Lay the Mountains Low (59 page)

“Well?” Chauncey demanded.

“Yes, Captain,” Potts huffed. “Is the fact you've returned so quickly a good sign? Or a portent of trouble?”

With the makings of a shrug, Rawn disclosed, “I don't know for sure. A voice inside is warning me that the Nez Perce are planning an attack. But on the other hand, Looking Glass offered to surrender all the ammunition in his camp, as a guarantee his Indians intend to go through this country peaceably.”

“I sure as the devil pray you set that godless red bastard on the right path!” Potts grumbled.

“I think for want of ammunition, or Chariot's threat to fight alongside with us, the Nez Perce are wavering,” Rawn declared.

Potts enthused, “Now's the time to hold fast, Captain!”

With a nod of affirmation, the captain continued, “I repeated that nothing short of their unconditional surrender would be accepted by the army. I could tell he didn't like that a whit, gentlemen. Not at all. But, in turn, he could see I was not about to bend like a reed in the wind. So that's when he asked me for another meeting tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow?” Potts echoed in a higher pitch.

“Perhaps another day will find General Howard's column racing up behind the village,” Rawn had asserted hopefully.

“Have you received some news from Idaho I don't know about?” the governor demanded.

“No,” the captain admitted. “But, even allowing for the Nez Perce marching a little faster up the Lolo, with General Howard's column coming out of Idaho right behind these hostiles, they shouldn't be but a day, maybe two, behind this camp.”

Potts puffed his chest out showily. “So we're going to have to come out here again and beg a goddamned audience with this vermin-infested redskin tomorrow morning?”

Rawn's face had suddenly beamed, as if he were the cat who had cornered the canary. “No, we won't be begging for another meeting, Governor. Before he turned to leave, I told the chief if he wanted to have any further communication with me … it would have to be under a flag of truce at our fortified barricades.”

“So there's no definite plans to hold another parley?” Barbour inquired.

“Nothing definite,” Rawn confessed. “But I did tell him that I had to see him at the rifle pits by noon tomorrow.”

Later that Friday evening as a relentless drizzle began, the newspaperman crabbed through the log-and-rifle-pit barricades, making a firm count of the current manpower available to the captain. A day ago, at the height of the scare, Rawn could boast a strong garrison. Including officers and enlisted, civilians, and about eighteen Flathead warriors, Barbour had tallied 216 men ready to deny the Nez Perce passage if and when they pressed the issue a day ago.

But things sometimes have a way of unraveling on a man.

As more and more of the valley volunteers argued over the possibility of the Nez Perce remaining peaceable as they passed through the Bitterroot, small groups of civilians began to slip away just after darkness gripped the canyon. Rumors that Looking Glass had guaranteed not to harm any of the valley residents were good enough for more than half of them.

Throughout that soggy night of 27 July, volunteers continued to saddle up and ride away for their homes. Then, just before dawn, three unarmed Nez Perce approached the
breastworks and were taken into custody.

“Tom Hill,” one of them gave his name to E. A. Kenney.

Kenney in turn explained to Rawn, “He's kin to John Hill, Cap'n. Part of Poker Joe's band.”

With Hill were a half-breed companion named George Amos and an elderly full-blood named
Kannah.

“The old one's a squaw man,” Kenney explained.

“He looks awful Indian to me,” Rawn stated. “Where I come from a squaw man is a white fella who marries an Indian squaw.”

“In this country, it means half-man, half-woman.”
*

All three had been visiting the Non-Treaty camp up the Lolo Trail but sneaked out to reach the soldier lines over the objections of their chiefs. Having spent years in the Bitterroot, they admitted not having much stomach for a fight with the white man.
**

Still, Rawn's diminishing manpower wasn't the thorniest problem he had to tackle. Come morning, he was about to find out that Looking Glass and his people weren't going to play along with the captain's delaying game any longer.

At 8:00
A.M.
on 28 July Pierre had come in from scouting close to the Nez Perce camp with the astounding news that the hostiles were tearing down their lodges and packing up for the trail.

“That could mean that the scouts they surely have posted on their back trail have brought news of Howard's approach!” Rawn cheered. “We'll have to delay them only a little while—until the general's cavalry can race up on their rear.”

“It might also mean that Looking Glass has decided not to enter Montana,” Potts conjectured, tugging on his Van Dyke. “They might be pulling back to Idaho after all.”

“Either way,” Barbour declared aloud as he madly scribbled notes on that pad perched upon his knee, “you've won this bloodless little fray, Captain Rawn!”

Some of the giddy civilians set up a hurraw for the officer, for themselves, and for that day they sent the Nez Perce packing without firing a shot.

But at just past ten o'clock, Chauncey Barbour and the rest were brutally yanked out of their self-congratulatory reverie.

“Injuns! Injuns!”

“I see ‘em!”

“Goddamn—lookit all of ‘em!”

Barbour brought the looking glasses from his eyes and quietly exclaimed, “The red bastards are slipping right around us!”

 

*
Delaware Jim reportedly had scouted for explorer John C. Fremont in the 1840s and had worked in this local area as early as the 1850s as a hunter, guide, and interpreter.

*
Devil's Backbone,
vol. 5, the
Plainsmen
series.

*
A squaw man, as the Nez Perce would put it, is “one who does not have the dignity of a warrior” To their way of thinking, such a person was gender-neutral. In history contemporary to the Nez Perce War, there were two such persons. One had been killed in Lewiston by a miner during the gold rush, and the other died at Kamiah, one of Lawyer's Christians.

**
Dawn placed the three under arrest and would take them back with him to the Missoula post where they would remain in custody for the remainder of the war.

