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

In late October at the same time Miles was chasing Sitting Bull to the banks of the Yellowstone, and Crook sent Mackenzie to capture the Red Cloud and Red Leaf camps, Colonel Samuel L. Sturgis and his wounded Seventh Cavalry had marched away from Fort Lincoln to impose Phil Sheridan’s sanctions at the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River agencies. Sturgis and his troopers seized more than two thousand ponies and assorted weapons.

Few today know little of those military seizures on the reservations, wherein we see the army commanders once again persisting in their pattern of marching against those they can punish in a misguided belief that those agency bands were in fact supplying the nomadic hostiles with ponies, weapons, and warriors. In his autumn offensive, Sheridan used more than five thousand troops, those either directly involved or those who stood in reserve at the frontier posts should they be needed … a full fifth of the U.S. Army at that time!

Sheridan was proud to boast that, “For the first time, all the agencies ceased to be points of supply and re-enforcement for the hostile Indians; and henceforth the troops will have only to contend with the Indians hereditarily and persistently hostile.”

The pony and weapon seizures went on into the following year as one small warrior band after another limped in to their agencies to surrender, even after both Crook and Terry were reassigned.

But perhaps the real shame is that of all those ponies seized, the animals drew an average of only six dollars each in auction. Worse still was the fact that of the auction’s receipts, not a dollar was ever used to purchase cattle for the agencies, as had been promised. In military archives those thousands of dollars have never been accounted for.

It was surprising to me to learn that Mackenzie’s 1876 journey to that section of the Big Horn Mountains was not the first. Two years earlier in 1874 Captain Anson Mills of the Third Cavalry marched his Big Horn Expedition almost due north from Rawlins Station on the Union Pacific line, instead of starting out from Fort Fetterman to the southeast. In the fall of that year they had gone as far north as practicable before turning east, eventually reaching the rim of what is today called Fraker Mountain, which overlooks the valley where the Dull Knife Battle would take place. Because there was no way down for their horses and pack mules, Mills’s men were compelled to backtrack several miles until they could find a better way into the valley of the Red Fork. The expedition eventually did pass directly over the site in making their way downstream, exiting the canyon to the east through the same gap Mackenzie’s troops would use in approaching the Cheyenne village.

To better impress upon the reader just how steep and forbidding is the terrain at the upper end of the valley where Morning Star’s people took refuge, built breastworks, and eventually struggled in their nighttime winter climb out of the valley through what is today called Fraker Pass, let me quote that observer who accompanied Captain Mills in 1874:

The situation on the western end of the battlefield area, as I remember it from 1874, … is that of mountains, pure and simple—not “Bad Lands,” as understood by frontiersmen.

I am particularly indebted to the labors of historian Sherry L. Smith in recounting the journal of her relative, William Earl Smith—a private who served as one of Mackenzie’s orderlies during this critical campaign. Through him we have one of those rare firsthand glimpses into not only the day-to-day weather and human interest of the campaign trail, but a very microscopic look at the relations between soldier and officer in the frontier army.

She states:

The relationships among enlisted men, noncommissioned officers, and commissioned officers—[were] relationships characterized at times by affection, at others by brutality. The army caste system is vividly revealed in Smith’s description of the expedition’s daily life. He is acutely aware of a system that allows officers to abuse soldiers verbally and physically with few restraints … Smith’s account (as well as those of his military superiors) undermines the notion of a purposeful, stately, tightly organized campaign.

I am most grateful that William Earl Smith left us another of those terribly personal records we chance upon from time to time, for history is not a dull recitation of historical facts. Instead, history is the record of human events. Not merely the when and where of conflict, but more so the how and why of those clashes. If for no other reason, I want my novels to stand apart from all others for bringing the breath of life and the pain of a human soul to this crucial period in American history. How unfortunate that all too few of us were ever taught a biographical history.