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

So it was that years later Cyrus Townsend Brady made a glaring mistake in his story of the battle in Indian Fights and Fighters when he wrote: “Dull Knife, their leader, was found in the village with half a dozen bullets in him. He had fought gallantly in the open until he died.”

After they were beaten by the soldiers, after suffering the loss of everything they owned, but especially after being rebuffed by no less than Crazy Horse himself, some of the Ohmeseheso decided to go into the reservation. Other small bands began to send in runners to the agency, saying they would come in when they were able to—impoverished of weapons and horses, lodges, and clothing—so poor were they. And many of those runners mentioned the inhospitable reception they got from the Crazy Horse people, sending word to the reservation agents that they would be willing to go out with the army and hunt down the Oglalla leader.

In fact, more than one of the Northern Cheyenne war chiefs specifically stated as a condition of his surrender that he be “allowed to send his warriors with the white soldiers to fight Crazy Horse.”

To this day, this is a continuing controversy between the former allies once considered so close as to be “cousins.” While the Crazy Horse faction among the Oglalla Lakota deny the war chief’s rejection of the Morning Star people at worst, and play it down as inconsequential at best—the Northern Cheyenne still harbor a resentment against the man, a resentment against the Lakota band who refused them help in that awful winter.

Once Crazy Horse turned his back on the Ohmeseheso, there was no other hope for them. No other choice for many a man but to take his family in to be fed at the agency, and there to offer his services to the army desperately seeking to capture the elusive Oglalla war chief.

Unlike their former allies, the Northern Arapaho were able to establish a good relationship with their longtime enemies—the Shoshone. Beginning from that council Crook held with his allies at Reno Cantonment in the days prior to the Dull Knife Battle, the Arapaho fostered good relations with the Shoshone, who eventually invited the Arapaho to settle on the Wind River Reservation—thereby avoiding exile to Indian Territory—what would be the final humiliation and punishment for the Northern Cheyenne … but that is another story for us to tell through the eyes of Seamus Donegan in the years to come.

In those weeks leading up to the battle, we see the beginning of the erosion of those traditional powers of the Cheyenne chiefs. Last Bull’s success in blunting the orders of Old-Man Chiefs first to pick up and flee, then to build defensive breastworks, would be paid out in a heavy cost for many years to come. At the beginning of the reservation period more and more of the Cheyenne saw that nothing remained for them in practicing their traditional ways, so adopted the white culture. As well, Indian Bureau officials were quick to play upon this weakening of the traditional Cheyenne way of governing, acerbating the intratribal, intrasocietal frictions for their own benefit and to keep matters on the “civilizing pathway.”

Through the next few winters there were some traditionalists among the Ohmeseheso who watched from the wings and found good reason to believe in the old ways.

You will recall how Black Hairy Dog performed his ritual curse against the soldiers and those scouts who led the ve-ho-e against the Morning Star village. Even Old Crow, one of those scouts, recognized the gravity of what was going on and went to offer cartridges to the warriors and priests in the rocks.

“I must fight against you, but I am leaving a lot of ammunition on this hill,” he shouted to the priest, hoping to mollify the spirits.

Despite finding the bullets where Old Crow said he would leave them, for many years afterward the Cheyenne scorned their chief, Old Crow—openly declaring that he had betrayed his own.

In his research while writing Sweet Medicine, Father Peter Powell states, “Many of the Old Ones, alive during the 1950’s and 1960’s, declared that all the Cheyennes who scouted for the soldiers died not long after this fighting [at the Dull Knife Battle]. They were killed by the power of Maahotse, when the Sacred Arrow points were turned against them.”

And tribal historian John Stands in Timber agrees in his book compiled by Margot Liberty, saying that all of Mackenzie’s Cheyenne scouts were dead by 1885 because the Sacred Arrows were turned against them that day in the Red Fork valley.