Lay the Mountains Low (3 page)
Read Lay the Mountains Low Online
Authors: Terry C. Johnston
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J
OSEPH
The Rains encounter was a small but sweeping victory for the Nez Perces. Coming on the heels of their success over the army at White Bird Canyon, it had the effect of inspiring them to continue in their course. It impacted the army negatively, not only through the loss of Rains and his men, but it prevented Howard from attaining the upper hand in the war and ending it quickly, while simultaneously contributing to the building public skepticism about army capabilities.
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J
EROME
A. G
REENE
The U. S. Army and the Nee-Mee-Poo Crisis of 1877
If Howard had been as bold [at the Clearwater] as General Gibbon [was at the Big Hole] we might have been all taken, although we intended to fight to the last.
â
W
HITE
B
IRD
The Battle of the Clearwater was indisputably a watershed in the army's campaign against the Nez Perces. By not pressing them in their retreat from the village, General Howard lost both the initiative and an opportunity to finally curb the non-treaty Nez Perces and end the war.
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J
EROME
A. G
REENE
In retrospect, the Nez Perces' parochial perspective of the war, and their insensibility to comprehending the scale and span of the United States government's resistance to [their flight from their homes in Idaho Territory to the Big Hole in Montana Territory], became key ingredients in their ultimate tragedy.
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J
EROME
A. G
REENE
UTHOR'S
F
OREWORD
B
EFORE YOU BEGIN READING THIS BOOK
, I
WANT YOU TO
take a moment to consider that the story you hold in your hands is entirely true.
While I'm sure you realize that I have constructed dialogue from a myriad of historical documents to make this story leap off the page with a sense of immediacy, I have striven to capture each person's individual character in their manner of speech. Rest assured that I haven't fabricated a single one of the scenes that follow this introduction. Every incident happened when and where and how I have written it. Every one of the characters you will come to know actually lived, perhaps died, during these pivotal weeks during the Nez Perce War of 1877.
After my previous fourteen
Plainsmen
novels, millions of you already have an abiding faith in me, a belief that what you're going to read is accurate and truly authentic.
But for those of you thumbing through your first Terry C. Johnston book, let me make this one very crucial promise to you: If I show one of these fascinating historical characters in a particular scene, then you'd best believe that character was thereâwhen it happened, where it happened. I promise you, despite the overwhelmingly popular and politically correct notions long held by most people, this is how the tragedy of the Nez Perce War did unfold.
Truth is, I could have written a book nearly twice as long as this if I had explored the complex historical background of the old treaties and how they were broken after gold was discovered deep in Nez Perce country, if I had begun reciting in chapter and verse all the intrusions by whites where they were not allowed by the early treaties, relating to you that seductive lure of alcohol and firearms on the young warriors; writing of the rapes and murders committed against those Nez Perce bands helplessly watching as their old way of life was trampled underfoot right before their
eyes, not to mention the government's feeble efforts to keep a lid on each deplorable incident after the fact.â¦
But, for all that detailed background I didn't cram into these three novels I'm writing on the Nez Perce War, the reader can learn every detail he or she wants to know in the following books:
I Will Fight No More Forever,
by Merrill D. Beal
The Flight of the Nez Perce,
by Mark H. Brown
The Nez Perce Tribesmen of the Columbia Plateau,
by Francis Haines
The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest,
by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.
As for my storyâbeginning with the outbreak of the war as I told it in
Cries from the Earth
âI dispensed with all that oft-confusing historical background because you can learn it far better elsewhere ⦠and because I prefer to plop you right down into the middle of this tragic conflict.
As you are drawn back in time and reading the pages of my story, you may well wonder: What are these brief news articles that appear here and there at the beginning of certain chapters or scenes? Keep in mind that those clippings aren't the fruits of my creative imagination. Rather, they are ripped right from the front pages of the newspapers read by living, breathing people in that summer of 1877.
One more sidelight before you start what will surely be one of the most fascinating rides of your lifeâthe letters that Emily FitzGerald, wife of surgeon John FitzGerald, writes home to her mother from Fort Lapwai are real, too. Transcribed verbatim for you, every last word of those letters make them simple, heartfelt messages from a woman who finds herself trapped squarely at ground zero, right in the middle of an Indian war.
I hope Emily's letters, along with those timely newspaper
clippings, will lend an air of immediacy to this gripping tale that every other book on the Nez Perce War has not.
