: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

Chapter 25

25 November 1876

At long last the final company was “up,” closing the file, those last soldiers joining the rest in that gently sloping patch of ground before the entire command once more fell silent between the hulking shoulders of that canyon they would be plunging into momentarily.

They had covered more than twenty-five miles in darkness to stand here on the threshold of attack, listening to the distant voice of that war drum.

Then Mackenzie returned with Rowland and the Cheyenne scouts, coming alive, the colonel animated suddenly—officers old and young clustered around him. He raised himself in his stirrups as his staff came to a halt, fanning out in a crescent around their leader.

“From what our scouts tell us, the Cheyenne are having war dances in at least four locations in that village. Rowland’s men spotted at least three pony herds, and the lodges are pitched on both sides of the creek. Seems they tell me that with all the noise and activity going on, we can advance up the canyon some distance before we would be in danger of alerting the village,” the colonel told the hushed gathering in low tones. “We’ll get into position, conceal the column, and begin the attack at daylight.”

He then went on to order up the companies he believed were most ready to spearhead the first assault into the village, ordering the North brothers to lead their battle-eager Pawnee into the breech in advance of any soldiers—punching through the village and on to secure the Cheyenne pony herd should there be the slightest chance of an enemy ambush.

Then he gave the order of the attack, company by company.

And concluded his terse, clipped instructions by saying, “Gentlemen, inform your battalions of their deployment. I hope to capture the village in a pincers: between one arm formed by the Shoshone and Pawnee, and the other arm by our troops. If all units do as I have ordered, we should surround the village completely, shutting off all chance for the hostiles to escape. With that in mind, remind your men of General Crook’s admonition—that we must do our best to assure the enemy’s capture, especially the lives of the women and children. Spare all noncombatants as we seal off the village.”

Mackenzie arose in the stirrups once more, tugging at the brim of his big black slouch hat, preparing to tear it from his head dramatically. “This is what we’ve prepared for. Let it be us who go and end this war, here and now.”

“It must ache like hell,” Seamus had been speaking in low tones to the lieutenant beside him.

John Bourke was roughly kneading one hand with the other, both of them securely wrapped inside their heavy wool mittens. “Damn, it does.”

“The cold will bother it for the rest of your life, aye?”

“Ever since last winter at the Powder.”

“When you stuffed you hand down through that hole in the ice and plunged it into the freezing water,” Donegan commented. “You gonna be all right to handle a gun with it?”

Bourke tried out a feeble grin in the gray light ballooning behind them as the walls ahead of them echoed the distant drum upvalley, where they watched Mackenzie, Rowland, and the Cheyenne scouts returning, emerging suddenly out of the mouth of the valley. “I can still hold a pistol as good as any man, Irishman. And pull the damned trigger when I have to.”

“Just promise you’ll stick close to me, Johnny,” Seamus suggested. “I’d like to have a man of your caliber at my back.”

The grin became a warm smile. “We have had our backsides hung over a few fires together, haven’t we, Seamus?”

He smiled back at the officer. “And a lot more to come too.”

“And now the Cheyenne.”

“This? Why this morning is just another day at the office for you desk-jockey sojurs!”

“Damn you,” Bourke replied with a grin, then said, “Look at that, will you?”

Seamus turned, finding the morning star brightening the sky behind them in the east. “It’s a good omen, Johnny.”

“Damn right, it—”

Then they both jerked up, finding Mackenzie standing frozen in the stirrups as the entire force of Indian allies fell mute—their medicine songs stopped in midphrase—a hush fallen over the whole of Mackenzie’s column. Stunned into silence as they began to realize that the big drum had been stilled. No longer did they hear any of the fragments of primal songs reverberating down the canyon.

Suddenly many of the weary troopers were coming off the icy ground, leaping to their feet, having lain down next to their horses to sleep, reins tied at their wrists, so exhausted they paid no heed to the deep snow and the subzero temperatures.

Then all was a noisy blur as the men began knocking the white fluff from their coats with tiny billows while the captains and sergeants and corporals hurried through the litany of forming up their units.

In that next instant one of the Sioux scouts kicked his pony savagely, pounding his heels into its flanks, bumping into Donegan’s bay as the Indian shot past the stunned Irishman. Everyone else suddenly speechless with this bold and idiotic act.

“Who the hell is that?” someone cried from the headquarters group.

“Scraper!” Frank Grouard hollered angrily.

“Get that son of a bitch back!” Mackenzie ordered, pulling his revolver and yanking back on the hammer as if he were prepared to knock the brash Sioux out of the saddle himself.

In a flurry of feathers and greasy blankets, rifles held high, two more Sioux scouts dashed past, ordered by Three Bears to head off the young man’s daring solo assault on the village.

