Lay the Mountains Low (47 page)

BY TELEGRAPH

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OREGON

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Joseph Apparently Getting Away.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 12.—A Portland press dispatch telegram received to-day at military headquarters, dated Cottonwood, July 8, says that all of Joseph's band have crossed the Clear Water, supposed to be heading for the Bitter Root country. Should this be true, the fight will prove a running one. The infantry will prove comparatively non-effective. Decisive work will have to be done by the cavalry.

I
T HAD ALMOST BEEN A MONTH SINCE CAPTAIN CHARLES C
. Rawn and his small infantry detachment put Fort Shaw and the Sun River behind them on 9 June. His own I Company, along with Captain William Logan's A Company—a total of forty-five men—had come here to this valley of the five rivers with orders to purchase supplies and hire quartermaster employees, who would help construct a small post
*
some four miles southwest of Missoula City, Montana Territory. Back in May, Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan requested an allocation of $20,000 from the secretary of war for this post that would police intertribal conflicts over hunting grounds. The citizens on this side of the Bitterroot, on the other hand, wanted Colonel John Gibbon's Seventh U. S. Infantry to make a firm show of protecting the settlements.

After all, from here the Nez Perce War was no more than a mountain range away.

Back in April a large band of Looking Glass's people—returning from a successful buffalo hunt on the northern
plains—camped with Chief Chariot's
*
Flathead, still residing south of their reservation and Missoula City in the Bitterroot valley. For generations it had been a common practice for the Non-Treaty bands to spend a little time with their acquaintances in Montana Territory, both Flathead and white. Later, in mid-June, an additional thirty-some lodges of Nez Perce stopped in the Bitterroot on their way home to Idaho Territory, just about the time the wires began to hum with news that war had broken out. Because a growing number of his citizens were becoming nervous that trouble could boil over into Montana Territory, Governor Benjamin F. Potts began raising hell with the army and officials back in Washington City, asking permission to raise a state militia. He was turned down at the highest levels.

Instead, the army said they had already dispatched this detachment of two companies west to Missoula City, there to establish a presence in the Bitterroot valley, where the Nez Perce were often seen coming and going, as well as trading, during the hunting season.

A Civil War veteran, with sixteen years in the regiment, Captain Rawn didn't know what more he could do to quiet the inflamed passions of the settlers in this country. Upon his arrival, valley locals recommended he place an outpost somewhere up the Lolo Trail because of the threat and the Nez Perce tradition of traveling to and from their home through the Lolo corridor. Rawn agreed,
if
the citizens would provide his detachment with horses. None of the civilians would, so things quieted down somewhat when the locals went back home, grumbling and disgruntled at the army's inaction.

Which gave Rawn the opportunity to pay a call on Peter Ronan, newly appointed agent to the Flathead. Together they had gone to see Chief Chariot, securing his promise that, should the hostiles spill over into Montana, the Flathead would remain neutral but nonetheless provide intelligence
of Nez Perce movements to the white man.

“You feel like you can trust this Chariot?” Rawn had asked as they rode back toward the agency.

“I'd like to think I could,” Ronan admitted. “But something tells me we'd better keep an eye on him.”

“That's exactly what I was thinking” Rawn replied. “There are simply too many of these Flatheads for a right-thinking man not to be wary and mistrustful of them catching this contagion if it spread from Idaho. Something in my gut is telling me I better not be too trusting of that Indian. His eyes shift a little too much.”

Maybe it was nothing at all to worry about, but some time back a small band of eleven Nez Perce lodges under Eagle-from-the-Light had already joined Chariot's Flathead, more or less permanently, erecting their camp circle just south of the exit from the Lolo Trail, declaring they wished to stay in Montana despite the fact that Howard and agent John B. Monteith had ordered them back to Idaho and a life on the reservation.

Just last week Eagle-from-the-Light had come to Ronan requesting permission to camp right on the reservation just north of Missoula City itself, in his people's attempt to stay out of trouble should the hostile bands invade Montana Territory. But the Flathead agent refused, saying he did not want to provide a haven for Indians illegally off their reservation. In the end, those eleven lodges stayed where they were near the terminus of the Lolo Trail in the Bitterroot valley.

Even though Governor Potts made his second request of the army to form a citizen militia this very day, the thirteenth of July, for the time being Captain Rawn felt like everything was under control. Word was, General Oliver Otis Howard had a column of some six hundred men, both soldier and civilian, about to crush the upstart Nez Perce. It was an Idaho war. Bred, born, and fanned to a white-hot heat over there in Idaho.

So the kettle would have to boil with a mighty tempest
for those troubles to erupt across these mountains.

Despite the constant rains that early summer, Rawn kept on chopping, hauling, and stacking logs as the walls of a few sheds were completed and he surveyed the site for the larger buildings. So much for the unbounded excitement and romance of a frontier officer's life.

A
FTER
Captain Robert Pollock's men buried the blackened bodies of their twelve
*
dead comrades in temporary graves at dawn on the battlefield plateau where the soldiers had given their lives, full military honors given over a mass grave dug just behind the field hospital, and Captain Henry Winters's E Troop of the First U. S. Cavalry started Surgeon Sternberg and twenty-seven wounded
**
for Fort Lapwai in dead-axle wagons and crude travois at 9:00
A.M.
that Friday, the thirteenth of July, General O. O. Howard's command set off on that trail leading them down the Clearwater after the retreating Nez Perce.

