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

Chapter 38

Big Freezing Moon 1876

Every throb of that drum was like a tiny stab at his heart—making pain for him in each of his six wounds. Little Wolf knew the Snake Indians would beat it right on through the bitterly cold night.

But for the tiny fires they had kindled here and there in the breastworks and among the rocky crags that shadowed the valley, it was very dark. The stars had been blotted out not long after the sun had turned the clouds a deep reddish purple. And then it began to snow.

The clouds hovered just over their heads, shrouding the tops of the mountains, as the chiefs and headmen of the People gathered in council to discuss what course they should take.

There wasn’t much arguing—for their choice seemed clear. While there were those who spoke on behalf of the wounded, the sick, the old, and the little ones, who whimpered with the intense cold and their empty bellies, still no one chose to surrender to the soldiers in the valley. There was but one course to take, and that was for them to start away from the valley that very night, abandoning the camp where everything they owned had been destroyed.

How proud Little Wolf was that his people were still fierce and as full of fight as ever despite their devastating loss.

“I will remain behind, even if no others stay with me,” Young Two Moon volunteered. “Tonight I will sneak down close to the village under the cloak of darkness and wait for the soldiers to leave tomorrow when I can go down to what piles of rubble and ash are left—to see what I can find for us to use.”

“This is good,” Little Wolf replied. “And we need others to follow the soldiers’ trail as they leave the valley. To see where they are going now that we journey north.”

“We must travel through the mountains for a long distance,” advised Walking Whirlwind. “If we go onto the plains too quickly, the soldiers will find us there and we will never reach the Crazy Horse people.”

Just as Old Bear’s small band of Tse-Tsehese had done last winter following the fight on the Powder River in the Sore-Eye Moon, they would again seek out the Hunkpatila Oglalla band of Crazy Horse, said to be camped for the winter along the Tongue River.

Besides that drumming and the triumphant singing of the Shoshone scouts in the valley below, all around the chiefs women were keening softly, crying out with shrill and angry voices, mourning the dead, singing over the wounded as the old shamans shook their rattles, blew their prayers into each bloody, frozen bullet hole with four long puffs of air.

Brave, heroic men like Yellow Nose suffered in silence for the most part, asking only for sips of melted snow as they lay curled close to the small fires.

For all the pain they had caused his people, Little Wolf still would gladly take Old Crow’s gift of soldier bullets—those boxes of the shiny cartridges left behind in the rocks below Morning Star and the others. Yes, Little Wolf was never so proud he did not use the white man’s bullets to defend his people.

He wondered now how Old Crow slept, wondering if he slept at all—having turned against the Ohmeseheso even though he too was one of the Council of Forty-four. Perhaps the power of the Maahotse would indeed kill all those who had turned their backs on their own people.

For a long time that afternoon Black Hairy Dog had prayed over the Sacred Arrows he pulled from their fox-skin quiver. Many warriors and women eventually gathered around the priest, all joining in to stamp their feet and sing the songs that would put a curse on every one of those who fought on the side of the white man against their own people.

Then, slowly, with much respect, the Sacred Arrow Priest lifted the Arrows one by one from the white-sage bed he had made for them to overlook the valley, replacing them in the quiver. Then just past twilight Little Wolf sadly watched Black Hairy Dog place the Maahotse on his wife’s back, and together with an escort of some eighteen families they began their retreat to the south. Big Horse, White Buffalo, Young Turkey Leg, and others were, after all, Southern People like Black Hairy Dog.

“We will stay east of the mountains as we go south,” they told Little Wolf and the rest at their last council just before departing. “When we reach the foot of Hammer Mountain* we can then turn our faces south by east back to our agency.† Only then will I be sure the Maahotse are safe.”

Esevone was safe as well. Some time ago Coal Bear and his woman had fled up the mountain with the Medicine Hat as men like Box Elder, with his Sacred Wheel Lance; Long Jaw, with his bullet-riddled red blanket cloak; and Medicine Bear, with the magic of the Turner, first used their powers to cloak the old couple with invisibility, then diverted the enemy’s bullets. By sundown there were many who had poked their fingers through the countless holes shot in Long Jaw’s cape, whispering in amazement that not one ve-ho-e bullet had penetrated his body.

Truly, the Everywhere Spirit had watched over His people this day. But they still faced the winter, and the wilderness, and the search for the Hunkpatila of Crazy Horse.

Little Wolf winced with the pain in his six wounds as he turned to look up the slope into the darkness at the faint points of red light glowing here and there. Beside one of those fires rested the Hat Bundle. With its power secure, the People just might survive the coming ordeal.

