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

Many believed there would be peace now as the Lakota wandered north by west, back toward the Elk River while the air turned cold and the first snows lanced out of the sky. Winter was coming, and they must hunt the buffalo once more to make meat in preparation for the time of great cold. The herds were gathering north of the Elk River.

But so were the soldiers, scouts had reported.

Sitting Bull vowed his people would stay out of the way of the soldiers if they could. But in this same camp Gall still mourned the loss of his wives and children at the fight along the Greasy Grass. In a flux of rage the fierce war chief said the soldiers would drive the buffalo away and make it a very hard winter for their people. He wanted to lead the warriors down on the soldiers soon and drive them off the Elk River for good.

Still, Sitting Bull said they would wait. And see how the hunting went. So far they had not had much success. Which made for a restless anger growing among the people.

That cold morning a day after they had crossed to the north side of the Elk River, Johnny was one of the few in camp awake to hear the distant call shouted by the scouts returning from the hills.

“Soldiers!”

Bruguier swept up his big blanket coat and mittens, pulling that big floppy hat down on his head, and jabbed his way out of White Bull’s lodge into the cold autumn air.

“Soldier wagons!” came the cry as the scouts swept into camp.

Already men were bursting from their lodges, weapons in hand, singing out to one another in excitement and blood oaths.

“Soldier wagons in the valley beyond the eastern hills! Many mules! Food, blankets, and guns!”

Then Gall was among them, raising his soldier carbine high overhead, shrieking that now was the time to finish what the white man had started.

“Come! Let us make war again!” he cried.

They answered him with hundreds of throats.

“Come!” Gall bellowed for all to hear. “Let us finish what we started on the Greasy Grass!”

* Yellowstone River, Montana Territory.

† On the Cheyenne River, Dakota Territory.

* The Moreau River, Dakota Territory.

Chapter 3

11 October 1876

“We’re ready to roll, Captain,” said the lieutenant, who sported a thick and jaunty mustache as he saluted his superior officer.

They both sat on horseback at the head of a jagged column of ninety-four wagons that fall morning as the horizon to the east was only then beginning to pale. Light enough to make out the rutted road to Tongue River.

“Very good, Lieutenant,” Charles W. Miner replied to the battalion adjutant. “Let’s be off.”

First Lieutenant Oskaloosa M. Smith reined about and raised an arm in the air, shouting out his order. “For-rad … harch!”

In a pair of long columns of twos and stretched down either side of the wagon train, four companies of foot soldiers set off under the bellowed echoes of their noncoms. Civilian teamsters slapped long lengths of well-soaped leather down onto the backs of those six-mule teams harnessed to these wagons filled to the gunnels with freight bound away for the army’s cantonment at the mouth of the Tongue River. It was there Colonel Nelson A. Miles’s Fifth Infantry had been throwing up log huts against the coming of what boded to be a very severe and hoary high plains winter.

Ever since August, in fact … when General Alfred H. Terry had turned Miles back to the Yellowstone with his regiment—there to build a winter cantonment under the orders specified by Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan. There to prevent the hostiles of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse from crossing the Yellowstone, from there having a straight shot of it into Canada. Very plainly the colonel chomped at the bit to be the one who would turn back the Sioux, perhaps even to capture the very chiefs who had mauled and butchered Custer’s regiment.

“Here we will be a stone rolled squarely into the hostiles’ garden,” Miles was fond of saying as summer waned and slid headlong into autumn.

The days gradually shortened as Terry and Crook lumbered about in search of the Sioux. And then the soldier chief called the Red Beard found a band of them camped beside the Slim Buttes. Yet in the end, Crook’s men—infantry and cavalry alike—had barely survived getting the hell out of Sioux country, down to eating their horses.

Somewhere out there Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse still wandered about with their war camps filled with souvenirs from the fight along the Little Bighorn.

“It won’t be Crook who gets a crack at them now,” Miles had told his officers. “Terry’s scampered back to Lincoln for the winter. And Crook’s gone lame with that horsemeat march. He’s headed back to Laramie with his tail stuck between his legs.”