Marching across the northeastern corner of the Camas Prairie, the column passed by McConville's now-abandoned Misery Hill. By midafternoon they had covered nine miles on the trail to the subagency at Kamiah, located on the north bank of the Middle Fork of the Clearwater. At 3:30
P.M.
atop a low rise on the south bank of the river, the general's staff halted to pass around two pair of field glasses, gazing at the well-manicured gardens and the cultivated
fields. What drew their attention even more magnetically some three miles away was that sight of the last of the Non-Treaty bands fording the river in their crude buffalohide boats shaped like overturned china teacups.
*

While he had been congratulating himself for more than a day on the success of the battle, Howard wondered how he was going to follow Joseph and that village across the Clearwater.

When the Kamiah Christians under the leadership of James Lawyer, son of the noted Treaty chief, learned the warrior camp was coming their way, they had the foresight to remove their boats normally kept at the crossing. In addition, they had disabled the cable ferry used with those boats at this crossing. With those actions taken, most of the Lawyer Indians retreated into the hills, unwilling to openly oppose the Non-Treaties. Denied those boats, the warrior bands had resorted to the ancient bullboat, using what few buffalo hides they had managed to take with them in their precipitous retreat from the Clearwater encampment.

Just beyond those last stragglers clambering onto the north bank stood the subagency's buildings, surrounded for the moment by the massive horse herd. A little farther up the hill many of the warriors were already busy erecting some crude breastworks of stone and downed timber.

Howard's belly burned in frustration. Barely late again! One step behind. Always one step behind Joseph!

“Get Colonel Perry up here on the double!” he ordered C. E. S. Wood, then watched the lieutenant salute and rein about.

In moments, Perry's horse was sliding to a halt before the general.

“Bring Whipple's company and take your cavalry battalion on the double to the right. Stop those Indians from getting away!” the general ordered grimly. “I'll send
Wilkinson with a Gatling and limber to support you, then lead the rest myself.”

He did not wait for Perry to get his battalion pulled out of column and on its way, content to watch those distant figures finish their crossing, slowly winding away from the east side of the Clearwater. Instead, the general ordered Jackson's B Troop, in the vanguard, to advance on the river crossing as they bore left of Perry's and Whipple's men. Behind Jackson came Miles with his infantry battalion, then Miller's artillery, followed by the rest of the cavalry and pack train. Trimble's H Troop served as rear guard while the column began its descent to the ford.

At the moment Perry's battalion reached the river and wheeled left to return to the main column-—which was no more than four hundred yards away—the Nez Perce opened a brisk and concentrated fire on his troopers. It appeared his cavalry had walked right into a well-conceived ambush.

“Order the gallop!” Perry shouted, waving an arm and whipping his horse around as the mounted men began to shoot past him.

But as the bullets sailed around them in the confusion and panic, some of the horses became unmanageable, even wild—rearing and wheeling. Three of the men in the captain's company flung themselves out of their saddles and abandoned their horses, while others dismounted and hung onto their frightened horses, all of them sprinting through a grainfield to the left of their formation, racing back for the main column.

By the time Perry's entire battalion reached Wilkinson's artillerymen at the ford, they had withdrawn from the effective range of those enemy carbines. Already the Gatling guns had been wheeled into position and set up their first distinctive chatter.

“General, sir,” said Major Edwin C. Mason as he came to a stop at Howard's elbow, “if I may be so bold as to express my disgust at the lack of … of courage shown by Colonel Perry and his cavalry.”

“Colonel Mason?” Howard said, his eyebrows narrowing
at his newly appointed chief of staff. “What's your complaint?”

“It's clear the Nez Perce hold the colonel's cavalry in profound contempt after the White Bird fiasco. Which is as it should be, General,” Mason continued, warmed to his criticism. “The truth is, the First Cavalry is almost useless to you. They cannot fight on horseback, and they
will
not fight on foot!”

Howard seethed, wanting to rebuke Perry then and there for the embarrassing display—but held his tongue, for they had a hot skirmish just getting under way. He had to admit: He was growing disgusted with the captain who had failed him not only at White Bird but again at Cottonwood Station, too, then only the day before when he failed to follow up the fleeing warriors once his men were across the Clearwater.

For some time the warriors kept up their brisk fire, pinning down the soldiers and returning the long-range Gatling and rifle fire from the Springfields. When the noise began to taper off, Howard finally figured out that the warriors were only covering the escape of their families while the Nez Perce streamed out of sight and into the timbered hills, climbing north-northeast.

“Report on casualties, Lieutenant,” the general ordered his aide, C. E. S. Wood.

In a matter of minutes, as Howard sat impatient in the saddle, Wood was back.

“No dead. Two men wounded. One in bad shape with a head wound, sir.”

Just down the slope from him, Wilkinson's artillery continued to pound those slopes across the river without any effect. After an hour, a disappointed Howard ordered the shelling stopped. With the warriors and their families retreating, it was time for him to begin a crossing. But to do that would require the nonexistent boats of the Lawyer Indians. Complicating matters, the heavy wire cable had been freed from one end of the crossing.

As he was forced to watch the dark figures disappear
among the green hillsides, Howard continued to seethe with the failure of his troops. It felt as if he was foiled at every step, kept no more than a narrow river from catching his quarry.