But at a terrible cost.

Then he shuddered to think how many were sure to die in the coming ordeal.

During his short nap in the midst of the long-range battle yesterday afternoon, William Earl Smith’s leg had gone to sleep and a deep cold had seeped into the muscles. As the night wore on, the leg continued to hurt all the more, making any attempt he made at sleep fitful and sporadic. Between the leg and the cries of the wounded in the nearby field hospital, Smith didn’t figure he had slept for more than an hour at a time all night long.

Each time he awoke, he came to with a start, slowly realizing where he was, listening to the groans of those in pain and the voices of those men on picket duty, or what soldiers were unable to sleep. And each time he came awake, the private always found Mackenzie pacing back and forth. At first he figured the colonel was attending to one matter or another, but Smith soon came to realize Mackenzie had instead slipped into some kind of deep depression.

William Earl liked the man, and it bothered him to find Mackenzie so sorely troubled. It even shook the young private to the core to have seen the colonel openly cry when he learned Lieutenant McKinney had been killed at the ravine.

The following morning Smith scribbled in his journal:

I don’t believe he slept at all that nite. His mind must of been troubled about some thing. I don’t know what, for he is the bravest man I ever saw. He don’t seem to think any more about bullets flying than I would about snowballs.

By dawn all of the killed and wounded soldiers had been brought in and accounted for, since it was generally believed the Cheyenne would resume the battle as soon as there was enough light for them to see their targets. Instead, the hilltops and rocky ridges were eerily silent as night bled into that Sunday, the twenty-sixth of November.

“It’s just as well,” Mackenzie murmured over his breakfast of black coffee as the sky grayed. “Last night in officers’ conference I decided that even the infantry would pay too high a cost trying to dislodge the warriors from the rocks in these mountains. Sadly, I now realize we’ve already paid too high a price for this victory.”

For a time Smith figured his commander might be morose simply because of losing so many casualties to the enemy, while at the same time during that officers’ meeting last night Mackenzie could personally verify no more than twenty-five warriors killed from the many reports. To justify so many dead soldiers, he should have clearly killed many, many more Cheyenne.

“But those are only the bodies which fell into our hands, General,” Wirt Davis had coaxed.

“How well we all know that the Indian drags off most of his comrades,” said John Lee.

“Perhaps,” answered a perplexed and clearly agitated Mackenzie as his men went about settling on the official accounting of the enemy dead.

The Pawnee had taken six scalps. Two soldiers had taken another pair of scalps. Frank Grouard himself had lifted one scalp. While one lieutenant reported he had personally killed one warrior, Captain Davis stated his company had killed six to eight more. Then Cosgrove’s Shoshone stated they had dropped four Cheyenne warriors. A one-eyed civilian scout claimed to have killed another warrior. And the combined Sioux and Arapaho scouts tallied another dozen enemy killed.

That cold, snowy morning as Mackenzie penned his official report, gray clouds hung low along the silvery mountaintops ringing the red valley. While the men stomped their cold feet and trudged about through six inches of new snow, enjoying their coffee around the cooking fires, Mackenzie sent out some of his Cheyenne and half-breed scouts to make contact again with the enemy—perhaps now to coax them into surrendering after the awful cold of last night.

But as much as the scouts called out to the hills in their native tongue, there was no answer but their echo. Cautiously they inched up the slopes toward the breastworks at the upper end of the valley, fully ready to encounter an ambush. Instead, the snow only became deeper, nearly covering all the tracks. The Cheyenne had been gone for some time.

Returning to the valley at midmorning, the scouts reported to Mackenzie what they had discovered. The numerous black rings of long-dead fires had been drifted over with new snow. Deep trails showed how the many had struggled single file up the rugged slopes for more than five miles into the mountains. The broad scoops of old snow told of many travois used to carry the dead and wounded warriors as the defeated Cheyenne disappeared into the wilderness. And they did not forget to mention the occasional patches of blood not yet covered by snow at the tops of the mountainsides.

But what spoke most eloquently were more than a half-dozen pony carcasses found here and there along the trail. Once the tribe’s most prized possessions, those horses were now the Cheyenne’s only food.

“You say they did what with the entrails?” Mackenzie asked the scouts for a clarification.

Interpreter Billy Garnett repeated, “It’s what a Injun’ll do, General. They’ll shoot the pony and slit it open soon as it’s dropped. They pull everything right out of the belly so the old ones getting froze up can stuff their hands and feet into the gut piles to keep from dying.”

“Dear God in heaven!” Mackenzie gushed in a whisper. “How … how many of those fresh carcasses did you find?”

