Cries from the Earth (38 page)

“There,” he had convinced Ollokot, “we can wait while the wounds of these killings have healed and this current trouble is forgotten.”

“And then?” Ollokot had asked in resignation.

“We will see what sort of peace Cut-Off Arm will offer us, so we can return to this country.”

“I think the Shadows have a long memory,” Ollokot had grumped. “We might be fools to believe those Boston Men will give us a good peace.”

For a long time Joseph had weighed their options. In the end he reluctantly vowed, “If Cut-Off Arm does not deal with us honorably while we are in the buffalo country, then I will lead our people north into the Old Woman's Country, where we will find Sitting Bull's Lakota.”

No matter how cheerful he tried to make that option sound, all the paths that lay before them appeared equally grim. So Joseph's heart lay heavy in his breast, not so much because other chiefs and warriors had openly called him a coward for wanting to wait at
Tepahlewam
so they could see what sort of peace the bands could forge with the soldiers when the army came, not even heavy because many had accused him of being a traitor and suspected he would be a turncoat for the Shadows … but heavy because he felt he could peer into the days and the seasons ahead, glimpsing what fate now held in store for his people.

Somber and weary, Joseph led his people away from
Sapachesap
for the mouth of the White Bird, knowing that even though only one of his warriors had followed Sun Necklace and taken part in the murderous raids up and down the Salmon, he himself would be blamed for the trouble because of his prominent role in the failure of the recent negotiations, especially because of his past defiance against the agent and Cut-Off Arm. As the other bands had packed up and abandoned
Tepahlewam,
Joseph had despaired that he no longer held any power to determine the future of the Wallowa. Now that was held in the hands of the soldier chief.

If he were given the chance to sue for peace, Joseph vowed to do what he could on behalf of all the
Nee-Me-Poo.
Somehow he would have to convince Cut-Off Arm and Agent Monteith that even though ten, perhaps fifteen, white lives had been taken already, those lives had been sacrificed only after the young men had soaked their hearts with Shadow whiskey. Besides, Joseph would argue, that slaughter of a few whites along the Salmon and up on the Camas Prairie had to be weighed against twenty-four long winters as the Boston Men raped
Nee-Me-Poo
women, stole
Nee-Me-Poo
horses, cattle, and land … twenty-four long winters as the miners, cattlemen, and settlers wantonly murdered Joseph's people.

Here on the hillside where he could look down on
Lahmotta,
into that bottomground along White Bird Creek, Joseph recognized how this traditional campsite had been chosen for defense generations ago. Backed by the Salmon River to the west, they were flanked on both sides by high ridges and deep ravines. Atop nearby buttes the chiefs could post sentries to watch for the approach of any soldier column. The scarcity of level terrain at this traditional camping ground would serve the bands well should the white men choose to attack. Here a few warriors could hold off more than twice as many as their number.

Turning his pony about, Joseph hurried back along the column to reach his wife's travois. There he leaned over and held down his hand, smiling. But when she raised her hand to touch his, she seized it, squeezing fiercely.

“Stay close, Joseph. I am so afraid for your daughter.”

Tears stung his eyes. “Do not fear, woman. Our daughter has been born in freedom.”

He stayed with the travois on their way down the long slope toward the great encampment where the other bands had already erected a forest of lodgepole cones, spreading their smoke-blackened buffalo-hide covers over them. Somewhere near the creek he would help his eldest daughter erect their lodge.

Then he would wait.

Joseph knew he could do little else but wait and brood that Cut-Off Arm held the power now. The
Nee-Me-Poo
could only wait.

Would the soldier chief come to punish his people with a harsh and unjust peace?

Or would he send his soldiers?

Chapter 30

June 16, 1877

He was a mishmash of contradictions, this Arthur Chapman.

At thirty-six, he stood tall, spare, and every bit as lean as a buggy whip. He still had plenty of his hair: black as the bottom of a tar spring did it spill across his shoulders. Born in Iowa, Chapman was no more than seven years old when his family moved to Oregon during that monumental western migration upon the Emigrant Road. His father soon became one of the founders of Portland.

