Lay the Mountains Low (73 page)

“Jesus,” Jacobs whispered.

Not only did the telltale sounds of chopping and women's voices drift up to him from below and far to the left, but he could also see the smudge of smoke from their many fires, the dust from the hooves of the ponies the young men were racing on the flat beyond the village, along with hearing the chatter of those small boys he spotted chasing one another through the horse-high willow growing along the creek that gurgled at the base of the slope right below him. Other youngsters sat atop their ponies, watching over the horse herd. More than a hundred warriors lazed about in the sunny camp. Women pitched tepees here or there; others dragged poles across the creek or prepared a midday meal over their fires.

His mind quickly turning like a steam-driven flywheel, Bradley began calculating the distance he had covered since separating from Gibbon, working over the hours it would take those foot soldiers in their wagons, pulled by the weary teams laboring up the divide, to reach the headwaters of Trail Creek before they could ever begin to work their way down to this spot. Only if those foot soldiers left the wagons behind …

“Come on,” he whispered to Jacobs.

They scrambled down the limbs like a pair of schoolboys, exuberantly leaping the last five feet to the ground before trudging uphill to Drummond, waving for him to remount and follow rather than chancing any more words on the hillside. Surprise was of the utmost concern now. Surprise—that most fragile of military commodities.

Bradley threaded his way in and out of the trees, climbing slightly, following his own back trail to where he had left Blodgett, Catlin, and his sixty men. And as his horse huffed across the grassy hillside, he began to formulate the terse note he would send back to the colonel somewhere far above them this morning—perhaps still on the other side of
the pass as the sun came up bold and brassy, striking the western slopes of the Big Hole. His heart sank as he recognized that it was too late for his small detachment to run off the horse herd and harry the village this day. The others were too far in the rear for that.

They would have to wait now, he would write Gibbon. Wait for the general to bring up his entire column before they would jump the enemy.

When that dispatch was written and the courier on his way, the lieutenant decided he would lead his advance detachment down this trail, to the very edge of that stand of timber where he had spied on the Nez Perce camp.

And there they would lie in wait for the arrival of Colonel John Gibbon—who would lead the rest of the Seventh Infantry when he unleashed all bloody thunder on that unsuspecting village.

 

*
In naming this place after a ground squirrel, the Nez Perce more specifically made reference to a smaller animal called a picket pin, due to the fact that when the tiny, thin animal stands at watchful attention beside its burrow, it looked just like the wooden picket pin a man would use to anchor his horse.

**
The Non-Treaty bands arrived in the valley of the Big Hole on the afternoon of August 7, and would stay again the night of the eighth—relaxed and celebratory up to the fateful morning of August 9.

*
Rawn's Fort Fizzle in the Lolo Canyon.

*
Today's Trail Creek.

*
Today's Ruby Creek, which, with Trail Creek, forms the North Fork of the Big Hole River.

*
Do you remember this figure? It did not come from the actual number of soldiers Gibbon had along. Instead, this was the exact number he had told Father Anthony Ravalli he had with him back on August 5. The priest must have been the source for this news story!

*
John Deschamps, a valley volunteer now with Gibbon, had counted 250 guns among the Non-Treaty bands and two-thousand-plus horses in their herd, some of which were fine “American” horses bearing their brands. One of the Nez Perce had tried to interest Deschamps in buying a gold watch with the former owner's name engraved inside, for the paltry sum of thirty dollars!

*
Through present-day Nez Perce Pass, in the extreme southwestern corner of Montana.

A
UGUST
7–8, 1877

A
N HOUR BEFORE DAWN ON THE MORNING OF 7 AUGUST
, their ninth day since departing Kamiah Crossing, General Oliver O. Howard had asked the tall frontiersman Joe Pardee to guide his aide-de-camp, First Lieutenant Robert H. Fletcher, and correspondent Thomas Sutherland down the Lolo to the valley below, from there to escort them north to Missoula City as quickly as they could ride without endangering their mounts. Fletcher, acting quartermaster for the column, carried writs to purchase what additional supplies were needed to see Howard's column through to the end of the chase.

At this point, they all had a feeling—admittedly something more than a mere hope—that the campaign was nearing its end.

By 9:00
A.M.
when the command reached those log breastworks erected by Captain Charles Rawn's regulars and volunteers, Howard felt unduly disgusted, believing the Nez Perce War should have bloody well ended right there.
*

“Over there, General,” explained Joe Baker, one of the few citizens who rode at the head of the column, “you can see where Joseph's hostiles turned off to the north and circled around the barricades by going up that ridge.”

“Joseph was too smart for them,” commented Lieutenant C. E. S. Wood.

“Maybe they believed they could trust Looking Glass,”
Baker voiced the civilian point of view. “From what I hear, he's always been a good Indian when he's in the Bitterroot country.”

Howard squinted beneath the high, intense sunlight, his eyes tracing that narrowing trail as it disappeared up the grassy hillside, looping behind the rounded hills far above Rawn's fortress, beyond the effective range of an army Springfield.
Joseph never should have gotten around them. How in blazes did he do this?
the general brooded, ruminating on just how many times the wily chieftain had outwitted him. Surely that
Wallowa
leader had to be one of the most talented military strategists Oliver Otis Howard had ever confronted on any battlefield.

“How far to the Bitterroot valley itself?” he asked of those who had joined him during this brief halt at the barricades.

Baker, who had made the crossing between Montana and Idaho territories many times, answered, “Not far, General. A few more miles is all.”

