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

Afterword

As promised in the afterword of Trumpet on the Land, at the very beginning of A Cold Day in Hell I’ve taken the luxury of moseying back in time a bit toward the story we covered at the end of that earlier novel, by having Frank Grouard relate his little-known private horse race with the poet scout, “Captain” Jack Crawford who had likewise accompanied George Crook’s army through Wyoming, Montana, and Dakota Territory.

I was able to draw this exciting and ofttimes silly tale not only from the memoirs left by Frank Grouard and Jack Crawford themselves, but from Captain Andrew S. Burt as well. From his account we learn that James Gordon Bennett, wealthy publisher of the New York Herald, not only paid Crawford the $500 promised him by the grouchy news correspondent Reuben Davenport, but another $225—in payment for “horses killed and expenses.”

After speaking to General Sheridan at Laramie, Crawford returned to Custer City in the Black Hills, where he learned he had been discharged as a scout for slipping away without notice at Crook City. Quartermaster records, in fact, show that he was relieved of duty on 15 September. He may well have spent the month of October among his old haunts, enjoying his notoriety among the prospectors and merchants of the Black Hills.

But by the second week of November he was in Omaha, on his way to Philadelphia, where he joined up with Buffalo Bill’s newly reinstated production of a western melodrama. In the next few months Crawford “discovered that his talents for entertaining extended beyond the glow of an evening campfire.” After the successful spring season of 1877, he broke with Cody and formed his own theatrical company.

In the years to come we will find the Irish-born “poet scout” relating many of his exploits in the form of rhyme and verse before Chautauqua audiences and upon many other lecture platforms. But he will reemerge in the future, for he served as a scout during the Apache warfare in the Southwest, at the conclusion of which he established a ranch on the Rio Grande where Crawford would live until his death in 1917, living each day according to the personal philosophy he oft times recited:

I never like to see a man

a ’rasslin’ with the dumps,

’cause in the game o’ life

he doesn’t always catch the trumps;

but I can always cotton to

a free and easy cuss

as takes his dose and thanks the Lord

it wasn’t any wuss.

Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis’s encounters with the Hunkpapa of Sitting Bull and Gall are little known, as contemporary accounts of the Spring Creek skirmishes are extremely rare. I owe a great debt of thanks to historian Jerome Greene for the landmark work done in two of his books, for digging up what scant information does exist in what was left by three of the participants. For the military story of the “Spring Creek encounters” I relied upon the writings of Oskaloosa M. Smith and Alfred C. Sharpe. The lone Indian account was recorded by Stanley Vestal from the mouth of Lazy White Bull (Joseph White Bull).

We have more to rely upon when it comes to the Cedar Creek councils between Miles and Sitting Bull, and their Battle of Cedar Creek—although it is far from being a “wealth of information.” Not only did Miles leave an admirable record of his momentous talks with the Hunkpapa leader, but we again have White Bull’s remembrances, along with those of Long Feather, Bear’s Face, and Spotted Elk to give us an idea of what was going on in the Lakota camp during those crucial hours and heated deliberations.

Extremely critical, don’t you see, for this was the first time a representative of the white man’s government had met with a leader (if not the leader) of the Indian coalition that had for months checkmated, then trounced, the Army of the West. While Cyrus Townsend Brady’s account erroneously has both parties meeting for the protracted councils on horseback, the importance of the meetings rests in the fact that such a face-to-face confrontation allowed Miles to see for himself “the condition and temperament” of the bellicose Lakotas after months of fighting, months of being chased and harried by the soldiers.

In addition, and by no means less important, these dramatic conferences exhibited to the war chiefs the readiness of Miles and his soldiers to bring the nomadic warrior bands to bay, and eventually in to their reservations. Because they could plainly see the Bear Coat’s resolve, on 27 October over four hundred lodges of Miniconjou and Sans Arc surrendered—some two thousand people. Since Miles had no way to feed that many additional mouths at the Tongue River, he took five of their chiefs as hostages for the good performance of the rest of their people, who promised to move in to their agency at Cheyenne River.

As it turned out, only some forty lodges ended up turning themselves in at the reservation. The rest hightailed it up the valley of the Powder to join what would become a large winter village of the Crazy Horse people and the Northern Cheyenne—an imposing gathering by any standard!

In the end that confrontation between Nelson Miles and the warrior bands in the valley of Cedar Creek in Montana Territory would set the stage for the colonel doggedly pursuing his winter campaign against the enemy, a story we will tell in the next volume of the Plainsmen Series, Wolf Mountain Moon.

In late October at the same time Miles was chasing Sitting Bull to the banks of the Yellowstone, and Crook sent Mackenzie to capture the Red Cloud and Red Leaf camps, Colonel Samuel L. Sturgis and his wounded Seventh Cavalry had marched away from Fort Lincoln to impose Phil Sheridan’s sanctions at the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River agencies. Sturgis and his troopers seized more than two thousand ponies and assorted weapons.

Few today know little of those military seizures on the reservations, wherein we see the army commanders once again persisting in their pattern of marching against those they can punish in a misguided belief that those agency bands were in fact supplying the nomadic hostiles with ponies, weapons, and warriors. In his autumn offensive, Sheridan used more than five thousand troops, those either directly involved or those who stood in reserve at the frontier posts should they be needed … a full fifth of the U.S. Army at that time!

Sheridan was proud to boast that, “For the first time, all the agencies ceased to be points of supply and re-enforcement for the hostile Indians; and henceforth the troops will have only to contend with the Indians hereditarily and persistently hostile.”

The pony and weapon seizures went on into the following year as one small warrior band after another limped in to their agencies to surrender, even after both Crook and Terry were reassigned.

But perhaps the real shame is that of all those ponies seized, the animals drew an average of only six dollars each in auction. Worse still was the fact that of the auction’s receipts, not a dollar was ever used to purchase cattle for the agencies, as had been promised. In military archives those thousands of dollars have never been accounted for.

It was surprising to me to learn that Mackenzie’s 1876 journey to that section of the Big Horn Mountains was not the first. Two years earlier in 1874 Captain Anson Mills of the Third Cavalry marched his Big Horn Expedition almost due north from Rawlins Station on the Union Pacific line, instead of starting out from Fort Fetterman to the southeast. In the fall of that year they had gone as far north as practicable before turning east, eventually reaching the rim of what is today called Fraker Mountain, which overlooks the valley where the Dull Knife Battle would take place. Because there was no way down for their horses and pack mules, Mills’s men were compelled to backtrack several miles until they could find a better way into the valley of the Red Fork. The expedition eventually did pass directly over the site in making their way downstream, exiting the canyon to the east through the same gap Mackenzie’s troops would use in approaching the Cheyenne village.

To better impress upon the reader just how steep and forbidding is the terrain at the upper end of the valley where Morning Star’s people took refuge, built breastworks, and eventually struggled in their nighttime winter climb out of the valley through what is today called Fraker Pass, let me quote that observer who accompanied Captain Mills in 1874:

The situation on the western end of the battlefield area, as I remember it from 1874, … is that of mountains, pure and simple—not “Bad Lands,” as understood by frontiersmen.

I am particularly indebted to the labors of historian Sherry L. Smith in recounting the journal of her relative, William Earl Smith—a private who served as one of Mackenzie’s orderlies during this critical campaign. Through him we have one of those rare firsthand glimpses into not only the day-to-day weather and human interest of the campaign trail, but a very microscopic look at the relations between soldier and officer in the frontier army.

