Lay the Mountains Low (67 page)

The remembrance of those long, deadly days on the outskirts of Atlanta always made the young soldier smile at the ironic twists his life had taken. With Reconstruction under way across the Confederated states, he fell in love with and married a daughter of the Old South, her father, an Atlanta physician—his Miss Mary Beech.

Knowing what little opportunity he had to return home to at the end of the war, Bradley enlisted in the regular army, serving with the Eighteenth U. S. Infantry—which engaged against the Lakota at Crazy Woman's Fork in Dakota Territory during the early days of the Bozeman Road—before he was transferred to the Seventh U. S. Infantry in 1871, along with a promotion to first lieutenant.

The young lieutenant and his wife were soon blessed with the first of two daughters—Bradley called all three his houseful of ladies.

Those who served with him vouchsafed that he was a man absolutely without fear, a true warrior in whom the fighting spirit was aroused in battle. While not as large as many infantrymen of the day, Bradley was lithe and sinewy, ever active and energetic.

Ever since his arrival in Montana Territory, he had endeared himself to many of its earliest pioneers as he tirelessly collected their reminiscences for the possible publication of a book at some future date. In particular, he was fascinated with the early fur trade of the Far West. His collection of narratives was one of the earliest to record the history of Fort Benton and the American Fur Company on the Upper Missouri River. With an insatiable appetite for the history and ethnography of the region, this budding scholar—who was just now joining the ranks of other inquisitive frontier army officers like John G. Bourke and
Charles King—hoped his studies would one day provide a comfortable life for him and his Miss Mary and give both their daughters the grand weddings every girl dreams she will have.

But war would remain his chosen profession.

On the evening of 26 June 1876, as he was leading a few Crow scouts and the small advance up the valley where they would eventually discover the grotesque, dismembered bodies of the Custer dead, in some way the lieutenant already sensed what he was about to stumble across. Only a day earlier, he had confided to his journal: “There is not much glory in Indian wars, but it will be worthwhile to have been present at such an affair as this.”

He hoped the Seventh Infantry would now have a chance to make a little history—instead of merely witnessing it.

Their colonel commanding had mobilized the Seventh from Camp Baker, Forts Ellis and Shaw, and even out at a tiny way camp pitched beside Dauphin Rapids on the Missouri River to pull together this skimpy force of eight officers and eighty-one
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enlisted men.

Gibbon had wired Governor Benjamin F. Potts concerning two possible eventualities, depending upon where the Nez Perce turned once they debouched from the Lolo. If the Non-Treaty bands turned north at the end of the Lolo Trail for the Blackfoot River, Gibbon wanted Potts to have his local militia assist Captain Rawn, who would be forced to follow the Indians until the colonel met them somewhere west of Cadotte Pass. But if the hostiles turned south, Potts was to send his volunteers to guard those passes leading into the Big Hole basin, with orders to delay the Non-Treaty bands until Gibbon could catch them from the rear and give a fight.

“Please give instructions,” the colonel told the governor, “… to have no negotiations whatever with the Indians, and the men should have no hesitancy in shooting down any
armed Indians they meet not known to belong to one of the peaceful tribes.”

Rendezvousing just west of Cadotte Pass with eight troopers from the Second U. S. Cavalry out of Fort Ellis, they soon met wagons loaded with families and their meager belongings, civilians escaping the western sections of the state. Near New Chicago, several small parties of militia from Pioneer and Deer Lodge, already on the way to the Bitterroot, joined Gibbon's men.

Accompanied by the eight cavalrymen, the colonel himself had pressed ahead of his column for Missoula City with all possible dispatch, reaching the community on 2 August. There he commandeered some wagons to be sent back for his foot soldiers and pack-master Hugh Kirkendall's mule train from Fort Shaw.

Bradley himself reached Captain Rawn's post the next afternoon with the rest of Gibbon's undermanned column. At this early stage of the pursuit, the colonel maintained the optimism that he could overtake the slow-moving village within two days by making long, forced marches.

“I speculated the same thing you did, General,” Charles Rawn disclosed to Gibbon, using the colonel's highest brevet rank awarded for gallantry in the Civil War. “Utilizing locals and some of my own men as spies, I've managed to keep an eye on the hostiles, charting their movements every day. We should be able to overhaul them in a matter of days and bring them to a fight.”

“They're headed over the mountains by their normal route, Captain?” Bradley asked Rawn.

“They'll have to go through Big Hole Prairie. Two days ago when I wasn't proof certain of when you'd arrive, I wired Governor Potts that I would lead some fifty or sixty regulars in pursuit, knowing full well I'd have to temporize my march so that you or General Howard could catch up before I overtook the rear of the hostile village.”

“What do your sources tell you the bands are doing, Captain?” Bradley asked. “Are they moving any faster the closer they get to the head of the valley?”

“No, Lieutenant,” Rawn said. “If anything, they appear to dawdle a little more each of the last few days. I've become pretty well satisfied that they will not hurry out of the Bitterroot until they know that one army or the other has arrived to give them chase. Not surprisingly, they have been keeping a watch on us, too, and therefore know everything that's going on with us.”

“How many warriors do you estimate are with them at this point?” inquired Bradley, who would be in charge of a small detail of scouts.

Rawn turned to the lieutenant and said, “At least two hundred and fifty.”

