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

Chapter 20

Freezing Moon 1876

A sliver of the old moon still hung in the sky this morning before the sun crept from its bed in the east. With sixty-eight winters behind him, an old man like Morning Star was up and stirring, out to relieve his bladder. It seemed the older he got, the more urgent was this morning mission.

Before too long would come the Big Freezing Moon. And the hard times would begin. As the autumn aged into winter, more and more agency people wandered in to join the great village while the men hunted for the meat the women would dry over smoky fires. Game had been plentiful on the west side of the White Mountains,* but here along the east slope the hunting had become hard. The men were forced to go farther, hunting great distances out onto the plains, among the tortuous tracks of coulees and ravines, the dry washes where the deer and antelope had taken shelter from cold winds. A man of the Ohmeseheso was duty-bound to provide for his family and the village. Survival of the People was more important than earning coups in war or stealing another tribe’s ponies. As the white man tightened his noose around this great country and the game disappeared, Morning Star felt the pull on his inner spirit which all young men must also feel. Usually the snows brought elk and deer down from the high places in these mountains touched this morning with a gentle pink as the sun poked up its head.

Perhaps something else had driven the animals away.

But he did not want to think about that. Morning Star stoically remained faithful in his belief that the Powers would protect the People for all time if they would only resist the white mans seduction, the white man’s destruction.

Yes! Perhaps the Powers would truly guard the People this time, especially now that both sacred objects were here together in their great village.

Morning Star’s people had camped along a small stream at the base of the White Mountains when Black Hairy Dog arrived from the Indian Territory far to the south. There was loud and joyous celebration in the village when the old warrior who had succeeded his dead father, Stone Forehead, as keeper of the Maahotse, the Sacred Medicine Arrows, rode in. Black Hairy Dog’s wife rode on a second pony behind him, carrying the arrows in their kit-fox-skin quiver on her back—in that ancient, reverent way proscribed by Sweet Medicine.

In hurrying from that hot land to the south to reach the Powder River country, the warrior, who had seen fifty-three winters, and his wife had bumped into a wandering soldier patrol in the country off to the southeast, not long after making a wide circle around Red Cloud’s agency. When the soldiers began their chase, the couple divided the arrows and galloped off in different directions. Days later on the upper reaches of the Powder River the two found one another with great rejoicing and happy tears. With the four arrows reunited, the couple continued their journey to search for the great village in the mountains.

At long last both Great Covenants of the People rested in their sacred lodges at the center of the camp crescent, the horns of the semicircle opening, like the lodge doors, toward Noaha-vose, their Sacred Mountain. From its high places flowed endless new life for the People, invigorating both the Sacred Buffalo Hat and the Sacred Medicine Arrows. Now Morning Star could dare to hope once more.

Up till now, everything else had been only prayer.

More than once he had confided to Little Wolf that the People should not associate so closely with their belligerent cousins, the Lakota. Though the scars had faded from his flesh, the deep wound to Morning Star’s pride had never healed in ten long winters. When the soldier chief Carrington had wanted to talk to the Ohmeseheso leaders at the Pine Fort,* Morning Star had joined the other headmen in visiting the soldiers. That night, back in their camp a short distance from the fort, they were surrounded by a large band of Lakota warriors led by Man Afraid of His Horses and a youngster named Crazy Horse, Lakota warriors who beat Morning Star and the others with their bows—humiliating the old Tse-Tsehese chiefs for betraying their alliance by talking to the hated white man.

Ever since, Morning Star had been wary of the Lakota in general, and Crazy Horse in particular. Even Little Wolf, a just and courageous man, tended to distrust the Lakota more with every season this conflict dragged on and on. Unlike most of their people, Little Wolf had refused to learn the Lakota tongue, only one of the increasing symptoms of tension in the tribes’ long alliance.

Morning Star turned upon hearing the shouts and cries from the far north side of camp. On his spindly old legs, the chief hurried with the others brought from their beds to see what had caused the disturbance. By the time he arrived, there were hundreds crowding in on the two Lakota riders who had been visiting the People and two days ago departed to rejoin their own people camped with Crazy Horse on the Sheep River† at the mouth of Box Elder Creek. Now the pair were telling and retelling their story as more and more men and women came up to join that excited throng.

“After sundown the day we left your village, we drew near what we thought was a camp of our people north of here. But something just did not feel right. We stopped short of the village and decided to investigate. Waiting until first light, we finally saw some people coming down to the river to swim. The closer we looked, the more we could tell it was not a Lakota camp.”

“Who was it?” someone cried out from the crowd.

“Were they friends?”

