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

Chapter 24

24–25 November 1876

Leaving Tom Moore’s pack train behind, with a single company for escort and orders to follow after a wait of two more hours, the Indian scouts led Mackenzie’s command away from Beaver Creek as the sun set behind the Big Horns, while the land was becoming nothing more than a dimly lit, rumpled white bedsheet pocked with the darker heads of sage and the faint trace of willow-lined ravines snaking darkly among the drifts of white. From time to time the column would pass a buffalo skull lying akimbo, half-in and half-out of a skiff of crusted snow. Tracks of an occasional coyote or deer or antelope crisscrossed the rippled, wind-sculpted icing smeared over the rumbling land they climbed and fell with throughout that twenty-fourth of November.

As the command dismounted for the first of some twenty times, each man walking single file and leading his mount so they could squeeze themselves through a narrow ravine into the impenetrable bulk of the mountains, the soldiers coughed, sneezed, grumbled, and cursed—but the troopers and their allies had been ordered to enforce a strict silence, for a column moving into position for the attack, unaware that it has already been discovered by the Cheyenne, is not allowed the luxury of a great deal of noise.

Everything that could be tied down had to be kept from causing racket. Although they were ordered not to smoke, not to light a match for their pipes, many consoled themselves with their favorite briar anyway. By and large the officers turned away without scolding—knowing that for these men forced to endure this subzero march, a bowl of Kentucky burley could be a small but meaningful pleasure.

From time to time orders were whispered back down the column for the troops to reform in columns of twos, but soon came another command for the men to proceed in single-file through the winding, narrow passages they encountered. As the column strung itself out for more than five miles on such occasions, the men were required to stop and wait at times for more than half an hour before they could move on. While many impatiently waited out the backed-up muddle, some of the older hands dismounted and slept right where they hit the ground, reins tied around their wrists. Other men merely dozed in the saddle despite the plunging temperatures. More and more it was proving to be slow going with all the delays, with the rise and the fall of the trail—considering they already had the scent of their quarry in their nostrils and should have been closing in for the kill.

The ranks grew all the more quiet as the darkness swelled around them like an inky, purple bruise until the ground finally smoothed, growing less rugged after they had pierced the outer wall of the mountainside. On the far side of the high peaks above them the sun sank beyond like death’s own grave as soldiers and scouts alike followed the Arapaho Sharp Nose’s trail out of the narrow gorge where they had been strung out for more than half a dozen miles, those eleven hundred men inching along in the coming dusk one at a time as the land began to lead them up, up from the plain into the darkest recesses that would ultimately draw them into the veritable heart of the Big Horn Mountains. No longer were they in the land of the curious prairie dog that would stick its head up from a hole for a peek and a protest at the passing beasts before ducking back into the warmth and darkness of its protective burrow while the frozen men and animals plodded past.

Here the cliffs and towering monuments of stone closed in around them on both sides, seeming to slam shut on their rear too—forbidding any retreat.

In the west the sky had turned from rose to purple to indigo, lowering as they pushed on through the glittering, frozen darkness, feeling their way step by icebound step in their heaving climb to over thirty-five hundred feet among the juniper, stunted jack pine, and cedar. Every man, horse, and mule of them stumbling, slipping, sliding sideways on icy patches where the sun hadn’t penetrated between the narrow battlements of wind-eroded red rock.

Every now and then at a particularly difficult ravine an order came back for the column to “close up, close up!” Each time those at the head of a company would report to the troop in their advance that they had successfully made the crossing; the last man of that troop calling out to the company behind them in the dark, bringing them on with nothing more than the encouragement of that voice coming out of the gloom of that oppressive, frozen darkness.

And with every narrow stream or creek they were forced to cross, the cold, frightened horses splashed the icy water onto their riders, drenching the troopers, leaving every man frozen to his marrow, every animal shuddering in uncontrollable spasms.

Throughout their long night march the overanxious allies hurried past the slow-plodding soldiers on right flank or left, darting by singly or in pairs, all of them urging their ponies faster than the troopers pushed their big cavalry horses—until every one of the scouts had coagulated at the front of the march.

Ready to strike.

As the moonless winter night squeezed down, a man here and there fell out to await the tail of the column—those few who precariously clung to their saddles, careening side to side as if they were about to retch, stricken with that strange and sudden malady known as altitude sickness, perhaps numbed by the endless cold, even those few in any battle-ready regiment who are always taken with a sudden case of unquenchable fear.