“Dumb son of a bitch,” Bourke murmured. “Eager to get in the first coup.”

“Or get himself a name for being the first one to die fighting in the village!” Donegan replied.

“He was just arguing with Three Bears,” Grouard explained as he moved up. “Mad he didn’t get his sergeant’s stripes. So I figure he wants first strike.”

Everything was close to pandemonium as the troops finished dressing their formation, every last man pitching himself into the saddle with great urgency of a sudden, horses sensing what was to come. The allies pressed in upon the colonel and his headquarters bunch—eager to be off to join those three who had disappeared through the tall willows and around a sharp right-hand bend to the valley’s throat.

“Lieutenant Dorst—it’s time to order the charge!” Mackenzie bellowed above his group, again rising in the stirrups, finally ripping the floppy-brimmed hat from his head and waving it enthusiastically as his adjutant pranced up on his mount. Then the colonel turned to Crook’s aide. “Captain Bourke—would you care to take the order for our charge back to Major Gordon and his battalion?”

“I’d be honored, General!” Bourke replied, twisting his horse about in a tight circle and giving it his heel to race back across that patch of open ground.

Mackenzie was then waving his hat, emphatically signaling. “Major North! Now! In with your Pawnee battalion!”

Those forty-eight allies had stripped off coat and saddle, down to the barest battle dress, maintaining enough of their uniforms so that the soldiers would recognize them in the din, confusion and fear of the fight now about to open in all its color and splendor, the crushing weight of its blood and its terror.

“Major Cosgrove!” Mackenzie hollered as the North brothers galloped off, shouting their orders, the Pawnee sergeants twisting about on the bare backs of their ponies to pass on the commands to each troop of the battalion as an excited babble of many different tongues rose over the command. “You and Lieutenant Schuyler—in with the Shoshone! Take and hold that high ground on our left flank! In with you, now!”

Brave Wolf did not join in the dancing last night.

The Contrary warrior and a few of his friends successfully eluded the Fox Soldiers who were charged with preventing anyone from leaving camp … but slipping out was easy, for it seemed Last Bull’s warriors had celebration on their minds. Women and dancing. Women and laughter. Women.

It was easy for Brave Wolf and his friends to sneak from camp, thread their way through the leafless brush, and climb the plateau north of the village where one or more of them kept a vigil throughout those frigid hours among the rimrocks. Expecting the soldiers to approach the camp sometime during the night and attack once dawn had arrived.

In the cold light the flames from the huge bonfire were eventually allowed to fall, and at last the Fox soldiers allowed the People to stumble off to their beds. So weary were they from dancing nonstop across the night.

An old man looked up from his bed and asked his son, “You have been up in the rocks?”

Brave Wolf nodded in answering his father as he ducked into his family’s lodge. “Yes. We saw nothing. Some of us heard a rumble, in the east. But … we saw nothing.”

“They are coming,” his father declared, his eyes wide with anxiety.

Brave Wolf glanced at his mother, looking at them both, a blanket pulled up to cover most of her well-seamed face, only her frightened eyes showing like radiant pools in the dim light. His two wives and his children were already soundly asleep in their robes and blankets.

“What do you want me to do, Father?”

“Do not take off your moccasins,” the old man instructed. “Take nothing off … so you will be ready when the soldiers come here.”

“My mother is ready?” Brave Wolf asked.

“We did not take off our clothes,” his father replied. “None of us—not your wives and children—so we will be ready to run to the cliffs when the shooting starts.”

Swallowing with growing apprehension, Brave Wolf settled on his haunches before the dead fire his father was beginning to rekindle with shaking hands. “I told you, Father: we saw nothing. No sign of the soldiers—”

“You remember Box Elder’s vision?”

Brave Wolf nodded.

His father continued, “I believe the power of that man’s medicine. All the times Box Elder told our people some event was about to occur, it came true. I believe he is right when he told the village he saw soldiers attacking us here.”

“All right, Father,” Brave Wolf said as he crawled over to his blankets and robes. “I too will sleep with my clothes on—so I will be ready when the soldiers come.”

Around Seamus and Bourke crowded the Sioux, Arapaho, and the Cheyenne scouts under Lieutenant William Philo Clark and Second Lieutenant Hayden Delaney, their ponies prancing, sidestepping smartly—every man wound as tight as the mainspring in a two-dollar watch.

Mackenzie’s big chestnut was among them in the next moment. “Mr. Clark! Mr. Delaney—as ordered, you will lead your battalion up the center and into the village!” The colonel’s eyes fell on Donegan as men yelled and horses grunted. “You—Irishman! Watch that pretty head of hair!”