She states:

The relationships among enlisted men, noncommissioned officers, and commissioned officers—[were] relationships characterized at times by affection, at others by brutality. The army caste system is vividly revealed in Smith’s description of the expedition’s daily life. He is acutely aware of a system that allows officers to abuse soldiers verbally and physically with few restraints … Smith’s account (as well as those of his military superiors) undermines the notion of a purposeful, stately, tightly organized campaign.

I am most grateful that William Earl Smith left us another of those terribly personal records we chance upon from time to time, for history is not a dull recitation of historical facts. Instead, history is the record of human events. Not merely the when and where of conflict, but more so the how and why of those clashes. If for no other reason, I want my novels to stand apart from all others for bringing the breath of life and the pain of a human soul to this crucial period in American history. How unfortunate that all too few of us were ever taught a biographical history.

So I am in Sherry Smith’s debt, for she did in her Sagebrush Soldier what more historians should be doing for the reading public, what I attempt to do as I knit together many different accounts of every campaign, every battle, in hopes that through those different points of view we will more closely arrive at what really took place. Unlike what most of the academic historians do in their work—striving to support and defend one point of view—Smith herself says:

Rather than present participants’ accounts separately, this approach aims for greater integration of perspectives. It rests on the belief that such a method lends itself to a closer approximation of the truth.

I’m grateful too for the brief, terse diary left us by Sergeant James McClellan, from whose words I have gleaned some rare nuggets of daily life for the cavalry trooper serving in Crook’s cavalry. He served out his five-year enlistment, receiving his discharge in June of 1877—the back of his certificate noting that he was credited with killing the warrior known as Bull Head.

Over half a century later Motor Travel magazine (published by the American Automobile Club) began running a two-year series of articles on the Powder River Campaign of 1876. Survivors of the battle were contacted to participate, and McClellan himself wrote seven of the articles. Perhaps most interesting to me was that during those two years of renewed interest in the campaign, an era when the motion picture was flickering into its golden age, McClellan publicly stated the time had come to produce a film of the attack on the village. He believed it should be done sooner than later as there were still a few survivors left who could serve as consultants “about the essential details.”

Needless to say, nothing ever came of his personal campaign, and he died soon thereafter in 1936. An interesting footnote to those of you who have been reading the Plainsmen Series from its beginning six years ago is that McClellan served in H Troop, Third Cavalry, under Captain Henry W. Wessels, son of the Henry W. Wessels who marched north to Fort Phil Kearny to relieve Colonel Henry B. Carrington following the disastrous Fetterman Massacre almost a decade before the army defeated the Cheyenne in the valley of the Red Fork.

It comes as no surprise to me, therefore, that history is indeed often a study of converging, diverging, then reconverging currents.

Another interesting footnote to our story is that Red Shirt—one of the seven Lakota scouts who located the Cheyenne village, and one of the two who remained behind to watch for signs of discovery—later joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s wild west show when it sailed across the ocean to England, performing before her Majesty, Queen Victoria.

Because of the cold gloom of that night, because of the cold fog settling in the valley, Red Shirt and the other scouts never got a count of lodges to report so that Mackenzie would know just exactly what he was facing at the moment of attack. Indeed, there has persisted a minor dispute as to the number of lodges in the village. A few accounts state 175 lodges. Lieutenant John Bourke himself states there were 205 lodges, while later in his own account he states there were 200. Another contemporary account, this time by Lieutenant Homer Wheeler, states there were 205 lodges. In Son of the Morning Star Evan Connell’s arduous research states there were “more than two hundred lodges.” But in the end I have chosen to go with the number given by Luther North in his record, since Mackenzie himself sent the North brothers to get him an official count: 173.

So now we have the village in place, and they know the soldiers are coming (despite the erroneous statement Cyrus Townsend Brady makes in Indian Fights and Fighters, when he writes: “The sleeping Indians in the camp had not the slightest suspicion that the enemy was within a hundred miles[!]”).

Why didn’t the Cheyenne move? Or if they had determined they were going to fight, why not prepare to withstand the assault, as some of the chiefs suggested before they were bullied and shouted down by Last Bull and his Kit Fox Society?

Likely those will remain unanswered questions until the end of time.

It is almost certain that if Last Bull and the other war chief’s had worked together to prepare for the attack, the outcome might well have been dramatically different. Why did they choose not to set up an ambush somewhere near the narrow east gap where the weary, cold soldiers were most vulnerable on their played-out horses that terribly cold night? Another question for which I have no answer.

For the longest time the army believed that they had surprised the Dull Knife village—but the testimony of the Cheyenne participants in later years bring ruin to that myth. Young Two Moon and the others knew not only that the soldiers were coming, but knew they were being led by their friends from the Red Cloud Agency—Lakota and Cheyenne both!

How was it that Last Bull was able to cow the chiefs in that village, as well as the protectors and priests of the Cheyenne peoples’ two great medicines: the Sacred Hat and the Sacred Arrows? How could those chiefs ignore the power of Box Elder’s prophetic vision, when the man had been right time after time before?

Perhaps some clue comes to us in the interclan relationships within the Ohmeseheso in that year of 1876. Clearly, sometime in that spring Last Bull’s Kit Fox Society had gained the ascendancy over all other warrior societies among the Northern Cheyenne. Sherry Smith calls them “not only arrogant but even overbearing.” They were known among their own people as “Wife Stealers,” often called the “Beating-Up Soldiers.” They plainly had most everyone else afraid.

Everyone, except the rival Elk Scrapers Society.

During the previous February the rivalry between the two warrior groups had reached a peak when Last Bull had warned of the proximity of soldiers, but was ignored, even scorned by the Elk Scrapers. Days later when a group of Elk Scraper hunters came in with news of soldiers in the area, their reports were believed. This wound to his pride would fester for nine moons until the new emergency in the Big Freezing Moon allowed him to seize control from those less ruthless than he.

Among the Northern Cheyenne, Last Bull is still strongly blamed for the disaster. He was later deposed as leader of his society. In those years to come during his final days on the reservations, Last Bull chose instead to live with the nearby Crow. Some say the Northern Cheyenne military societies “ran him off.” As a result, his son, Fred Last Bull, grew up speaking Crow in Montana.

Needless to say, Last Bull’s adolescent bravado in the Big Freezing Moon of 1876 cost his people everything.

So when it came time for the cavalry to gallop across the broken ground of the valley, the Northern Cheyenne weren’t ready. Yet some thirty or forty warriors valiantly hurried into the deep ravine and waited for Lieutenant John A. McKinney’s troopers to come charging into point-blank range. But here is where I run up against one of those historical inconsistencies in a trifling detail that just nettles the hell out of me!

There’s a problem in the campaign literature in regard to what company McKinney led in his fateful charge that cold day.

In his carefully researched biography on Mackenzie, Charles M. Robinson states that McKinney rode at the head of A Troop.

But the confusion deepens. Second Lieutenant Harrison G. Otis, who was there to assist with holding McKinney’s men when they were being shot to pieces (and who would later take over command of McKinney’s company) is listed on the military rosters as being in ? Troop. In my list of characters, I’ve arbitrarily placed Otis as second in command in McKinney’s M.

Next we have another esteemed biography of Mackenzie in which the author, Michael D. Pierce, relates that McKinney did in fact lead M Troop into action that day.

No less than John Bourke himself states for the record that McKinney led M Troop toward its fateful encounter at the deep ravine.

