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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of these would surely die this night.

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

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

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

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

* Pike’s Peak.

† Southern Cheyenne Indian Agency, Darlington, Indian Territory.

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?”