“Aye, Colonel! Hep-haw!” And they were all off like the rush of a wave crashing upon the shore, him and his bay carried away at the front of those Indians, who suddenly freed their wildest screams and screeches all around him.

He was part of it, this rising of his gorge, this swelling of the animal within him. And then Seamus was bellowing along with the Indians, his throat raw with the cold, the muscles in his neck bulging as his horse tore down into the willow with the rest thundering all about him.

The cold along his cheeks stung every bit as much as the whiplash of those eight-foot-tall bare willow branches slapping, clawing, snatching at him and the others as they threaded their way across a little feeder stream, up the other side, the horses slipping on the icy ground, slashing the far bank with their hooves, a few of the ponies going down—the cries of their riders swallowed over with the rest of the clamor. Men left to climb back out of the frozen mud and boggy marsh, to remount and follow in the wake of those who clung to their wide-eyed, frost-snorting mounts like hellions thrust right out of the maw of Hades and flung headlong into this new dawn.

Right through the narrowing neck of the canyon where the riders could race four abreast now and on into the widening valley where the lieutenants shouted and Cosgrove bellowed—leading their Shoshone to the left, their ponies scratching for a hold on the red-rocked side of the slope they began to ascend, one horse at a time, climbing, climbing to reach that high ground where they could seize a commanding field of fire over the village.

Now the Pawnee were beginning to cross to the far side of the creek to the south of the canyon. Slowed, their ponies cautious, as they slipped and fought for footing again on the ice-rimed banks, most of the animals hurtling into the water—legs flailing in the air as they came down into the shockingly cold creek—rising with a struggle to leap across the stream with their riders and vault to the far side, sprays like cock’s combs roostering into the gray light of that bloody dawn, the first crimson light of day smeared recklessly on the tops of the high red bluffs above them all. The Pawnee screeched and cried out, exhorting one another, brandishing their carbines, many of them clamping the reins in their teeth as they splashed one another in that mad race to be the first in among the lodges … to be the first in to claim the finest of those Cheyenne ponies.

Among them one lone Pawnee shaman blew on a wooden pipe, its high-pitched notes rising with a waver above the hammer of hooves and the grunts of the horses, the cracking of ice and the snapping of bare willow limbs against legs and saddles and muscled pony flanks. A sound not unlike the wet, steamy whistle of the boats in Boston Towne’s harbor, these notes the man blew as they raced along—a strange, eerie war song that lifted the guard hairs on the back of the Irishman’s neck. Made that huge scar across the great width of his back tingle once more with alarm.

He had been swept up in half a hundred charges during the Civil War, riding stirrup to stirrup with brave men only heartbeats away from death, their bodies shredded by grapeshot and canister erupting in their midst. Seamus had been wounded before—hit not by shrapnel from Johnny Reb cannons, but hit instead by bone from the comrade riding to the left or right as their gallant troop set out behind the colors and banners and battle streamers for the enemy lines.

But nothing had ever stirred in him the feeling of being so carried away, of being so ultimately helpless against the powerful thrust of this moment in time, the way this charge reached down inside him and yanked him up by the balls. His heart rose to his throat, raw as it was—then he realized he was screaming at the top of his lungs with the rest of the copper-skinned scouts.

It surprised him when the first shots cracked the cold, brittle blue air of that valley morning yet to be touched by the faintest intrusion of the winter sun.

“Bet that’s one of them sonsabitches shooting off his gun at a herder boy!” Grouard growled beside him. “Get ’em some Cheyenne ponies!”

“Don’t make me no never-mind, Frank,” Seamus said. “The bleeming ball’s been opened, which means you and me are up for the first dance!”

Maybe it was one of the Cheyenne in the village who heard the first thunder of the hooves, Donegan thought as the big bay surged beneath him, all muscle and foaming fear … perhaps a warrior snatching up his weapon and bursting into that frozen morning, standing naked to confront that trio of Sioux scouts.

No matter now: the whole bloody village was brought to life with battle cries and thunderous echoes from each side of the canyon—up ahead children screaming and women crying out, the old wailing as they stumbled into the gray light of that terrible morn.

This dawning of a cold day in hell.

Warriors sweeping up weapons and cartridge belts, quivers and bows, hurriedly tying their war medicine at their loose hair or dropping the cords of pendants around their necks. Taking time for little else—this sudden attack did not allow them the leisure to paint, time to dress, the luxury of fleeing with blankets and robes. Instead these warrior would thrust their naked, shivering bodies between the first of the soldier scouts and their families. Protecting, defending. Laying down their lives.