This inland Northwest was a country rife with possibilities for a likely lad. Seeking his own brand of adventure at the ripe old age of nine, young Arthur carried dispatches for the army between The Dalles and Fort Walla Walla during the Rogue River Indian War. By the time he turned fifteen, Chapman had settled on a piece of ground beside White Bird Creek, near the mouth of a stream that would soon bear his name. It was there he began raising cattle and breeding horses, as well as operating a ferry across the Salmon River at the mouth of the White Bird. Because of his daring bravado and his uncanny ability to navigate his ferry across the swollen, raging river, even during the most tumultuous spring flooding, folks in the area began calling him Admiral, or simply “Ad” for short.

Ad Chapman it was, and always would be.

In '74 he sold his ranch to John J. Manuel and moved north to a new homestead he built on Cottonwood Creek some eight miles from Mount Idaho out on the Camas Prairie, where he continued to breed horses. Around the time the Nez Perce started kicking up a fuss, Chapman boasted owning some four hundred head of prime stock that grazed in his pastures in the shadow of Cottonwood Butte.

Oh, not that there wasn't a ticklish rumor about Ad and his horse-trading practices that cropped up every now and then: a story that claimed he had sold a horse to a warrior named White Eagle, then later taken the horse back by force. But that wasn't really anything more than talk. Not that Chapman hadn't tried to get the horse back, mind you—when Ad found out how the red bastard had cheated him by trading him three old horses, all soon to come down with the colic. Truth was, Ad was plagued by a short-fused temper, and when he went off looking to even the score with White Eagle, Chapman only got himself whipped pretty good by some of that Indian's friends.

Such affairs as that didn't do much good to endear the Nez Perce to Ad Chapman, even though he had married an Umatilla squaw a few years back, even though he spoke real good Nez Perce too. The couple had a young boy, and now his wife was expecting another child come early fall.

Hard as he tried, Ad couldn't seem to win with either side—not with most of the Nez Perce, who distrusted him to one degree or another, and not with some of the whites who considered him a traitor because he had married an Indian woman and fathered a half-breed child. Truth was, Chapman didn't endear himself to some folks simply because he called it as he saw it. If an Indian acted bad, he was due a thrubbing, Ad believed. And if a man stole a horse, he was due a hanging.

That's how Chapman came to be the leader of the bunch who caught a warrior named Wolf Head who was accused of stealing a settler's horse and some cows. Once the white posse got their hands on the Nez Perce warrior, they hanged him from the closest tree and left the body twisting in the wind for the better part of a week simply to scare hell out of the other bucks who might feel frisky enough to purloin some white man's horses or some beef on the hoof.

On top of all that, there was a story going the rounds that the Non-Treaty bands didn't trust him any farther than they could throw him because they claimed he had stolen some of their cows and sold them off to Chinese miners up at Florence and Elk City in the mountains. Hell, if those Indians didn't take better care of their stock than to leave their cattle run through Chapman's upper pasture, they deserved to be missing a few cows!

Such was the delicate line he walked between the white world and red in these parts. For good or bad, there honestly wasn't a man who possessed more experience dealing with the Non-Treaty bands than Arthur Chapman. In fact, over the years, he had forged quite a bond with chief Looking Glass and a few of his headmen. Ad figured when you got right down to it, that steadfast friendship had to go a long way to proving he wasn't so bad a fella to the Nez Perce.

But that friendship with Looking Glass and his bunch might have been reason enough some of the citizens who had flocked into Mount Idaho and Grangeville at the first whisper of trouble resented it when Chapman was elected to captain the volunteer company formed to defend the communities against the uprising. It made no never mind to Ad Chapman—there were more important things to concern him now than a few ruffled feathers of those shopkeepers and gentleman farmers. This was war.