J
ULY
28, 1877

H
IS LAKOTA ENEMIES CALLED HIM LIMPING SOLDIER, TO
the crow scouts who had served him during the Great Sioux War he was known as No Hip.

Since July of 1863 the man had walked with a decided limp, having suffered a debilitating pelvic wound at Gettysburg.

John Gibbon was his name, colonel of the Seventh U. S. Infantry, stationed in the District of Montana.

During the Civil War, General George McClellan, then commander of the Army of the Potomac, had lauded Gibbon's “Iron Brigade” as being the equal of any soldiers in the world. But after he was promoted to brevet major general and transferred to the command of a full division, Gibbon experienced a humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg, suffering 40 percent casualties, including his own severe hand wound. Just hours after the battle, Gibbon shook his bloody fist at the officers and enlisted of his failed command, roaring at them, “I'd rather have one regiment of my old brigade than to have this whole damned division!”

By the end of the war he had been wounded numerous times and was the recipient of no fewer than four brevet promotions. A shining example of the army's old school-dependable, straightforward, not at all full of inflated self-consciousness as were so many of his contemporaries—war hero Gibbon accepted the colonelcy of the Thirty-sixth Infantry, regular army. Five years later he took over the Seventh and moved onto the plains to fight a new enemy.

Sporting a gray-flecked Van Dyke, Gibbon was fifty years old this summer of 1877.

For the last few years his regiment had been headquartered at Fort Shaw, on the Sun River in north central Montana Territory. But Gibbon was also in charge of Fort Ellis
at the head of the Gallatin Valley
*
along with Camp Baker in the valley of the Smith River just east of Helena, the territorial capital, and he also maintained a small detachment at the important steamship terminus of Fort Benton, on the high Missouri River. In addition, Gibbon was overseeing construction of Fort Custer on the Bighorn at the mouth of the Little Bighorn.

While he owed some small measure of allegiance to his departmental commander, General Alfred H. Terry, this Civil War hero of South Mountain, Antietam, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg had long ago given his loyalty to the brash, cocky, hot-tempered little lieutenant general who was not only in command of the entire Division of the Missouri but also the second highest ranking officer in the whole bloody army—Philip H. Sheridan.

Over the past two months this straight-talking hero of Gettysburg had been watching the Idaho situation brew itself into a foul-smelling broth. Knowing firsthand just how nervous a lot the Montana citizenry were, Gibbon was not at all surprised when Governor Benjamin Potts was able to persuade Secretary of War George W. McCrary into sending troops to the western part of the state, hoping to quiet things down a bit earlier that summer. The colonel wrote back to the secretary, in his own inimitable way, questioning that decision made by civilian bureaucrats all the way back in Washington City.

Your dispatch of yesterday (19) received. Have but sixteen (16) privates for duty, a little better off at Ellis, and I will send all the men that can be spared from there. The force remaining in the District is so small that to scatter it any more than it is now is objectionable.

His polite disagreement with the War Department was barely gathering momentum when the wires buzzed with
word from the west that the Nez Perce were indeed headed for Montana. No longer merely a rumor.

That very next day, the twenty-first of July, Sheridan ordered Gibbon into the field with what troops he could muster to stop the Nez Perce. That same afternoon, the colonel sent a wire to Charles Rawn, whom Gibbon had constructing a post near Missoula City, informing the captain that it would be up to him to hold the Nez Perce in check until Gibbon could bring up reinforcements.

On the twenty-second, Gibbon wired Sheridan in Chicago:

Dispatch of yesterday received. Have ordered one company of infantry from Fort Ellis to Missoula direct. As soon as I can assemble troops here from Camp Baker and Fort Benton, I shall move via Cadotte Pass down the Blackfoot River towards Missoula. Shall probably be able to take nearly one hundred men. The troops being all infantry, these movements will necessarily be very slow and can do little but check the march of the Indians in the passes …

Departing Fort Shaw six days later to the music of Professor Mounts's barrel-organ harmonica pumping out “Ten Thousand Miles Away,” Colonel John Gibbon had his hundred marching off to the Nez Perce War.

The same morning that dirty little war was spilling over into Montana Territory.

O
N
the twenty-second of July, General Oliver Otis Howard had returned to Cold Spring on the Camas Prairie from Lewiston, bringing with him those two batteries of artillery culled from the San Francisco area and two companies of infantry from Fort Yuma, Arizona—both commanded by Captain Harry C. Cushing.

Although it had been a crushing disappointment for Howard not to find his wife on that steamboat, there had been a joyous reunion on the docks of Lewiston nonetheless.
Coming down the gangway was Cushing's junior officer, a dear and familiar face that brought joy to the old warhorse's heart. The general embraced his eldest son, Second Lieutenant Guy Howard, declaring he would serve out the campaign as one of Howard's aides.

Across the next four days settlers came out from Mount Idaho and Grangeville to visit the army camp at Cold Spring—registering lost cattle and stolen horses with the army, selling beef to Quartermaster Fred H. E. Ebstein, or simply to gawk, talk, and gab. During that time, the general, along with his newly appointed aide-de-camp, Guy Howard and correspondent Thomas Sutherland, reveled in the fishing at this popular resting spot for wayfarers traveling between Kamiah and Lapwai. Here, the correspondent detailed in his journal, the command settled into Camp Alexander near the mouth of Lawyer's Canyon and slowly went about the recuperation and preparation required of them if this army were to successfully pursue the Nez Perce fleeing Idaho.

“This stream would have made Izaak Walton himself brave all the Indians in Christendom for just one day's whipping at it,” Sutherland opined.

Howard grinned as if the war were held at bay and far from his mind, happy perhaps just to watch how much his son enjoyed their daily excursions along the leafy banks.