So, like Pierce and author Fred Werner, I’ll throw my weight behind the contemporary source, an army officer and adjutant who is accustomed to paying attention to such details.

A most fitting memorial to this fallen officer was the establishment of Fort McKinney in 1877 near the present-day town of Buffalo, Wyoming, after the army abandoned Reno Cantonment.

It never fails. In every battle I have written about in this dramatic and tragic struggle so far, there are Indian and soldier combatants who rise above the rest in the heat of conflict, throwing their bodies into the line of fire, heedless of personal danger as they pull a dead or wounded comrade out of harm’s way, or stand over a fallen comrade as the enemy charges in. And such action never fails to bring tears to my eyes, or my heart to my throat.

Time and again in this battle Cheyenne warriors rode out alone to draw soldier fire that would allow women and children to escape up the narrow canyon and on to the breastworks. Men like Yellow Eagle, who escorted the old and the infirm to safety. Men like Little Wolf, who was wounded six times that day guarding the mouth of the escape ravine. Men like Long Jaw, who repeatedly drew bullets to himself so that the shamans would be better protected. The powerful mystics: Black Hairy Dog; Coal Bear; Box Elder.

And then there was Sergeant Thomas M. Forsyth who, although wounded, stayed with the body of his company commander, the dying John A. McKinney. More than any other officer, noncoms such as he were the “bone and the sinew” of the frontier army.

Forsyth’s bravery in the face of overwhelming odds and almost sure defeat did not go unnoticed. Five days after the battle Lieutenant Harrison Otis, now in command of M Troop, went to Mackenzie to personally recommend Forsyth (along with Sergeant Frank Murray and Corporal William J. Linn) for honorable mention. Private Thomas Ryan, who of his own volition stood at Forsyth’s side over McKinney’s bullet-riddled body, was eventually awarded a Certificate of Merit, an honor reserved for privates who had distinguished themselves in combat.

While Mackenzie did approve Forsyth’s promotion to regimental sergeant major the following summer, it was not until the end of the great Indian wars that the old, white-headed sergeant finally received what he had been long deserving.

Nearing the end of his career, Forsyth wrote to Captain J. H. Dorst, former adjutant to the deceased Mackenzie, discussing the propriety of his applying for a Certificate of Merit himself at that late date after going a decade and a half without any sort of recognition. Congress had just recently passed a law that would allow noncommissioned officers to receive the award previously reserved for privates. Ever a modest, but highly sentimental, man, the sergeant wrote Dorst:

I would like to leave my children something besides my name when I answer the last roll-call and anything that could bear testimony to bravery and gallantry on the part of their father in action, would be the best and noblest remembrance, that a soldier’s children could have.

It should go without saying that Dorst was extremely moved. So moved that the captain went one step further: he began the laborious process of approving the old sergeant for the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Only months before that day when Forsyth stood ramrod straight on the parade at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Sitting Bull had been killed by his own police. Within two weeks of that murder Big Foot’s Miniconjou had been slaughtered by the remnants of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee. Finally, late in 1891, the Medal of Honor was approved for his heroic, selfless action that horribly cold day in the valley of the Red Fork Canyon some fifteen years before.

Sergeant Thomas H. Forsyth stood in the last rays of sunset before the assembled troops and officers, there among his wife Lizzie and what they called their “tribe” of five children, as this nation’s highest award for bravery was placed around his neck.

He had offered his life to protect a fellow soldier, and now in the final days of his long army career, Thomas H. Forsyth had finally given his children an intangible inheritance no soldier’s pension could ever match.

There are other small glimpses of bravery that history has penciled in the margins from this tragic campaign. The lone Indian scout wounded in the fight, that Shoshone named Anzi, sought to ride like a warrior as long as he could, although suffering greatly (having been shot through the abdomen). He remained in the post hospital at Reno Cantonment for nearly three weeks, then with two companions rode back home to Chief Washakie’s Wind River Reservation—more than two hundred miles away. John Bourke saw Anzi the following year at the time of the Nez Perce war.

“[Anzi] was still living,” Bourke wrote, “although by no means, so his friends told me, the man he had been before being so terribly wounded.”

A year or so after that, other Shoshone reported that Anzi was shot on a horse-stealing raid.

Captain John M. Hamilton led his troops in to rescue the remnants of McKinney’s butchered men. An extremely courageous soldier, he himself would not fall in battle until July 1, 1898, when as the lieutenant colonel of the First Cavalry, a bullet found him as he was leading his men in a charge up the side of San Juan Hill.

In our story we have mentioned that Sergeant James H. McClellan was credited with having killed the warrior named Bull Head in close-quarters combat in that struggle Wessels’s company had of it near the head of the deep ravine where McKinney’s men were ambushed. In our story of the battle, we also recount the tale of McClellan taking from the body a cartridge belt bearing a buckle engraved with the name Little Wolf. Because Bull Head for some reason had grabbed up Little Wolf’s pistol and cartridge belt at the moment of attack, it was long believed by the soldiers that they had indeed killed the Sweet Medicine Chief of the Cheyenne. Just another piece of circumstantial evidence that history allows us to chuckle over after the fact.

As you have learned in our story, there were many items pulled from the lodges that caused a great deal of anger among Mackenzie’s troops, just as there had been when souvenirs from the Custer battle dead were found among the lodges of American Horse’s Miniconjou after the day-long fight at Slim Buttes, a tale we told you in Volume Ten, Trumpet on the Land. But perhaps no better than here in the Cheyenne village was the severity of the Custer disaster brought home as both the number and variety of personal items began to mount on the blankets where the soldiers piled those ghostly relics.

Clearly one of the most interesting of these is the roster book, the sort taken into the field, this one carried by First Sergeant Alexander Brown, G Troop, Seventh Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Donald Mcintosh, into the valley of the Little Bighorn. The roster was started on 19 April 1876 at which time the troop was leaving Louisiana, ordered back to Fort Abraham Lincoln for the summer campaign.

Its next-to-last entry is quite prophetic:

McEgan lost his carbine on the march while on duty with pack train, June 24, 1876.

From summer into fall, across the next five months, the pages in that roster book were filled with pictures by High Bear, its new owner, a warrior who was himself killed in the Dull Knife battle. One of the pages shows High Bear lancing a soldier clearly wearing the chevrons of a sergeant major. In the months and years to come, the officers who examined the warrior’s crude drawing, and its chronological placement among his career of those coups depicted within the book, later came to believe High Bear was the one who killed Sergeant Major Walter Kennedy, the man who attempted to ride for help once Major Joel H. Elliott’s company was completely surrounded during the Seventh Cavalry’s attack on Black Kettle’s camp along the Washita in 1868.*

I am in hopes of receiving permission to reproduce in this novel a page from Lieutenant Donald Mcintosh’s memoranda book so that the reader can see where the lieutenant has listed the “best shots” in his company, starting with Sergeant Brown himself. Unlike the Brown roster book, which is in private custody, Mcintosh’s was for a long time displayed at the little Bighorn Battlefield Visitor Center, complete with its single bullet hole perforating the entire book. Then some two years ago it was stolen, its protective case ripped from the wall. Only recently has the thief admitted that he burned this priceless, dramatic relic. What a senseless tragedy! At times I would like to believe the thief merely told federal prosecutors that it was destroyed, and that it has really been sold to some wealthy collector who, like far too many others, hasn’t the slightest desire to share his or her precious relics with the rest of us.