From time to time in the coallike blackness it tried to snow. None of them could really see it snowing, able only to feel the frozen crystals sting the bare, exposed, and stiffened parchment of their cheeks and noses as the wind tossed and gusted through each narrow defile while the column drew closer.

Closer.

Again and again the forward scouts whirled back to Mackenzie and his staff through that long, cold night—urging the soldiers to press on, faster, ever faster … morning was coming and the village was near. Impatient were the auxiliaries all to be in position before first light. On and on the scouts prodded the white men to hurry. Morning would soon be upon them. The time for attack.

“Better that we let our Indians feel their way ahead as far as they want to,” Mackenzie muttered to those around him sometime late that night. “Some itch tells me there may well be a trap laid for us up there, the way those scouts are leading us through these narrow canyons. Perhaps the Cheyenne have a surprise waiting for us.”

But as much as they feared it, as ready as they were for it, as closely as the soldiers watched the rising tumble of rock around them—there came no ambush.

So dark and cold and suffocating was the night that Seamus began to believe they were the only creatures stirring in this part of the world. So small and insignificant did he feel here at the bottom of each gorge, beneath a sky so black that it seemed to go on forever, sucking every hint of warmth right out of the earth.

Donegan could not remember ever seeing as many stars as this back east in Boston Towne. Even away from the cities and the streetlights—never could the sky be as brilliantly flecked, for only here was the air so dry. He licked his fevered lips and remembered the amber jar stuffed in his pocket. Once more he dabbed the cold dribble from his inflamed nostrils with the huge bandanna that hung around his neck, then swabbed more of the tallow over the end of his nose, into the wide, oozy cracks on his lower lip.

Would they ever get into position to make their charge and begin the attack before daylight?

Or would they find they had to lay to another day in some pocket away from the village and not be able to have their fight until the twenty-sixth?

He fretted at their snail’s pace, knowing most of the others must be every bit as anxious as he was to get on with the fight. Now that they were there, now that it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass office monkey, there simply was nothing that could warm a man up like a fight for his life. A good blood-throbbing scrap of it.

How he wanted to get this over and done with, then home to both of them.

I’ll figure out the boy’s name on the trip back, he promised himself again. Time enough to do that, Seamus. Get this fight out of the way—and you can name your son.

Near two o’clock the column squeezed itself again through a narrowing crimson defile the scouts from Red Cloud’s agency called “Sioux Pass.” For more than five miles the column snaked through the tall, rocky canyon, the immense walls of which were stippled with stunted trees. Directly above them glittered no more than a long angular strip of star-studded sky. Ahead in the distance hung the silver-blue quarter of a moon, quickly falling into the west after its own brief ride across the heavens.

“Eight more miles,” came the whispered word back from the Indian trackers leading them through the darkness.

Eight miles below the valley where the scouts claimed Mackenzie’s soldiers would find the Cheyenne village, they struck the Red Fork of the Powder River. Out of that bleak, early-morning darkness two horsemen approached the head of the column. They proved to be Red Shirt and Jackass, the two Sioux scouts who had stayed behind to keep an eye on the village. It was plain to see that their ponies were done in: Jackass’s animal stumbled, about with its weary rider and eventually fell. Both men jabbered excitedly about seeing many ponies and even counting a few lodges in the dark. During the brief halt the pair was fed hardtack and cold bacon, then told to rejoin their fellow warriors as the column pressed on into the darkness.

Hoar frost from every nostril and mouth hung like a thickening blanket over the entire serpentine column eventually slithering itself out of the rocky gorge, emerging upon a patch of smoother, more open ground some half-mile wide by three miles in length, which the Sioux had long ago named the “Race Course.” Behind them to the east, the first telltale narrow thread of gray light stretched atop the distant horizon.

How close were they now?

While Seamus and the head of the march spread out there where the narrow ravine widened beside the nearby stream tumbling over its icy bed, its faint echo splashing off the canyon walls, the rest of the column came to a halt behind him. The men quieted their animals without instruction from their officers. And listened.

They needed no prodding, for all could hear the distant, throbbing, man-made reverberation wending its way up to them from afar.

