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

Little Wolf laid a hand on the shoulder of Morning Star’s son. “Pay heed—for you are like a nephew to me, Bull Hump. Our fight is far from over—but we have many dead and many who will die from their wounds if we do not care for them now. It is time we disappear and choose another place and time to fight this enemy.”

Try as the soldiers did to drive the Cheyenne warriors back into the recesses of the snowy, rocky heights surrounding the valley that morning, the enemy doggedly remained in range of the village.

Mackenzie could have inflicted more casualties among the warriors by pushing his advantage, ordering his men into the hills after the troublesome snipers. Which was sure to mean many, many more soldiers brought back to lie beneath blankets upon the cold ground there at the hospital knoll.

Instead the colonel chose to consolidate his grip on the village and inflict his punishment on the Cheyenne in a more dramatic and possibly far-reaching way. At the same time, he had to assure that his men did not waste their precious ammunition as the day wore on and the battle became a long-range duel. Using a dozen orderlies along with his aides Dorst and Lawton, as well as William P. Clark and even John G. Bourke, as couriers who raced back and forth alone across that dangerous half mile of no-man’s-land where the Cheyenne marksmen did their best to kill rider or horse, Mackenzie sent strict orders to his units deployed in every corner of the valley that they were to conserve their resources at all costs.

For the moment it appeared the Cheyenne were doing no different. All too readily did the warriors realize just how few cartridges they had snatched up to carry away from their lodges at the moment of attack. So what few shots they did aim at the soldiers were meant to garner the maximum demoralizing effect on the colonel’s men.

At the same time, to Mackenzie’s growing aggravation, not only had the Cheyenne apparently figured out the range of the Springfield carbines, but they appeared to be using their ammunition more wisely than his soldiers. Too, many of the warriors constantly slipped from crevice to rock, from rock to bush—moving into effective range, forcing the soldiers to keep their heads down, at times even luring some into giving chase up the sides of the hills and along the ridges, thereby bringing the white man into range of their guns.

Yet for the most part, as exasperating as the day was for Mackenzie, his soldiers reaped one small victory after another.

With his F Troop, Captain Wirt Davis laid plans to turn the tables on perhaps as many as a dozen warriors who had doggedly remained behind some rocks fronting a bluff, where the soldiers simply could not dislodge the enemy. Davis spread the word, then ordered his men to retreat on the double, turning and sprinting to the rear of a sudden. Sure enough, the eager warriors followed headlong, howling in victory, sure they were about to cut apart the rear of the soldier retreat when Davis’s men suddenly leaped into a shallow ravine, turned, and fired a deadly volley into the onrushing Cheyenne.

Those warriors not killed or critically wounded as the gun smoke cleared quickly retreated in panic and dismay.

Another group of Cheyenne took shelter in a shallow cave among the rocks on the north side of the valley. From there they put up a valiant fight until all were killed by Wessels’s company, who poured volley after volley into the dark recesses of the hillside.

At the rocks where Seamus had joined Grouard, Frank North, and a contingent of soldiers that morning, the warrior marksmen on the knoll were becoming all the more troublesome in forcing the surrounding white men to warily remain behind cover while from time to time more horsemen appeared on the open plain, each of them singing their war songs and shouting to the high ground, crying out to the Shoshone and Pawnee, to the Lakota and their brother Cheyenne—demanding the enemy to come out and do battle honorably; man to man.

And behind them all, on the distant ridge where they had erected their breastworks, the women keened and the old men sang their strong-heart songs—a strange, eerie, discordant background to the occasional burst of rifle fire that echoed off the cold red heights. From those rocks the Cheyenne could not escape without endangering their women and children for the time being, nor could they be dislodged without inflicting serious casualties on Mackenzie’s troops.

During the long-range sniping, a cavalryman disregarded orders to keep down and out of sight until the snipers could be ferreted out. Instead, he curiously raised his head and shoulders above the rock where he had taken cover and immediately earned a bullet through the jaw for his foolhardiness. Unconscious, he pitched forward against the side of the slope, head twisted in such a way that he drowned in his own blood as others watched helplessly.