Later that afternoon, when they did reach the mouth of Lolo Creek, Howard called for a halt to rest the men and graze the animals while he composed a short dispatch to Colonel Frank Wheaton, to be carried north to the Mullan Road, thence west, by two civilians from Idaho. He ordered the campaign's left column to shorten its daily marches until Wheaton would next hear from Howard about the possibility of returning to Lewiston, Idaho, “You may not be obliged to come through to Montana,”
*
the general wrote.

Because Division Commander McDowell in Portland had ordered Captain Cushing's and Captain Edward Field's batteries of the Fourth U. S. Artillery back to their stations days before Howard got around to starting east on the Lolo Trail and since Oliver could no longer justify needing the batteries because he was now
behind
the action, he separated those two units from his command at this point in the
chase, ordering them on to Deer Lodge, from whence they would march south to reach the railhead at Corrine, Utah. From there they would travel in boxcars back to San Francisco. At the moment, however, both batteries were more than two days behind Howard, along with the infantry still negotiating the Lolo Trail.

Before he was finished composing his dispatch, Quartermaster Fletcher and Sutherland showed up at the head of a string of wagons the lieutenant had commandeered in Missoula City. Howard now had the supplies he hoped would allow him to catch Gibbon, who must surely be closing the gap on the Nez Perce.

“A
WAKE
! Awake! All the People must listen to the contents of my shaking heart!”

At the old warrior's cry Yellow Wolf sat upright, the single blanket sliding off his bare shoulder in the dim gray light of dawn. He squinted, blinked, then rubbed his gritty eyes with the heels of both hands. Last night, he and other young men and women had stayed up, dancing, singing, talking of sweet things in their future around the fire until well past the setting of the moon. He had been asleep no more than two hours at the most—

“Awake!” Lone Bird's voice crackled even closer as the old warrior emerged through the nearby lodges, his pony slowly carrying him toward that scattering of blanket bowers where many of the young men slept away from their families now that they were of an age to marry … of the age to become fighters.

Kicking the blanket from his legs, Yellow Wolf stood and darted unsteadily toward the brave warrior. Many others were emerging from their bowers now to listen to the warrior who had first given them warning at the Medicine Tree.

“I am awake, Lone Bird,” Yellow Wolf muttered as he approached the horseman. “What say you now so early on a quiet morning?”

“This quiet will not last, Yellow Wolf!” Lone Bird announced
as he eased back on the single buffalo-hair rein tied around his pony's lower jaw. The animal stopped.

More and more people gathered, still half-asleep, a murmur growing like an autumn brook as they emerged from their blankets and robes into the misty morning air, so damp and chill it penetrated to the bone.

Looking Glass suddenly appeared scurrying around the side of a lodge, looking perturbed. “Lone Bird—”

“My shaking heart tells me something, Chief Looking Glass,” Lone Bird interrupted. “Listen again to my warning, for my words do not come easy.”

“What warning?” demanded
Ollokot
as he pushed through the forming crowd and laid his hand on the older warrior's knee.

“Again I have been told, as I was at the Medicine Tree: The eyes in this heart of mine say trouble and death will overtake us if we make no hurry through this land,” Lone Bird pronounced.

Looking Glass snorted a mirthless laugh. “We've heard your foolish talk before!”

“My heart does not regard it as foolish!” Lone Bird snapped. “I have never been one to talk of things that never came true.” His eyes turned, glaring into the face of the
Wallowa
war chief. “You know that,
Ollokot.”

“Yes, I trust the eye of your heart, trust what it can see,”
Ollokot
replied, his hand sliding from Lone Bird's knee.

“I cannot smother, I cannot hide, what my heart sees!” Lone Bird announced, his deep voice rattling over them all as if by the same thunder of the white man's throaty cannon. “I am commanded to speak what is revealed to me.”

“What would you have us do?” White Bird asked, the crowd parting as he stepped into that tight circle gathered round Lone Bird.

“Let us be gone to the buffalo country, if that is where we are bound, you chiefs,” Lone Bird demanded as he tapped his bare heels into the sides of his pony and moved into the crowd. “Let us be gone from this place. As quickly as the women can take down the lodges and pack the
travois, let us be gone from the trouble and death that is already nipping at our heels.”

For long moments Yellow Wolf watched the old warrior's back as Lone Bird's pony carried him away. That's when he recognized the face of Burning Coals, known as
Semu,
a man rich in horses. “Come,” he said, tapping the arm of his friend
Seeyakoon Ilppilp,
the one called Red Spy.

Trotting over to the wealthy man, Yellow Wolf begged, “Burning Coals, please let me and my friend borrow two of your fastest horses—”

“You have horses of your own,” Burning Coals responded, gazing down his expansive nose at the young warriors. “Why would I loan you two of mine?”

“Everyone knows you have the finest—the fastest—horses in all the bands,” Yellow Wolf praised, hoping the compliment would seal the loan. “I grow concerned by these warnings from Lone Bird's lips.”

“He is just a man given to unfounded fears,” Burning Coals sneered, waving off argument.

“We should see for ourselves,” Red Spy admitted. “Your horses are best for a hard scout up our back trail.”

“Scout? Up our back trail?” echoed Burning Coals. “No. I will not let you use up my horses for that. They are too fine for the likes of you and your friends, Yellow Wolf. Go somewhere else to get horses to carry you on your fool's errand!”

“Even
Wottolen,
a man with strong powers, dreamed yesterday of soldiers!” Yellow Wolf argued in disbelief. “Surely you cannot dispute the medicine of
Wottolen!”

Burning Coals turned away without a word, no more than a smug arrogance on his face as he waddled off.

“Go hunting, Yellow Wolf. There won't be any more fighting. I have seen it.”