Unlike the stingy, niggardly kind, Lieutenant John Bourke gave to posterity those grisly trophies he collected in the Cheyenne village. Pictured in his book on Mackenzie’s last fight are the two relics not meant for the faint of heart. First, there is a beaded necklace from which is suspended at least eight complete human fingers; between their array are sections of other human fingers, as well as teeth and iron arrow points. The second necklace appears to be made of trade wool sewn to a long strip of leather, much in the fashion of a soldier’s cartridge belt, constructed in such a way as to be worn around the neck with a narrow thong. But instead of the leather loops to hold the bullets, there are beaded loops holding twenty short fingers, from the fingertips down to the first joint.

These, the amateur ethnologist Bourke reported, in addition to a bag made from a human scrotum, were once the property of High Wolf, whom the lieutenant mistakenly called “the chief medicine man” of the Cheyenne. In 1877 he presented these war trophies to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., as specimens of “aboriginal religious art.”

While such relics might appear ghoulish and offend white sensibilities, Sherry Smith explains:

To be sure, the Northern Cheyenne did not see matters the same way. The saddles and canteens branded with Seventh Cavalry insignia, the scalps, the necklace of fingers—all represented Cheyenne victories over constant enemies who had, on other occasions, done the same to them.

It is with no small regret that we now bid Lieutenant John Bourke farewell for some time to come in this continuing narrative. The defeat of Morning Star’s Cheyenne marks the end of the fighting stage of his military career. But we will see him again in the years and stories yet to come: not as a warrior, but as an observer of the Northern Cheyenne flight from Indian Territory in 1878; again during the Ute War in Colorado, 1879; and finally among the Apache campaigns of the 1880s.

But—sadly—when he rode away from the Red Fork Valley, he had fought his last fight against Indians.

He, among many others both civilian and military with George C. Crook, had been in the field constantly since the previous winter’s campaign that began with the Reynolds’s fight on, and flight from, the Powder River.* Time and again the privations, the cold, the rain and snow, the hunger, and the interminable marches between battles took their toll on lesser men—breaking the health and sanity of their fragile human bodies and psyches. This is something I cannot stress enough—how these warriors on both sides suffered, even when they weren’t wounded … but endured.

Twice John G. Bourke had narrowly escaped death: once at the Reynolds’s fight, when he barely made the retreat, and again at the Rosebud fight, when he found himself alone during that horse charge and had to wheel and gallop back to safety just ahead of the enemy’s bullets—bullets that struck the soldier racing beside him.*

Perhaps we should slow down our twentieth-century rush and pay heed to such an experienced soldier when, after all that he had been through, John Bourke began in 1877 to question the struggle of which he had been such an integral part, the mindless machinery that had cost so many lives, both red and white.

From here on out, the lieutenant will lay down his carbine and pistol and pick up a far mightier weapon: his pen.

And while we’re on the subject of plunder, I often found among the literature much made of the Pawnee scouts’ abilities as talented plunderers. Luther North was quick to point out that his battalion of scouts ended up with less from the lodges than did the soldiers themselves. What the Pawnee did ride away with it seems they paid for in one way or another. What about those saddles they left behind at the East Gap that morning just moments before the attack? Perfectly natural for the North brothers to assume that the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts cut the cinches and straps—making the saddles all but unusable—if for no other reason than the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts had followed the Pawnee into the valley that morning.

But doesn’t it somehow seem just as reasonable to consider that one or more of Morning Star’s warriors took some revenge on that property they happened upon in wandering southeast across the difficult terrain—perhaps searching for an ideal sniping position? No one was ever charged with the crime, nor has any-person or band ever claimed responsibility for the act. It simply remains one of those nagging mysteries with which the Indian wars are so rife.

Before we leave the Pawnee, it might be interesting to note that Luther North very nearly missed that dawn charge!

So weary was he by the time they reached the point where Mackenzie had his men wait and form up for the charge, that North ordered one of the Pawnee to switch his saddle over to the strong Sioux pony he had captured in Red Cloud’s village. While that was being done, he trudged over to some nearby rocks where he could get out of the cold wind and sat down, immediately falling asleep.

When Mackenzie began to call for the men to mount up, Frank went looking for his brother, sending out some Pawnee, who returned unsuccessful. Lucky for Luther that he awoke himself with the growing clamor and happened to stumble out just in time to leap aboard his Sioux war pony at the very moment his brother Frank ordered the Pawnee to charge—the first horsemen into the valley.

After all the trouble Major Frank North was caused about his own captured Sioux pony by an indignant Three Bears and his Sioux scouts at Fort Fetterman, as well as on the march north—he finally elected to sell the horse to “a white scout who took him to the Shoshoni agency in the Wind River mountains, where he soon won the reputation of being the fastest runner in that section of the country.” Unfortunately, history does not tell us if that white scout was Tom Cosgrove or Yancy Eckles.

As had been the fate of the Sioux ponies, the captured Cheyenne ponies were later divided among the scouts, as I’ve told you, with the remainder being sold at auction. But the loss to the Cheyenne people cannot solely be measured in terms of ponies captured and lodges destroyed. The toll in human life was, as always, hardest to bear. Their casualties were never fully known until the tribe came in to surrender at Red Cloud Agency over the next year, when they ultimately submitted a list of forty warriors killed in the Dull Knife fight, but refused to speak of how many were wounded. Even sadder still, Cheyenne etiquette did not allow them to utter a word of the children and old people who froze to death escaping winter’s grip on the Big Horns. Only from what knowledgeable old soldiers and frontiersmen saw of the many gashed arms and legs of those mourning and grieving widows and orphan girls could they tell that the Cheyenne had paid a terrible price in Mackenzie’s victory. Especially in the cruel, hand-to-hand fighting at the deep ravine where the members of the tribe said at least twenty Cheyenne fell, the majority of the warrior dead.

What seems most significant to me about this campaign is that rather than merely pitting soldier against Indian—even more than pitting those longtime white allies like Shoshone and Crow and Pawnee against the Sioux and Cheyenne—this battle hurled Sioux and Cheyenne scouts from the Red Cloud Agency against the Cheyenne of Morning Star and Little Wolf. This Powder River Expedition therefore becomes as much an Indian tragedy as it is an Indian-wars tragedy.

Why would some men be induced to scout against their own people?

First of all, we might consider that these were men totally steeped in a warrior tradition. They were trained for battle, taught to regard ponies and rifles as the only legitimate displays of one’s manhood. When offered the chance to go riding off to war, even against the members of one’s own band, such a venture would likely seem much more preferable to endless days of boredom and confinement on the reservation.

Certainly there were others, especially among the Sioux scouts, who used the army’s need for their services as a wedge or lever to extract what they in turn wanted from the white man—in the way of pay, ponies, weapons, and so on.

But in the end, we must remember that while the white man saw the Sioux as Sioux, and the Cheyenne as Cheyenne, there were not only separate bands among each tribe, but separate kin-based clans and extended-family groupings as well. Loyalties went first to those family clans rather than some loose confederation of the Ohmeseheso, or the Oglalla, or the Hunkpapa. In addition, the record shows that some of the army scouts believed they were doing what they considered to be right by their people in going to help the soldiers drive their nomadic cousins back to their reservations. Such a life would be better for them in the end, they rationalized, better than being chased and harried, shot and impoverished, after all.

