Lay the Mountains Low
The Flight of the Nez Perce from Idaho and the Battle of the Big Hole - August 9-10, 1877
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
America's bestselling frontier writer combines his unique skills as both an acknowledged historian and a consummate storyteller, blending historical fact with powerful human emotions to vividly recreate the past for his millions of readers. In his most ambitious novel to date, Terry C. Johnston combines all the drama and gut-wrenching tragedy to tell the story of the Nez Perce War as a whole cloth, a complex tapestry of deeply wrought emotions and bitter betrayal. Johnston breathes life into little-known characters from this terrifying conflict that will leap out of the past with compelling urgency-page after page, everyone you will meet were real people at the most crucial point of their lives. This is a story of individuals, knitted together in a compelling mosaic of emotions that will sweep you up and carry you along at a gallop.
Despite one bloody skirmish after another, the Non-Treaty bands of Nez Perce still believe they can leave all the turmoil and killing behind in Idaho, fleeing General O.O. Howard's army across the Lolo Trail into Montana Territory. Looking Glass and the fighting chiefs lead their people to the "Place of the Ground Squirrels"-there to rest a few days while the women cut new lodgepoles, the children play for the first time in many weeks, and everyone celebrates leaving the war behind, rejoicing that they are on their way to the buffalo country.
But there in the Big Hole of southwestern Montana, a chill, misty dawn covered the advance of Colonel John Gibbon's Seventh U.S. Infantry as they stole down upon the sleeping, unsuspecting village...unleashing the bloodiest onslaught of the Nez Perce War!
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The 15th volume in Johnston's Plainsman Series, second in a trilogy of works based on the Nez Perc War of 1877 (after Cries from the Earth) and first of the author's westerns to be published in hardcover, this grim novel tells a true tale of butchery and massacre. Supplying his real-life characters with fictionalized dialogue, Johnston has cleverly arranged the historical narrative to produce a graphically violent portrayal of the army's brutal campaign to move the Nez Perc Indians from their rich lands in Oregon and Idaho to a desolate reservation. The Nez Perc , led by Chief Joseph, resist fiercely, and the war commences. Johnston tells this gripping story from several angles, following the Nez Perc as they try to escape to Canada, the soldiers who pursue them and the settlers who thirst for revenge. Covering the period from June 24 to August 10, 1877, this day-by-day account of ambush, atrocities and anguish is not for the squeamish. The soldiers and civilian volunteers who pursue the Nez Perc are a mixed bag of frontier veterans and nervous recruits led by the one-armed Civil War hero, General O.O. Howard. Joseph is a master tactician and his warriors repeatedly deal the soldiers bloody defeats as the tribe moves ever closer to sanctuary in Canada. What Joseph does not understand, however, is that the soldiers will never give up, no matter how many die in fights echoing with gunfire and the screams of the wounded. Clearly, there are no victors in this struggle, and neither side can claim much honor or glory. This installment concludes with the soldiers and Nez Perc butchering each other at the Battle of the Big Hole in Montana. Johnston is a skilled storyteller whose words ring with the desperation, confusion and utter horror of a fight to the death between mortal enemies. This is uncomfortable history, and it hits home like a blunt instrument.
