Lay the Mountains Low (96 page)

Even though I am omitting the rest of those two dozen historical topics for now, I plan to eventually discuss the most important of them in a
final
author's afterword, the one I'll write at the conclusion of this trilogy on the Nez Perce War. For any of you who want to read about my ongoing research travels along this second segment of the Nez Perce Trail, I'll refer you to my annual news magazine,
WinterSong
, in every edition of which I recount my journey to go where this Indian Wars history actually happened. For more information on this publication, please see the “About the Author” section that follows this afterword.

Rather than reprinting the long list of titles I relied upon while researching and writing
Cries from the Earth
as well as the story you have just read, I will refer you back to the listing I gave in the Author's Afterword at the end of that previous book. Additional sources I have used for telling this second tragic tale in
Lay the Mountains Low
are:

 

An Elusive Victory
—
the Battle of the Big Hole
, by Aubrey L. Haines

A Sharp Little Affair: The Archeology of the Big Hole Battlefield
, by Douglas D. Scott

“Battle of the Big Hole” by General C. A. Woodruff,
Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana
7 (1910)

“Chief Joseph's Flight Through Montana: 1877,” by Verne Dusenberry,
The Montana Magazine of History
2 (October, 1952)

Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891
, by Robert M. Utley

“Review of the Battle of the Big Hole,” by Amos Buck,
Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana
7 (1910)

 

Before jumping any further, I want to acknowledge the immeasurable help of two people, without whom this book could not have been written. The story you have just read is a chronicle, a rendering of the latest, most up-to-date research into the Nez Perce War.

I could not have researched this story over the past twenty-seven months without the assistance of my longtime friend Jerome A. Greene of the National Park Service's Rocky Mountain Regional Office. A few years ago Jerry began compiling his research for a soon-to-be-published volume on the
Nee-Me-Poo
Crisis, for the most part relying on primary accounts rather than secondary sources, along with his own intimate travels through Nez Perce country. His efforts serve as the framework for my three-book chronicle of the Nez Perce struggle: a trilogy of gut-wrenching novels that recount a five-month, fifteen-hundred-mile odyssey
from tribal greatness to the “Hot Place” in Indian Territory. My hope is that Jerry's newest book, to be published by agreement between the National Park Service and the Montana Historical Society, will be available to the general reader sometime in the year 2000.

Since his work is not yet available to the public, I relied upon the kindness and generosity of both Jerry Greene himself and the research librarian at the Nez Perce National Historic Park in Spalding, Idaho, Rob Applegate. With Rob's timely assistance, I got my hands on a copy of Jerry Greene's monumental manuscript, which is undergoing a final copyedit at this time. After I met Rob on his first day at Spalding back in 1998, it wasn't long before I found him to be a real asset to the National Park Service—always cheerful and helpful with my obscure and ofttimes troublesome requests.

Again I want to emphasize that
Lay the Mountains Low
could not have been written without both Jerry and Rob being in the background to answer my questions and give me their support. If you find you've had some of your questions answered on this part of the Nez Perce War story or you simply enjoyed this captivating tale, then you must surely appreciate the efforts these two fine employees of the National Park Service gave to see this novel written.

Were you as tantalized as I was with the mystery of what became of Jennet Manuel and her infant son at the end of
Cries from the Earth
?

If you weren't as baffled or eager to find out as I was, you have no need of reading any further. The rest of this abbreviated afterword will deal with that little-known and heartrending tale of the Nez Perce War.

The shedding of blood is always answered. Almost two decades of assault, robbery, rape, and murder committed against the Non-Treaty
Nee-Me-Poo
brewed the foul-smelling recipe that boiled over along the Salmon River, then spilled across the Camas Prairie in mid-June 1877.

Blood cries out for blood. Following those outrages against innocent white women and children committed by
drunken, revenge-seeking warriors from White Bird's and
Toohoolhoolzote
's bands (and I use the term
warriors
very loosely, because I prefer to call them criminals, if not thugs), young men who felt very brave sweeping down upon unarmed or outnumbered civilians in overwhelming force, this mystery revolving around Jennet Manuel came to captivate an entire region of our country during that bloody summer. The speculation continues to this day.