As you make your way through this story, page by page, many of you might start to worry when you find this tale missing our intrepid Irishman, Seamus Donegan. Be strong of heart! In the next volumeâ
The Broken Hoop
âSeamus; his wife, Samantha; and their son, Colin, will migrate from Fort Laramie in the spring of 1877, making their way north to Fort Robinson, where they will find themselves on center stage for the last months of Crazy Horse's life. When his old friend Colonel Nelson A. Miles marches his Fifth U. S. Infantry north from Tongue River in pursuit of the Nez Perce fleeing for Canada (that third and final act in this tragedy), the Irishman will be along ⦠as a brutal winter storm and the army descend upon the Bears Paw Mountainsâcatching the Non-Treaty bands just forty miles short of the Old Woman's Country,
As you saddle up and begin this ride with me, I want to remind you that every scene you are about to read actually happened. Every one of these characters was realâand they were there to walk that hallowed ground ⦠to live or die in what fading glory still belonged to the Nez Perce in a damned and dirty little war.
I couldn't have made up this remarkably intricate and tragic story if I'd tried. I simply don't consider myself that good a writer.
P
ROLOGUE
20 J
UNE
1877
C
URSING THE RISING SUN UNDER HIS BREATH, FIRST SER
geant Michael McCarthy ground the heels of both hands into his gummy, crusted eyes.
Already this morning the little settlement of Grangeville was slowly stirringânot just those soldiers and civilians who stood watch at the barricades for the approach of Joseph's Nez Perce warriors, but those men rekindling fires, women stirring up breakfast, and even the few children adding their cheery, innocent voices to the coming of this new day.
Squinting overhead, the Canadian-born McCarthy found a clearing sky. Far better than the low, leaden clouds that had hovered above them almost from the moment Captain David Perry had led them out of Fort Lapwai after the marauding Non-Treaty bands.
Perry. Just thinking about the man made McCarthy hawk up the night-gather clinging at the back of his throat. Now there was a coward weighed down beneath a captain's bars! There wasn't a goddamned reason they should have left more than a third of their command down in that valley of White Bird Canyon. A good officer, a brave commander, could have seized control of those wavering troopers, halted their wild retreat before it ever got startedâ¦.
The thirty-two-year-old soldier hung his head and took a deep breath as he clenched his eyes shut. McCarthy rememberedâdoubting he ever would forgetâthe sights he had left behind him on that battleground. Last man out that he was. The last to crawl up the 3,000 feet of White Bird Canyon ⦠the valley floor behind him littered with dead and wounded comrades, swarming with Nez Perce horsemen like an attack of summer wasps boiling out of their nest.
Perry had gone and jabbed a big stick right into that nest. And when there was nothing left for any of them to do but turn about and high-tail it back up the canyon wall, Captain David Perry was powerless to control the panic. Damn, but Michael) couldn't blame those poor enlisted weeds: Why would any of them want to stop, turn around, and start fighting anew for a commander like David Perry? Not when the captain had marched his bone-weary men down through the dark toward an enemy no one knew a god-blame-it thing about, every one of his hundred soldiers riding too-tired and ill-fed horses.
“They wasn't ready to fight,” he grumbled under his breath now as he dragged over the first brown boot. For a moment he caressed the soft, saddle-soaped texture of the tall, mule-eared boot top.
God bless sutler Rudolph,
he thought.
Godbless'im, Lord.
The afternoon after First Sergeant Michael McCarthy had been discovered and brought in by those two civilian volunteers from out near Johnson's ranch, near halfway between the White Bird divide and the settlement of Grangeville, Rudolph had graciously presented McCarthy with a pair of real leather boots to take the place of those ill-fitting rubber miner's boots the sergeant had discovered in an abandoned cabin on his way over the divide to the Camas Prairie. Once more, Michael knew how the Lord doth provide!
Left behind by the rest of those hardy old files bringing up the rear of the frantic retreat, McCarthy had lain there on the slope, playing dead until the screaming warriors thundered past. Only then did he quickly roll into the willow and wild rose lining the banks of White Bird Creek, slipping into the water so that only his head was showing there beneath the low-hanging brush. After waiting out the comings and going of the warriors searching for any wounded soldiers and looting the bodies of his poor dead comrades, it was no wonder the icy-cold water had soaked his regulation boots through and through. Soles falling away from lasts, stitches unraveling. Utterly worthless: just like near
every other piece of equipment this god-blame-it army gave its soldiers to use. Boots that never would get him up that slope he had studied from between the leafy willowâonly to find that he'd been discovered by a fat Indian squaw riding past on her pony.