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

Chapter 39

26 November 1876

Early on the afternoon of the battle, Second Lieutenant Homer W. Wheeler had been ordered to take his men of G Troop, Fifth U.S. Cavalry, and establish a guard outpost on the heights south of camp where the Shoshone scouts had remained throughout the fight.

Some two hours later one of Mackenzie’s orderlies had ridden up the narrow game trail to those heights.

“Lieutenant Wheeler?”

“That’s me.”

“The general commanding sends his compliments—”

“Forget the formality, soldier. What is it?”

“He requests to see you at once.”

“My troop?”

“Sir, he said nothing about that. Just that he wants to see you.

Flinging himself into the saddle, Wheeler led the pink-faced private back down that winding, narrow path to the site on the south slope overlooking what that morning had been the Cheyenne village, where Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie was overseeing the final mop-up of the enemy camp.

The young officer dismounted, handing his reins to the orderly, then stepped up, clicked his heels together, and saluted.

“General. Lieutenant Wheeler: G Troop, Fifth Cavalry. Reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Mr. Wheeler. Very good,” Mackenzie replied, returning the salute as the muscles along one side of his jaw convulsed. “I have an important duty for you.”

“Yes, sir. Anything to help.”

The colonel nodded, turning away to look across the decimated camp where scouts and soldiers were busy at that moment dragging plunder from the lodges, stripping the lodgepoles of their hide-and-canvas covers. Wheeler stepped up at the tall Mackenzie’s elbow to look down upon the scene.

“Do you see our hospital?”

“Yes, General.”

“The surgeons certainly have had a time of it today.”

“I can quite imagine, sir.”

Now Mackenzie momentarily glanced at Wheeler. “Lieutenant—I’m placing you in charge of transporting our casualties back to our wagon camp on the Powder.”

“Y-yes, General,” he said, his shoulders snapping back proudly. “It is an honor, sir!”

“What will you require?”

His mind burned with adrenaline as it raced over what he needed. “Twenty men, General.”

“Certainly.”

“And as many packers as the mule train can spare to handle the animals.”

“You have my authority.”

“With the general’s permission: can I inform you later just how many civilians I will require?”

“Yes, by all means. Now you must speak to the surgeons and see to things at the field hospital yourself.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll go there now, with your permission. Thank you.”

“Very well, then,” Mackenzie said quietly, almost too quietly to be heard above the commotion of the destruction being pursued downslope at their feet. “Do you have any further questions of your assignment?”

Wheeler turned on his heel, coming to attention, saluting smartly. “None at all, General. Thank you, sir. Thank you!”

Mackenzie saluted, murmured, “Good day, Lieutenant.” Then the colonel wheeled about on his heel, his shoulders sagging as he returned to his headquarters group—looking more like a man who had just suffered a defeat than a man who had just claimed a major victory in this long and indecisive campaign.

For a few moments more, Wheeler stood there, rigid—letting the personal triumph of it wash over him, enjoying this singular honor.

When he finally realized he must look a sight standing there by himself, staring from that outcrop of rocks at the village and the valley beyond, Wheeler quickly took his reins from the young orderly and remounted. Going to Tom Moore, he requested four packers at that time to lend a hand to the twenty troopers from his own company who could construct the travois they would need from the Cheyenne lodgepoles.

They had found it no easy task that late in the afternoon to scrounge up enough poles, rope, and robes or blankets for those travois. Most everything had been cut up and was in the process of being consigned to the leaping bonfires crackling throughout the village. Throughout the rest of that afternoon and on into the night, the two dozen men under Wheeler went through the grueling work of constructing thirty travois by firelight, using rope and strips of hide and canvas beneath those robes they had saved from destruction.

Because of the twenty-six enlisted men who had been wounded, as well as three more men so sick they could not ride in the saddle on their own, the surgeons reported to Wheeler that they would have no trouble filling those thirty travois. Dr. LaGarde and the others had decided to bury one of the six privates who had been killed there on the battlefield. Because his transport detail could not come up with material to construct more travois, Wheeler and the surgeons decided they would have to carry four of the dead unceremoniously slung over the backs of Tom Moore’s mules.