“That’s a goddamned drum!” whispered Billy Garnett, Sioux interpreter with the expedition.

“Hell if it ain’t!” said Billy Hunter, half-breed guide serving the North’s Pawnee battalion.

“Shush!” someone ordered nearby.

You could almost feel them hold their breath—eleven hundred of them now. So damned quiet a man could make out the snort of a horse halfway down the entire length of the column, maybe even hear the fart of one of Tom Moore’s mules at the very end of the entire procession.

“Rowland!” Mackenzie called out to his headquarters group.

“I’m here,” the squaw man replied, inching his horse forward.

“Bring some of your Cheyenne,” the colonel ordered. “Have them take us ahead to where we might get us a look at the village.”

Rowland gestured to Roan Bear, Cut Nose, and Little Fish, three of those who sat their ponies behind him. Wordlessly the trio led off as the squaw man and Mackenzie followed until all five were swallowed by the leafless willow choking a bend in the valley ahead.

Now the nearly four hundred Indian allies visibly became restless, muttering and restive, barely able to contain their primal excitement. Most of them took this moment to pull off to one side or another, leaping from their ponies. Donegan had seen the whole process many times before, yet it never ceased to make his heart leap in anticipation—to watch these Indians go about their toilet, pulling out paints and grease, bringing forth feathers and amulets, those stuffed birds and animal skins they would tie in their hair, smearing their braids with white earth or hanging empty brass cartridges in their black tresses, every last one of them mumbling to the spirits and invoking his private war medicine now that they were within earshot of the enemy.

Now that every last one of them knew they would not have to wait out another day.

This was the morning of the attack.

There were Northern Cheyenne in there. While the various Lakota bands might eventually be whipped in detail and driven back to the agencies—the Northern Cheyenne were known to fight to the last man.

As Sharp Nose rode among the Red Cloud scouts, whispering low, signing with his quick hands, the scouts dropped to the ground, adjusting their reins and pad saddles.

Behind Donegan the soldiers were now ordered out of their McClellans, instructed that here they would tighten cinches, check the loads in their .45-caliber single-action Colt revolvers with the seven-and-a-half-inch barrels. Make sure they had handy the hundred rounds of ammunition each of them carried for his .45/70 Springfield carbine.

The Indians went among one another, talking low, touching hands, pounding one another on the shoulders, making low cries of the wolf or some other creature which would provide its spiritual protection now that they stood on the brink of battle.

Donegan knew they were reminding one another that this would be a glorious day—perhaps a great day to die. Knowing that these Northern Cheyenne would put up a fight truly worthy of a warrior’s reputation.

He fingered the buckle on his bridle, then nervously loosened both pistols in their holsters, checking next the lever and trigger action on the Model ’73 Winchester, and finally allowed himself to turn, looking up the darkened canyon whence came that low, steady hammer of a great war drum. The enemy was awake. And perhaps they were ready for the attack.

As he stood beneath the halo of frost steaming from the bay’s nostrils, Seamus thought of Samantha and the boy. Hoping she would not worry, praying she would talk to the child about his father every day, just as he had pledged her to do while he was gone from them both.

Then he thought on his mother, his eyes drawn up to the sides of the canyon that rose before them. Thoughts of Uncle Ian far to the west in that Oregon country—how he raised family and stock and crops, his feet buried in the rich soil, the sort of man a woman could clearly count on.

Then as his eyes climbed even farther, ascending from the ridgetop into that icy blue pricked with countless stars, his thoughts naturally turned to Uncle Liam. And Seamus began to weep, silent tears spilling from his eyes, freezing on his cheeks, icing in the mat of winter’s beard.

Somehow sensing that man was with him at this very minute, in this forbidding land—at his shoulder once more, now that the fighting was at hand.

Last night as the sun began to lengthen shadows at the upper end of the valley, Last Bull’s warriors organized the men of the village to drag in dry timber from the surrounding area. They stood the huge trunks on end to form a conical “skunk,” into the center of which they then stuffed smaller kindling wood. As the light disappeared from the sky, the Kit Fox Society ignited their bonfire while others dragged up the huge drum they had captured from the Shoshone village. Six men could sit around it without crowding, each of them singing and beating time for the dancers.

