Lay the Mountains Low (25 page)

“C
OUNT
me in, Cap'n Randall!” cheered thirty-eight-year-old Luther P. Wilmot as he scrambled up to join the small group gathered around D. B. Randall in front of Loyal P. Brown's Mount Idaho House hotel.

“I'm proud to have you ride with us, Lew!” answered Darius B. Randall, the popular leader of the civilian militia recently banded together, what with the Nez Perce uprising. He himself had a long-standing dispute with the peaceful Treaty bands, who claimed Randall was illegally squatting on their reservation.

“I ain't got no horse, 'cept that wagon puller brung me in when Pete and me was jumped on the Cottonwood Road,” Wilmot apologized in his soft voice, brushing some of the dirty blond hair out of an eye.

“One of you boys fetch Lieutenant Wilmot a saddle,” Randall asked the crowd, then looked at Lew again.

“L-lieutenant?” Wilmot echoed the rank.

Randall nodded. “You're a steady hand, Lew. We're gonna get in a fight with these redskins soon enough. Something happens to the captain of this outfit, they're gonna need a lieutenant—a steady hand—to keep 'em together.
Besides Jim Cearly over there—you fit the bill nicely, Lieutenant.”

“T-thanks, D. B.,” he answered quietly, a little self-conscious in front of the other men.

“Now go get that big horse you rode in here,” Randall suggested. “That wagon puller of yours was strong enough to get you to Mount Idaho just in front of them Injuns. It'll be strong enough to carry you on that scout I want you to lead over west to Lawyer's Canyon.”

This first morning after Independence Day, a Thursday, Randall was calling for volunteers to join him in going to relief of the army entrenched on Cottonwood Creek.

For the last two or three days news had been drifting in that the hostiles had recrossed the Salmon River and were slowly marching for the Clearwater, with the likely intention of joining up with the survivors of Whipple's botched attack on Looking Glass's village.

Wilmot and his handful of scouts hadn't gotten but a couple of miles out of town, making for Lawyer's Canyon on the far side of Craig's Divide, when they met a Camas Prairie settler, who told them the hostiles had in fact reached the east side of the Salmon and were crossing behind Craig's Mountain.

“I was up to the soldier camp at Ben Norton's ranch last couple of days,” Dan Crooks explained. “Told them the news, too. To see for themselves, the officers sent out a scouting party two days back, with near twice as many men as you got with you, Lew.”

“Them soldiers see the Nez Perce camp like you done?”

Crooks wagged his head dolefully. “All of 'em got wiped out.”

Of a sudden, Lew remembered how the body of John Chamberlin had looked when they found him on the prairie. “Massacred?”

“Soldiers went right out that evening to bring back them butchered bodies, but on the way back to Cottonwood they was jumped by an even bigger war party and was drove back to Norton's about nightfall,” Crooks declared.

Lew studied the face of this youngest son of John W. Crooks, a wealthy landowner in these parts. “Them Injuns move on?”

Crooks wagged his head. “They come right back yesterday for a long fight with the soldiers; noon till moonrise, it was. So last evening I decided I was gonna light out for Mount Idaho at sunrise this here morning—gonna bring word to my pa and everybody that them soldiers need a hand.”

“C'mon,” said the lean and lanky Wilmot as he reined his horse around. “We're going back to tell Captain Randall your bad news. I figger he'll want us all to light out for Cottonwood Station to give the army some help.”

If anything was going to be done about stopping that Nez Perce village marching east from Craig's Mountain, then they would need every man—soldier
and
civilian—to get the job done.

Lew Wilmot and his twenty-eight-year-old freighting partner, Peter H. Ready, had had their own run-in with some murderous Nez Perce out on the Cottonwood Road just twenty days before, the same night the Nortons and Chamberlins were jumped and most in the escaping party killed. But the pair of teamsters had managed to cut free a couple of their big harness horses and lumber off bareback while most of the warriors slowed and halted to rummage through all those supplies destined for the Vollmer and Scott store in Mount Idaho that the white men had been hauling in their two wagons. Up to that moment, neither of them had heard a thing of what trouble was then afoot. An outright Indian uprising.

So this morning when Randall issued his call for volunteers, Wilmot could think of nothing more than his Louisa and their four young children. Brooding not only about the aging and infirm father he was caring for, as well as his wife, Louisa, and their three daughters … Lew's thoughts were also all wrapped up in that two-day-old son Louisa had just given him. What sort of place would this be if the Nez Perce weren't driven back onto their reservation? How
would life on the Camas Prairie go on if this bloody uprising wasn't put down and the murderers hung? Lew Wilmot had to do what he could to make this country safe for women and children.

He had come here from Illinois when he was but a lad himself—his father marching the family to Oregon on that long Emigrant Road. Not once in all those years growing up in this very country had Lew ever done one goddamned thing against these Cayuse or Palouse or the Nez Perce. But … the way they had screamed for his blood during that dark night's horse race across the prairie sure convinced Lew those warriors had some score to settle with somebody.

Lew and Pete had lost just about everything when they lost their freight, those two big wagons, and the rest of their draft animals to the war party.

“But we got our hair, Pete,” Lew had reminded his younger partner as they reached the barricades at Mount Idaho in the inky blackness. “Just remember that: We still got our goddamn hair.”

When Wilmot carried the news of the skirmishing at Cottonwood back to Randall, the captain announced he would be leaving for Norton's ranch within the hour.

“Lew! Lew!”

Wilmot turned as he finished tying off the horse to the hitching post outside Loyal P. Brown's hotel. It was a redfaced Benjamin F. Evans, a local.

“You coming along, Ben?”

“I'd like to go, but don't have no horse.”