As each of the travois was finished, it was immediately taken to the hospital, where it was placed in a slightly inclined position and another wounded soldier was gently lifted onto it. In that gray light of Sunday morning, 26 November, the last casualty was put to rest on his travois, joining all the rest who faced one another in two long rows on either side of a string of fires that had kept them from freezing throughout that frightful night.

A cold gust of wind slashed across Wheeler’s face when he turned slowly, thinking he had heard Mackenzie’s voice. The lieutenant shivered suddenly as he rose to greet the commander, his stomach growling hungrily, feeling the stupor of having gone without sleep for a second night.

“Lieutenant Wheeler.”

“Yes, General. Good morning.”

“Morning. Yes. Mr. Wheeler, I came to see how you were getting along. We’ll be moving out before noon.”

“I’ll be ready.”

“I see.” Then the colonel pointed down to the end of the row of travois. “Why are your men standing there holding those travois and wounded?”

“I have only four packers, General,” Wheeler said. “It takes two packers to lash up the travois to a mule. So some of my men are waiting with the wounded men who will be the next to have mules brought up for them.”

“Your men can’t get this done any quicker?”

In utter exhaustion he looked down at his boot caked with snow and ice. “No, General. My boys don’t know a thing about a proper mule hitch. But if I had—”

“—more packers,” Mackenzie interrupted, “you could hitch them all up at once. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir. About the size of it, exactly.”

The colonel turned to his regimental quartermaster as they started away. “Mr. Lawton—see that Wheeler gets the help he needs. Immediately. And then we’ll leave him alone. He seems to know what he is about.”

Wheeler watched Mackenzie’s back for a moment more, his weary mind sliding here and there in unconnected thought … wondering if he would have time to grab a nap before they would be moving out.

Morning Star ached to the bone with fatigue and cold.

Through that long night he had kept moving from fire to fire with the others as his people trudged step by frozen step more than five miles into the mountains. As wounded as was his own heart with his personal loss, Morning Star did what he could to console the relatives of those warriors who had been killed, their bodies fallen into the enemy’s hands.

Too, he sat for a time with each one of the mothers who had lost their infants to the incredible cold. And he joined those who were rubbing warmth back into the hands and feet of the old ones too frail and sick to move about and warm themselves.

Again and again he instructed this group or that to sacrifice one of their ponies not only for food they could roast over the tiny fires, but so that the old people could stuff their hands and feet among the warm organs and blood.

Still, the Ohmeseheso had suffered greatly that first night after the battle. Many of the old ones, the sick, the weakest—they had simply given up their spirits in the great cold, unable to keep the frightful temperature from their hearts.

Up ahead of him on the slope that gray-skinned morning as the sun blurred the eastern horizon to a narrow band of bloody red, a mother held the hand of one of her young children as they stumbled along, stiff-legged … while in the other arm she carried the frozen body of her infant who had died while struggling to nurse at its mother’s breast throughout the night.

How heavy his heart had become, for it seemed the very young and the very old were being ripped from the People. Perhaps all that would be left to his band would be those old enough to suffer the cold without dying, those young enough that the cold could not weaken their frail bodies.

All these winters of his life—through the battles and the migrations, in all that greatness and feasting, the women he had loved and the children who had sprung from his loins—so many winters that had flecked his hair with their snow … his heart had never been so heavy.

And he had never been quite so cold.

Last night he had squatted at a fire beside his missing son, Bull Hump, and some of the other old warriors, talking quietly while the keening surrounded them and the groans of the wounded reminded them all that there would be more to die.

Softly, Bull Hump had said, “The only thing that saved the lives of any of us was the smoke from so many guns—smoke which hung so low in the ravines and gulches, smoke which clung to the mountainsides so that the soldiers could not see us clearly as we fought. Had there not been so much gun smoke—more of us would have fallen.”

Now, as Morning Star reached the top of the icy, slippery slope and turned, the dry, cold air scratching his lungs with the torment of a porcupine-tail hairbrush, the chief gazed down through the bottom of the snow clouds at the valley below. Watching the last of his people struggling up the long slope through the timber, many crawling up hand over hand, barefoot, dragging tiny ones and the old with them through the depth of that new snow as they pushed ever onward into the soft underbelly of those clouds.