Some of the contemporary testimony tells us that Mrs. Manuel, and perhaps her son, too, were taken along with the retreating warrior bands as they fled over the Lolo Trail to Montana Territory. Other reports have her being killed by a drunken and spiteful warrior just days after she was captured at her home (the former Ad Chapman homestead on White Bird Creek adjacent to the battlefield of 17 June). Some Nez Perce sources, who claim to have been at the scene, would have you believe mother and son were murdered and their bodies consumed in the fire that consumed the Manuel house—a few of the Indian stories admitting that Jennet Manuel was still alive and conscious when the drunken murderers set fire to the house—while other Nez Perce sources claim she was killed somewhere along the Lolo Trail.

Let's go back to chapter 18 in
Cries from the Earth
, when Maggie Manuel has crawled out of her house and into the timber, attempting to find either her maternal grandfather, George Popham, or a local miner, Patrick Brice. She finds the Irish prospector and relates her story of how she watched from hiding as Joseph (who was widely reputed to abstain from whiskey—a fact testified to by even his most ardent spiritual enemy, Kate McBeth, the Christian schoolteacher at Kamiah, when she wrote: “Joseph had one good thing about him. He was a temperance man”) and his drunken warriors clubbed both Maggie's mother and little brother before dragging them off to finish the murders. The story Maggie later told with consistency has her watching Joseph stab her mother in the breast, as she is nursing the
infant, before Maggie herself is taken to another room, where she falls asleep.

This outrageous accusation that Joseph himself killed Mrs. Manuel simply refuses to die, especially among the Christian Nez Perce of today! Back in the summer of 1939, when Congress was considering a monument to Joseph, a Nez Perce from Lapwai, J. M. Parsons, wrote to U. S. Representative Usher L. Burdick to protest. Burdick had the Indian's letter read in the chamber and subsequently entered into the
Congressional Record
:

Chief Joseph was not the man which history would place before the educational institutions as has been suggested along with the erection of the memorial. He is guilty of wantonly killing a white woman, Mrs. J. Manuel, while he was under the influence of liquor. On June 15,1877, the chief and two companions, also under the influence of liquor, visited the home of the Manuels on White Bird Creek, where friendly Indians were keeping guard over the wounded Mrs. Manuel and baby with the understanding that the woman would be given aid in escaping to the white settlement. Joseph proceeded to wrangle over the succoring of the enemy white woman, and when the friendly Indians remonstrated, the chief reached out with a dagger and plunged it into her breast, killed her almost instantly … There is an old warrior living today who was present when the killing took place, and it has been generally known among the Nez Perce that Joseph committed the deed.

Upon learning of this claim, Nez Perce supporter and writer L.V. McWhorter wrote to Parsons, demanding he produce the “old warrior” and all evidence leading to Joseph's guilt. Parsons never answered any of McWhorter's entreaties.

In his book
Chief Joseph
—
the Biography of a Great Indian
, author Chester Anders Fee appears to have bought the
whole of Maggie's story of how her mother was killed when he writes:

…Mrs. Manuel, and her ten months old child fell injured when their horse stumbled. She with her baby and daughter, who had also broken her arm in the fall, were taken back to the ranch house by the Nez Perce, who then told her they would take no more lives if she gave them Mr. Manuel's rifle and ammunition. This she did, and the Indians left. But soon several others of the party returned and one plunged a knife into her breast, killing her, and later they also killed her baby.

A pretty convoluted explanation of how suddenly well mannered were that gang of murderers, while they were seizing everything and anything that suited them—including guns, ammunition, and white women. Mr. Fee simply can't have it both ways.

To continue with young Maggie's rendition of her story: When she awakens, the house is filled with an ominous silence. Opening the door to the main room, Maggie finds her mother's naked body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. That “blood oozed between my toes.” Near her mother's head lay her baby brother, John. In her version of the story, when she located Brice outside in the woods, she took him back into the house to view the bodies before they both returned to the timber.

