Lay the Mountains Low (46 page)

“Captain Whipple!” Perry shouted. “Give these civilians five more minutes, then put your men to work setting the tepees on fire!”

On all sides of McCarthy the civilians scrambled like ants on a hill a playful child has stirred with his stick—frantic to pull out everything of any value, claiming it for themselves … or reclaiming that which it was plain had been stolen from the farms along the Salmon or the ranches dotting the Camas Prairie.
The spoils of war,
Michael thought.
The spoils of a mean, dirty little war.

In reality, most of what he saw was the few earthly possessions left behind by some dead man or woman now mercifully torn from this veil of tears in that first flurry of brutal and senseless murders.

The sergeant listened as Captain Trimble rode up to Perry, saluted, and asked, “Colonel, when can the men fall out and prepare supper? They haven't eaten much but coffee and a few bites of bread in more than a day and a half now.”

“As soon as we have a defensive perimeter established and these lodges burned—just as General Howard ordered,” he replied, watching the east bank as more and more of the command streamed down to the riverside from the plateau above.

McCarthy's mouth was already watering, as he thought of the potatoes and bacon back on those pack animals, hot food they could fry up while the coffee was boiling. The first decent meal in days now that they had a firm victory in hand.

His stomach growled in protest. They'd eat till they could eat no more tonight, then set off in the morning, running those fleeing warrior bands into the ground somewhere on the Camas Prairie.

Joseph and Mary
—
with them Injuns on the run, this war damn near has to be over now!

H
E
was disgusted with the warrior chiefs. Disgusted with the other so-called fighting men, too. Still, Shore Crossing understood why they had decided to leave the soldiers behind and flee the camping place they called
Pitayiwahwih.
After two days of fighting, when no victory was in sight, it was better to leave so that a man could fight another day, in another place.

As the white man's big-throated guns sent the fiery balls into the camp, the women mounted up on their saddle horses and the young boys shooed the herds over the western hills, out of danger. At the edge of the timber west of the camp, Shore Crossing joined one of the knots of warriors waiting in the shadows for the first soldiers to come in pursuit of more than 450 fleeing women and children. But the
suapies
did not come racing in pursuit. It was easy to see how little the soldiers knew about crossing the river. The fast water would delay the white men long enough that the fighting men would not have to keep them busy while the camp escaped up the Cottonwood canyon.

With a struggle the soldiers reached the village, where some of them spotted
Ollokot's
fighting men in the timber. After making a few shots at the
suapies,
the chiefs gave signals with the wave of an arm. Most of the warriors slipped away through the hills to rejoin the rest of the people already on their way. By the time Shore Crossing and the others caught up to the frantic retreat, White Bird, Looking Glass, and Joseph had restored some sense of order to the line of march. No longer were they in mad retreat. Once more the warriors were positioned along the sides of the column as it emerged onto the edge of the Camas Prairie. As their hearts began to slow and their thoughts were collected, the chiefs, headmen, and warriors began to deliberate their options.

Shore Crossing and the other Red Coats wanted all the young men to follow them and make one last, grand attack on Cut-Off Arm's soldiers. Whoever was whipped, it would be the last fight. But most of the chiefs and warriors said
that events did not warrant one last, suicidal fight.

“Why all this war up here? Our camp is not attacked! All can escape without fighting. Why die without cause?”

Which meant that if the chiefs of the Non-Treaty bands were not going to risk their women and children in one last deadly battle, then their only course was to fully commit themselves to a war of retreat and evasion. And that decision left but two options for the leaders.

That night Joseph again proposed, “I want to return my people to the
Wallowa.
That is where we will make our stand, where we can die if we are to be wiped out.”

But Looking Glass sneered, arguing, “To march back to that rugged country between the Salmon and the Snake would expose our families to danger on the open ground of the Camas Prairie. The
suapie
fort is on one side, and the Shadow towns are on the other. No. We must stay close by the Clearwater, for here the canyons are deep enough that Cut-Off Arm's men become entangled as they cross back and forth. We can stay out of reach of the white men until we decide what to do, and where to go.”

Shore Crossing did not like this Looking Glass. At first the Alpowai chief had turned his back on the warrior bands, calling the fighting men fools for making war and shedding the blood of white men. Then last night, Shore Crossing had seen Looking Glass for what he was. After the darkness deepened and the shooting stopped, the Clearwater chief had slinked back down to camp to eat and sleep—as if no fight was going on above them! To
Wahlitits,
what Looking Glass had done was nothing short of cowardice. The chief was running away from the war.

In the end, the headmen elected to follow Looking Glass's proposal. But this time when they took refuge, they would send out scouts to prowl the surrounding countryside.

“Never again must we allow the white man to slip up on us undetected,” Shore Crossing told that large group of chiefs and fighting men.

With a triumphant grin, Looking Glass said, “Perhaps we can leave this war behind here in the Idaho … and slip away to the buffalo country, where we will never have to worry again that we will be attacked while our village is sleeping.”

There were many, many murmurs of agreement. Shore Crossing had to admit that it sounded seductive, safe, and luring. Could there really be a place where they would no longer be concerned with a blood-hungry army and Shadows crying for vengeance? But … was such a choice of running away from the enemy really the sort of decision a fighting man would make?

