A Cold Day in Hell: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

Chapter 4

14–15 October 1876

Telegraphic

Gen. Merritt Marching

Into Indian Land

THE INDIANS

Merritt on a scout—Bad Indians Still Raiding.

CHEYENNE, October 13.—General Merritt left Custer City with 500 men on a scout to-day. Their destination is not positively known but it is surmised to be the Bell Fourche Fork of the Cheyenne river. The remainder of the command is still at Custer. The party of Indians who killed Monroe near Fort Laramie a few days since also raided the ranch of Nick Jones on the old Red Cloud road, stealing twenty-five horses. Monroe’s body was pierced by eight bullets.

Captain Miner’s wagon train limped back to the Glendive supply depot after nine P.M. on the evening of 11 October, having hacked their way through the massing warriors, fighting for nearly every foot until the Sioux were certain the train was retreating to the east along Clear Creek. The warriors broke off their attack as the soldiers rumbled along a trail crossing higher ground, thereby giving the soldiers a commanding view of the surrounding countryside as darkness approached.

After allowing the mules and those four infantry companies two days to recoup their strength, Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis of the Twenty-second Infantry determined this time to set out himself to deliver those much-needed supplies to the Tongue River cantonment. On the afternoon of the thirteenth he informed his troops that with the addition of one more company to bolster their strength, they would be moving out come morning—at which point forty-one of the civilian teamsters buckled under and stated flatly that they were not about to ride back into the breech.

Like many of the other officers, Second Lieutenant Alfred C. Sharpe figured Otis’s soldiers would be all the better for not having those mule-whackers along.

“So be it,” Otis declared, nonplussed, when the civilians bowed their backs and refused to go. “We’ll do with what we have for teamsters and fill the rest of the wagon seats with soldiers. I’m determined to go through to Tongue River this time … even if fighting takes us there.”

Not only did they have the addition of G Company, Seventeenth Infantry, under Major Louis H. Sanger, this time they would haul three Gatling guns along with the wagon train.

That afternoon Otis dispatched a courier to ride off with news of the attack on Miner’s train as well as the renewed attempt to reach Tongue River, that report bound for Colonel William B. Hazen, commanding the Sixth U.S. Infantry at Fort Buford.

At midmorning on the fourteenth Otis’s eleven officers and 185 men departed Glendive cantonment, putting a scant ten miles behind them before going into bivouac for the night. Dusk had deepened, and many of the soldiers were preparing to turn in, when just past eight P.M. a shot was fired from one of the pickets, alarming the camp.

“I’ll lay you odds we had a man blast away at another Injun ghost,” growled Lieutenant Oskaloosa Smith as he trotted up beside Sharpe as they headed toward the disturbance.

“Like it was on your trip out, eh?” Sharpe replied.

Damn near a repeat, it turned out to be. Except for the fact that this time the picket reported spotting two horsemen when he offered his challenge—swearing to the officers on his mother’s grave he had hit one of them—although a hastily formed search party found nothing in the dark. Camp settled down and the rest of the night passed uneventfully. It wasn’t until first light when one of the outlying pickets brought within the lines a crippled pony he had spotted hobbling among some stunted cedar along the creek bottom.

“Injun pony,” Alfred Sharpe observed as the officers looked the wounded animal over.

A pad saddle was lashed around its middle with a single surcingle. Several blankets were tied behind the saddle. It wore a single rawhide rein, as well as a picket rope trailing behind the animal.

“I’ll bet that pony threw off the bloody savage and he had to fetch himself a ride with the other red bastard,” one of the men surmised.

Otis pulled on his gloves and looked into the sky at the emerging sun. “Time we got under way, gentlemen. Mr. Smith, see that this animal is put out of its misery.”

Just before seven A.M. on that bright, clear Sunday morning, the fifteenth of October, they resumed their journey. The drivers formed up the wagons into four long lines to make their way across the rolling, broken ground as the soldiers went into position to form a square surrounding the train. In the rotation of the march, Lieutenant Sharpe’s company that day drew duty as the advance guard for the column. When his foot soldiers stepped out in lively fashion, making good time just in front of the first wagon and the rest of the escort, the lieutenant began to recall Sunday mornings he had enjoyed back east.

