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

That afternoon on the way back to Buffalo, Wyoming for the night, the local radio weatherman said there was a major winter storm expected late tomorrow. Ain’t that the luck? But it’s something I’ve come to expect in this country. Here I came down on the battle’s anniversary: sunny, almost shirtsleeve weather … and tomorrow there’s going to be at least a fifty-degree drop in the temperature, and a major amount of snow blowing in! Just what the old frontiersmen came to know about this country—you better be prepared for anything, because you’re bound to get it in the way of fickle weather.

In the months to follow, Ken and Cheri Graves, as well as Mike Freidel, kindly answered my numerous questions, all three of them putting up with me until I could finally send them both big “overnight” packages filled with the appropriate chapters on the battle—asking for their corrections and suggestions. I can’t thank them enough for allowing me to impose upon them at a particularly busy time of the year as I finish this afterword—March is, after all, recruiting season for Mike, and it’s when the lambs and calves are dropping for Ken and Cheri.

I especially want to express my gratitude to Mike Freidel for his repeated work with me on the battlefield map. From those first days of the four of us going over the maps done for previous works on the Dull Knife fight—when Ken, Cheri, and Mike pointed out errors and discrepancies—to coming up with our own crude pencil sketches, and finally to working over a dining-room-table-sized USGS topographic map … all that labor just so we could give the reader as much a feeling of being right there as we could. Ken and Cheri and Mike all had a big hand in helping me make this battle come to life for you.

Long will I be in their debt.

Being on private land, where this fourth generation of a ranching family works at making a living the same way as those who came here in the years immediately following the battle, I get an immense amount of pride just from knowing folks like these. Hardworking, straight-talking, God-fearing, and life-loving people who possess what all too few today don’t—a genuine love for the land, and a love for what that land has always meant to those who passed this way to share in God’s bounty.

So again to Ken, Cheri, and Mike, I say thanks for welcoming me into your hearts and your homes, and for teaching me all that I needed to know so I could write the book that would tell not only an accurate story, but the authentic story of what happened here among these tall red mountains that terribly cold day in hell, 25 November, 1876.

TERRY C. JOHNSTON

Dull Knife Battlefield

Red Fork Ranch, Wyoming

25 November 1994

* Long Winter Gone, Vol. 1, Son of the Plains Trilogy.

* Blood Song, Vol. 8, The Plainsmen Series.

* Reap the Whirlwind, Vol. 9, The Plainsmen Series.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TERRY C. JOHNSTON was born on the plains of Kansas and has immersed himself in the history of the early West. His first novel, Carry the Wind, won the Medicine Pipe Bearer’s Award from the Western Writers of America, and his subsequent books, among them Cry of the Hawk, Dream Catcher, Buffalo Palace, Crack in the Sky, and the Son of the Plains trilogy, have appeared on bestseller lists throughout the country. Terry C. Johnston lives and writes in Big Sky country near Billings, Montana.

Little Wolf and Morning Star (Courtesy National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)

General Crook’s Headquarters. Fort Fetterman (Courtesy Wyoming State Museum Archives)

Powder River Expedition Crossing the Platte River, November 14,1876 (Courtesy Wyoming State Museum Archives)

Old Fort Reno—Supply Depot for Powder River Expedition (Courtesy Wyoming State Museum Archives)

A COLD DAY IN HELL

A Bantam Book / February 1996

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1996 by Terry C. Johnston.