So the presence of those Sioux and Cheyenne scouts was vital not only to demoralize the Morning Star warriors, but the scouts had already played an important role in knowing how and where to locate the village. They were the ones who stayed behind among the rocks while the rest scampered down the backtrail to inform Mackenzie to hurry up. They were the ones who made possible the long-night march through the rugged mountain terrain. And they were the ones who played a prominent role in the day’s fighting: showing themselves to the Morning Star Cheyenne, thereby exacting a demoralizing effect hour after hour as the destruction of the village began.

For generations afterward there was bad blood between many of the Sioux and Cheyenne groups. Like Wooden Leg, many of the Cheyenne were highly critical of those who would come with the soldiers “to kill their friends.” For years many of the tribe did not allow stories to be told by those who had served as scouts for Crook and Mackenzie. Wooden Leg had himself lost a brother in the battle, and for years he often wondered if one of the Cheyenne scouts who had come with the ve-ho-e had killed him.

Forgiveness would come hard. Very, very hard.

Without a doubt, that winter campaign signaled the end of the great Sioux-Cheyenne coalition that had crushed Custer, twice held Crook at bay, and given Phil Sheridan one hell of an ulcer. No more would the warrior bands so readily trust one another.

The first of the Cheyenne limped into the Red Cloud Agency by January 1877. Dull Knife himself would surrender in April of that year, saying to Mackenzie, “You are the one I was afraid of when you came here [to Camp Robinson] last summer.”

So it was that years later Cyrus Townsend Brady made a glaring mistake in his story of the battle in Indian Fights and Fighters when he wrote: “Dull Knife, their leader, was found in the village with half a dozen bullets in him. He had fought gallantly in the open until he died.”

After they were beaten by the soldiers, after suffering the loss of everything they owned, but especially after being rebuffed by no less than Crazy Horse himself, some of the Ohmeseheso decided to go into the reservation. Other small bands began to send in runners to the agency, saying they would come in when they were able to—impoverished of weapons and horses, lodges, and clothing—so poor were they. And many of those runners mentioned the inhospitable reception they got from the Crazy Horse people, sending word to the reservation agents that they would be willing to go out with the army and hunt down the Oglalla leader.

In fact, more than one of the Northern Cheyenne war chiefs specifically stated as a condition of his surrender that he be “allowed to send his warriors with the white soldiers to fight Crazy Horse.”

To this day, this is a continuing controversy between the former allies once considered so close as to be “cousins.” While the Crazy Horse faction among the Oglalla Lakota deny the war chief’s rejection of the Morning Star people at worst, and play it down as inconsequential at best—the Northern Cheyenne still harbor a resentment against the man, a resentment against the Lakota band who refused them help in that awful winter.

Once Crazy Horse turned his back on the Ohmeseheso, there was no other hope for them. No other choice for many a man but to take his family in to be fed at the agency, and there to offer his services to the army desperately seeking to capture the elusive Oglalla war chief.

Unlike their former allies, the Northern Arapaho were able to establish a good relationship with their longtime enemies—the Shoshone. Beginning from that council Crook held with his allies at Reno Cantonment in the days prior to the Dull Knife Battle, the Arapaho fostered good relations with the Shoshone, who eventually invited the Arapaho to settle on the Wind River Reservation—thereby avoiding exile to Indian Territory—what would be the final humiliation and punishment for the Northern Cheyenne … but that is another story for us to tell through the eyes of Seamus Donegan in the years to come.

In those weeks leading up to the battle, we see the beginning of the erosion of those traditional powers of the Cheyenne chiefs. Last Bull’s success in blunting the orders of Old-Man Chiefs first to pick up and flee, then to build defensive breastworks, would be paid out in a heavy cost for many years to come. At the beginning of the reservation period more and more of the Cheyenne saw that nothing remained for them in practicing their traditional ways, so adopted the white culture. As well, Indian Bureau officials were quick to play upon this weakening of the traditional Cheyenne way of governing, acerbating the intratribal, intrasocietal frictions for their own benefit and to keep matters on the “civilizing pathway.”

Through the next few winters there were some traditionalists among the Ohmeseheso who watched from the wings and found good reason to believe in the old ways.

You will recall how Black Hairy Dog performed his ritual curse against the soldiers and those scouts who led the ve-ho-e against the Morning Star village. Even Old Crow, one of those scouts, recognized the gravity of what was going on and went to offer cartridges to the warriors and priests in the rocks.

“I must fight against you, but I am leaving a lot of ammunition on this hill,” he shouted to the priest, hoping to mollify the spirits.

Despite finding the bullets where Old Crow said he would leave them, for many years afterward the Cheyenne scorned their chief, Old Crow—openly declaring that he had betrayed his own.

In his research while writing Sweet Medicine, Father Peter Powell states, “Many of the Old Ones, alive during the 1950’s and 1960’s, declared that all the Cheyennes who scouted for the soldiers died not long after this fighting [at the Dull Knife Battle]. They were killed by the power of Maahotse, when the Sacred Arrow points were turned against them.”

And tribal historian John Stands in Timber agrees in his book compiled by Margot Liberty, saying that all of Mackenzie’s Cheyenne scouts were dead by 1885 because the Sacred Arrows were turned against them that day in the Red Fork valley.

The Sacred Buffalo Hat remains not only a spiritual object, but a pawn in the struggles between warring factions in the Northern Cheyenne here on their Montana reservation. As recently as November 11, 1994, the traditionalists “kidnapped” the Hat from its Sacred Lodge near Lame Deer. For nearly three months the lines were clearly drawn between those who are traditional and those who are more willing to accommodate white culture on the reservation. And then, even after Cheyenne U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell came west to mediate unsuccessfully, the two sides agreed at least to talk.

Eventually, as one would turn over a hostage, the Sacred Hat Bundle was peacefully turned over to the Sun Dance Priest, Francis Kills Night, although Bureau of Indian Affairs police were on hand in the event matters got out of hand. It was agreed that the tribe’s traditional warrior societies would now discuss and decide upon who would become the new Keeper of the Hat. They stated it was far better to solve their religious differences among themselves than allow the interference of outside forces including the Indian Bureau and the FBI.

So it was that at three minutes till noon on Friday, January 27, 1995—Sun Dance Priest Kills Night trudged through the mud and a misting rain with the sacred bundle on his back. He entered its Sacred Lodge. Esevone had come home to her people.

On the Northern Cheyenne Reservation there are three people I have called upon to help in explaining culture and religion to this ve-ho-e writer, hoping that I would get it right, praying I would capture the spirit of those people, the true spirit of that time. First of all, I want to thank Josephine Sootkis and her daughter Ruby, of the Dull Knife Memorial College, both of whom are direct descendants of Morning Star. And I appreciate the help of Ted Rising Sun, another direct descendant of the chief known to the white man as Dull Knife. Their stories and heartfelt scholarship have proved invaluable to me in expressing the horror of this tragic conflict. Ruby herself is busy at work on a screenplay dealing with the 1879 outbreak of the Dull Knife forces from Fort Robinson. In addition, Bill Tall Bull, tribal historian, always makes himself available to answer questions, however minute, no matter how ignorant those questions may sound coming from the mouth of a white man.

Disappointed and cold, Crook and Mackenzie sat on the banks of the Belle Fourche as long as they could in that December. Then on the twentieth they received a terse telegram from Phil Sheridan with the information that their transportation bill for the campaign was sixty thousand dollars per month, while the allowance was a mere twenty-eight thousand dollars. “Those few words,” John Bourke noted in his diary, “mean that this campaign must terminate speedily.”

