Lay the Mountains Low (95 page)

A
UGUST
10—11, 1877

A
T SUNDOWN THAT NIGHT OF 10 AUGUST, HUGH KIRKEN
dall's wagon train rattled into the siege compound without any interference from the Nez Perce everyone believed were still in the area.

It was accompanied by Captain George L. Browning and Second Lieutenant Francis Woodbridge, who, earlier that afternoon, had been directed by John Gibbon to lead twenty-five men up the mountainside and escort the wagons on down Trail Creek. Hours before at daybreak, the colonel had dispatched Sergeant Mildon H. Wilson of I Company and six men from K Company to reach the wagon corral and bring in the train. But as midday came and went Gibbon grew more apprehensive that Mildon's small squad had been ambushed; he had dispatched Browning's detail.

Those wagons arrived about 6:00
P.M.
, carrying all the coffee and hardtack the ravenous men could eat, along with their wool blankets. At least this night would be a shade more comfortable for the survivors.

“Wish we had some more of that bacon those two civilians brought in this morning,” said the colonel.

“It didn't last long, did it, sir?” asked Lieutenant Charles Woodruff.

“A few bites for each man sure didn't go far.” Gibbon sounded regretful.

“There will be more coming when General Howard arrives.”

The lieutenant prayed his words would come true.

Earlier that morning Sergeant Oliver Sutherland had himself come on down the trail after spending most of the previous day at Kirkendall's corral. He was carrying that message from Howard telling Gibbon how he was coming
ahead with 200 horsemen and hoped to catch up to the infantry before Gibbon pitched into the Nez Perce.

“Why did you end up staying with the wagon train instead of riding on down here to deliver your message as ordered, Sergeant?” Woodruff asked the question he was sure Gibbon wanted to have answered.

“Made a try, sir,” Sutherland admitted. “I started out with eight or nine of the wagon guard you left—but we was met on the trail by a big war party and drove back. A damn lucky thing they didn't follow us up the trail and find our wagons, Lieutenant.”

That's when Gibbon had proposed, “I'm going to send an escort back right now—and bring those supplies in.”

Minutes later two of Kirkendall's teamsters—Jerry Wallace and John Miller—rode in, having started down the trail right on the heels of Sergeant Sutherland. Hung from Wallace's saddle horn was a grease-stained canvas bag that contained a side of bacon. It was promptly divided up among the famished men, disappearing down their gullets with an amazing speed. After suffering some thirty-six hours without anything more to eat than the pasty remains of hardtack scraped off the bottom of their haversacks and a few strips of raw meat butchered from Woodruff's bloated horse, Gibbon's compound was next to famished.

While this one side of bacon had done little to fill their shrunken bellies that morning, it had nonetheless gone far to lifting their sagging spirits for the rest of that day.

Not long after Kirkendall's wagons rattled in, it began to grow dark on that lonely rectangle of rifle pits for a second night. Twilight was deepening when one of the civilians called out, asking the rest to look at the three dim, flickering lights he had spotted to the southeast. Woodruff saw them, all three slowly bobbing, wavering, either on or against the plateau rising beyond the flat where much of the Nez Perce village still stood.

“What you make of that?” Charles asked the colonel.

Gibbon shook his head. “Can't be torches. Maybe
they're small fires where their sharpshooters huddle to warm themselves.”

“I didn't see any fires while they had us surrounded last night, General,” Woodruff had replied. “Why would they light those three fires way off over there tonight, and nowhere close at all—”

Woodruff was interrupted with what he figured was the answer. A cluster of twelve distinct shots tore through their compound, some from each of the three sides. Then the echo of all that gunfire quickly faded, absorbed by the coal-cotton black of night.

Several discordant voices shouted at them from the river bottom—not in the manner of a war cry … but more so as a salutation.

“I think we've just been told they're leaving,” Gibbon commented quietly.

Those mysterious lights, along with that final volley and farewell salutation, were just enough to keep Woodruff restless through that night. Despite his knotted belly finally being filled by hardbread and coffee and despite the warmth of a wool blanket to curl up inside, the lieutenant remained wary that the departure was all a ruse, right up till dawn on the eleventh of August.

“That lieutenant's in a bad way,” confided Tom Sherrill, a civilian who had a rifle pit right beside Woodruff, the moment the lieutenant stirred.

First light was beginning to seep into the Big Hole.

“You mean English?”

Sherrill nodded, then whispered again. “Ain't a man here can't tell how bad he's suffering. That back wound of his is the worst I've ever seen.”

“We'll have a surgeon here soon, Tom.”

“The lieutenant, he asked me to take his boot off and rub his feet—saying they was getting stone-cold on him,” Sherrill said in a hush. “But I couldn't get 'em off, everything was so wet. I ended up cutting the stitches on one of his boots with my folding knife, right down the back. Got it off
that way. Started rubbing his foot. Wasn't long before he told me, 'It's no use; I'm done for this time.' “

Woodruff nodded knowingly. “I'd consider it a personal favor to me, if not to General Gibbon, if you'd do all in your power to make Lieutenant English as comfortable as you can until a surgeon arrives.”