Up here where the smoke hung just beneath the clouds there clung the stench of death and destruction. Everything gone to ash and smoke. Those lodges of each warrior society exquisitely decorated with regalia, painted to record the exploits of their members, their finest deeds: a retelling of men and soldiers and horses pitched together in struggles from the past. A glorious past.

Each man’s most important clothing was gone in the smoke. Beautifully tanned hides, quilled and beaded—a warrior’s holy clothes that he would wear into battle. Scalp locks and the medicine drawings on each shirt, the leggings, his fighting moccasins. The great spray and tumble of war eagle feathers worn by some, or the great provocation of the horned headdresses that adorned others.

But with the attack yesterday morning, there was no time to dress and paint while one said his prayers. Only a few at the upper end of camp had a moment to sweep up a sacred bonnet or a special amulet to give them strength in the coming fight. Their sacred war medicines, prayer bundles, all of it—everything except Maahotse and Esevone—was gone. What hadn’t been burned had been carried off by the enemy’s Indians.

Even the Sacred Corn, given by the Grandmother Earth to Sweet Medicine to feed his people at the beginning of time. How it had stabbed Morning Star’s heart to watch the soldiers throw the last few ears of their Sacred Corn into the fire. No more would the People know freedom from want with it gone. Now—he knew—they would always be hungry.

The Ohmeseheso were running again.

So Morning Star wondered if it would not have been better to die the death of a warrior in yesterday’s battle, along with his two sons and those grandchildren … better that than to watch his people’s greatness die at the bottom of those bloody footprints scattering up the silent, mourning mountainside.

In addition to the twenty-four soldiers and Indian scouts wounded in the battle, Lieutenant Homer Wheeler’s detail was attending to one of the Shoshone who had suffered a terrible abdominal wound. Because of the poor prognosis for a man shot through the intestines, the army surgeons didn’t hold out much hope for the scout named Anzi to survive long enough to reach the wagon camp. Since he was marked for death, the course of treatment was simply to make the patient as comfortable as possible and administer as much painkiller as was necessary.

For Anzi, Dr. LaGarde prescribed laudanum, a morphine derivative, and approved all the whiskey the Shoshone wanted. With such a combination coursing through his system, the warrior had somehow survived the night, lasting into the next morning while Mackenzie’s cavalry prepared to leave the Cheyenne village behind.

But rather than slipping away, as the surgeons had predicted, the warrior instead began to insist upon more and more whiskey from his attendants through the long, cold night.

“Oh, John!” he would call out to one or another of the hospital stewards or Wheeler’s escort detail. It mattered little what the soldiers’ names were, because Anzi preferred to use that common expression many of the Shoshone gave when addressing any white man.

“What you want now, Anzi?” a soldier would ask.

“Oh, John! Heap sick! Whiskey! Whiskey!”

So all through that night and into the gray of dawn Wheeler’s troopers poured whiskey down the mortally wounded scout, as well as sharing some with a few of the other critically injured soldiers like Private Alexander McFarland, who lapsed in and out of consciousness. But by midmorning, as the cavalry was preparing to embark, Wheeler had been forced to kneel at Anzi’s side, explaining that there was no more whiskey for him, no officers’ brandy, either.

“No whiskey, John?”

“No whiskey. No more. None.”

Grim-lipped and resolute, the Shoshone slowly rolled to his side as if he were about to give up the ghost, when he dragged his legs beneath him and rose unsteadily between a pair of his fellow Shoshone, there at his side in a deathwatch.

“Where are you going?” Wheeler demanded, stunned as he called out to the Shoshone’s back.

Over his shoulder the wounded scout replied, “Anzi go ride. Warrior always ride.”

As tired as he was, Seamus Donegan nonetheless preferred to be one of the last out of the valley that Sunday afternoon. He hadn’t snatched a bit of sleep for two nights now, what with the march of the twenty-fourth, then with the way the Shoshone scouts caterwauled all last night after the battle, mourning their tribesmen, women, and children recently killed by the Cheyenne of this very village.

Shortly past eleven A.M. Mackenzie gave the order, and the scouts began driving more than seven hundred captured ponies ahead of them through the bogs and the willow thickets, heading downstream.

Minutes later the men swung into position by columns of fours where possible, pointing their noses south by east toward the gap they had entered in the cold, gray-belly light of dawn the day before. Seamus wondered if he had become more accustomed to the deep cold, or if the temperature might be moderating, actually allowing it to snow gently once more on the dark, serpentine column snaking its way across the pristine white that bordered the Red Fork of the Powder River.