The commanders were forced at last to turn the expedition back to Fort Fetterman, where within weeks the campaign was disbanded.

Headquarters Powder River

Expedition

Cheyenne, W.T., January 8, 1877

General Orders

No. 10

The Brigadier General Commanding announces the close of the Powder River Expedition, and avails himself of the opportunity to thank the officers and men composing it, for the ability, courage, endurance and zeal exhibited by them during its progress.

With the mercury indicating such extreme degrees of cold as to make life well nigh unbearable, even when surrounded by the comforts of civilization, you have endured, with uncomplaining fortitude, the rigors of the weather from which you had less to protect you than an Indian is usually provided with.

The disintegration of many of the hostile bands of savages against whom you have been operating attests the success of the brilliant fight made by the Cavalry with the Cheyennes on the North Fork, and your toilsome marches along the Powder River and Belle Fourche.

It is a matter for solemn regret that you have to mourn the loss of the distinguished and brilliant young Cavalry officer, First Lieutenant John A. McKinney, 4th Cavalry, and the gallant enlisted men who fell with him in the lonely gorges of the Big Horn Mountains …

By Command of Brigadier-General Crook

(signed) John G. Bourke

As Crook disbanded the expedition, he ordered Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry back to Camp Robinson. Not only were many of the animals broken down and almost out of forage in those final weeks, but the endless and severe cold, coupled with that intensely contested battle and their brutal march to the Belle Fourche, had all taken its toll on not just the soldiers but Crook’s officer corps as well.

Most dramatic was the deteriorating mental condition of Ranald Mackenzie himself.

In those weeks leading up to the battle and the days that followed, the colonel’s extreme sensitivity to the most minor slight was exhibited with increasing degrees of paranoia. To the soldiers who had served under him for some time, it seemed they were now serving under a commander who was becoming inconsistent at best, capricious at worst. But in the emotional wake following the Dull Knife Battle, Mackenzie’s fellow officers and his troopers simply believed their leader was suffering from nothing more than self-doubts about his actions during the fight.

Most of those closest to Mackenzie at that time, including Crook and Dodge, merely believed the colonel’s mental state was a result of Mackenzie’s so severely chastising himself for not bringing the battle to a more concrete conclusion, for not pursuing the Cheyenne into the mountains and capturing (if not killing) more of the enemy. Clearly, a supreme opportunity had been laid in his lap, so that over the days following the battle he criticized himself more and more for not fully seizing that opportunity.

There existed such an intense rivalry among the officers serving the frontier army—especially among those few colonels who had their gaze firmly set on the stars: general’s stars. In fact, one of those very human pieces to the puzzle that is the Mackenzie legend has it that one night in bivouac, while campaigning against the Kwahadi Comanche on the Staked Plain of the Texas-panhandle country, the colonel walked some distance from his campfire and stood staring up at the brilliant, crystal-clear night sky dusted with a resplendent display of heaven’s brightest lights twinkling overhead.

The legend goes on to tell us that Mackenzie’s adjutant came up in the dark to stand beside his commander, then said, “Sir, there’s someone between you and that star.”

“Whatever do you mean?” Mackenzie turned to ask.

“His name is Miles, sir.”

Indeed, from the days of that campaign on the southern plains when Miles and his Fifth Infantry were whittling away at the Indians every bit as effectively as was Mackenzie and his Fourth Cavalry—it had become clear to everyone in the army that the three rising stars were Custer, Miles, and Mackenzie. As in any endeavor when the reward is so rich, so great as a general’s star, the feelings of competition had to be extremely keen … the chance for messing up and making a mistake so precarious.

Perhaps his self-doubts about how he could have done better in the Dull Knife fight began to aggravate what had heretofore been nothing but an imbalanced mental state.

Yet here I stand more than a century later, with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight knowing what despair Mackenzie was to exhibit in the months and years left him, knowing that his would be a premature death exacerbated by the severe depression he was wallowing in, and from which he could not save himself.

While he was on the return trip to Camp Robinson, Mackenzie received orders to report to Washington, where he was to place himself under no less than the secretary of war. By that time back east the disputed returns from three southern states meant that the outcome of the presidential election was still in question—a situation that with every day was raising more and more passion among the parties on both sides. Many of the more extreme Democrats were threatening to raise their own private armies to force the seating of their candidate, Tilden.

Determined to preserve order, a worried President Grant began to call in troops from the western frontier in the event of a revolt or civil insurrection. He personally selected Ranald Mackenzie to take command of those troops who would be protecting Washington City itself—a remarkable testament of faith in the abilities of this commander who continued to suffer so many self-doubts.

Over the years many of you have written to say just how much you appreciate having me list a bibliography for you to use when you go in search of further sources on each particular campaign. So for those of you who want to do some more digging into Crook’s and Mackenzie’s Powder River Campaign and the Dull Knife Battle, you’ve got some winter reading to do:

Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry, by George F. Price.

“A Day With the ‘Fighting Cheyennes’: Stirring Scenes in the Old Northwest, Recalled for Motor Tourists,” Motor Travel Magazine (December 1930, January 1931, February 1931).

Bad Hand—A Biography of General Randal S. Mackenzie, by Charles M. Robinson III.

Bad Hand: The Military Career of Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, 1871–1889, by Lessing H. Noel, Jr. (Ph.D. dissertation), Department of History, University of New Mexico, 1962.

Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 1876–1877—The Military View, edited by Jerome A. Greene.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee—An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Brown.

By Cheyenne Campfires, by George Bird Grinnell.

Campaigning with Crook and Stories of Army Life, by Charles King.

“Campaigning with the 5th Cavalry: Private James B. Frew’s Diary and Letters from the Great Sioux War of 1876,” by Paul L. Hedren. Nebraska History 65 (Winter 1984).

Campaigning with King—Charles King, Chronicler of the Old Army, edited by Paul L. Hedren.

Centennial Campaign—The Sioux War of 1876, by John S. Gray.

Cheyenne (Wyoming) Daily Leader (Aug., Oct., Nov., Dec, 1876).

Cheyenne Memories, by John Stands in Timber and Margot Liberty.

Chronological List of Engagements Between the Regular Army of the United States and Various Tribes of Hostile Indians Which Occurred During the Years 1790 to 1898, Inclusive, by George W. Webb.

Crazy Horse and Custer—The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, by Stephen E. Ambrose.

Crazy Horse—The Strange Man of the Oglalas, by Mari Sandoz.

Crimsoned Prairie—The Wars Between the United States and the

Plains Indians During the Winning of the West, by S. L. A. Marshall, Brigadier General (Ret.).

“The Death of Lt. McKinney in the Dull Knife Fight,” by L. A. LaGarde (Address at the Order of the Indian Wars Assembly, March 6, 1915).

Death on the Prairie—The Thirty Years Struggle for the Western Plains, by Paul I. Wellman.

Death Song—The Last of the Indian Wars, by John Edward Weems.

The Dull Knife Battle—“Doomsday for the Northern Cheyennes,” by Fred H. Werner.

“The Dull Knife Symposium,” presented by the Fort Phil Kearny/Bozeman Trail Association, funded by the Wyoming Council for the Humanities—August 1989 (papers delivered by John D. McDermott, moderator; Margot P. Liberty; Jerome A. Greene; Ted Risingsun; Sherry L. Smith; and Douglas C. McChristian).

The Fighting Cheyennes, by George Bird Grinnell.