And then Seamus realized what it was that was dragging its razorlike claws across the inside or his belly: he suddenly sensed how it must be to protect those you love, to defend your home, to stand and face the assault at all costs. Somewhere inside he sensed as he had never before sensed just how these Cheyenne warriors would fight this day—from lodge to lodge, rock to rock, yard by yard … and it scared Seamus down to the marrow of him.

Now Gordon’s soldiers were pressing hot upon the scouts’ tails, Mauck’s battalion coming hard behind them: a mad cacophony of men bellowing orders on the run above the deafening tumult of sound laid back upon sound within the re-repeating echoes quaking within that canyon—not a single mount slowing as the soldiers fanned out, sweeping into a broad front behind Donegan and those savage mercenaries Mackenzie brought there to destroy the Cheyenne.

As if they had suddenly emerged from the narrowing maw of a cannon, immediately before them lay the narrow plain—the enemy village no more than three quarters of a mile ahead. Behind him troopers whooped and hollered. Indian scouts cried out anew with their medicine songs. And every heel hammered unmercifully into the ribs and flanks and bellies of their heaving mounts.

Somewhere far behind him and to his right, where Mackenzie’s headquarters group would be, a lone bugle stuttered out the notes of the charge. Again and again it echoed back on itself from the terrible blood-tinged red walls.

As if any of these men had to be told, Donegan mulled to himself as he clamped tight and low to his animal. As if any of them had to be told they were to hurl themselves into the goddamned thick of it.

Ahead in that dusky darkness of a night graying into morn Seamus made out the first faraway muzzle flashes. The sharp cracks of carbines stuttered a heartbeat later. Then the big drum suddenly throbbed again, this time not with the steady, rhythmic beat that had signaled last night’s revelry. Now it was beaten frantically, a call of alarm hammered out upon its taut surface, warning and awakening even the heaviest of dark-skinned sleepers.

At that moment Seamus watched the North brothers turn their battalion off the narrow terrace that ran along the mountain to their left and plunge their mounts down into the boggy creek bottom to make a recrossing. For what godforsaken reason, he could not figure out. While the Pawnee ponies jammed up in the the miry ground, slowed to all but a stop as they struggled up to their bellies in the muddy swamp, Seamus and the other scouts rumbled past.

Then in the growing clamor of gunfire and wailing women, Seamus turned—suddenly hearing the eerie croon of that Pawnee’s sacred flute again in the noisy cacophony of gunfire and screaming voices, surprised to find the first of the North scouts freed from the boggy ground, all of them laid out along their ponies’ necks, racing with total abandon once more toward the heart of the village, which for the most part lay along the south bank of the creek as it flowed to the east out of the canyon.

A few gunshots rattled behind him—among the Pawnee.

They must have run onto a herder out alone back there, Seamus thought as his horse swept across the grass slickened with icy frost toward the first of the deserted lodges erected in the starkly beautiful amphitheater, the walls rising above them five hundred feet in places, a thousand feet in others. In numberless icy brooks and freshets, waters tumbled down into a maze of shallow ravines, each one slashing the valley floor in its race to feed its waters to the Red Fork, each crevice thereby marked with the telltale path of willow and box elder.

As the lodges loomed closer, his nose came alive.

Woodsmoke and green hides laid out for fleshing, roasting meat and animal fat to be mixed for pemmican with last autumn’s cherries, the odor of fresh dung and the scent of unmitigated fear. Donegan had smelled all these before—as far back as the summer of sixty-nine and the destruction of Tall Bull’s village at Summit Springs.*

On to the Comanche and Kiowa and Cheyenne camps huddled at the bottom of Palo Duro Canyon, which rose majestically above the smoke-blackened lodges in just the way this valley rose above these lodges he and the rest of the scouts found themselves among of a sudden.

In the middistance the flashes of the enemy guns became a steady, pulsing light as the Cheyenne warriors fired, retreated to another lodge, turned and fired once more as they sought to stem the overwhelming tide … then hoped for nothing more than to protect the retreat of their families.

To his right Seamus could see that down the northern edge of the elongated valley ran a low plateau for something on the order of a mile. Ahead beyond the village the canyon itself disintegrated into a series of upvaults and deep ravines, flat-topped hills and snakelike gulleys where he could barely make out the black flit of bodies against the growing light of that cold day. Swarming into every recess in that rocky red sandstone maze—the Cheyenne were making good their escape among those rugged slopes that tumbled one upon another into the high white mountainsides just now touched with the rose of the sun’s rising this cold, cold day.

It reminded Seamus of the color of blood daubed, spilled, smeared upon the snow.

The way the warriors had fled to the steep sides of the canyon, there likely to take cover and train their fire down upon the village, Donegan realized Mackenzie’s dawn attack already had the makings of one damned cold day in hell.

* Black Sun, Vol. 4, The Plainsmen Series.