Lay the Mountains Low (9 page)

“I've seen enough, Doctor,” he said in a soft voice, sensing the sweat bead on his brow as he replaced the hat upon his head, his flesh grown clammy. “I think … I've seen quite enough.”

 

*
Cries from the Earth,
vol. 14, the
Plainsmen
series.

J
UNE
25–26, 1877

“W
HO GOES THERE
?”

The instant that harsh voice challenged them out of the inky night, Sergeant Michael McCarthy snapped awake in the saddle.

Their company commander was the first to reply as the thirty-some soldiers of H Company and a handful of hangers-on from Mount Idaho clattered to a noisy halt in the dark, just after 2:00
A.M.
on that Monday morning, 25 June. “Major Joel Trimble—First U.S. Cavalry!”

“Cavalry!” a second, different voice shouted now, less threatening and an octave higher with relief and celebration.

There came a sudden bustle of noise from the darkness in their front: sounds of shuffling, running feet, several more muffled voices mixed with a little unrestrained exuberance as the wooded river bottom came alive.

“Open this goddamned gate!” a new voice was raised. “Get it open for them soldiers!”

“By bloody damn,” Lieutenant Parnell exclaimed with no small measure of exhaustion beside McCarthy, “appears we've found the settlers of Slate Creek!”

Just past two-thirty, early on the morning of 26 June, Company H had done just that.

It had been closing in on complete darkness the night before when they reached the tiny mining settlement of Florence, finally coaxing out a few of the Chinese and what few whites still remained in the town to report what they knew of the marauding Indians. It was useless attempting to pry any information from the Oriental laborers, but two of the white miners had a little news to relay on the movements of the Non-Treaty Bands. The Nez Perce were no longer encamped at the mouth of the White Bird. They had eased south, up the Salmon toward Horseshoe Bend.

“The savages appear to be acting as if we won't attack 'em again,” Trimble had explained to the entire company just before he ordered them to remount.

Parnell had asked, “We still going on to Slate Creek, Major?”

“Get them saddled, Sergeant McCarthy,” was Trimble's only reply as he ignored his lieutenant. “We're not sticking around here when we've got ground to cover.”

Those weary, saddle-galled troopers had climbed back into their McClellans after no more than fifteen minutes with their boots on the ground and pushed on. Twelve miles later, as McCarthy's watch was nearing midnight, Trimble called for another halt in an open patch of meadow surrounded by stands of timber. The moon was just then tearing itself off the horizon to the east, somewhere behind the Bitterroot Mountains.

“Don't loosen your cinches, boyos,” McCarthy warned his men. “You can eat your tacks if you got 'em, but no pipes. Remember what happened at the White Bird. No god-blame-it pipes in this country.”

After something less than an hour Trimble gave the order to remount and they marched on, encountering some crusted snow just after leaving the small meadow and climbed ever higher. What with those snowfields reflecting the dim starlight, the whole countryside limned by a bright, silvery half-moon, the view was stunning. In awe at such breathtaking scenery, McCarthy knew it would take a pen much more eloquent than his to do justice to their cross-country ride.

The quiet of that mountain wilderness, the blackness of the night that surrounded them, the rhythmic plodding of the saddle horse beneath him—all of it proved more than McCarthy could fight. He drifted off and was dozing in the saddle when those voices called out from the dark.

After a brief celebration and a shaking of hands all around, the settlers helped Trimble's men find a corral for their weary horses, then led the soldiers within their log walls. Clutching their blankets about their shoulders,
the troopers collapsed here or there, wherever a man might find enough room to stretch out, close his eyes, and sink immediately into a well-earned sleep.

By the gray light of false dawn McCarthy came awake, rolling out to join two civilians at the west wall where they had a low fire going, coffee warmed to see them through their watch.

“William Watson's the name,” the older man introduced himself with a big hand.

The sergeant replied, “I heard you're the one knowed how to build this fort.”

“That's right. Got all my learning during the war,” Watson explained.

“Your education come in handy here,” McCarthy said, admiring the sturdiness of the timbers the men had sunk into three-foot-deep trenches, then back-filled. “Can't see how the bloody h'athens could've broke in here on you.”

Norman Gould said, “Bill here, he saw to it we'd get all the women and young'uns into the stone house back yonder if the bastards broke over the walls.”

“We made the house our powder magazine,” Watson explained, jabbing a thumb toward the structure. “Blow up everything—everyone, too—before the Nez Perce got their hands on 'em.”

“Didn't know how long we'd have to hold out,” George Greer said. “Word was that General Howard was somewhere in the field, but we didn't know just where you soldiers was, or when you'd get here to us.”

“Wasn't the general moved out first,” McCarthy explained dolefully. “Maybe it had been Howard what led us down into White Bird 'stead of Colonel Perry his cowardly self there'd be more of me friends alive to greet this very morning.”

The coffee was good, but the sun that broke over the hills that morning felt even better. Trimble had McCarthy tell the men that H Company would be spending a day of rest at Slate Creek—recruiting their horses and gathering strength for the rest of their mission.

Later that Tuesday morning, some of the women and children ventured from the stone house, stepping outside the safety of the stockade walls for the first time in more than a week of dread. While the rest of the women were grateful for, and the children excited about, the arrival of the soldiers, not one of Trimble's cavalrymen got a peek at either Helen Walsh or Elizabeth Osborn.

“Rumor has it they was violated,” Parnell explained in a whisper as he and McCarthy walked up the slope to relieve two men of their watch along the Salmon.

“Raped?”

“Shhh!” Parnell rasped angrily. “It's talk like that made them two women fear to show their faces.”