“At least six, General. But we turned back—likely more on over the top. We didn’t dare get up that far. They had themselves a strong rear guard forted up and ready for us.”

“The enemy’s gone—you’re sure?”

Garnett nodded, saying, “’Cept them what’s staying behind to keep a eye on your army.”

“Yes,” Mackenzie replied as if his mind were elsewhere. “Now that I have stripped them of their pony herds and destroyed everything they own … the enemy will want to know what more I’m up to. Yes, by all means: let them flee through these mountains if that’s what they want. And for now, we’ll let the forces of ‘General Winter’ deliver the final blow to the Cheyenne.”

Late the night before, while the snow had fallen as thick as cottonwood fluffs drifting down from the low-slung clouds, Young Two Moon had stealthily crept toward the camp where the soldiers continued their destruction of their village. Far from the firelight that lent an eerie, otherworldly crimson glow to the bellies of those snow clouds, the young warrior waited, and watched, as the ve-ho-e cooked and ate, talked and slept.

It was long after that soldier camp grew quiet enough to hear the moans of their wounded that Young Two Moon suddenly remembered the few lodges that had been pitched some distance away from the main camp—across the creek and closer to the base of the red bluff where the soldiers had dragged all those who had fallen in battle.

There were no fires burning, no flames casting their glow upon the undersides of the clouds from that direction. Perhaps …

Alone, Young Two Moon slunk back up the slope of that western hill into the thick, soft, icy cold of that snow-cloud before he began traversing the hillside. It took him a long time to pick his way toward the site of those abandoned lodges, in and out of the shallow ravines, crossing from willow clump to willow clump in the darkness—stopping every few steps to listen to the sodden, silent night for the breathing, the boot sounds of any soldier-camp guard standing his rotation.

What a wonder! For some reason the Everywhere Spirit had seen to it that these lodges had been spared. Ma-heo-o had not completely turned his face from his People!

Yet, despite the fact that the lodges were still standing, for the most part the white man’s scouts had already plundered the dwellings. Growing less hopeful as he entered first one, then the second, Young Two Moon found only three old buffalo robes among them all—hides so poor and bare-rubbed that the enemy scouts had thought them all but useless.

Still, they had proved to be a valuable treasure to a people who had nothing.

As he had gathered up that third thin robe, someone downstream cried out sharply, in a language Young Two Moon did not understand. A shot was fired in the darkness—then a long rattle of gunfire was punctuated by shouting among the white men.

One of their camp guards must have thought he heard something, the young warrior brooded as he slipped away into the darkness.

Quickly he retraced his steps, dragging those three robes back up the mountainside to the first fire, where he helped wrap an old woman and two of her grandchildren within one of the robes. At the second and third fires up the slope, he watched the abandoned robes enwrap several little ones huddling together to share their mutual warmth. For the most part, the adults were too cold to utter any thanks as they crouched by the fires, rubbing bare hands together over the flames, kneading the frozen flesh of their naked feet, gazing up at the young warrior with eyes pooling with gratitude.

And at the edge of the dim light thrown out by each of those fires sat young mothers slowly rocking back and forth on their haunches as they softly keened their mournful death prayers. The first of the tiny infants had begun to die one by one—children so small and nowhere strong enough to survive the brutal cold of that long, terrible day now stretched into an endless winter night.

Other women murmured their death songs for fallen husbands and brothers and sons as they hacked off clumps of their hair, dragged knives and pieces of sharp red chert across their arms and down their legs, mutilating themselves again and again throughout that long, horrid night while the oozing blood froze until the ugly wounds were repeatedly reopened by the mourners.

Here and there in the shadows flickering on the frozen snow lay the wounded warriors, some with a peeled branch between their teeth, others grinding their pain into strands of wrapped rawhide or twisted fringe so these stoic ones would not cry out in their private agony.

Some of these would surely die this night.

The dead. Already there were three-times-ten on the battlefield, young and old warriors who had fallen too close to the soldier lines to recover their bodies. They would be scalped by the enemy’s scouts.

But among these who had been brought to the fires in the breastworks and this mountainside, even more had died after Young Two Moon and the handful of others who would remain behind had crept back into the darkness of the ravines and coulees, slipping silently toward the soldier camp.

There the young warriors had waited in the first cold streaks of day-coming as the white man and his Indians finally saddled, formed up, and began their retreat from the valley.

The ve-ho-e having stripped a once-powerful and very proud people of everything … everything but their lives.

* Pike’s Peak.

† Southern Cheyenne Indian Agency, Darlington, Indian Territory.