The Fighting Norths and Pawnee Scouts, by Robert Bruce.

“Fighting the Cheyennes: A Hot Little Battle on the Red Fork of the Powder River, Nov. 23, 1876, with Renegades,” by S. Millison, National Tribune, May 17, 1928.

Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents Among the Indian Campaigners, by Oliver Knight.

Fort Laramie—“Visions of a Grand Post” by Robert A. Murray.

Fort Robinson—Outpost on the Plains, by Roger T. Grange, Jr.

Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay—The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars, by Don Rickey, Jr.

Frank Grouard, Army Scout, edited by Margaret Brock Hanson.

Frontier Regulars—The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891, by Robert M. Utley.

The Frontier Trail, by Colonel Homer W. Wheeler (Ret.).

General George Crook—His Autobiography, edited by Martin F. Schmitt.

“General Philip Sheridan’s Legacy: The Sioux Pony Campaign of 1876,” by Richmond L. Clow. Nebraska History 57 (Winter 1976).

“Getting Into Uniform: Northern Cheyenne Scouts in the United States Army, 1876–81,” by Karen Easton (master’s thesis, University of Wyoming), 1985.

“Historical Address of Brig. Gen’l. W. C. Brown, U.S. Army Retired” (Read at Unveiling of Monument to Lieut. Frank D. Baldwin Near Olanda, Montana; June, 11, 1932), Winners of the West, August 30, 1932.

Indian-Fighting Army, by Fairfax Downey.

Indian Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady.

“The Indian Situation: Mackenzie’s Fight with the Cheyennes,” Army Navy Journal, December 19, 1876.

Indian Wars, by Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn.

The Indian Wars of the West, by Paul I. Wellman.

“The Journals of James S. McClellan, 1st Sgt., Company H., 3rd Cavalry,” edited by Thomas R. Buecker, Annals of Wyoming 57 (Spring 1985).

The Lance and the Shield—The Life and Times of Sitting Bull, by Robert M. Utley.

Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard, by Joe DeBarthe.

Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, by Oliver Knight.

“Mackenzie Against Dull Knife: Breaking the Northern Cheyennes in 1876,” by Lessing H. Nohl. In Probing the American West: Papers from the Santa Fe Conference, edited by K. Ross Toole, et al.

Mackenzie’s Last Fight with the Cheyennes: A Winter Campaign in Wyoming and Montana, by Captain John G. Bourke.

Man of the Plains—Recollections of Luther North, 1856–1882, edited by Donald F. Danker.

Military Posts in the Powder River Country of Wyoming, 1865–1894, by Robert A. Murray.

Military Posts of Wyoming, by Robert A. Murray.

The Most Promising Young Officer—A Life of Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, by Michael D. Pierce.

Motor Travel Magazine, articles by Lieutenant John G. Bourke, May 1930, July 1930, August 1930.

“Mounted Riflemen: The Real Role of the Cavalry in the Indian Wars,” by James S. Hutchins. In Probing the American West: Papers from the Sante Fe Conference, edited by K. Ross Toole, et al.

Nelson A. Miles—A Documentary Biography of His Military Career, 1861–1903, edited by Brian C. Pohanka.

Nelson A. Miles and The Twilight of the Frontier Army, by Robert Wooster.

On the Border with Crook, by John G. Bourke.

Paper Medicine Man—John Gregory Bourke and His American West, by Joseph C. Porter.

“Pawnee Trails and Trailers,” by Captain Luther H. North, Motor Travel Magazine, March 1929, April 1929, May 1929, June 1929, July 1929, August 1929, September 1929, October 1929, December 1929, January 1930, February 1930, March 1930, June 1930, July 1930, May 1931, June 1931, August 1931.

People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830–1879, by Peter J. Powell.

Personal Diary, by John G. Bourke, on microfilm, in possession of the Denver Public Library, Western History Section.

Personal Recollections of General Nelson A. Miles, by Nelson A. Miles.

The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone—A History of the Yellowstone Basin, by Mark H. Brown.

Sagebrush Soldier, by Sherry L. Smith.

The Shoshonis—Sentinels of the Rockies, by Virginia Cole Trenholm and Maurine Carley.

“Sitting Bull Strikes the Glendive Supply Trains,” Westerners Brand Book, (Chicago) Vol. 28, (June, 1971).

Soldiers West—Biographies from the Military Frontier, edited by Paul Andrew Hutton.

Son of the Morning Star, by Evan S. Connell.

Spotted Tail’s Folk—A History of the Brule Sioux, by George E. Hyde.

Sweet Medicine: The Continuing Role of the Sacred Arrows, the Sun Dance, and the Sacred Buffalo Hat in Northern Cheyenne History, by Peter J. Powell.

Two Great Scouts and Their Pawnee Battalion—The Experiences of Frank J. North and Luther H. North, by George Bird Grinnell.

The View from Officers’ Row—Army Perceptions of Western Indians, by Sherry L. Smith.

Warpath—The True Story of the Fighting Sioux (The Biography of White Bull), by Stanley Vestal.

Warpath and Council Fire—The Plains Indians’ Struggle for Survival in War and in Diplomacy, 1851–1891, by Stanley Vestal.

War-Path and Bivouac—The Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, by John F. Finerty.

William Jackson, Indian Scout, by James Willard Schultz.

Wolves for the Blue Soldiers—Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860–1890, by Thomas W. Dunlay.

Wooden Leg—A Warrior Who Fought Custer, interpreted by Thomas B. Marquis.

Yellowstone Command—Colonel Nelson A. Miles and the Great Sioux War, 1876–1877, by Jerome A. Greene.

The Dull Knife Battlefield exists today much as it did over a hundred years ago—with the exception of the simple stone marker erected near the village site, the single dirt road that hugs the foot of Mackenzie Mountain, and the fact that in the last century the leafy cottonwoods have taken hold along the stream bottom and down in the bogs once infested with ten-foot-high willow at the time soldiers and warriors clashed here.

Only a year after the fight Harmon Fraker came in to homestead the valley. The mountain that forms the north rim of the site is named Fraker Mountain for that first settler. Then in 1901 a rancher by the name of Charles N. Graves came to Wyoming out of Nebraska, gaining title to the valley five years later. Through the twenties and into the thirties, both he and his son, Frank O. Graves, witnessed numerous visits to the battle site by many of the old soldiers and aging Indians who had taken part in the tragic struggle. Next to take over operations was Norris Graves, and now his son and daughter-in-law, Ken and Cheri, run cattle and sheep in that ruggedly secluded corner of the Big Horns.

This is the famous “Hole in the Wall” country of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Climbing close to five thousand feet above sea level, you reach the valley by a long, twisting stretch of dirt road that winds through some stunning blood-red mountains dotted with one variety or another of emerald evergreen. As you draw closer, the walls begin to rise dramatically to a height of a thousand feet or more above you. And then, before you’re really prepared, you are suddenly thrust around a bend and down the slope into the valley itself, which measures some two miles long and from a quarter of a mile to about a mile wide in places.

The Morning Star camp was pitched for the most part along some flat ground on the south bank of a gentle, trickling stream running from west to east all year long because it was fed by a warm spring that prevented the stream from freezing (a fact heretofore neglected by the historians). Here, where the village stood, the valley is its widest. Downstream to the east, where Mackenzie’s cavalry burst through the gap, the valley is at its most narrow.

This is truly a dramatically spectacular symbol of some of God’s finest sculpturin’s!