Peaceful Sabbath, he ruminated as the frosty air began to warm, sensing some contentment flood over him with those fond memories. How pleasant it would be back in the States today, he thought: to hear the church bells ringing and to see the good people coming into church. He almost imagined he could hear the sweet tones of the organ, the choir raising their voices in song with the old hymns, and that oft-repeated proscription of the preacher from Sharpe’s youth, “The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him—”

The rattle of rifle fire cruelly shattered his reverie into a thousand tinkling pieces like the falling of broken glass. Officers shouted orders while most of the men bellowed oaths. Mules brayed and bucked in their harnesses. Timbers creaked and wagon tongues groaned as teamsters and green soldiers fought to control the unruly, frightened animals hitched to those ninety-four wagons. Immediately in their front the two point men, half-breed scout Robert Jackson and Sergeant Patrick Kelly, were whipping their horses back to the column, laying low in the saddle, bullets sailing over their heads as a band of horsemen suddenly appeared behind them, racing in hot pursuit. The hat flew from Sergeant Kelly’s head in the mad chase. Immediately a warrior reined around and dismounted, picking up the spoils and planting the hat atop his braided scalp lock and feathers while the rest of the horsemen drew up and halted just inside rifle range, taunting Sharpe’s soldiers as hundreds more made their show along the nearby bluffs, hollering and screaming like devils incarnate.

“Sergeant!” Alfred Sharpe bellowed.

“Sir!”

“Left front into line!” he called out the order.

“All right, you young sappies!” the sergeant growled as he whirled on his heel. “You heard the good lieutenant yer own selves now! Left front into line!”

Jackson and Kelly dusted to a halt among Sharpe’s company and dismounted hurriedly. The swarthy half-breed scout collapsed to the round, ripped off one of his moccasins and held it to the sky for all to see, poking a finger through a new bullet hole. Sergeant Kelly inspected the track of a bullet that had ripped the thick shoulder of his dark-blue wool coat, the torn cloth now fluttering in the breeze.

Otis reined up on horseback immediately behind his forward company. “Mr. Sharpe—detach with ten men and deploy to that hill on your right! The rest of your company will move forward under Mr. Conway, putting pressure on those bastards holding that bluff. Drive them from it, Mr. Conway—is that understood?”

William Conway saluted anxiously. “Yes, sir!”

As Conway formed up the rest of H Company, Sharpe counted off his ten and jogged to the right, slowed by the steepness of the slope of that hill where they would have a commanding field of fire against the bluff where the enemy horsemen swarmed. While Otis kept the train moving and the rest of the foot soldiers came up double-time to bring their Long Toms to bear on the Sioux, the warriors began to fall back as bullets landed among them. Still they persisted, swarming on this flank or that, moving like a stream of quicksilver where they thought the soldiers weakest. As soon as that position along the rumbling wagon train was bolstered, the horsemen would dart off to put pressure on a new position while the wagons slowly punched safely through the defile and made the gradual climb up to the top of the rolling prairie.

“This is Sitting Bull’s bunch, men!” the lieutenant colonel reminded them from horseback, first here, then there, above his men—making one fine target of himself. “These are the devils who butchered Custer! We have them! By Jehovah—we have them now!”

For more than an hour the long-range skirmishing dragged on as Otis kept his civilian and soldier teamsters urging their mules with every crack of the whip, hauling those wagons along the road as they inched closer and closer to the Yellowstone River. Behind them and in front, more and more Sioux boiled like an anthill before the coming of a thunderstorm.

“Lookee yonder, Colonel! We got some folks coming in!”

At the cry from one of Sharpe’s men, the lieutenant and Otis whirled, spotting the three men sprinting on foot, headed directly for the soldier line from the nearby timber that bordered the north bank of the Yellowstone.

“Hold your men at ready, Mr. Sharpe,” Otis ordered.

“Why—them’s soldiers!” someone shouted.

“Bluecoats—sure enough,” Sharpe replied with a wag of his head. “But look there at the rest of them Indians riding lickety-split to cut ’em off, Colonel.”

Right behind the sprinting trio came a mass of warriors spurring their little ponies like angry hornets.

“Lay down some covering fire, by God!” Otis screeched. “Don’t let those red sonsabitches cut those men off!”

Sharpe hurried H Company into position on the prairie, squad by squad stepping forward to use their far-reaching weapons most effectively. Here and there among the Sioux, riders fell back, but others kept on racing for the three men on foot. Suddenly, at just the right range, the last of the Sioux skidded to a halt and gave up the chase as the trio kept running for their lives until they reached the front of H Company. As they lunged among the soldier lines, gasping and grunting for wind, it was plain as paint to see they were Indians dressed in soldier clothes.

“Don’t shoot!” Sharpe ordered his men, then he turned on the three. “Get your goddamned hands up!”

