Lay the Mountains Low (97 page)

As the village was preparing to march the morning after the heated argument, Yellow Bull and others discovered Mrs. Manuel missing. The war chief told Stranahan he believed she had been killed and her body hidden in the brush, somewhere off the Lolo Trail.

Around this same era on the reservation, one of L.V. McWhorter's informants said that Red Wolf (this is not the same “Josiah” Red Wolf who was but a young child at the time of the Big Hole fight, so the Red Wolf referred to might well have been the child's father or an uncle) attempted to abduct Mrs. Manuel from her ranch, riding with her on horseback, “when she snatched the knife from his belt and attempted to kill him. He struck her, felling her to the ground, and she died from the fall.”

To that testimony McWhorter adds: “Presumably she was carried back to her home and the house then set afire.”

Which, at least to me, is a convenient and blameless way to deflect a certain guilt for the murder—after all, the woman was “threatening” her kidnapper with his own knife—as well as a means to conceal the fact that Mrs. Manuel had started over the Lolo Trail with the Non-Treaty bands. Why are there so many different stories if every one of McWhorter's informants is telling the truth? There are so many attempts to have Jennet Manuel killed in her own home and her body conveniently consumed to ashes so the hunt for her would end.

Including the journalist who rendered a questionable version of Patrick Brice's story in 1911. Charles S. Moody chronicled the miner's experiences in an article for
Century Magazine
, “The Bravest Deed I Ever Knew.” Brice carried the wounded Maggie Manuel back to her home, Moody writes, which was “only a heap of smoldering ashes. Among the embers lay the charred body of a woman and her infant. The Indians had taken Mrs. Manuel and her baby back to the house, killed them, and then fired the house.”

Trouble is, Brice had testified that when he left the White Bird Canyon the Manuel house had not been destroyed.

It took nearly fourteen years after that before there arose any corroboration for Yellow Bull's account to Nez Perce agent Stranahan. Enter a young Treaty or Christian Indian named Many Wounds, who had taken the white name of Sam Lott. He approached an old warrior, who was embittered by the decades of struggle as he had watched the
Nee-Me-Poo
lose their land to white gold seekers and settlers.
Peopeo Tholekt
, known as Bird Alighting, had survived the many battles the Looking Glass band suffered during the war—a struggle that many of their people considered both their finest hour and their worst calamity.

Arriving at Bird Alighting's poor shack at the appointed hour on the appointed day, Many Wounds decided to begin their discussions by having the old warrior talk about many of the relics and artifacts Bird Alighting had in sight there at his tiny cabin. One of the very first Many Wounds took in hand to ask about was a blond scalp lock,

“Hair of white woman,” Bird Alighting explained. “Mrs. Manuel.”

He went on to relate how the woman was taken prisoner in the first raids and was subsequently taken with them as they started toward Montana Territory. On the way she took sick and died. The men buried her under some rocks beside the Lolo Trail. Bird Alighting related how Joseph took the woman's scalp after she was dead.

“The hair was beautiful,” Bird Alighting explained the chief's motivation.

Years later, Bird Alighting somehow had fallen heir to the blond scalp lock. To Many Wounds he explained how sorry he was, how sorry Joseph himself was, for the woman's capture, her plight, and her death far from loved ones.

Personally, I don't know how much credence to put into the second part of this story, concerning Joseph scalping a dead woman on the Lolo Trail because he wanted to keep her blond locks. With what I know of the band structure at that time, it doesn't seem feasible that Joseph, a leader of the
Wallowa
people, would pass down such an important
memento to an unrelated person like Bird Alighting, who was a member of Looking Glass's
Alpowai
band—especially when they were living apart on different reservations (remember, Joseph never was allowed to return to his homeland, living out his final days at the Colville agency). Perhaps that second part represents a little embellishment, while the kernel of the story remains intact and truthful.