“Were they our enemies?”

“They were Shoshone!” one of the Lakota shouted.

“Enemies!” a woman screeched.

“How many?”

The other Lakota answered, “Not many. We can kill them all!”

“Yes! Kill them all!” was the cry taken up by the young warriors.

In a matter of moments the whole village was abuzz with battle plans and preparation. The various leaders from the warrior societies quickly decided who among them would go to fight, and who would have to be left behind to guard the village while most of the fighting men were absent. Before the sun had climbed off the bare tops of the cottonwood trees, the war party galloped off. Women went about preparing for a great feast when the men would return.

The next day their victorious warriors came home, carrying the many scalps and fingers taken from the enemy dead, as well as the hands of twelve Shoshone babies killed in the fight where they left no survivors—bringing back a lone infant they would raise as one of their own people, taken from the breast of a brave Shoshone woman. But for that victory, the People had paid a heavy price.

Because of the battle casualties, the Tse-Tsehese moved camp down the foot of the mountains, and the village remained in muted mourning that first night. The following day at sunset they began their victory dance. It began snowing again, fat flakes falling so thick that they hissed into the great skunk, that huge bonfire the warrior societies built and lighted for the celebration. Each warrior’s wife brought out the scalps her husband had taken while he recited his battle exploits—telling how the enemy had been packed and ready to move for the day when the warriors attacked; telling how the enemy ran, leaving all their goods and ponies and took to the hills where they could throw up some breastworks of rocks and brush; from there the Shoshone put up a hard fight—Little Shield, Walking Man, Young Spotted Wolf, and Twins were all seriously wounded in the fight, and the Shoshone killed nine Tse-Tsehese warriors in their desperate defense; the fighting raged until sundown, when the last of the enemy was killed. The dancing and feasting continued throughout the night as the stars whirled overhead.

And in the morning, Little Wolf, another of the Old-Man Chiefs, came to tell Morning Star that someone had stolen his ponies overnight while the camp was celebrating.

“Who could have done that?”

“Not the Shoshone,” Little Wolf speculated.

“No, not them. The attack took care of them.”

“I think the Ooetaneo-o, the Crow People. From the tracks I followed a ways, the thieves came from the north.”

“Over the mountains?” Morning Star asked.

“Yes, I think so”

“Why would they steal only your ponies?”

Little Wolf wagged his head, as if attempting to sort it out. “Perhaps to lay a trap for one of us, a few of us—whoever will go after those ponies. Not the whole band.”

“Are you going after your horses?”

“No,” Little Wolf said, gesturing with his hands moving outward from his chest. “I give the ponies to the Crow People. I will not go after them.”

Morning Star watched his old friend walk away. It was a strange feeling inside him now. For this was the only time in his long, long memory that the People allowed stolen ponies to go with the thieves without giving chase.

The village moved again that day, to the mouth of Striped Stick Creek on the Powder River. As the women raised the lodges and started the fires, many of the men rode down the Powder hunting for deer and antelope. In the evening when they returned they brought the news of finding many, many tracks of iron-shod American horses tramping through the snow and mud, finding the ruts cut by the white man’s wagon wheels too—all of them moving north by west along the divide south of the Powder River.

“Surely they go to that small soldier camp beside the Powder,” Little Wolf observed that night as the old men and war chiefs gathered to discuss what course of action to take.

“There are always wagons coming and going from that place where the soldiers live in their dirt lodges,” Yellow Eagle said. He was one of the hunters who had seen the tracks for himself. “This was not the same. Too many wagons. Too many horses and walk-a-heaps.”

Last Bull growled, “They are coming to look for us!”

“We do not know that yet,” Morning Star quieted the alarmist.

“We should find out,” Little Wolf decided.

And the rest agreed. They decided to select four wolves to investigate what the tracks truly meant. The Old-Man Chiefs instructed the two Servant Chiefs to handpick certain young men with specific talents to go on this important mission. The Servant Chiefs went first to the lodge of Hail. There they took the young man by the arms and brought him to the Council Lodge. Again they went out and returned with Crow Necklace, one of the most respected Crazy Dog little chiefs. Again they went out and brought back Young Two Moon. Finally they returned to the Council Lodge with the last of the sacred four, High Wolf.

When the wolves were seated in a line before the old chiefs, Morning Star explained, “We have selected you four because we know we can depend upon you to go out and follow the trail Yellow Eagle and the others discovered to the south. When you find the trail, stay with it. Do not leave it until you learn who made the tracks, and where they are going. Why they are in this country.”

