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

As had been the fate of the Sioux ponies, the captured Cheyenne ponies were later divided among the scouts, as I’ve told you, with the remainder being sold at auction. But the loss to the Cheyenne people cannot solely be measured in terms of ponies captured and lodges destroyed. The toll in human life was, as always, hardest to bear. Their casualties were never fully known until the tribe came in to surrender at Red Cloud Agency over the next year, when they ultimately submitted a list of forty warriors killed in the Dull Knife fight, but refused to speak of how many were wounded. Even sadder still, Cheyenne etiquette did not allow them to utter a word of the children and old people who froze to death escaping winter’s grip on the Big Horns. Only from what knowledgeable old soldiers and frontiersmen saw of the many gashed arms and legs of those mourning and grieving widows and orphan girls could they tell that the Cheyenne had paid a terrible price in Mackenzie’s victory. Especially in the cruel, hand-to-hand fighting at the deep ravine where the members of the tribe said at least twenty Cheyenne fell, the majority of the warrior dead.

What seems most significant to me about this campaign is that rather than merely pitting soldier against Indian—even more than pitting those longtime white allies like Shoshone and Crow and Pawnee against the Sioux and Cheyenne—this battle hurled Sioux and Cheyenne scouts from the Red Cloud Agency against the Cheyenne of Morning Star and Little Wolf. This Powder River Expedition therefore becomes as much an Indian tragedy as it is an Indian-wars tragedy.

Why would some men be induced to scout against their own people?

First of all, we might consider that these were men totally steeped in a warrior tradition. They were trained for battle, taught to regard ponies and rifles as the only legitimate displays of one’s manhood. When offered the chance to go riding off to war, even against the members of one’s own band, such a venture would likely seem much more preferable to endless days of boredom and confinement on the reservation.

Certainly there were others, especially among the Sioux scouts, who used the army’s need for their services as a wedge or lever to extract what they in turn wanted from the white man—in the way of pay, ponies, weapons, and so on.

But in the end, we must remember that while the white man saw the Sioux as Sioux, and the Cheyenne as Cheyenne, there were not only separate bands among each tribe, but separate kin-based clans and extended-family groupings as well. Loyalties went first to those family clans rather than some loose confederation of the Ohmeseheso, or the Oglalla, or the Hunkpapa. In addition, the record shows that some of the army scouts believed they were doing what they considered to be right by their people in going to help the soldiers drive their nomadic cousins back to their reservations. Such a life would be better for them in the end, they rationalized, better than being chased and harried, shot and impoverished, after all.

So the presence of those Sioux and Cheyenne scouts was vital not only to demoralize the Morning Star warriors, but the scouts had already played an important role in knowing how and where to locate the village. They were the ones who stayed behind among the rocks while the rest scampered down the backtrail to inform Mackenzie to hurry up. They were the ones who made possible the long-night march through the rugged mountain terrain. And they were the ones who played a prominent role in the day’s fighting: showing themselves to the Morning Star Cheyenne, thereby exacting a demoralizing effect hour after hour as the destruction of the village began.

For generations afterward there was bad blood between many of the Sioux and Cheyenne groups. Like Wooden Leg, many of the Cheyenne were highly critical of those who would come with the soldiers “to kill their friends.” For years many of the tribe did not allow stories to be told by those who had served as scouts for Crook and Mackenzie. Wooden Leg had himself lost a brother in the battle, and for years he often wondered if one of the Cheyenne scouts who had come with the ve-ho-e had killed him.

Forgiveness would come hard. Very, very hard.

Without a doubt, that winter campaign signaled the end of the great Sioux-Cheyenne coalition that had crushed Custer, twice held Crook at bay, and given Phil Sheridan one hell of an ulcer. No more would the warrior bands so readily trust one another.

The first of the Cheyenne limped into the Red Cloud Agency by January 1877. Dull Knife himself would surrender in April of that year, saying to Mackenzie, “You are the one I was afraid of when you came here [to Camp Robinson] last summer.”