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

So I am in Sherry Smith’s debt, for she did in her Sagebrush Soldier what more historians should be doing for the reading public, what I attempt to do as I knit together many different accounts of every campaign, every battle, in hopes that through those different points of view we will more closely arrive at what really took place. Unlike what most of the academic historians do in their work—striving to support and defend one point of view—Smith herself says:

Rather than present participants’ accounts separately, this approach aims for greater integration of perspectives. It rests on the belief that such a method lends itself to a closer approximation of the truth.

I’m grateful too for the brief, terse diary left us by Sergeant James McClellan, from whose words I have gleaned some rare nuggets of daily life for the cavalry trooper serving in Crook’s cavalry. He served out his five-year enlistment, receiving his discharge in June of 1877—the back of his certificate noting that he was credited with killing the warrior known as Bull Head.

Over half a century later Motor Travel magazine (published by the American Automobile Club) began running a two-year series of articles on the Powder River Campaign of 1876. Survivors of the battle were contacted to participate, and McClellan himself wrote seven of the articles. Perhaps most interesting to me was that during those two years of renewed interest in the campaign, an era when the motion picture was flickering into its golden age, McClellan publicly stated the time had come to produce a film of the attack on the village. He believed it should be done sooner than later as there were still a few survivors left who could serve as consultants “about the essential details.”

Needless to say, nothing ever came of his personal campaign, and he died soon thereafter in 1936. An interesting footnote to those of you who have been reading the Plainsmen Series from its beginning six years ago is that McClellan served in H Troop, Third Cavalry, under Captain Henry W. Wessels, son of the Henry W. Wessels who marched north to Fort Phil Kearny to relieve Colonel Henry B. Carrington following the disastrous Fetterman Massacre almost a decade before the army defeated the Cheyenne in the valley of the Red Fork.

It comes as no surprise to me, therefore, that history is indeed often a study of converging, diverging, then reconverging currents.

Another interesting footnote to our story is that Red Shirt—one of the seven Lakota scouts who located the Cheyenne village, and one of the two who remained behind to watch for signs of discovery—later joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s wild west show when it sailed across the ocean to England, performing before her Majesty, Queen Victoria.

Because of the cold gloom of that night, because of the cold fog settling in the valley, Red Shirt and the other scouts never got a count of lodges to report so that Mackenzie would know just exactly what he was facing at the moment of attack. Indeed, there has persisted a minor dispute as to the number of lodges in the village. A few accounts state 175 lodges. Lieutenant John Bourke himself states there were 205 lodges, while later in his own account he states there were 200. Another contemporary account, this time by Lieutenant Homer Wheeler, states there were 205 lodges. In Son of the Morning Star Evan Connell’s arduous research states there were “more than two hundred lodges.” But in the end I have chosen to go with the number given by Luther North in his record, since Mackenzie himself sent the North brothers to get him an official count: 173.

So now we have the village in place, and they know the soldiers are coming (despite the erroneous statement Cyrus Townsend Brady makes in Indian Fights and Fighters, when he writes: “The sleeping Indians in the camp had not the slightest suspicion that the enemy was within a hundred miles[!]”).

Why didn’t the Cheyenne move? Or if they had determined they were going to fight, why not prepare to withstand the assault, as some of the chiefs suggested before they were bullied and shouted down by Last Bull and his Kit Fox Society?

Likely those will remain unanswered questions until the end of time.

It is almost certain that if Last Bull and the other war chief’s had worked together to prepare for the attack, the outcome might well have been dramatically different. Why did they choose not to set up an ambush somewhere near the narrow east gap where the weary, cold soldiers were most vulnerable on their played-out horses that terribly cold night? Another question for which I have no answer.