Lay the Mountains Low (60 page)

“We've already caught enough fish to drive amateur fly flingers into a hospital with sheer envy!” Sutherland gushed.

Howard's face went grave. A sudden cold dash of realism seemed to mock the newsman's high spirits. The general declared, “I only wish Joseph and his hotbloods could be caught this easily.”

Sutherland knew just how much Howard was suffering at the public criticism going the rounds in the national papers. It did not take a phrenologist to diagnose that this beating the general was taking at the hands of the press was the primary, if not the sole, reason for his decision to follow Joseph's war camp himself.

In a dispatch intended for all three of his newspapers, sent with a mail courier back to Lapwai and beyond, Sutherland wrote:

General Howard rode into Lapwai that night on special business … and returned the next afternoon with the face of his proposed campaign somewhat changed. He had learned at Lapwai that on account of the hounding of several influential papers, the Cabinet at Washington had been considering the feasibility of removing him from his command and appointing Crook in his stead. Hearing that the cause of dissatisfaction was want of activity—which is not only baseless but almost ironical, as we have been constantly on the go ever since the troops have been in the field—General Howard resolved to … start with the rest of his command through the impenetrable Lolo Pass, and follow Joseph to the very death.

In private circles, Major Edwin Mason was telling others that the plan for the command to take up the chase over the Lolo was his idea, preempted by the general commanding.

“No matter,” Mason grumbled to Sutherland, and in a letter to his wife as well, “my plan will tell in the end—if we keep after them we are bound to strike them sometime and somewhere.”

On the morning of the twenty-sixth of July, Howard led the short march from Lawyer's Canyon to the subagency at Kamiah, where the command set about the laborious task of crossing the Clearwater with men and materiel, horses and mules, soldiers and packers, along with a contingent of Treaty scouts. The general paid a few of the Treaty men one dollar per head to swim the command's stock over.

Early the next morning, 27 July, Howard dispatched two of McConville's civilians, “Captain” James Cearly and “Sergeant” Joseph Baker—both Mount Idaho volunteers—each to carry a copy of his message for Captain Rawn. Should the pair run into trouble and have to split up, Howard was counting on one of them to make it through to
Missoula City. But instead of setting off on the Lolo route Howard had chosen for his column, Cearly and Baker decided they would take what was called the Old Nez Perce Trail. Following the Clearwater to its source in the mountains, they would make their crossing of the southern pass,
*
then drop into the head of the Bitterroot valley, where they would finally point their noses north for that new army post being raised near Missoula City.

In his dispatch, Howard informed Rawn that the Nez Perce were demoralized, so he believed it wouldn't take much to hold the Non-Treaty bands until the general could come up from the rear to take them in whole:

If you simply bother them, and keep them back until I can come close in, their destruction or surrender will be sure. We must not let these hostile Indians escape.

On each of those three laborious days of crossing and seeing to a thousand final preparations, Howard received a telegram from General McDowell back in Portland, besides a flurry of frantic messages from Governor Potts in Montana Territory, all of them relating the most current revelations about the Indians' movement up the Lolo Trail, clearly intended to nudge the general into starting on his chase. At the bottom of every one of McDowell's wires, the division commander had hand-written the same succinct postscript: “I most strongly encourage your rapid movement up the Lolo Trail.”

In the last few weeks Sutherland had come to know Howard as a man who held his emotions close to the vest, rarely allowing anyone to get a glimpse of who he was inside or what turmoil he was going through. All the correspondent could learn was that the general's dispatches back to McDowell remained steadfastly upbeat day after day, repeatedly explaining to his commander and their superiors
back east: “In another month I shall surely be able to make clean work of the whole field.”

Then early on the morning of the twenty-eighth, just as they were honing the final preparations to depart Kamiah the following day, some fifty packers—who had charge of more than 350 mules for the campaign—went on strike for higher wages.

In a spasm of anger, many of Howard's officers threatened to commandeer the mules and assign their own men to duty as packers. But it did not take long for the general to realize what an impossible struggle greenhorn troops would have with the notoriously testy animals on that impossibly narrow and treacherous wilderness trail over Lolo Pass. Without making the slightest complaint or threatening the civilians with retaliation, Howard gave the Mexican head packer, Louis, and his civilians their due.

As the general walked away from that meeting with his mule skinners, Thomas Sutherland read the expressions of unvarnished satisfaction, happiness, and downright respect for this one-armed officer those half a hundred hard-cases wore on their faces. After those many muddy days tramping through the Seven Devils region of the Salmon River wilderness with this column, the correspondent was already impressed with this outfit of packers. When describing them in several of his dispatches, he referred to them as a splendid class of men physically, with just enough of an accent—since many possessed some degree of Mexican blood—to give proper pronunciation to the word
aparejos
or to swear in a most musical tone. Sutherland marveled how those crude, unlettered, and rough characters were always the first to build their campfires at night and the first to cook their meals. More important for what was yet to come, the packers had never faltered in battle or on long marches demanded of them.

Howard had not only done the just thing in giving those civilians their raise in pay—no matter that to some it seemed like a bold case of highway robbery since they were less than a day from embarking on their journey up the
Lolo—Sutherland knew the general had done the right thing.

Now all this column had to do, come dawn, was finally get on the trail of those hostiles once more … before the Nez Perce had a chance to scatter all across the buffalo plains of Montana Territory.

Wreaking havoc and murder in their wake.

“D
ON'T
shoot! Don't shoot!” came the cry from that lone stationary horseman who continued to shout at his fighting men as the warriors turned aside, starting up that ridge less than a half-mile from the white man's breastworks.

