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

Behind them Lieutenant Kell’s K Company closed the file as the last wagons reached the creek and began taking on water before crossing—when suddenly more than a hundred warriors roared down on them from behind, yipping and firing on that little band of soldiers just moving into the water from the east bank. When Kell sent word to Otis that his men were running low on ammunition, the lieutenant colonel ordered down another thousand rounds and a few reinforcements.

About the same time that ammunition was reaching K Company, the last of the wagons began pulling farther and farther away across the stream. For a few minutes it appeared Kell’s men would be cut off and surrounded by the hostiles—sure to be overwhelmed. Time and again the horsemen surged forward, sweeping past and dropping to the far side of their ponies, firing beneath the animals’ necks before clattering away, hooves churning up clods of prairie. Charge after charge after charge—

“Major Sanger!” Otis screamed above the noise of wagons and men, mules and Sioux. “Take your men and break through to K Company. Bring them up to rejoin the column!”

Answering with only a salute, Sanger got his G Company off at a lope to reinforce Kell’s besieged troops barely holding up the rear of the column. By now the Sioux had fired the tall dried grass on both flanks of the column on the west bank and to the rear, where they began to withdraw with Sanger’s reinforcement of Kell’s soldiers.

The air burned their lungs as they struggled to close up with the wagons. Men coughed, dropped to their knees as they were robbed of breath, sucking desperately at the air as black flecks of smoldering grass littered the sky all around them like July fireflies.

“Keep those goddamned wagons moving!” Otis yelled far to the front, prodding his drivers. “We stop here—we’re all done for!”

Inch by inch, foot by foot, the mules and wagons formed up by fours once more having reached that high ground. Together with what was left of the escort not fighting in their front or to their rear, they ground their way along the rutted Tongue River Road.

They came to a jangling halt, men bellowing and the mules noisily fighting their harness—for out of the north and east swarmed a reinforced party of yelping horsemen.

“Keep those goddamned wagons moving!” Otis hollered, weaving in and among the leaders atop one of the five horses left for his men at Glendive Cantonment.

When things appeared their worst, the warriors on the right flank suddenly broke off their attack and boiled to the front of the column, where some of the horsemen crossed and reinforced their numbers, suddenly putting extreme pressure on the left side while the rest remained to stubbornly harass the front of the train. It was there the first wagons slowed even more until the entire line was all but stopped.

In heartbeats Otis lumbered up to his advance guard, ordering, “Mr. Sharpe—detach Mr. Conway with a squad of ten men and keep the way cleared!”

With Lieutenant Conway and his soldiers off to punch their way against the warriors at their front, Sharpe remained with the rest of his H Company as well as G Company to hold back the extreme pressure of those warriors reinforced on their left flank. It took the better part of an hour before the wagons were once more able to move down the road. By that time the smoke became even more suffocating from the grass fires that raged around them on all sides—some of the wagons and mule teams forced to frantically dash through the leaping flames, men hollering in panic and mules braying in fear … when within moments the winds shifted around from the west and for the most part raised that thick, choking pall—preventing the gray, stinging blanket from completely swallowing the movement of the soldier column.

Someone cried out on Sharpe’s far right. He whirled to watch a soldier from G Company spin to the ground, clutching his knee. The man’s bunkie was on him in an instant, ripping off his belt and tightening it above the wound. It wasn’t but a minute before Surgeon Charles T. Gibson was there to lend a hand.

At that very moment Sharpe realized just how cut off they were: on all sides the rolling prairie lay blackened, smoldering, a great gray shroud blotting out the midafternoon sun hung like a red ball above them in the autumn sky. It reminded the lieutenant of the waste Napoleon had laid to the steppes of Russia in his disastrous retreat more than half a century before. Then he chided himself—to think that his little struggle was of any consequence compared to the great European campaigns he had studied at the Academy.

Then almost immediately he decided theirs was a worthy struggle. While Napoleon battled against a civilized enemy—Otis’s column found itself surrounded by a fiendish enemy who fought not only with bullets, but with smoke and fire and devilish noise. In addition, they each struggled privately against the twin demons of a soldier’s nightmare: hunger and thirst.