Turning slightly, Wilmot patted the rump of his horse and said, “Listen here—I've got a friend who owns one of the best horses on Camas Prairie, and he told me any time I went out for some scouting I could have his horse to ride. You can ride this'un here, and I'll go fetch that other'un for myself.”

Although twenty-five men had offered to ride with Randall earlier that morning, only fourteen others answered D. B.'s call, joining Wilmot and Evans when they rose to
the saddle a half hour later, all seventeen starting out of Mount Idaho for Cottonwood. Lew looked around him at the others. At least ten were joking and slapping at one another, acting like this was going to be some Fourth of July church picnic.

At the same time all Lew could think about were those three girls of his, Louisa, and that two-day-old baby boy—the five of them taking cover back there in Loyal P.'s hotel.

Cottonwood lay some sixteen miles off across the gently rolling Camas Prairie. A lot of bare, goddamned open ground to his way of thinking.

“C
APTAIN
Whipple!”

He turned on his heel at the cry.

“Two riders coming in—at a gallop!”

Stephen Whipple could see how those men licked it down the road from Mount Idaho. Clearly soldiers, the yellow cavalry stripes on their britches aglitter in the summer sunlight that late morning, their stirrups bobbing with every heaving lunge the horses made, hooves kicking up scuffs of dust as they tore down the aching green of the Camas Prairie.

“They're gonna have trouble now, Captain!” announced Second Lieutenant William H. Miller, pointing off to the east, where a war party of some twenty warriors suddenly popped over a low rise. A half-dozen of them immediately reined aside and started angling in a lope toward the two couriers while the rest came to a halt to watch the attack.

As soon as this news was reported to Captain David Perry, the commander ordered half of L Company to saddle their mounts and prepare to go to the aid of that endangered pair of riders.

“How far off do you take them to be, Lieutenant?” Whipple asked Miller, who had his field glasses pressed against his nose.

“Two miles, Captain. No more than that.”

Whipple turned at the rumble of hooves as those mounted cavalrymen rattled past at a walk, then broke into
a lope as soon as they cleared the outer rifle pits. A quarter of a mile away the detail halted and shifted into a broad front, removing their carbines from the short slings worn over their shoulders. As the soldiers at Cottonwood watched, puffs of dirty gray smoke appeared above the detail. Then, two seconds later, the loud reports reached the bivouac. Volley by volley, the rescue detail was shooting over the heads of the couriers, laying their fire down at those six pursuing warriors.

“It worked, Captain!” Miller cried. “By damn, it worked, sir!”

Whipple only nodded, his attention suddenly snagged on something else. “Let me see those glasses, Lieutenant.”

Miller handed the binoculars to him. Putting them to his eyes, Whipple slowly twisted the adjustment wheel, bringing the distant figures into focus.

The lieutenant asked, “More Indians, Captain?”

“I'm not really sure,” Whipple replied. “They don't look to be riding like Indians. And they're coming across the Prairie from Mount Idaho.”

“How many? Can you tell, sir?”

“Less than two dozen,” the captain said. “No more than twenty at the most.”

“With news from us about the Rains defeat,” Miller began, “would General Howard be sending us any reinforcements from his column?”

“No—I think that's a band of civilians, Lieutenant.”

Then Whipple slowly dragged his field of vision to the right, scanning the Camas Prairie just west of the Cottonwood-Mount Idaho Road. But he stopped, held, took a breath as he twisted the adjustment wheel.

“The village is on the move, gentlemen.”

Out in the lead of the distant mass were the horses, two—maybe as many as three—thousand of them. As he watched, Whipple's heart sank.

Sixty, seventy, shit—more than a hundred horsemen began peeling away from both sides of the column now, feathers and bows and rifles bristling atop their painted, racing
ponies. More than a hundred-twenty of them now made their appearance from the back side of Craig's Mountain. And instead of coming for Perry's bivouac at Cottonwood, they were angling off for that small group of horsemen coming out from Mount Idaho.

Whipple moved his view back to the south, finding those civilians once more, as the massive war party put their ponies into a gallop.

“Something tells me those riders aren't soldiers,” the captain declared. “I figure them for a band of hapless civilians whose luck has just run out.”

 

*
The term the Nez Perce veterans historically used to describe the rifle pits in their testimony on the Cottonwood skirmishes after the war.

*
Whipple's Gatling gun.

*
Craig Billy Crossing.

K
HOY
-T
SAHL
, 1877

F
OR THE
NEE-ME-POO
THESE WERE THE FIRST DAYS OF THE
season when the blue-backed salmon made its mating run in Wallowa Lake. The meat of those strong fighting fish was red and sweet. Every bit as sweet as were these days now that they had the
suapies
on the run.

After they had ambushed the two Shadows and fought the rest of the soldiers all the way back to their burrows on Cottonwood Creek, Yellow Wolf proudly rode into the village singing an echo of his medicine song. This echo, as his people called it, was a peculiarly intoned melody that announced to the camp that the singer had met and killed an enemy. Oh, how the young women looked at him then! It had been a good night of dancing, singing, and celebrating with those soft-eyed ones who peered at him from beneath thick lashes in the firelight.

Early this morning, the older women and men were up before dawn, preparing for another day's march across the Camas Prairie. This time they were packing for the short journey that would bring them to
Piswah Ilppilp Pah,
or the Place of Red Rocks, a good campsite in the canyon that would take them down to the Clearwater.

As Yellow Wolf crawled on hands and knees from his brush shelter into the bright light, gazing around at the bustle of activity,
Weesculatat
rode up, calling out, “You, young fighter—come with me this morning!”

He ground his knuckles into his red eyes sleepily. “I was awake too long last night.”