Captain Charles Rawn focused the field glasses on the Nez Perce riders as Pierre, the Flathead interpreter, quickly translated the horseman's commands for every man, soldier or volunteer, who could easily hear the chief's loud bellow, admonishing his warriors to protectively flank the column of women, children, and old ones.

“ ‘Don't shoot,' Looking Glass tells them,” Pierre explained. “ ‘Let those white men shoot first!' ”

The vanguard of the fighting men had escorted their families and horses laden with baggage to within some eight hundred yards of the fortress before angling away to their left, starting up the ridge rising at the north side of the narrow canyon. For the longest time the white men did nothing but stare, dumbfounded at how they had been caught so flat-footed.

“White Bird told you he didn't wanna fight if he didn't have to,” reminded scout E. A. Kenney, breaking the uneasy silence. “I s'pose you can take 'em at their word about it now.”

Frustrated to the point of taking a bite out of his soggy slouch hat, Rawn stomped around the rifle pits, angrily keeping his soldiers and what few civilians were left at the barricades ready for an assault, watchful for anything that might prove this to be a ruse meant to conceal an attack by more of their warriors.

The captain hadn't gotten much sleep the night before—
what with all the clatter and chatter as more than a hundred of the brave Bitterroot valley volunteers abandoned the barricades and rode off for home. By dawn, the officer found he was left with less than eighty men all told: soldiers, civilians, and Chariot's Flathead, too.

Two hours after getting the report that the Nez Perce were packing up for the trail, those men behind the barricades spotted the first warriors leading the women and children up the narrow ridgeline until they disappeared behind a tall, conical hill, completely hidden from view.

By 11:30
A.M.,
the captain ordered a mix of forty-five soldiers and civilians to accompany Lieutenant Tom Andrews on a mission downstream, where they were to guard the trail below the barricades and arrest any stragglers they could.

No more than a half hour later, the last of the Nez Perce rear guard had disappeared from sight behind the high timbered ridge north of the barricades.

“Captain Rawn!” came the shout from the rifle pit nearest the steep slope to the north. “The Injuns coming our way! Coming for us!”

With a loud clatter of metal and wood, the squeak of leather, and the pounding of hundreds of feet, the soldiers, civilians, and Flathead warriors streamed toward that section of the barricades. As the men hunkered down in the dapple of overcast sunlight broken by the tall evergreens that towered over the canyon floor, the breastworks bristled with weapons trained on that small group of Nez Perce slowly advancing on the white men.

A civilian announced, “They got women with 'em, too.”

“What the hell they doing?” someone asked as the group halted two hundred yards from the muzzles of those rifles.

Before anyone could venture a guess, one of the riders at the front of that group of men, women, and children advanced a few more yards, then stopped before he shouted something in bad English.

“Pierre!” Rawn ordered. “Tell 'im to talk Nez Perce so we can understand him!”

After a brief exchange, the Flathead declared, “Old man's name Amos. Friend of mine. Live for some winters near Missoula with his people. Eight lodges—men and women, children, too. They come surrender to you.”

“Surrender?” Rawn asked dubiously. “What the blazes were they doing up here with the hostiles if they've been living friendly near Missoula City?”

Pierre shrugged. “Amos says he heard the Looking Glass people were coming. He was once a Looking Glass Injun. So he took his families up the Lolo to visit old friends. But when he saw there gonna be trouble, Amos want no part of it. Want to come in and give up to you. But Looking Glass and White Bird, they keep warriors close by Amos people so they don't surrender.”

“But they're surrendering now?”

“Looking Glass let them go this morning because the village go on by your log soldier fort.”

“All right. Captain Logan, go out there with Pierre and a squad of men. Quickly disarm those warriors.”

“You want us to dismount them, Captain?” William Logan asked.

“No. Just take their weapons for the time being.” Rawn turned to gaze down the valley where the Nez Perce camp was migrating at a leisurely pace. “We'll find out if they're all that friendly soon enough.”

Fifteen minutes later the captain was leading out the rest of his force, turning east down Lolo Creek. Instead of hurrying to catch up to the tail of the Indians' march, Rawn had his men cautiously probing forward in a military formation, with flankers to the sides and a number of civilian skirmishers arrayed in advance of the main body.

It wasn't long before those volunteers grew increasingly bold and eased up much too close on the end of the column—where the Nez Perce fighting men suddenly whirled about on their ponies and stopped in their tracks, bringing their weapons up, ready to fire on the white men. For a moment there was an anxious clamor as the civilians skidded to a halt there on the banks of Lolo Creek and turned
around, bumping into one another to be the first out of danger and rifle range.

“What the devil's going on?” Rawn bawled at the first of those retreating volunteers galloping back to the main group. “I didn't hear any damn shots—have you been fired on? Did you take any casualties?”

Alfred Cave, a settler from the Bitterroot valley, yanked back on his reins and stopped near the officer, breathlessly explaining, “They made a show to shoot us then and there! Bastards gotta be setting up an ambush for us right ahead, Captain! They was drawing us in closer and closer, just the way they would afore they'd close the trap!”

“Trap?” Rawn echoed skeptically. “How the blazes can those Indians lay a trap for us when we know right where they are?”

Without a word of reply, Cave sheepishly turned aside, rejoining the rest of those who had fled from the advance without uttering a word.

“Mr. Matte!” he called over to the older, French-blood half-breed from the valley.

Alexander Matte moved up on his horse, followed by a half-dozen Flatheads, all of whom wore strips of white cloth around their heads, another strip tied around one upper arm so that, should a fight erupt, soldier and civilian alike would know who was a friendly, who was not.

“Take your trackers and go up the line,” Rawn ordered. “Keep your head down and find out if the Nez Perce are laying an ambush for the rest of us.”

 

*
Near present-day Bozeman, Montana.

*
Today's Lost Trail Pass in extreme southwestern Montana.