“How long you figure on that?” Sherrill asked. “Till Howard gets here with them reinforcements?”

“I'm praying they will show up tomorrow.”

“I
T
'
S
Myron! My stars—it's Myron Lockwood!”

Lieutenant Woodruff looked up from an inspection of Private Edward D. Hunter's wound to his right forearm. Both bones had been shattered by a Nez Perce bullet, and without proper bandages the gaping hole—like the rotting horse carcass—had become flyblown. Try as Woodruff might to protect the wound with strips of the soldier's uniform these last two days, this morning it was a wriggling mass of maggots.

Getting to his feet, Charles thought he recognized that civilian slung between the two Sherrill brothers, Tom and his older brother, “Bunch.”

“How bad is he?” John Gibbon asked as he rolled onto his hip and struggled to rise, dragging that wounded leg of his.

“He'll live!” Bunch Sherrill bellowed enthusiastically. “If those Nez Perce couldn't kill Lockwood in our attack and they never found 'im hiding in the bushes—by damn, this tough ol' nail ain't gonna die on us now, General!”

Just before daylight the brothers had slipped down to the mouth of the gulch
*
to look for their Bitterroot friend, the same Myron Lockwood who had horses stolen from him and his house looted as the Nez Perce meandered up the valley.

“I really 'spected to find 'im dead,” Tom Sherrill confessed as they dragged Lockwood up to the fire and eased
him down between them, the trio hunkered close to the flames.

To Woodruff's way of thinking, for the moment Lockwood hovered a little closer to death than he clung tenaciously to life.

“Found 'im sitting with his back against a wall of rock,”
*

Bunch Sherrill declared. “From the looks of 'im, he's lost considerable blood.”

“How is it he's still alive and the Nez Perce killed every other one of our wounded they got their hands on?” Gibbon asked. “He tell you that?”

Tom Sherrill shrugged. “Myron's so damned cold and stiff after these last two days and nights—he ain't been able to say a thing to us yet.”

“Fortunate he kept that coat with him,” Woodruff commented as the damp wool of the man's heavy hip-length coat steamed so near the warmth radiating from their fire.

“This wasn't his,” Bunch Sherrill admitted quietly. “We took the coat off Elliott.”
**

“He won't mind now, Elliott won't,” Tom assured the others as he kneaded one of Lockwood's hands between his. “Man's been dead for two days now.”

“That's a dead man's coat?” asked Captain James Sanno.

“Don't appear it's making a damn bit of difference to Myron that's he's wearing a dead man's coat,” Tom grumbled. “After them red bastards run off with his horses a few days back, sacked his house, and stole everything of value from him. Then this poor son of a bitch almost died down there in our attack on that village. That should show you Myron's a hard piece of iron. He ain't the sort what's easy to kill.”

After sunrise, Colonel Gibbon asked Woodruff to select one of their best riders and put him on the strongest horse. “I have a sinking feeling that Mr. Edwards didn't get
through the Nez Perce gauntlet when they had their noose tightened around us the other night.”

“You're afraid he could be dead, sir?”

“Or worse,” Gibbon admitted in a whisper. “A captive, tortured like the rest we heard being butchered down in the river bottom the day of our fight.”

Sergeant Mildon H. Wilson was again the man for the assignment: a ride of more than eighty miles. While Gibbon completed another set of dispatches, Woodruff had the courier select his mount and saddle from what had been brought down with Kirkendall's wagons the afternoon before. When Wilson began to knot two small leather satchels behind his saddle, each one carrying an extra pistol and some ammunition for his Springfield, the lieutenant was struck with a sudden impulse.

“Sergeant, I want you to wait a few minutes before you ride out of here.”

“Sir?”

“I've got something to write,” he explained in a hush. “A letter I want you to see gets started back to Fort Shaw from Deer Lodge for me.”

The older man nodded, his eyes crinkling with warmth. “Of course, Lieutenant. Something for your missus.”

At the edge of his rifle pit, Lieutenant Charles A. Woodruff propped his dispatch ledger on his knees and began to scratch out a heartfelt communication to his wife, hopeful it would reach her at Fort Shaw before word of their terrible fight reached the telegraph keys of the outside world. Hoping to reassure her that he was alive, and whole.…

 

*
Today's “Battle Gulch.”

*
Stake No. 50, Big Hole National Battlefield.

**
Lynde C. Elliott, Stevensville volunteer.

*
Howitzer.

As I began collecting my thoughts to write this wrap-up to
Lay the Mountains Low
, I discovered I had more than two dozen subjects I originally wanted to discuss here at the end of this second novel on the Nez Perce War. Trouble is, I feel compelled to pare away at that list of topics, because this has been the longest, most complex, book I've ever written.

While there are lots of interesting subjects I would like to tell my readers after researching and writing this dramatic, and ultimately tragic, story,
Lay the Mountains Low
is a big book to begin with. After muddling over every one of those two dozen topics I wanted to write about, I came to believe that while most are interesting at the very least, what I should do here in these next few pages is deal with only one of those subjects—a topic most compelling, downright intriguing. An unfinished story I promised you more about in the last book,
Cries from the Earth.