Lay the Mountains Low (41 page)

The lieutenant put the pencil between his teeth and bit down hard, feeling the wood give way. He did not want to break it, only stifle his scream. Frustration, anger, disappointment … and maybe a little fear. That, too.

He wrote a bit more:

Warriors continually pressed upon us, their brown naked bodies flying from shelter to shelter. Their yells were incessant as they cheered each other on or signalled a successful shot. Some even wore tufts of grass tied to their heads as they crawled about for a better position, would shoot, then move on to another likely spot.

For a moment the lieutenant remembered how he had seen the war chief he was convinced was none other than Joseph himself.

Saw him everywhere along the line; running from point to point, he directed the flanking movements and the charges. It was his long fierce calls which sometimes we heard loudly in front of us, and sometimes faintly resounding from the distant rocks.

On all sides of him in the dark he could make out the men grumbling about their thirst and talking incessantly about water, some thanking God for the evening breeze and
a little respite from the heat, others saying it was going to get downright cold and they'd all be freezing by morning.

And the wounded. How they groaned and cried out piteously, begging for water, pleading for the surgeon to see to them next, one man asking his fellows to kill him so he would be out of all the ache and pain he could no longer stand it was so monstrous—

Wood clenched his teeth together to keep from screaming himself. If this was Indian fighting, he wasn't sure this army had anything to be proud of.

And he didn't know if he wanted anything more of Indian fighting.

 

*
Devil's Backbone
, vol. 5, the
Plainsmen
series.

*
Indian Territory.

J
ULY
11, 1877

C
ORRESPONDENT THOMAS SUTHERLAND FOUND IT IMPOSSI
ble to sleep that night as the temperature sank and the wind came up atop that barren plateau where the men huddled in the cold, cursing their sweat-dampened clothing that now had them chilled to the bone. As the cold, humid air settled to the ground around their rifle pits, the dew soaked their uniforms, making the men even more miserable.

A few of the wounded men whimpered, and some screamed as the surgeons continued to work over them with the probes and the saws, despite the dark that smothered everything but the sounds of suffering. One of them cried out for his mother just before he died. Sutherland had never heard of such a thing before. Then an old gray-bearded infantryman told him it happened all the time.

“Hundreds of times, fact be,” the soldier said beneath the dim starshine. “Back to the war, heard more men beg for their mammas than I ever wanna hear again.”

The thought made Sutherland even colder, so chilled to the marrow that he wondered if he would ever be warm again.

Off and on he wrote in his journal, long handwritten pages covered by his tight scrawl, from which he would compose his newspaper dispatches:

 

Although we outnumbered the Indians … we fought to a great disadvantage. The redskins were in a fortified canyon, shooting from the brow of a hill, through the grass, and from behind trees and rocks, while our men were obliged to approach them along an open and treeless prairie. At times a redskin would show his head, or jump up and down, throwing his arms about wildly, and
then pitch himself like a dead man flat upon the grass, and these were the only chances our men had to fire …

During the early part of the fight an Indian with a telescopic rifle was picking off our men at long range with unpleasant rapidity (evidently mistaking me for an officer the way his shots fell around me), when one of Lieutenant Humphrey's men “drew a bead” on the rascal …

Desultory shooting is kept up, with intervals of sharp firing, for seven hours … Wishing to enjoy all the experiences of a soldier, I took a rifle and crept out to the front line of pickets prepared to take notes and scalps. My solicitude in the former direction was nearly nipped in the bud, for the moment I inquisitively popped up my head, a whine and thud of bullets in my proximity and a very peremptory order to “lie down, you d——d fool,” taught me that hugging mother earth with my teeth in the dirt was the only attitude to assume while in that vicinity.

 

He sighed, vividly recalling just how deadly the enemy fire had become as the temperature rose and the sun slowly sank for the west. That experience was something Sutherland knew he never would forget:

At one point of the line, one man, raising his head too high, was shot through the brain; another soldier, lying on his back and trying to get the last few drops of warm water from his canteen, was robbed of the water by a bullet taking off the canteen's neck while it was at his lips.

Sutherland brooded on how Private Francis Winters, serving with Captain S. P. Jocelyn's B Company of the Twenty-first, had his black felt hat shot off three times; then spare minutes later a fourth bullet clipped his ammunition belt as if it had been cut with a knife. The same bullet severely wounded him in the hip.

For some seven hours the battle never cooled as the Nez Perce pinned down Howard's army on three sides, despite
how the Gatling guns and two howitzers raked the Indian positions.

Crawling up to the west side of the line late in the afternoon, the correspondent had watched Captain Eugene A. Bancroft, M Battery of the Fourth U. S. Artillery, leap to his feet for but an instant—saying he intended to survey that part of the battlefield where the Nez Perce were putting pressure on his howitzer emplacement—and instantly be struck in the left side of the chest.

At another place in the line Sutherland had watched Lieutenant C. A. Williams take a bullet in the hip. As the young officer calmly began to dress his own wound by himself, he accidentally raised one arm too high in the grass and took another bullet, this one shattering his wrist.

Late in the day, Lieutenant Harry Bailey—serving with Jocelyn's B Company of the Twenty-first U. S. Infantry—had come into headquarters, where he blew off a little steam with Sutherland before meeting with Howard's staff among those stacks of pack saddles and apishamores, ammunition and ration cases Trimble's and Rodney's men had piled up at the center of the battlefield, constructing a network of head-high barricades.