Although Brice would never confirm that part of the girl's story—he stated that when he went back to the house he found it empty—Maggie Manuel remained consistent with every other detail of that night, right on into her adulthood.

First of all, let's lay to rest her allegation that Joseph killed her mother. Aside from whether or not Maggie herself had ever seen Joseph, chief of the
Wallowa
band, and would be able to identify him, the simple fact is that he could not have been in the White Bird Canyon the night of 15 June 1877. He and his brother,
Ollokot
, along with their
families and the rest of the
Wallamwatkin
, were far, far to the north, sleeping in their camp near Cottonwood Creek after fleeing
Tepahlewam
at news of the murders and outrages against the whites on the Salmon.

When Brice left the White Bird Creek area with Maggie, he said the house was still standing. Later when the Irish miner was reunited with George Popham in Grangeville, Popham told him the house was burned to the ground. There should have been charred bodies, if not human skeletons, among the ashes as forensic evidence. When two local frontiersmen, Ad Chapman and James Conely, raked through the cinders of the Manuel place, they found some bones—but both men remained convinced the charred bones they discovered belonged to an animal.

But there were those who disagreed with this assessment. Writing a letter to the editor of the Lewiston
Teller
on 19 July, local resident J. W. Poe stated: “It was currently believed that Mrs. Manuel and the child were still alive until I had examined the ruins and found positive evidence to the contrary.” On his journey back to his own looted store along the Salmon River after Howard's army marched into the area, H. C. “Hurdy Gurdy” Brown visited the Manuel homestead and declared his certainty that Jennet and little John had perished in the fire. However, historian Jack Mc-Dermott could not locate what “evidence” led Poe and Brown to unwaveringly declare both mother and son had died in the flames.

Perhaps it was nothing more conclusive than the jewelry someone unearthed in raking through the ashes of the Manuel home … earrings Maggie stated unequivocally that her mother was wearing the day of the attack.

The certainty that mother and son had been killed at their home was further solidified when local trader Harry Cone recorded his reminiscences as one of the settlers who took shelter behind the stockade at Slate Creek (see chapter 46 in
Cries from the Earth
). Cone remembered how one of the Nez Perce horsemen who came to the stockade wall to settle accounts with trader John Wood disclosed to an old
Nez Perce woman, Tolo, who was in the stockade with the whites, how Mrs. Manuel was killed by a fellow warrior under the influence of whiskey: “She [Tolo] began to talk, upbraiding them for killing their friends and hers, and Mrs. Manuel, who, we learned from them, one of them had killed, who was full of bad whiskey.”

Yet on 28 July, more than a month later, the Lewiston
Teller
stirred things up anew by announcing: “Squaws still report that Mrs. Manuel is living and a prisoner.”

Additionally, here in
Lay the Mountains Low
we told you Henry Buck's story” of seeing a blond-haired white woman among a small group of squaws he saw fleeing from the Nez Perce village at the time of Gibbon's attack at the Big Hole. But it wasn't until years later that a settler in the Bitterroot valley finally reported that he had spotted a blond-haired white woman with the Non-Treaty bands as they made their way to the Big Hole.

Two independent, and highly intriguing, sightings far, far from the charred remains of the Manuel house on White Bird Creek.

This story refused to take an entirely straight and uncompromising path, just as much of history itself refuses to do. A hint of something stuck its head up here, a rumor was reported there—and that's the way the mystery rested for almost a quarter of a century.

It wasn't until 1900 that the first Nez Perce account of the raid and abduction was given to a white man. Yellow Bull (who was called Sun Necklace at the time of the war) told his story to C. T. Stranahan—Nez Perce agent at the time—swearing the white man to keep his story secret until after Yellow Bull's death (which did not occur until July of 1919). According to the war chief, Mrs. Manuel was captured and kept a prisoner by an Indian Yellow Bull refused to name. Some time after the Non-Treaty bands had crossed the Lolo Pass into Montana Territory, Yellow Bull continued, her captor and another warrior began to quarrel over the white woman. The bickering escalated until friends had to keep the two apart.