“They was … shamed by the h'athens?”

The lieutenant nodded as they neared the improvised rifle pits. “Both of 'em, over and over again by the red bastards. 'Cause of it, neither of them women gonna ever be the same again.”

It made his blood boil, to think of those painted-up, blood-splattered, stink-smeared warriors humiliating, dishonoring, shaming those two women.

The sergeant turned to stare a long moment down at the stone house, his heart breaking for both victims of such unspeakable horror. “No small wonder is it? Why them poor women can't hardly face their friends no more.”

“They lost their husbands, too, I heard,” Parnell said. “Come out of it only with their wee ones.”

“Them's the ones we're fighting the Nez Perce for, Lieutenant Parnell,” McCarthy growled. “Them women and children. They're the reason I wanna kill me ever' last Injun buck I can put in my sights, or get my hands around. They're less'n human, ever' last bloody one of 'em.”

“W
E
should reach the scene before midmorning, General,” declared Captain David Perry after he had saluted the campaign's commander in the misty damps of predawn that twenty-sixth day of June.

“You understand my purpose in going into that valley is not to engage the Nez Perce,” Howard reminded.

“You explained that to me last night.”

“I want only to find their location, then follow them with my trackers,” the general continued. “But I won't come up on them and attack until I have been reinforced in the next few days. I'm afraid if your experience has taught me anything, it is that caution is the watchword.”

Perry licked his lower lip. “I think we all have a newfound respect for their fighting abilities, sir.”

“Besides discovering where the enemy is and where he is going, I also seek to honor those fallen men with a decent interment.”

It made Perry's skin crawl to think of those bodies having lain in the open for the last nine days—bloating in the rising heat, blackening with decay. A fallen soldier deserved far better from his fellows.

A
T
six-thirty that Tuesday morning, barely an hour after sunrise, General Howard led his column of infantry, cavalry, and artillery out of that one-night bivouac at Johnson's ranch and started for the White Bird battlefield.

At the top of the hill, Howard had Arthur Chapman called over to the head of the march.

“Mr. Chapman, I'm putting you in charge of the Walla Walla volunteers.”

“You got something in mind for us?” the dark-eyed civilian asked.

“A scouting mission,” the general said. “To determine where the Nez Perce have gone.”

“Very good, General,” Chapman replied. He pointed off to the right of their line of march. “We'll push west till we reach the edge of the canyon, staying with the top of this ridge, where Colonel Perry and the rest of his men straggled out of the canyon the morning of the fight.”

Perry asked, “Will that give you a good vantage point to look into the valley of the Salmon?”

But Chapman never looked at the captain. He merely nodded to Howard and answered, “None better. We'll have us a good look around for them red murderers for you, General.”

Howard rocked back in the saddle, arching his back as if attempting to relieve a knotted muscle. “Very good. We'll be in the valley.”

“Gonna bury them soldiers?” Chapman asked with a great deal of curiosity in his eyes.

“We're going to do what any God-fearing soldier would do for his fallen comrades.”

Perry watched Chapman turn away without another word; then Howard spoke.

“Colonel, we'll leave Whipple's L Company and Captain Throckmorton's artillery unit in an advantageous spot at the top of White Bird Hill, perhaps over there.”

“They'll cover our advance in the event of a surprise, sir?”

The general nodded. “Exactly.” Then he turned to a knot of nearby officers. “Colonel Miller?”

The Massachusetts-born captain serving with the Fourth U. S. Artillery, Marcus P. Miller, urged his horse close to Howard's. “Sir?”

“You're assigned the advance as we enter the valley.”

The captain saluted. “Yes, General. Captain Winters?”

Henry E. Winters wheeled his mount and approached. “Am I given the honor of supporting the colonel?” He used Miller's brevet rank.

“You are,” Howard replied. “Colonel Perry and I will follow you down with the rest of the command. When we reach the battlefield, the colonel himself will organize the search for the bodies of his dead.”

The first corpse they found startled the men in the advance with Miller and Winters. From a distance, the figure appeared to be an Indian hiding behind a bush, perhaps even pointing a weapon at the oncoming soldiers. While the rest of the column watched, Winters sent three men forward—their carbines held at ready, prepared to fire, all
aimed at the rigid corpse. Up close they discovered that it wasn't an Indian at all, but a white man, his body standing, somehow attached to the spiny branches of a hawthorn bush—both arms outstretched as if he were clutching it.

“It's Sergeant Gunn,” Perry grimly explained to Howard after they stopped near the remains of the gray-haired veteran. “F Company, sir.”

“He sold his life dearly that day, Colonel.”

Perry nodded, noticing the many copper cases in the grass near Gunn's feet. “Colonel Miller, assign three men to bury Sergeant Gunn.”

The rest pushed on toward that distant ridge where Perry had deployed his battalion for their abbreviated battle against the screaming horsemen. After crossing another hundred yards, the captain realized he would never forget the grisly sight that greeted them this sunny Tuesday morning. While he was certain the terror of their frantic retreat would forever trouble his waking hours, Perry was just as certain the horror of what lay before him at this very moment would forever haunt his nights.

That and the unearthly stench.

Arms and legs frozen akimbo in death, twenty-some bodies lay scattered across the hillsides, every last one blackened by nine days of mortifying decay and a relentless summer sun, flesh grotesquely swollen with the gases of decomposition until most of the faces were totally unrecognizable in their horrid death grins.

Oh, the stench. When that morning's warm breeze suddenly died and the heavy air lay still upon that field of death, the pungent odor rose up to assault a man with a gagging ferocity.