He recognized this situation for what it was, right off. Back on Thursday afternoon, two of his Nez Perce friends—Looking Glass and Yellow Bear—rode over from the big gathering they were having at the head of Rocky Canyon on Camas Prairie to let Chapman know that some of the young bucks had gone on the warpath and had already killed seven white men by that time. A damn honorable thing of those two old friends to come warn him at a time like that, even going so far as to suggest that he clear out till things quieted down. No sooner had he gotten his wife and son started away, his two hired men coming along with Ad's three prized breeding stallions, than they spotted a war party headed for his ranch.

Chapman figured he might well owe Looking Glass his life for that warning, because it had been a horse race all the way to the outskirts of Mount Idaho.

Sprinting into the tiny settlement barely ahead of those warriors screaming for his blood, Ad dropped out of the saddle in front of Loyal P. Brown's hotel and began spreading the alarm, shocking one and all with the news of the Salmon River murders. By nightfall the folks flooding into town had formed their own militia company and elected Chapman as its captain. As soon as he had mounted pickets to watch all the approaches to town, Chapman asked for volunteers to carry word to Fort Lapwai.

That's when Lew Day had stepped up. Within minutes, the courier was on his way to Cottonwood House.

In the predawn darkness of the following morning, June 15, Chapman had slipped out of town and back to his ranch to keep a planned rendezvous with Looking Glass and Yellow Bear. Just before five o'clock, as the sky was graying, he rode up to his friends, a bit surprised to find them accompanied by two other warriors. The four grimly related the names of the settlers who had been killed up to that point in time, including some white folks on the Camas Prairie. It shook Chapman to his boots when Lew Day was reported as being among the dead.

That's when Ad knew he couldn't stand back and ask for any more Mount Idaho volunteers to make that deadly journey. So then and there he asked Looking Glass's brother if he would ride from Mount Idaho to Fort Lapwai. Without hesitation the warrior agreed to carry word to the soldier post.

A half-breed named West took off about seven that Friday morning, carrying a letter from saloon-keeper Brown. About an hour later,
Tucallasasena,
the chief's brother, set off with a second note from Brown to the post commander at Lapwai. Ad figured one of them would get through and bring the soldiers running.

Once those couriers departed, the men of Chapman's militia went out to gather up their dead, along with what survivors they managed to find. One small band of volunteers ran across Hill Norton, scared out of his wits, near the edge of town. And a little while later some other men managed to coax a hysterical Lynn Bowers to accompany them to Brown's hotel, where Loyal P. and his wife, Sarah, were nursing the wounded and feeding everyone for free out of their stores. By afternoon more than 250 souls had converged on the mountainside village.

Chapman figured if there were any others who hadn't made it into town by sundown that Friday … they weren't coming. Likely dead by now.

Knowing the pitiful story of Mrs. Chamberlin and her daughters, the rest of the women murmured softly among themselves on what fate awaited them and their children if the warriors attacked the town in strength. Chapman, Brown, Rowton, and a few others kept every able-bodied man at the barricades they had thrown up at both ends of the street and tallied their firearms. There weren't enough rifles to go around so when a new watch arrived to assume their rotation on the picket line, those going off-duty handed over their weapons to the fresh guards. Ad never told another soul just how pessimistic he felt about having enough firepower to hold back all those warriors Looking Glass had warned him were busting loose from the encampment at Rocky Canyon.

But there were some peaceful, idyllic moments nonetheless as twilight came down that Friday night, the fifteenth. Most of the mothers were having a dickens of a time getting their frightened children to lie down and drift off to sleep, so the town's finest voices agreed to sing some lullabies for the wee ones. James Adkison sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and “Onward Christian Soldiers”; then John Rowton climbed a tall pine tree standing inside their makeshift stockade and with his melodious baritone sang a heart-wrenching rendition of “I'll Remember You, Love, in My Prayers.”

As it grew dark that evening, Chapman listened all the more intently to every sound drifting in from the night, brooding on those women and children gathered in this tiny settlement, each of them so scared they could hardly close their eyes and sleep. For now it didn't make any difference that a few folks here in Mount Idaho had done their level best to cheat or steal from the Nez Perce. No matter that most of the citizens were guiltless in every way.