A dozen men had their rifles pointed at the trio as the three bent at the waist, weak-kneed from their spring, sucking in air as if every breath might be their last. Their eyes were wide, staring round at all the muzzles pointed their way.

“C-c-cap’n Miner here?” one of the trio huffed breathlessly in a thick, half-breed English.

“Yes, he’s with us,” Otis replied. “I’m Colonel Otis. Who the hell are you?”

“Otis? You the soldier chief from Glendive?” the swarthy man gasped, glancing at the other two with him. “We come from Miles.” He pointed to the other two, both of them clearly Indians, then put his two hands to his head to make wolf ears—the plains sign for scout. “His scouts. Miles send us find Miner and wagons.”

“This is it, mister.”

The scout looked over his shoulder at the swirling Sioux. “Miles, he want us find wagons. We ain’t seen wagons for so long.”

“Yes, goddammit,” Otis growled. “I understand we are overdue. But, by Jehovah, we’re getting there. When did the three of you leave Tongue River?”

The dark-skinned scout watched momentarily as Robert Jackson came up beside Otis. “Four of us come from Tongue River. Hello, big brother,” he called out, stepping forward with his arms held wide.

“Brother?” Otis asked, dismayed as the two embraced. “Is this your brother, Jackson?”

The two brown-skinned men embraced, pounding one another on the back; then Robert turned back to Otis and said, “This is my little brother, William. Miles send me to help you, and keep William to help him.”

“You have water, brother?” asked William Jackson with a pasty tongue.

“Get these men some water,” Otis ordered, then turned back to the two half-breeds and the Indian scouts. “You were saying you started off from the Tongue with four of you. And tell me how you came to be afoot.”

“We started off with four horses from Miles to look for this train. Miner late with wagons—Miles start to worry days ago. Near sundown yesterday we run onto a big war party. Made a running fight of it. One of my Rees—White Antelope—he was knocked from his horse while we run from the war party. But Bear Plume here was able to get him on the back of his own horse, to protect his body from the enemy. We get White Antelope into cover down by the river, yonder.”

“Down west of here?” Robert Jackson asked, pointing toward the distant Yellowstone.

“Yes” William replied. “We hide in the willow back a good ways. All our horses killed or wounded in holding the Lakota back. At sun going down yesterday we set the two wounded horses free to fool the enemy—and then after dark we make off toward the mouth of Clear Creek. The Lakota never found us all night we stay back in the brush. We hear shooting last night, off to the east.”

“You must mean when some of these bastards tried to jump our picket lines,” Sharpe said.

“We stick to the brush all night. We wait,” Jackson continued. “Your fight start today, we hear the guns. Still we wait till we see soldiers.”

“So you got a man dead?” Otis asked.

William Jackson nodded gravely, “Bleed a lot and die yesterday. Gone now.”

“Where’d you leave his body? The Sioux get him?”

“No,” William said, turning to point as he answered, “Carried him all the way down in the brush, beside that tall cottonwood.” Some sadness crossed his face as he turned back to the lieutenant colonel and added, “Bear Plume wants to bury their friend.”

“By all means,” Otis replied knowingly, his eyes shifting to watch the long-range scrap between his men and the swirling horsemen.

True to his word, the colonel ordered Sharpe’s H Company to push on toward the far copse of trees along the Yellowstone where Otis stopped the wagon train, set out skirmishers, and effectively held the Sioux at bay while he had a detail bury the dead Arikara scout before pressing on.

“Let’s get this wagon train to Tongue River!” he finally cried, setting Sharpe’s company out in the advance once more.

Hour after hour the rolling fight raged on as Otis kept his civilian and soldier teamsters grinding along, whipping mules ahead of their heavy wagons. In and out, back and forth the Sioux swarmed, shrieking, screeching—never drawing close enough to use their bows but firing their rifles instead, showing a healthy respect for those long-range guns of the infantry. Minute by minute it seemed the enemy horsemen were reinforced—new warriors arriving at the scene until there was an estimated force of some seven to eight hundred Sioux facing the beleaguered, outnumbered soldier column.

Desperate to punch his way through, Otis used every trick up his sleeve: with every Sioux charge, he ordered a countercharge by one company or another while the wagons continued on at a slow but steady pace. One after another he ordered out the various squads and companies, each unit skirmishing with the enemy horsemen before being recalled while another company was dispatched into the fray at a different position along the line of march.

As steady as was their progress, by two o’clock that afternoon Otis’s column had made no more than six miles since morning, virtually fighting tooth and nail for every yard beneath the high autumn sun that caused the men to sweat despite the season.