And there was no finer way to see such sculpturin’s than on horseback, accompanied by the two most knowledgeable guides I could have wanted. Ken Graves saddled us up just before sunrise on this anniversary date as I trudged over to the corral and got to know his part-time ranch hand, Mike Freidel—a historian in his own right and athletic coach over at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. Mike’s been coming over to the place for better than fifteen years now, and—believe me—Ken and Mike know every square foot of that valley, from far out of the east gap where the cavalry came in, formed up, and began their charge, to the breastworks and the narrow escape canyon at the other end of the valley, and on up the mountainsides where the Cheyenne fled into the winter night toward Fraker Pass.

More important, for all those years the two of them have traveled the ground by horseback, in and out of that maze of rocky walls, trackless ravines, and well-used game trails, coming to know exactly where Mackenzie’s scouts led the soldiers into the valley, just where Cosgrove and Schuyler led their Shoshone single file up the steep and precarious mountain path to reach the top of what is today called Mackenzie Mountain. So if I was forced to choose in a disagreement between an academic historian and these rancher-horsemen on how an army was going to march into the east gap and on into the valley, you can bet your last twenty-dollar gold piece I’d lay everything I had on Ken Graves and Mike Freidel showing me just where Mackenzie’s horse planted its hooves back in 1876.

And those fellas did just that. They led me all the way east to that flat area the Sioux scouts called the race ground, where Mackenzie stopped his scouts and troopers and sent ahead his small band of spies while they listened to the Cheyenne drum echo down the canyon. From there we rode into the valley as the charging cavalry would have, picking our way across the narrow feeder creeks and down into the willow bogs, just as those cavalrymen would have done. Finally onto the flat where we hugged the long, low plateau at the base of Fraker Mountain until we stopped, getting our first magnificent view of the valley itself.

Just as Mackenzie would have seen his first view. The village is arrayed on our left in a crude horseshoe. Ahead of us, as the Shoshone open fire and the Pawnee hurl themselves against the fringe of lodges, the enemy is already bolting out of the upper end of the village, some of the warriors sprinting into a deep ravine—a large band of them hurrying across the open ground to seize some of their ponies before the herd can be captured.

These are the ponies Mackenzie does not want to lose.

“Would you like to ride it the way McKinney’s men charged that morning?” Ken asked.

Already my eyes were misting, and I had one hell of a lump in my throat. “You damn bet I would!” I croaked.

Without another word, those two horsemen suddenly spurred themselves away, leaving room between them for me as we rolled those three eager horses into a full, windblown gallop that whipped the cold breeze across my cheeks, the tears from my eyes. On and on over the gently rolling ground we raced, heading for the knoll where the Cheyenne riflemen were setting up shop. Then suddenly—

Ken and Mike reined up just ahead of me, shouting for me to do the same. If I hadn’t stopped when I had, your author would have been faced with choosing to jump his horse across an impossibly wide ravine, or slam into the far side, where I would have eaten a few yards of the Wyoming landscape for breakfast.

I came to see firsthand how Lieutenant John A. McKinney and the men of his M Troop failed to see the ravine until they were all but on top of it—at the moment the Cheyenne warriors rose out of the bowels of the earth like screaming demons and fired point-blank into those blue ranks.

Believe me, the more I travel these battlefields, I become all the more a believer that there is no substitute for being there. Going to the place myself, so that I can factually, accurately translate the countryside, the very feel of a piece of sacred ground like this for the millions of readers who will never get a chance to be there themselves.

Ken and Mike showed it all to me from horseback, around the Red Butte behind which the surgeons set up their field hospital and near which private Baird was buried by the willows in an unmarked, unknown grave. We rode halfway up the precipitous slope of the rocky outcrop Mackenzie used as his command post during the hottest of the fighting. With them I circled around toward the twin buttes, which stood near the final northernmost end of the soldier line. Then we climbed the horses up the front of the ridge where the sharpshooters sat in the snow, the very top of which was occupied by the women and others singing the strong-heart songs to their warriors.

What a thrill it was for me to dismount, moving carefully among the piles of rocks frozen hands placed one on top of another more than a century ago! To stand there where the Ohmeseheso stood, watching their greatness spiral into the cold blue sky overhead with the oily black curl of smoke rising from every burning lodge. Then finally to mount up and ride on to the far upper end of the valley, there to get a feel of the steepness of the slope as the survivors scurried hand and foot, scrambling ever higher toward Fraker Pass, hoping for safety from the soldiers.

By the time we returned to the corrals near the ranch house, the three of us had been out in the saddle for more than five and a half hours. Unlike those two saddle-hardened veterans, this Ol’ boy doesn’t get much of a chance to do that kind of real riding: almost straight up or straight down in places! So you better believe that the following day, my Ol’ bones were cussing me but good!

We had lunch with Cheri and the Graves daughters, then spent part of the afternoon sharing more stories of that battle, tales of Custer and the Indian wars in general, and with me just wanting to get a feel for what winter was like in that beautiful, silent valley. For, you see, the only problem with our ride this anniversary day was that I looked out of the Graves’s ranch-house window, but I didn’t see any snow.

That afternoon on the way back to Buffalo, Wyoming for the night, the local radio weatherman said there was a major winter storm expected late tomorrow. Ain’t that the luck? But it’s something I’ve come to expect in this country. Here I came down on the battle’s anniversary: sunny, almost shirtsleeve weather … and tomorrow there’s going to be at least a fifty-degree drop in the temperature, and a major amount of snow blowing in! Just what the old frontiersmen came to know about this country—you better be prepared for anything, because you’re bound to get it in the way of fickle weather.

In the months to follow, Ken and Cheri Graves, as well as Mike Freidel, kindly answered my numerous questions, all three of them putting up with me until I could finally send them both big “overnight” packages filled with the appropriate chapters on the battle—asking for their corrections and suggestions. I can’t thank them enough for allowing me to impose upon them at a particularly busy time of the year as I finish this afterword—March is, after all, recruiting season for Mike, and it’s when the lambs and calves are dropping for Ken and Cheri.

I especially want to express my gratitude to Mike Freidel for his repeated work with me on the battlefield map. From those first days of the four of us going over the maps done for previous works on the Dull Knife fight—when Ken, Cheri, and Mike pointed out errors and discrepancies—to coming up with our own crude pencil sketches, and finally to working over a dining-room-table-sized USGS topographic map … all that labor just so we could give the reader as much a feeling of being right there as we could. Ken and Cheri and Mike all had a big hand in helping me make this battle come to life for you.

Long will I be in their debt.

Being on private land, where this fourth generation of a ranching family works at making a living the same way as those who came here in the years immediately following the battle, I get an immense amount of pride just from knowing folks like these. Hardworking, straight-talking, God-fearing, and life-loving people who possess what all too few today don’t—a genuine love for the land, and a love for what that land has always meant to those who passed this way to share in God’s bounty.

So again to Ken, Cheri, and Mike, I say thanks for welcoming me into your hearts and your homes, and for teaching me all that I needed to know so I could write the book that would tell not only an accurate story, but the authentic story of what happened here among these tall red mountains that terribly cold day in hell, 25 November, 1876.

TERRY C. JOHNSTON

Dull Knife Battlefield

Red Fork Ranch, Wyoming

25 November 1994

* Long Winter Gone, Vol. 1, Son of the Plains Trilogy.

* Blood Song, Vol. 8, The Plainsmen Series.

* Reap the Whirlwind, Vol. 9, The Plainsmen Series.