?”

The scout nodded. “The chiefs said they would go their way peacefully if you let 'em pass.”

Rawn sighed, studying his boot toes a long time before he looked up at the civilian to say, “All right, Mr. Kenney. We'll hold this Indian here with us for safekeeping while you go back up the road.”

“Go back up the road, Captain?”

“I'm sending you to tell Joseph I want to talk with him myself tomorrow,” Rawn explained for the hearing of them all. “Tell him to come to our camp in the morning and we'll have a talk about where his people can go now.”

 

*
The Lolo Hot Springs made famous by Lewis and Clark on their journey west in 1805.

J
ULY
26, 1877

“W
HICH ONE OF THESE IS WHITE BIRD?” CAPTAIN CHARLES
C. Rawn quietly asked of volunteer leader E. A. Kenney as the white men brought their horses to a halt a few yards from the two Nez Perce.

“The oldest one there on your left,” indicated the civilian as the two chiefs looked over the line of white men.

“Looking Glass is the other,” Rawn surmised with much disappointment, glancing at the decorated mirror hanging from the chief's neck. “Which means that Joseph didn't come.”

“Right.” Kenney pointed beyond the pair. “I figger he's back with the rest of their chiefs—in that group you see waiting at them trees.”

“If he's the leader of the whole band of hostiles, do you suppose he sent these two other chiefs out simply to toy with me?”

Kenney didn't speak immediately. Instead, he looked over that group waiting well behind the two delegates, searching for Joseph. Finally he shrugged and said, “Maybe he's over there. Hell, I don't have no idea why Joseph ain't here.”

It was late Thursday afternoon, 26 July, when Rawn, accompanied by Captain William Logan, Chief Chariot, and the newly arrived Montana governor, Benjamin F. Potts, along with more than a hundred soldiers and “irregulars,” moved out from behind their log-and-pit barricades under a white handkerchief tied to the barrel of a Long-Tom Springfield rifle and rode up the Lolo Trail toward Woodman's Prairie, where Joseph's village was now camped. Upon spotting the big gathering of warriors drawn up on a ridge and displaying themselves in an intimidating manner,
the white delegation had stopped just beyond the range of the Nez Perce rifles.

“Let's begin with the point you need to impress upon them about disarming, Captain,” prodded Potts, ever the politician.

Over the last few days the governor of Montana Territory had hustled down from Helena by stage. Leading a group of some fifty volunteers from the territorial capital, Potts and his civilians had reached Missoula City a little past three o'clock that very morning. As soon as he had acquired three horses at a livery, Potts and two of his staff immediately led their volunteer brigade south for the Lolo Trail, reaching the barricades just before noon.

Sizing up the situation as only an elected official could, the governor told Rawn, “It would be madness for us to attack their camp with an inadequate force. The only thing that can be done is to hold these Indians in check until such a force arrives that will compel their surrender.”