“Looks like they don’t intend to budge from that bluff to our front, Colonel,” Sharpe cried out to Otis.

For a long moment the train commander appraised their situation. Just ahead of him lay the narrow valley of Clear Creek, the stream having cut itself to the bottom of a narrow gorge some two hundred feet deep. On the far side of the rocky ravine at least two hundred Sioux held a commanding position—awaiting the soldiers. The wagon train came to a clattering halt.

“We can’t make that crossing,” Lieutenant Kell complained.

“We must, sir,” Sharpe argued, turning to study Otis’s face—hoping to find some resolve there. “We must make the crossing, Colonel.”

“Or?”

“Or we’ve been defeated and we’ll never resupply Tongue River again.”

Otis turned on Sharpe, bellowing loudly, “Absolutely correct, Mr. Sharpe! Gentlemen—those fiends will not turn us back. It’s up to you. Do you understand?”

Sharpe saluted smartly and said, “Requesting that you position one of the Gatlings to lay down a covering fire for my men, Colonel.”

“Dandy idea, Lieutenant!”

Within minutes the field piece was rolled into position and a crew set to rake the far side of the valley where the Indians waited while Sharpe quickly formed up his men and led them off on the double, rushing to secure the crossing. Just as they reached Clear Creek, with the bullets kicking up spouts of dirt around them, Sharpe’s sergeant Hathaway grunted, falling to his knees beside the lieutenant.

“I’m hit, sir!” and he threw a hand to his breast as he collapsed to the ground.

In that moment Sharpe watched the sergeant pull his hand away and inspect himself. There was no blood, no bullet hole, but there at his knee lay the spent bullet that had whacked him on the chest. Yet in the space of that few heartbeats, the warriors on the far side of the stream got their range and began to lay in a galling fire on the gallant men of H Company.

“Into the stream! Now, men—be lively!” Sharpe called out, knowing if he did not keep them moving now, they would waver, fall back, and they would never secure the crossing.

Waving his service revolver in the air with one arm, he tugged his sergeant back to his feet; then together they raced to the creekbank, leading the soldiers through the skimpy brush and into the shallow water. To the far side they splashed, shooting and bellowing as the warriors on the far bluff yelped and screeched in dismay.

“Fire by volleys!” Sharpe ordered on the far bank. “First squad! Forrard …” waiting for them to kneel, then, “aim—fire!”

The first six slogged forward, drenched above their knees, shivering in the cold autumn wind that knifed down the sharp ravine, immediately went to their knees, and fired on command.

“Second squad!”

A second set of six moved through the ranks of the first.

“Aim!”

Kneeling immediately, throwing their long rifles against their shoulders, cheeks to the stocks, eyes along the barrels.

“Fire!”

One after another Sharpe had the rifle squads leapfrogging forward, slowly purchasing a few more yards of ground on that far bank with each volley, inching their way up the slope to the rocks where the warriors held on, firing down on them.

“We can take the hill!” Sharpe shouted as the enemy fire began to taper off. “Now, men! On the double: charger

Like fiends themselves, H Company sprinted and skidded, slipped and clawed their way up the slope toward the Sioux. Some cursed, others screamed, and most silently went about their reloading, shell after shell after shell, foot by foot pushing back the enemy.

Atop the bluff now they could see that the last of the warriors had set fire to the tall tinder-dry grass. The flames leaped and crackled beneath each strong gust of wind, driving layers of stifling smoke down on the soldiers as they clambered up the rocky slope.

Near the top, Sharpe turned to look behind him for but a moment, and in that moment saw Otis himself leading the first of the wagons out of the stream and up the trail. By damn! H Company had secured the crossing. Wagon by wagon, the teamsters and soldiers were stopping in the shallow creek to water the stock as they reached the stream. Beside each wagon soldiers quickly refilled the water barrels before more teams pushed on down into the creek bottom. Two or three wagons at a time now rumbled up to the west bank of Clear Creek—which meant that now the warriors might swarm in on all sides of H Company and the supply train.

What made things all the more frightening for the lieutenant was that with the smoke and the fires, the noise and the way the battle rolled here, then there—for the life of him it seemed even more warriors were coming to reinforce the horsemen all the time.

Behind them Lieutenant Kell’s K Company closed the file as the last wagons reached the creek and began taking on water before crossing—when suddenly more than a hundred warriors roared down on them from behind, yipping and firing on that little band of soldiers just moving into the water from the east bank. When Kell sent word to Otis that his men were running low on ammunition, the lieutenant colonel ordered down another thousand rounds and a few reinforcements.