A year after the Nez Perce War, Duncan McDonald undertook a journey to visit White Bird and those Nez Perce who made it across the Canadian border at the time of the Bear's Paw fight. A half-breed (McDonald's mother was Nez Perce and his father a factor with the Hudson's Bay Company), he served as the agency trader for the Flathead tribe at Jocko. He wrote a series of articles that appeared in the Deer Lodge, Montana, newspaper, the
New North-West
, adding a colorful dimension to the entire story on the outbreak and war, including this confusing and controversial subject of Mrs. Manuel's disappearance.

McDonald muddied the waters about Joseph in specific, and this incident in general, even more than they already were when he wrote:

 

It seems that at the earliest commencement of the Nez Perces war there were two white women murdered. One of them was murdered by an Indian who was drunk. The other white woman was burned in a house with her child. When her husband and others were murdered by the Nez Perces, she went upstairs. The Indians say they did not see her at the time of killing the men. When the Indians got possession of the house, Joseph, Jr. was present. He was sitting at one side of the place smoking his pipe. He was asked by the warriors what should be done—whether they should set fire to the house or leave without destroying it. All this time the woman and child were upstairs, but the Indians say they did not know it. Young Joseph answered, “You have done worse deeds than burning a house. You never asked our chiefs what was best to be done. You have murdered many men and not
asked advice of your chiefs. You can do as you please about the house.”

Some of the young men lit a match and set fire to the building. They then went back a little and sat down to watch it burn. They were suddenly startled by the piercing screams of a woman in the second story of the house. Young Joseph ordered them to put out the fire. The young Indians ran down to the water, filled their hats, threw it on the flames, and tried every way they knew to extinguish the fire and to save the woman. But it was too late. She and her child perished.

The same young warriors who were with Joseph, Jr., at the time told me that when he left the place, Joseph held down his head for a long time and, at last looking up, he said they had done very wrong in burning the woman, that he was very sorry, that he had believed the house empty.

The burning of this poor, harmless woman looks very bad for the Indian side. Still there is some blame should attach to the white man. The white man does wrong in allowing the Indian to have whiskey. It is easy to reply that the Indians take the whiskey away from them by force, but there are many whites who are ready to sell whiskey to them in time of Indian Wars.

 

Both Duncan McDonald and L. V. McWhorter lived in and wrote about the final days of an intensely racist era in the American West. Since we know of their passionate support of the Nez Perce, is it reasonable to assume that they would do everything in their power to deflect blame from the raiders and murderers, but to place it instead on the white victims? Blaming them for bringing on themselves their own brutal deaths?

Neither George Popham (Jennet's father) nor Patrick Brice was a witness to what happened to Mrs. Manuel, so they can't be considered as anything resembling reliable witnesses. Nor was her husband, John, who had been left for dead out by the White Bird Road as told in
Cries from
the Earth
; then we learned he had miraculously survived here in
Lay the Mountains Low
. John Manuel rarely, if ever, made any statements about the disappearance of his wife and son—but on one of the few occasions he ever talked about the tragedy, Manuel only said his family had been captured by the Nez Perce and “doubtless killed as they were never found afterwards.”

As Jack McDermott sees it, John Manuel clearly harbored his own doubts about Maggie's and George Popham's cremation theory.

Friends and associates of the family throughout central Idaho refused to question Maggie's version of the story or her integrity. Everyone who ever talked to the child came away asserting, at the very least, that Maggie believed her own tale. Years later, some historians even purported that the girl must have suffered some traumatic hallucination—a reasonable assumption given the fact that she was a very young and impressionable child at the time of the brutal attack and had witnessed the killing of “OF man” James Baker, the murder of her father, and the long hours of terror that followed, culminating in what she claimed was Joseph's murder of her mother and brother before the warriors set fire to the house in an attempt to destroy evidence of their dastardly crime.

But … maybe there's a way to reconcile Maggie's account that does not rely on having to ignore her testimony or call her account a “post-traumatic stress” hallucination.

Clearly, Maggie saw some Nez Perce leader take a hand in the abduction of her mother. The fact that Joseph was the best known of the leaders in that locality and at that time must have played a major role in her testifying that Joseph was the murderer. Makes sense to me that a six- or seven-year-old girl could make such a claim and continue to believe it down to her dying day in Butte, Montana.

