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

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.