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

Not that it was any colder than it had been a moment ago. The young brakeman from Illinois shook with the cold fire he saw blazing in the colonel’s eyes as Mackenzie rallied his officers.

As icy as the weather had been for the past week, the surgeons were nonetheless already predicting that this night would see temperatures dropping further still. How they would know, Smith could not dare to figure out.

After all, this afternoon beneath a bright winter sun the mercury in the surgeons’ thermometers had risen to a high of fourteen below—which meant it didn’t have all that much to fall before it froze into a solid silver bead at the bottom of the bulbs … at thirty-nine below zero.

By the time Donegan returned to the village with Bill Rowland, the destruction of the Northern Cheyenne was well under way.

“Mackenzie sent North’s Pawnee into the camp to get things started,” John Bourke explained as he walked up while Seamus dismounted, tying his horse off beneath the rocks of the south ridge. “Major North told me that within minutes of starting their work, four of his battalion’s horses had been hit by enemy fire and killed.”

Nodding, Seamus said, “They’re in the hills around us—and it will take too damned many good lives to blast them out.” Bitterly, he gazed around at the cavalry-horse carcasses scattered here and there upon the trampled snow.

Bourke went on to explain that by keeping out of sight of those Cheyenne snipers while the sun was still hung in the sky, the Pawnee were able to go about their grisly work nonetheless, concealed behind the lodges they were plundering and burning.

Then the lieutenant said, “You all right, Irishman?”

He sighed. “Yes. Just that … the fighting don’t ever get any easier, Johnny.”

For some time Bourke didn’t say anything; then he explained, “Just a while back Mackenzie told me that he most regrets losing McKinney.”

“All of us can regret losing a good fighting man.”

“Mackenzie seems especially … well, morose about it,” Bourke continued. “In his private despair he said that he alone had recognized young McKinney’s potential four years ago when the lieutenant had been what the general called a hard-drinking and irresponsible shavetail.”

“He came out of the Academy and into Mackenzie’s Fourth to get the green worn off, that it?”

With a nod Bourke said, “Sadly, the general told me he watched over McKinney and pushed him along until he could call McKinney one of the most gallant officers and honorable men that he’s ever known.”

“You and me both have seen a lot of good men fall in this struggle, Johnny,” Seamus said, reflecting on all the faces, young and old, that passed through his mind.

“But some deaths a man takes harder than others,” Bourke replied. “I don’t know if Mackenzie’s going to hold up, Seamus. As the afternoon has waned, so have the general’s spirits. I feel his despair … his gloom is deepening.”

Nearby, the noisy, dirty work of complete and utter destruction continued. What the Pawnee had begun, soldiers now relished in completing. Captain Gerald Russell’s K Troop, Third U.S. Cavalry, along with Captain Wirt Davis’s F Troop of the Fourth, had been dispatched to get on with this matter before night descended upon the valley.

With camp axes and tomahawks found among the lodges, Russell’s and Davis’s soldiers had begun by cutting each canvas or buffalo-hide lodge cover from its graceful spiral of poles. Dozens of cold and brittle blades rang out as the thin poles were cut down, hacked into pieces, then fed to the roaring bonfires, where many of the detail warmed themselves momentarily before they plunged back into this ruinous business of total war.

Everything that could not be consumed to ash was broken: metal bits were smashed beneath rocks; holes were knocked in the bottoms of kettles, punched through canteens and pans and other utensils; all manner of ironware—including spades, picks, shovels, hammers, scissors, and all manner of knives—all of it broken before they were tossed into the fires.

Everything else was fed to the flames that grew hotter and higher as the sun slipped toward the west and the shadows lengthened like the talons of the long winter night itself.

In several unusually big lodges the soldiers found the inner walls ringed with countless saddles and woven bridles, along with war regalia hung from the liner ropes in these warrior-society gathering places.

From every family dwelling the Pawnee and troopers pulled clothing and craftwork. Into the flames went skin paunches, bladders, and rawhide parfleches stuffed with fat and marrow. Flames roared audibly over the distant, eerie keening of the women courageously gathered at the breastworks. Nowhere in the valley could a man escape that audible crackle produced by the many immense fires, a roaring, gushing sound akin to some monstrous appetite demanding more and more sustenance.