As he and those who closed the file on the column entered the boggy willow thickets, Donegan turned in the saddle one last time to look back on what had been the Cheyenne camp. Among the wispy sheets of the wind-whipped, billowy snow, he thought he caught sight of three Cheyenne warriors reentering the village.

He reined up, curious. Alone now as the sounds of the column inched away from him, the Irishman watched the trio of warriors move slowly from one pile of ash and rubble to another until they finally collapsed as if all the spirit had been sucked right out of them. As he nudged his heels into the bay’s flanks and moved out once more, Seamus listened to the distant, sodden wails of grief from those three warriors who sat in the ruins of their village, crying out in despair and utter pain, wailing with implacable grief.

Up ahead of him the men cursed and yelled, packers and soldiers alike, as they struggled with their mules and horses. The animals slipped and slid crossing every precipitous slope—skidding onto their haunches and braying in protest.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Wheeler and his escort of two companies of the Third Cavalry quickly discovered it best to lower the travois with their wounded still attached by several ropes rather than careen down each treacherous hillside. The most dangerous slopes were the long ones, which required the soldiers to tie their lariats together as they had to lower each wounded man down more than two hundred feet, one at a time to men and mules waiting below. Once the ropes were untied from the travois, they were drawn back up the hill and another travois lashed in and lowered.

As the progress of the column was slowed, Seamus repeatedly caught up with Wheeler’s escort. Each time he lent a hand where he could, joking with some of the wounded, touching the shoulder of others who were clearly in great pain. Always offering what comfort he might give.

“Aye, and that last drop was a daisy, Irishman,” one old private snorted as his travois was tied up and made ready for another trip down the snowy slopes. “Why—I’ll have you know I ain’t had sech a pucker of a toboggan ride since I was in knee britches!”

For the journey two men were assigned to each of the mules carrying the dead, to make certain the cantankerous animals did not break away and possibly disfigure their departed comrades by colliding against rocks and deadfall. Four men were positioned around each of the wounded: one to lead the mule, two to dismount and heft the travois around difficult terrain, and a fourth to lead the four cavalry mounts. At every stream crossing, the soldiers and packers were forced to dismount and unhitch the travois—carrying the wounded across the icy, slippery rocks by hand and on foot. To assure that the wounded troopers were given the finest of attention, Wheeler had assigned one noncommissioned officer for every five travois.

Because of such care only one accident happened that entire first afternoon. At one of the many repeated crossings of the Red Fork the mule jerked the travois out of the hands of the litter handlers and dragged the wounded soldier on through the shallow creek. But because of the length of the poles and the inclined position of the soldier upon them, he wasn’t soaked—only splashed by the skittish mule’s hooves.

Yet it wasn’t only those steep and narrow parts of the trail that made the day’s journey so treacherous.

Late that afternoon Seamus had gone ahead to reach that smooth, undulating ground the Lakota and Cheyenne scouts had christened “Race Horse Canyon.” To the rear arose yelps and curses, the clatter of hooves and squeak of leather. A wild-eyed mule careened its way with travois bounding and bouncing across the sage flats. Wheeling the bay quickly, the Irishman raced to catch up the runaway animal, slowing it until it turned with him and stopped—when Donegan immediately dismounted to lunge back to the wounded trooper still strapped in.

Breathlessly the Irishman asked, “You … you all right, sojur?

The hapless passenger caught his breath, blinking his eyes, then grinned gamely as he gazed up at Donegan to say, “Let her go, by damn! Whoooeee! If I had me some bells jingling, I’d think I was taking a sleigh ride back home!”

“Where are you wounded?”

“Hip, sir.”

“You want me fetch up a surgeon to come see to you?” The soldier shook his head bravely; then, as he shifted himself, his face clearly etched with pain, he said, “There’s others hurt worse off’n me, mister. I’ll fair up in a minute or two. Just let me catch my breath, will you? And you can put this gol-danged mule back in line with the other boys.”

Donegan readjusted the thin blankets over the wounded man, tucking them in beneath the soldier’s chin.

“All right, Private,” he said quietly, feeling his eyes mist. “Let’s you and me head for home.”