And perhaps she did actually see that Indian leader “stab” her mother and brother. Or perhaps the truth is as I chose to write it: that they were clubbed and dragged off, because Patrick Brice never saw the bodies, nor did he see
the “pool of blood” Maggie claimed her mother and brother were lying in. The flow of Maggie's events is murky, but the truth may well be that the warrior who wanted Jennet Manuel for his own may have slashed her in a struggle over the infant she clutched in her arms. Then to subdue her, he or another of the attackers clubbed her over the head, as well as he or another warrior clubbing the child.

Here's where Maggie's story gets really muddied. It's entirely possible the drunken warriors left Jennet and baby John lying in a puddle of blood on the floor and departed, thinking them dead, when Maggie chanced to discover the bodies in the silent house—taking them for dead. As for me, I have a pretty good idea that Maggie found her baby brother in a pool of blood, but not her mother. Maggie concocted that part of the story.

Why kill one and not the other? Because the war chief wanted only Jennet Manuel and had killed the infant child so that she would not be dragging him along and tending to his needs. There are cases known to Western historians of such infanticides occurring during the Indian wars on the central and southern plains. White woman captured, her infant child has its brains dashed against the trunk of a nearby tree …

Perhaps some hours later when a little of the mind-numbing whiskey began to wear off, the raiding party returned for either or both of two purposes. First, to see about acquiring more whiskey. L. V. McWhorter, like many of the apologists, was well ahead of his time with what I will call “blame deflection.” It's always good for someone who can't take personal responsibility for himself to blame his divorced parents, an alcoholic father, sexual abuse, or absentee parents. In the case of these first raids on the Salmon and Camas Prairie, McWhorter points his finger of blame not at the thugs and criminals who committed the murder and mayhem, rape and arson … but at the white man and his terrible whiskey!

It is only fair to the Indians to call attention to the fact that the outrages against women and children did not occur
until after the raiders became beastly drunk on whiskey found by the barrel at Benedict's store-saloon located on the lower reaches of White Bird Creek. That atrocities were committed by a few of the young Nez Perces, no one pretends to deny. But whiskey was at the bottom of all of them.

Or perhaps the raiding party returned for a second reason: As the murderer brooded long and hard on what he had done, perhaps he decided his best course would be to destroy the evidence of his crimes of kidnapping and murder. To his way of thinking, if he burned down the Manuel house, with the child's body therein, then the white man would think that both mother and child were burned—eliminating any need for the whites to pursue the war party to get the captive woman back.

I'm of the opinion that the whites at the Slate Creek stockade were told Jennet was dead because the Nez Perce warriors did not want the white men to know she was still alive and in the possession of one of their petty war chiefs. What Harry Cone and others heard doesn't serve as a discrepancy. I think it serves to prove that Jennet Manuel was still alive at the time.

And the presence of those earrings found among the ashes of the house is the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. After all the time that had elapsed, and after what might have been the first stripping and rape of Mrs. Manuel there and then in her own house, the discovery of those earrings in the house proved one thing only—that some searcher found earrings belonging to Jennet Manuel in the ashes of the house where Jennet Manuel used to live. Nothing more.

When all is said and done, I believe that baby John was dead the night of 15 June. It was his bones discovered in the ashes by Ad Chapman and James Conely. Bones they said were those of an animal. Why would they say that? Because they were too small to be Jennet's? Could the bones have been those of baby John? But why weren't there enough
bones found together for a savvy frontiersman to realize he was looking at a human skeleton?

And what of the stories left by Bird Alighting and Yellow Bull telling how Mrs. Manuel started the trip over the Lolo Trail with the Non-Treaty bands but either was killed in some sort of rage (according to Yellow Bull) or died of sickness, perhaps of exposure (according to
Peopeo Tholekt
)? It's hard to believe that either of them would have reason to lie at such a late date, what with the many years that had elapsed, not to mention that each man knew he was nearing the end of his life. I can't believe either man had anything to gain by concocting a bald-faced lie that many years after the crime. Especially after so many sources, down through the intervening years, had done their level best to convince journalists and writers that Jennet Manuel had died in her own house, where her body was consumed by the flames of revenge.