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

War-Path and Bivouac—The Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition, by John F. Finerty.

William Jackson, Indian Scout, by James Willard Schultz.

Wolves for the Blue Soldiers—Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860–1890, by Thomas W. Dunlay.

Wooden Leg—A Warrior Who Fought Custer, interpreted by Thomas B. Marquis.

Yellowstone Command—Colonel Nelson A. Miles and the Great Sioux War, 1876–1877, by Jerome A. Greene.

The Dull Knife Battlefield exists today much as it did over a hundred years ago—with the exception of the simple stone marker erected near the village site, the single dirt road that hugs the foot of Mackenzie Mountain, and the fact that in the last century the leafy cottonwoods have taken hold along the stream bottom and down in the bogs once infested with ten-foot-high willow at the time soldiers and warriors clashed here.

Only a year after the fight Harmon Fraker came in to homestead the valley. The mountain that forms the north rim of the site is named Fraker Mountain for that first settler. Then in 1901 a rancher by the name of Charles N. Graves came to Wyoming out of Nebraska, gaining title to the valley five years later. Through the twenties and into the thirties, both he and his son, Frank O. Graves, witnessed numerous visits to the battle site by many of the old soldiers and aging Indians who had taken part in the tragic struggle. Next to take over operations was Norris Graves, and now his son and daughter-in-law, Ken and Cheri, run cattle and sheep in that ruggedly secluded corner of the Big Horns.

This is the famous “Hole in the Wall” country of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Climbing close to five thousand feet above sea level, you reach the valley by a long, twisting stretch of dirt road that winds through some stunning blood-red mountains dotted with one variety or another of emerald evergreen. As you draw closer, the walls begin to rise dramatically to a height of a thousand feet or more above you. And then, before you’re really prepared, you are suddenly thrust around a bend and down the slope into the valley itself, which measures some two miles long and from a quarter of a mile to about a mile wide in places.

The Morning Star camp was pitched for the most part along some flat ground on the south bank of a gentle, trickling stream running from west to east all year long because it was fed by a warm spring that prevented the stream from freezing (a fact heretofore neglected by the historians). Here, where the village stood, the valley is its widest. Downstream to the east, where Mackenzie’s cavalry burst through the gap, the valley is at its most narrow.

This is truly a dramatically spectacular symbol of some of God’s finest sculpturin’s!

And there was no finer way to see such sculpturin’s than on horseback, accompanied by the two most knowledgeable guides I could have wanted. Ken Graves saddled us up just before sunrise on this anniversary date as I trudged over to the corral and got to know his part-time ranch hand, Mike Freidel—a historian in his own right and athletic coach over at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. Mike’s been coming over to the place for better than fifteen years now, and—believe me—Ken and Mike know every square foot of that valley, from far out of the east gap where the cavalry came in, formed up, and began their charge, to the breastworks and the narrow escape canyon at the other end of the valley, and on up the mountainsides where the Cheyenne fled into the winter night toward Fraker Pass.

More important, for all those years the two of them have traveled the ground by horseback, in and out of that maze of rocky walls, trackless ravines, and well-used game trails, coming to know exactly where Mackenzie’s scouts led the soldiers into the valley, just where Cosgrove and Schuyler led their Shoshone single file up the steep and precarious mountain path to reach the top of what is today called Mackenzie Mountain. So if I was forced to choose in a disagreement between an academic historian and these rancher-horsemen on how an army was going to march into the east gap and on into the valley, you can bet your last twenty-dollar gold piece I’d lay everything I had on Ken Graves and Mike Freidel showing me just where Mackenzie’s horse planted its hooves back in 1876.