At the quivering fringe of the firelight some of the mothers protectively hovered beside their daughters. Other mothers tied lengths of rawhide or braided horsehair from their daughter’s belt to another until five or six of them were joined together in this fashion. It was their hope that such a precaution would prevent the young Kit Fox warriors from dashing up to snatch one of the young women and pirate her away when the celebration became heady with passion. By and large most of the mothers did not stray far from the dancing circle, staying in sight of their daughters, hoping to protect them from Last Bull’s strutting warriors.

And strut they did.

They came through the village, herding everyone toward the huge dance arena. And when the hundreds were gathered and the drum began to throb, the cocky warriors went among the crowd, commanding all to dance or be beaten with bows—a degrading humiliation. Only the most courageous refused to dance to the Kit Foxes’ victory over the Shoshone.

Men like Brave Wolf, who had taken a vow as a Contrary. Even Last Bull did not molest such a crazy, wanting-to-die warrior. It was gratifying to Morning Star to find that Brave Wolf and a handful of other young Contraries kept moving in and out of camp to the east in their lonely vigil—their keen senses on edge for the soldiers they expected to come from that direction. Up among the huge boulders along the sides of the canyon they rode, listening for any sound, watching for the glint of a rifle barrel or bridle in the winter moonlight.

Then the moon fell in the southwest and only the stars lit the sky with a cold blue light. Brave Wolf and the others returned to camp, reporting in to the three Old-Man Chiefs. What starlight fell from the sky was not enough to help them see an enemy far away in that rugged country.

The singing and dancing continued as the People grew more and more weary, and the Kit Foxes worked themselves into a frenzy of war lust.

Sometime after the moon had fallen, Sits in the Night went to check on his ponies he had driven down below the village to graze. As he was approaching the open glade where he had left them Sits in the Night saw someone driving the ponies off to the east. His heart in his throat, he reined about immediately and raced back to the village. There he told his story to the camp crier, who immediately went through those gathered at the dance to tell the story of someone stealing the horses.

“I got there in time to see people driving off my ponies. I could see them whipping my ponies. I could hear the blows as they struck my animals. I think the soldiers have come—for farther down from there I heard a rumbling noise!”

“Aiyee!” screeched several people in terror.

Many held their hands over their mouths, their eyes wide as silver conchos, afraid that Box Elder’s vision was coming to pass.

The crier declared, “We had better look to making breastworks! The soldiers are nearly upon us!”

Crow Split Nose—chief of the Himo-we-yuhk-is, the Crooked Lances, and second in command of the Elk Society only to Little Wolf—stepped forward to bravely declare, “I think it would be a good idea for the women and children to tear down the lodges and take them up to that cutbank to the west where there is a good place to throw up breastworks. They should do this at once.”

Emboldened by the news of strangers around their camp and the courageous words of those who would defy Last Bull’s Kit Foxes, many of the families turned away at this time and once more prepared to take blankets and robes and special treasures into the surrounding hills to safety.

But as quickly the brazen chief and Wrapped Hair appeared in their midst, screaming for their warriors, sending the bold young men here and there—ordering them to whip anyone who attempted to leave the village. If simply cutting cinches would not work, the Kit Foxes were to beat their own people with their bows.

“No one will leave this village tonight!”

Wrapped Hair agreed, raising his voice in the martial call. “We will stay up all night and dance—then defeat the soldiers come morning!”

Last Bull whirled on Crow Split Nose with a cruel sneer, spiting out his words, “Why are you so afraid of the ve-ho-e soldiers, Crow Split Nose? You will not be the only man killed if we are attacked!”

“I do not care for myself,” the Elk Society leader replied stoically. “I care only for the women and children who will be killed because of your foolishness. I want to get them up where they will be safe when the bullets fly about our heads. We must leave only men in camp.”

“Yes—there will be men in camp!” Last Bull roared.

“Good,” Crow Split Nose said, his eyes gleaming with fury. “Come morning you will know what is to happen to our people. Wait until morning, Last Bull—and your fate will be at your door!”

Laughing off that challenge, the war chief of the Kit Foxes turned to his warriors and once more commanded them to scatter, staying on guard to see that no one fled camp. Once more he waved his arms and the drum began, the songs rising into the cold night air as the hundreds of feet pounded the frozen earth.

It filled Morning Star’s heart with sadness as he watched his own three sons join the dancing.