There on the Cottonwood the head of the march came back around on its tracks, starting east once again, looping for the Clearwater once more. As the sun began to settle atop the far mountains, those in the lead angled north, following the river bluffs downstream. Those warriors riding far out on the flanks stopped on the heights where they could once more look down on what had once been their camp of celebration and joy. The ground of
Pitayiwahwih
crawled with soldiers like a nest of spiders while spires of oily black smoke rose in the hot afternoon air. In huge bonfires the
suapies
were destroying everything the People had left behind. Sadly, the Non-Treaty bands dropped behind the bluffs, continuing downriver for Kamiah, where the Dreamers sometimes visited the Christian Indians who tended their fields there.

If little else was clear, Shore Crossing knew that Cut-Off Arm's soldiers had no intention of chasing them this night. The white men believed they had won a great battle. Even though the
suapies
had managed to kill only four warriors
^*
while three times as many whites were dead, the soldiers
would think they had won! Even though the village had escaped, even though the
Nee-Me-Poo
still had their great herds of horses and cattle … the white man would make much of that fight on the Clearwater.

From experience, the chiefs knew Cut-Off Arm would make much of a few tired, old horses they had abandoned to the
suapies.
He would make even more of all the lodges the women had been forced to leave behind—even though the women could eventually cut more lodgepoles and the men could hunt more hides, once they were gone to the buffalo country.

So how was it that the white men could turn an ignominious defeat for them into such a glorious victory over the
Nee-Me-Poo?

“How the hell old do you think she is, Lieutenant?” Thomas Sutherland asked the general's aide just after sunset.

It was nearing 7:00
P.M.
Melville Wilkinson shrugged as General O. O. Howard came up to a stop in that narrow gauntlet made by the Treaty Nez Perce who served as his trackers. The lieutenant whispered to the newsman, “From the looks of her, my guess is she's close to a hundred!”

Sutherland figured that wasn't far off. The old woman had to be no less than ninety, frail and wrinkled and so slow to move that she had been waiting for the soldiers to find her propped against this tree on the outskirts of the abandoned village. While soldiers and civilians alike were gallivanting around camp, showing off their buckskin clothing and moccasins they had saved from the burning lodges, the correspondent had trotted over as soon as he heard the call for some of the Christian Indians to help interpret the gap-toothed woman's garbled talk.

Now that Howard was here, the trackers began to string together broken words in English, a few phrases, for the white men, explaining what she had told them in their native tongue.

“Where is the camp going now?”

She didn't know for sure. Just getting away from the soldiers.
They wanted to be left alone, and the chiefs were arguing about how best to leave all the trouble in Idaho behind.

Howard inquired, “What will it take for Joseph to surrender his people and come on the reservation?”

She gazed up at the one-armed general long and steady with her rheumy, watery eyes, then informed the translator that Joseph was not the chief of that village. There were five bands. Five chiefs. And Joseph was too young to be a chief over them all. Older men had the wisdom to assume that sort of leadership in emergencies such as this. Men like
Toohoolhoolzote,
White Bird, and especially Looking Glass.

“
Toohoolhoolzote,
” Howard echoed with an angry growl. “I put that old man in jail months ago. Should have kept him there.”

“No, he will never lead the camps,” she replied, folding her arthritic hands across her lap.
Toohoolhoolzote
was too unstable, too fiery, too harsh to reign as chief over all the bands together.

“White Bird? If Joseph isn't leading them, is White Bird?”

Again she stared the general in the eye and told the Christian trackers that the only one who seemed to have enough power to hold all five bands in his hand was her chief.

Howard looked quickly at the trackers. “Who the blazes is her chief?”

“Looking Glass.”

Sutherland watched Howard wag his head, realizing the general must suddenly be considering how Whipple had botched his mission to arrest the chief and hold him for the duration of the hostilities. Had that sad little debacle been handled better, Howard might well have deprived the warriors' bands of that one chief they were now rallying behind.

“General, sir?”

Howard turned with the rest of them as Lieutenant Parnell rode up on horseback, accompanied by another of the Christian trackers.

“This one just came back from seeing things to the north, General,” Parnell explained.

Howard studied him a moment. “Reuben. That's your Christian name?”

“James Reuben,” the man said in passable English. “News for you.”

“Out with it,” Parnell nudged.

“Kamiah,” Reuben began. “Warriors go to Kamiah—”

“Seems the hostiles aren't fleeing onto the Camas Prairie like we figured they would when we spotted 'em running west,” Parnell declared impatiently. “They're scampering north instead, downriver.”

With a lunge, Howard came up to Reuben's knee, staring up at him in the evening twilight. “That's a Christian settlement, isn't it?”

Reuben nodded. “I come back with word of the burning and stealing.”

“Joseph's warriors are already destroying Kamiah?” Howard asked.

“They come to cross the river at the Kamiah ford,” the tracker explained, his eyes shifting anxiously. “They cross the river there to burn houses of James Lawyer people, or … or—”

“Or what?” Howard snapped impatiently.

“Kamiah is the end of the road.”

Now Howard grabbed Reuben's reins. “End of what road?”

“End of the Lolo. Kamiah begin the road to the buffalo country.”

 

*
Going Across or
Wayakat,
Grizzly Bear Blanket or
Yoomtis Kuunin,
Red Thunder or
Heinmot Ilppilp,
and Whittling or
Lelooskin.
Both
Wayakat
and
Lelooskin
fell so close to the soldier lines they had to be left where they lay in the retreat from Battle Ridge.

J
ULY
13, 1877