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

And then there was Sergeant Thomas M. Forsyth who, although wounded, stayed with the body of his company commander, the dying John A. McKinney. More than any other officer, noncoms such as he were the “bone and the sinew” of the frontier army.

Forsyth’s bravery in the face of overwhelming odds and almost sure defeat did not go unnoticed. Five days after the battle Lieutenant Harrison Otis, now in command of M Troop, went to Mackenzie to personally recommend Forsyth (along with Sergeant Frank Murray and Corporal William J. Linn) for honorable mention. Private Thomas Ryan, who of his own volition stood at Forsyth’s side over McKinney’s bullet-riddled body, was eventually awarded a Certificate of Merit, an honor reserved for privates who had distinguished themselves in combat.

While Mackenzie did approve Forsyth’s promotion to regimental sergeant major the following summer, it was not until the end of the great Indian wars that the old, white-headed sergeant finally received what he had been long deserving.

Nearing the end of his career, Forsyth wrote to Captain J. H. Dorst, former adjutant to the deceased Mackenzie, discussing the propriety of his applying for a Certificate of Merit himself at that late date after going a decade and a half without any sort of recognition. Congress had just recently passed a law that would allow noncommissioned officers to receive the award previously reserved for privates. Ever a modest, but highly sentimental, man, the sergeant wrote Dorst:

I would like to leave my children something besides my name when I answer the last roll-call and anything that could bear testimony to bravery and gallantry on the part of their father in action, would be the best and noblest remembrance, that a soldier’s children could have.

It should go without saying that Dorst was extremely moved. So moved that the captain went one step further: he began the laborious process of approving the old sergeant for the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Only months before that day when Forsyth stood ramrod straight on the parade at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Sitting Bull had been killed by his own police. Within two weeks of that murder Big Foot’s Miniconjou had been slaughtered by the remnants of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee. Finally, late in 1891, the Medal of Honor was approved for his heroic, selfless action that horribly cold day in the valley of the Red Fork Canyon some fifteen years before.

Sergeant Thomas H. Forsyth stood in the last rays of sunset before the assembled troops and officers, there among his wife Lizzie and what they called their “tribe” of five children, as this nation’s highest award for bravery was placed around his neck.

He had offered his life to protect a fellow soldier, and now in the final days of his long army career, Thomas H. Forsyth had finally given his children an intangible inheritance no soldier’s pension could ever match.

There are other small glimpses of bravery that history has penciled in the margins from this tragic campaign. The lone Indian scout wounded in the fight, that Shoshone named Anzi, sought to ride like a warrior as long as he could, although suffering greatly (having been shot through the abdomen). He remained in the post hospital at Reno Cantonment for nearly three weeks, then with two companions rode back home to Chief Washakie’s Wind River Reservation—more than two hundred miles away. John Bourke saw Anzi the following year at the time of the Nez Perce war.

“[Anzi] was still living,” Bourke wrote, “although by no means, so his friends told me, the man he had been before being so terribly wounded.”

A year or so after that, other Shoshone reported that Anzi was shot on a horse-stealing raid.

Captain John M. Hamilton led his troops in to rescue the remnants of McKinney’s butchered men. An extremely courageous soldier, he himself would not fall in battle until July 1, 1898, when as the lieutenant colonel of the First Cavalry, a bullet found him as he was leading his men in a charge up the side of San Juan Hill.

In our story we have mentioned that Sergeant James H. McClellan was credited with having killed the warrior named Bull Head in close-quarters combat in that struggle Wessels’s company had of it near the head of the deep ravine where McKinney’s men were ambushed. In our story of the battle, we also recount the tale of McClellan taking from the body a cartridge belt bearing a buckle engraved with the name Little Wolf. Because Bull Head for some reason had grabbed up Little Wolf’s pistol and cartridge belt at the moment of attack, it was long believed by the soldiers that they had indeed killed the Sweet Medicine Chief of the Cheyenne. Just another piece of circumstantial evidence that history allows us to chuckle over after the fact.