Then Little Wolf said, “Perhaps the trail will meet another party somewhere. As Morning Star has said, we are depending upon you to find out the answers to all our questions and to return with what we must know. Now, go catch up your strongest ponies, but return to this lodge before you set out on your journey.”

When the four had returned with their horses, weapons, blankets, and coats, the chiefs led them through the village in a long procession behind the Old-Man Crier who sang out, “Behold! I come with four young men for whom we will look in the days to come. For whom our ears will listen in the days to come. They are going out to look for the tracks of those who have sneaked into our country. This sacred four will return here when they have news of these enemies!”

The four companies drawn from units of the Fourth, Ninth, and Twenty-third infantries to man Reno Cantonment certainly enjoyed their visitors and did all they could to join in on the revelry those first two days after Crook’s men were paid and all hell broke loose. The carouse allowed Pollock’s men a brief respite from the ongoing construction expanding the warehouses, cavalry corrals, teamster shed, blacksmith shack, and the company mess kitchens, each one built of logs “half-above-ground.”

During the night of the nineteenth three shots were fired in the raucous camp, leading Colonel Dodge to call upon General Crook to have the sutler’s saloon closed. Dodge came back to the infantry camp grumbling and cursing the general: Crook had refused because he was a personal friend of the trader, and together they were partners in an Oregon sheep ranch.

So rowdy was the nonstop celebration that Dodge himself went to appeal to Pollock, asking that the cantonment commander close down the trader’s saloon. Little did the officers know that the sutler was in cahoots with another civilian who had set up an awning over his peddler’s cart some distance upstream in a copse of cottonwood, where many of the horse soldiers had been going to cut and peel the cottonwood bark to feed to their mounts as the snowstorm continued into the night.

More shots were fired in the cavalry camp by drunken soldiers after moonrise. Investigating, some of Dodge’s officers discovered the whiskey peddler, confiscated his goods, and knocked in the tops of the kegs with their rifle butts, spilling all that heady saddle varnish across the frozen ground.

Still, they were too late for one of the Fifth Cavalry troopers who had already stumbled away from the scene by himself, down to the icy bank, where he tripped and fell into the Powder River. Soaked to the gills, he belly-crawled onto the muddy bank, exhausted and unable to move any farther. At sunrise his bunkie awoke and went looking for the missing trooper, finding him dead in the frozen mud beside the river. His company scratched a hole out of the unforgiving, icy ground and laid their comrade to rest late that afternoon of the twentieth as the howling gales of wind-driven snow began to taper off, there to sleep through eternity beneath the flaky sod of Indian country.

That afternoon a party of thirty-four starving Montana miners stumbled into the cantonment. Just days before, the blizzard had caught them out and unprepared. For better than forty-eight hours they had trudged on through the jaw of the storm, the mighty winds at their backs, pushing them farther and farther south. Perhaps remembering how well some Montana prospectors had served him so ably at the Battle of the Rosebud, Crook graciously supplied the hungry civilians with some of Quartermaster John V. Furey’s rations, blankets, and tents for shelter.

Throughout the night of the twentieth the gusty winds continued to bully the land with snow flurries, keeping most of the men huddled close to their wind-whipped fires. Nonetheless, Crook’s auxiliaries were far from deterred in expressing their new friendship for one another—holding mutual feasts, dancing, and serenades far into the night.

Snow lay drifted against the sides of the tents when the sun finally peeked over the ridges to the east on Tuesday morning, the twenty-first of November. Mackenzie had his cavalry battalions up early, breaking camp and saddling up to move another mile downstream so the horses could find more grazing where the wind had blown patches of ground clear. Seamus hung back with the packers near the teamsters’ camp. To him, all that packing up and moving no more than a mile seemed work for work’s sake. Just like the army way of things. And that made it something the Irishman loathed.

“Seamus! Seamus!”

Donegan turned to find old Dick Closter lumbering up from the latrines dug north of camp. “What’s up, mule skinner?”

“They’re back!”

“Who’s back?”

Closter turned, his white beard brilliant against his smoke-tanned face. “Them Injun scouts Crook sent out! They’re back!”

“Good to hear,” Donegan grumbled, and tucked the muffler higher around his ears. “Maybe now the general will find out where we need to go—”

“I’ll lay you ten to one the general’s Injuns know where to find Crazy Horse!”

That got the Irishman’s attention. He bolted to his feet. “Where’s those scouts now, by damned?”

“Yonder,” Closter said, pointing. “They was heading for Crook’s camp, taking their prisoner to show him off to the general.”

* Big Horn Mountains.

* Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory—autumn, 1866.

† Big Horn River.