“I had a helluva time of it, keeping my men on the firing line this afternoon,” Bailey admitted. “As soon as I got some placed at proper intervals and I moved on down the line to instruct others, as many men would run back to their holes or trenches in the rear!”

Grinding a fist in an open palm, Bailey continued, this time telling a story of two officers.

“They were lying behind small head shelters with dusty sweat streaks down their faces, dodging bullets. They yelled at me to get down as I was drawing fire. When two bullets tipped the earth between their heads and my ankles, I dove for cover! After a few minutes of that dangerous give-and-take, I began to realize that a nearby company and my own had mistaken one another for the enemy, Mr. Sutherland! Friendly fire, I'd say!”

“You were drawing fire from another outfit?”

Bailey nodded. “Those damned warriors! They were shooting and whooping so much at us, my company and an artillery battery were distracted enough to start jumping around, bobbing up and down, firing at each other at a lively rate.”

“How'd you get it stopped?”

“At first I tried yelling, but the racket of the guns was too much for me, so I ran out between the two lines yelling for all parties to cease fire! 'You're firing into your own men!' ”

“You're lucky you weren't hit!” Sutherland snorted.

“Little chance of that,” the lieutenant grumbled. “I suppose I'm fortunate that the army can only afford to give each man three cartridges a month for rifle practice.”

“Was anyone hurt in that exchange?” the correspondent inquired.

Bailey shrugged. “None of us can ever be certain, and I'm sure no one will ever say a thing about it, but Private Winters claims nothing will ever convince him otherwise but that his dreadful hip wound was caused by a bullet from that artillery battery.”

Thinking now about Bailey's powder-blackened, sweat-smeared face, Sutherland shaved a little more off the end of his pencil, sharpening the lead with his small penknife, then licked it and went back to writing, remembering how some companies right at the farthest extent of the firing line had reported they were running low on ammunition earlier that afternoon. When none of the soldiers or officers volunteered to resupply those units,

Ad Chapman jumped on his spirited horse and with a heavy box of cartridges on his back hip, started at full run amid a shower of balls for the front, where he safely landed his precious burden. Surely this citizen soldier and guide is one of the most intelligent and bravest men in the command.

Then Sutherland's mood darkened a bit again, and he recalled:

Not long ago Surgeon Sternberg was called at night to go to the fighting line … where he found a man who was a packer, badly wounded and bleeding profusely. Sternberg feared he could not remove him any distance without danger of great loss of blood. Surgeon instructed his assistant to light a candle and screen it with a blanket, in order to form a shield behind which he could tie the artery. No sooner had the candle been lighted than the bullets came thick and fast at this little mark, and it had to be quickly extinguished.

At times this night could be excruciatingly quiet, eerily so. They could hear the warriors moving about in the timber and brush nearby, scraping rocks atop one another as they fortified their breastworks. At times the sounds of drumming, the shrieks of war dances, and the wails of mourning women drifted up from the river valley encampment somewhere below the bluff.

In such a morose, gothic atmosphere, Sutherland could not help but remember his brief friendship with Sergeant James Workman of the Fourth Artillery and how it had come to such a tragic end in the brilliant glare of a sunny afternoon:

 

He was a very intelligent young man, being one of the best Shakespearean scholars and readiest quoters from standard English poets I've ever met. But I think him quite depressed these last few days, weighed down with unspoken troubles and bitter recollections from his past.

During the battle I was shocked, startled when Workman suddenly stood up and charged alone toward the Indians. Almost instantly he fell flat on his face, pierced by Nez Perce bullets on every side. How tragic is his death, but the man seemed fixed upon it, determined to die—

 

Suddenly in that murky silence of summer night Sutherland was interrupted in his writing when one of the sergeants gruffly reminded his men to get back to work deepening their rifle pits there in the dark beneath the cold pinprick stars, scratching shallow trenches in the barren, rocky soil. Although none of them had eaten since breakfast, come night there wasn't a complaint about food. Only the lack of water.

Thirst had created its own exquisite brand of incomparable torture.

Y
ELLOW
Wolf lay with his cheek against the earth, listening to the sporadic gunfire as the hot afternoon waned, and closed his eyes. So tired was he that the young warrior did not realize he had fallen asleep until he awoke with a start and furtively looked about. The sun was lower, and no one else was around anymore.

He remembered his wounded uncle crawling off earlier, saying he wanted
koos,
so would attempt to reach the spring for a drink. But he had not come back, and the others had crawled away, too. Yellow Wolf could not see another fighting man, only hear the soldiers on their line, dangerously close behind the tall grass. As he was lying there, thinking what to do now that he was alone with the enemy, a voice barked from behind him.

“Why is he lying there? Yellow Wolf must be wounded!”

Then another voice came from a closer point off to his left: “Who are you, lying flat like you are? Soldiers are coming close! Don't you see them?”

Keeping his head low, Yellow Wolf tried to see who had spoken but could not for the grass. In a moment, the same voice whipped his ears again.

“Yellow Wolf! Are you wounded? Why aren't you shooting? Go ahead and kill some soldiers! They are coming close to kill you if you don't defend yourself!”

This time the young warrior raised his head up a little, far enough to see that it was
Wottolen,
the older warrior
known as Hair Combed Over Eyes. He was one of the war leaders who commanded some young men at the edge of that bluff. And he was right.

When Yellow Wolf looked, he saw how the soldiers were crawling toward him in the grass, no more than thirty steps from him already, slipping up cautiously like a snake you could not see until it struck.