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

As you have learned in our story, there were many items pulled from the lodges that caused a great deal of anger among Mackenzie’s troops, just as there had been when souvenirs from the Custer battle dead were found among the lodges of American Horse’s Miniconjou after the day-long fight at Slim Buttes, a tale we told you in Volume Ten, Trumpet on the Land. But perhaps no better than here in the Cheyenne village was the severity of the Custer disaster brought home as both the number and variety of personal items began to mount on the blankets where the soldiers piled those ghostly relics.

Clearly one of the most interesting of these is the roster book, the sort taken into the field, this one carried by First Sergeant Alexander Brown, G Troop, Seventh Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Donald Mcintosh, into the valley of the Little Bighorn. The roster was started on 19 April 1876 at which time the troop was leaving Louisiana, ordered back to Fort Abraham Lincoln for the summer campaign.

Its next-to-last entry is quite prophetic:

McEgan lost his carbine on the march while on duty with pack train, June 24, 1876.

From summer into fall, across the next five months, the pages in that roster book were filled with pictures by High Bear, its new owner, a warrior who was himself killed in the Dull Knife battle. One of the pages shows High Bear lancing a soldier clearly wearing the chevrons of a sergeant major. In the months and years to come, the officers who examined the warrior’s crude drawing, and its chronological placement among his career of those coups depicted within the book, later came to believe High Bear was the one who killed Sergeant Major Walter Kennedy, the man who attempted to ride for help once Major Joel H. Elliott’s company was completely surrounded during the Seventh Cavalry’s attack on Black Kettle’s camp along the Washita in 1868.*

I am in hopes of receiving permission to reproduce in this novel a page from Lieutenant Donald Mcintosh’s memoranda book so that the reader can see where the lieutenant has listed the “best shots” in his company, starting with Sergeant Brown himself. Unlike the Brown roster book, which is in private custody, Mcintosh’s was for a long time displayed at the little Bighorn Battlefield Visitor Center, complete with its single bullet hole perforating the entire book. Then some two years ago it was stolen, its protective case ripped from the wall. Only recently has the thief admitted that he burned this priceless, dramatic relic. What a senseless tragedy! At times I would like to believe the thief merely told federal prosecutors that it was destroyed, and that it has really been sold to some wealthy collector who, like far too many others, hasn’t the slightest desire to share his or her precious relics with the rest of us.

Unlike the stingy, niggardly kind, Lieutenant John Bourke gave to posterity those grisly trophies he collected in the Cheyenne village. Pictured in his book on Mackenzie’s last fight are the two relics not meant for the faint of heart. First, there is a beaded necklace from which is suspended at least eight complete human fingers; between their array are sections of other human fingers, as well as teeth and iron arrow points. The second necklace appears to be made of trade wool sewn to a long strip of leather, much in the fashion of a soldier’s cartridge belt, constructed in such a way as to be worn around the neck with a narrow thong. But instead of the leather loops to hold the bullets, there are beaded loops holding twenty short fingers, from the fingertips down to the first joint.

These, the amateur ethnologist Bourke reported, in addition to a bag made from a human scrotum, were once the property of High Wolf, whom the lieutenant mistakenly called “the chief medicine man” of the Cheyenne. In 1877 he presented these war trophies to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., as specimens of “aboriginal religious art.”

While such relics might appear ghoulish and offend white sensibilities, Sherry Smith explains:

To be sure, the Northern Cheyenne did not see matters the same way. The saddles and canteens branded with Seventh Cavalry insignia, the scalps, the necklace of fingers—all represented Cheyenne victories over constant enemies who had, on other occasions, done the same to them.

It is with no small regret that we now bid Lieutenant John Bourke farewell for some time to come in this continuing narrative. The defeat of Morning Star’s Cheyenne marks the end of the fighting stage of his military career. But we will see him again in the years and stories yet to come: not as a warrior, but as an observer of the Northern Cheyenne flight from Indian Territory in 1878; again during the Ute War in Colorado, 1879; and finally among the Apache campaigns of the 1880s.

But—sadly—when he rode away from the Red Fork Valley, he had fought his last fight against Indians.