His eyes squinting with determination and a heap of keen anticipation, Bradley looked at Colonel Gibbon and declared, “That ought to make for a damn good scrap of it, sir.”

BY TELEGRAPH

—

KANSAS.

—

An Imposing Military Funeral at
Fort Leavenworth.

LEAVENWORTH, Ks., August 3.—Yesterday evening the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific brought the remains of Captains Yates and Custer, Liets. McIntosh, Smith, Calhoun and Worth. The bodies were placed in the Post chapel, and a guard of honor was stationed and remained during the night. This morning a large number of people visited the chapel and viewed the caskets containing the remains of the honored dead … The procession was formed, and the remains taken to the cemetery, about one mile distant, upon artillery caissons. Each caisson was drawn by two bay horses. Following each caisson was a horse caparisoned in mourning, and led by a cavalry soldier, according to the custom of the funeral ceremonies for officers in the cavalry service. During the march to the cemetery, minute guns were fired and flags lowered to half-mast … Arriving at the Post cemetery,
the Episcopal service was read and a salute of three volleys was fired over the graves. The ceremonies were very imposing. All the arrangements were complete and carried out in perfect order. It was estimated that there were nearly three hundred carriages in the procession … The fact that the lamented dead had lived at that garrison and were well known and honored by our people created an intense feeling of sympathy among the entire community. Five of the brave soldiers in the army have thus been tenderly placed in their final resting place in the beautiful Leavenworth cemetery with all the honors due to men of noble and daring deeds, and their memory will be cherished by every patriot in the land.

Rationed for twenty days, General O. O. Howard's seven-hundred-thirty-man column struck out for the western terminus of the Lolo Trail beneath a steady, cold, depressing rain early that Monday morning, 30 July.

It had taken more than a day to repair the wire cable across the Clearwater, then two more days to slog the entire command across to the north bank. That final day of preparation, the twenty-ninth, was a Sunday. Howard attended a Presbyterian service conducted in both Nez Perce and English by Archie Lawyer, son of the great treaty chief. It was a chance to offer prayers to the Almighty. And that night, their last beside the Kamiah crossing, the general committed his innermost doubts to paper:

There is a stern reality in going from all that you love into the dread uncertainty of Indian fighting, where the worst form of torture and death might await you. It is very wise and proper to ask God's blessing when about to plunge into the dark clouds of warfare.

In the advance by four o'clock that Monday morning rode twenty-four members of a tribe that was an ancient enemy of the Nez Perce, Bannock scouts, who had arrived on
the twenty-eighth from Fort Boise with Major George B. Sanford of the First U. S. Cavalry. Major John Wesley Green, also of the First, would be along soon, temporarily delayed with two infantry companies at the nearby mining community of Florence. Above their traditional leggings of buckskin or antelope hide the Bannock wore army tunics of dark blue, gaily set off with bright sashes of stars and stripes fashioned from old garrison flags. They were led by Buffalo Horn, who, just two days before departing Fort Boise, had returned to his people after serving Colonel Nelson A. Miles during the last skirmishes of the Great Sioux War.
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Despite the rain that fell in sheets, Buffalo Horn and his fellow trackers were eager to hunt down the fleeing village filled with their longtime enemies. With the arrival of these Indian scouts, the general dismissed McConville's volunteers mustered from the rural settlements of eastern Washington.

The quartermaster had seen to it the column was supplied with rations for twenty days, along with additional beeves on the hoof. Howard designated Lewiston as the main depot for his army in the field, leaving orders that the general staff was to keep the depot well furnished with at least three months' supplies on hand. Forage would not be carried along, because the general and his officers believed they could obtain what they needed for their stock along the way.

The column's supplies would be transported on the backs of a long train of more than 350 mules, in addition to what mules were needed to carry the dismantled Coehorn mortar
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and drag the two Gatling guns and a pair of mountain howitzers over the rugged Lolo Trail. This march would prove itself to be like no other since Hannibal himself had crossed the Alps.

From the Kamiah crossing of the Clearwater, the rainsoaked, slippery trail was an ordeal Howard likened to a monkey climbing a greased rope, as it angled northeast for sixteen miles toward the
Weippe
Prairie—where the soldiers found that the Nez Perce women had dug up much of the lush camas meadows—then would extend almost due east into the Bitterroot Mountains for more than a hundred miles of narrow ridges and harrowing precipices, not to mention boggy mires where man and beast sank to their knees and slapped at blood-devouring mosquitoes or that fallen timber so thick an exasperated Howard believed a man could cross from one side of the Lolo to the other stepping only on downed trees, without his feet once touching the ground.

Eleven years before, at the time of both the Idaho and Montana gold rushes, Congress had funded a party of ax-men and former Civil War engineers under Wellington Bird and Sewell Truax to survey and build a road over the Bitterroot. It was, by and large, this narrow, primitive “wagon road” that the Nez Perce had started out on a full two weeks before General Howard ever got under way, his column following the same exhausting path toward Montana Territory—fighting their way over and around trees felled by high winds and heavy, wet snowfall, over and across the remnants of once-massive snowdrifts. On either side of the plodding column arose peaks rising more than seven thousand feet high, all still blanketed with a thick mantle of white that day by day became moisture draining into the Middle Fork of the Clearwater on the west, into the Bitterroot River to the east.

So slow was their pace that it did not take long every morning for the entire command to find itself strung out for more than five, sometimes as many as six, miles in length.