About the same time that ammunition was reaching K Company, the last of the wagons began pulling farther and farther away across the stream. For a few minutes it appeared Kell’s men would be cut off and surrounded by the hostiles—sure to be overwhelmed. Time and again the horsemen surged forward, sweeping past and dropping to the far side of their ponies, firing beneath the animals’ necks before clattering away, hooves churning up clods of prairie. Charge after charge after charge—

“Major Sanger!” Otis screamed above the noise of wagons and men, mules and Sioux. “Take your men and break through to K Company. Bring them up to rejoin the column!”

Answering with only a salute, Sanger got his G Company off at a lope to reinforce Kell’s besieged troops barely holding up the rear of the column. By now the Sioux had fired the tall dried grass on both flanks of the column on the west bank and to the rear, where they began to withdraw with Sanger’s reinforcement of Kell’s soldiers.

The air burned their lungs as they struggled to close up with the wagons. Men coughed, dropped to their knees as they were robbed of breath, sucking desperately at the air as black flecks of smoldering grass littered the sky all around them like July fireflies.

“Keep those goddamned wagons moving!” Otis yelled far to the front, prodding his drivers. “We stop here—we’re all done for!”

Inch by inch, foot by foot, the mules and wagons formed up by fours once more having reached that high ground. Together with what was left of the escort not fighting in their front or to their rear, they ground their way along the rutted Tongue River Road.

They came to a jangling halt, men bellowing and the mules noisily fighting their harness—for out of the north and east swarmed a reinforced party of yelping horsemen.

“Keep those goddamned wagons moving!” Otis hollered, weaving in and among the leaders atop one of the five horses left for his men at Glendive Cantonment.

When things appeared their worst, the warriors on the right flank suddenly broke off their attack and boiled to the front of the column, where some of the horsemen crossed and reinforced their numbers, suddenly putting extreme pressure on the left side while the rest remained to stubbornly harass the front of the train. It was there the first wagons slowed even more until the entire line was all but stopped.

In heartbeats Otis lumbered up to his advance guard, ordering, “Mr. Sharpe—detach Mr. Conway with a squad of ten men and keep the way cleared!”

With Lieutenant Conway and his soldiers off to punch their way against the warriors at their front, Sharpe remained with the rest of his H Company as well as G Company to hold back the extreme pressure of those warriors reinforced on their left flank. It took the better part of an hour before the wagons were once more able to move down the road. By that time the smoke became even more suffocating from the grass fires that raged around them on all sides—some of the wagons and mule teams forced to frantically dash through the leaping flames, men hollering in panic and mules braying in fear … when within moments the winds shifted around from the west and for the most part raised that thick, choking pall—preventing the gray, stinging blanket from completely swallowing the movement of the soldier column.

Someone cried out on Sharpe’s far right. He whirled to watch a soldier from G Company spin to the ground, clutching his knee. The man’s bunkie was on him in an instant, ripping off his belt and tightening it above the wound. It wasn’t but a minute before Surgeon Charles T. Gibson was there to lend a hand.

At that very moment Sharpe realized just how cut off they were: on all sides the rolling prairie lay blackened, smoldering, a great gray shroud blotting out the midafternoon sun hung like a red ball above them in the autumn sky. It reminded the lieutenant of the waste Napoleon had laid to the steppes of Russia in his disastrous retreat more than half a century before. Then he chided himself—to think that his little struggle was of any consequence compared to the great European campaigns he had studied at the Academy.

Then almost immediately he decided theirs was a worthy struggle. While Napoleon battled against a civilized enemy—Otis’s column found itself surrounded by a fiendish enemy who fought not only with bullets, but with smoke and fire and devilish noise. In addition, they each struggled privately against the twin demons of a soldier’s nightmare: hunger and thirst.

From this high ground they had struggled so hard to reach and to hold against terrible odds, the lieutenant now dared look back at the narrow valley where the Indians swarmed against the rear guard. Now the Sioux held the valley behind them. The enemy had possession of water and wood while the soldiers had only what they hurriedly had taken on in crossing the creek. To attempt to run that gauntlet back to the creek for water would be nothing short of sheer suicide.

Up here on the high ground there was little to no firewood. What there had been was now all but burned to ash as every footstep and every hoof raised the stifling black dust into the air. As a biting wind came up, the sun continued its rapid fall, closing on the far horizon.

Out there to the west … where Miles and his Fifth Infantry knew nothing of their predicament.