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

William Jackson had seen twenty-one winters since his Blackfoot mother had given birth to him at Fort Benton, far, far up the Missouri River at the head of navigation, just downstream from the Great Falls. At that time the American Fur Company was in the buffalo-robe trade with the western tribes. He had to do no more than close his eyes these days to remember the great adobe and picket walls, the two-story buildings enclosed within—a great place to be a child.

His grandfather, Hugh Monroe, had been an employee of the great Hudson’s Bay Company, first coming to its Mountain Fort on the Saskatchewan in 1816, where he married Fox Woman, daughter of a Blackfoot chief. He held the position of post hunter, and together they had two sons and two daughters. One of them, Amelia, would marry Thomas Jackson, the member of an old Virginia family who had joined American Fur in 1835. Unlike the rest of the company employees who followed the custom of marrying Pikuni women, a tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Thomas had fallen in love with Amelia.

Robert was their firstborn. Two years later William came along. They were inseparable. What a life they shared! As children they learned the three languages spoken at the fort: English, French Creole, and Pikuni. The Blackfoot tongue dominated most trade talk. By the time the boys were six or seven, they could speak all three languages with equal ease. In addition, on those long winter nights huddled before their fires in the fort’s quarters, father Thomas had taken pains to teach his two sons to read and write.

“You will learn never to shame the noble blood that runs in your veins,” he instructed his boys. “Your mother comes from Pikuni royalty. And my own family goes back a long, long way in the Old Dominion.”

Every year with the summer steamer their father made sure he brought up toys and games and storybooks from the company’s offices in St. Louis. As boyhood slowly passed away, the boys learned to ride and shoot, use a knife and tomahawk from their mother’s people. Such training was vital, for any man who carried Indian blood in his veins, the northern Rockies meant he would have friends, and he would suffer enemies. In their youth William and Robert narrowly escaped an Assiniboine war party. Not long afterward the first settlers came and threw up their log huts in the shadow of Fort Benton.

“That marks the beginning of the end for us!” grandfather cried, shaking a fist at the newcomers.

“What does this mean?” young William had asked, frightened.

“It means the whites are invading our country,” the old white-head explained angrily. “They will build a town, right here! They will begin to swarm all over our plains and along the foot of our mountains. They will kill off our meat animals, trap out our fur animals. My young ones—they are the kind that will desolate our country with their cattle and make beggars of us!”

Occasionally the boys would go out for days and camp with “woodhawks”—those men who, at great risk to their lives, would cut the immense cords of wood they sold to river steamboats plying the northern rivers each summer. During those seasons of their lives, not a year went by without raids by the Northern Cheyenne or Lakota—taking the lives of many of these daring, hearty woodhawks who would move their camp every day, eat supper around a fire, then always float downstream a mile or so before making a fireless camp for the night.

In the early spring the ice began to break up in those northern rivers. Every day they watched the passing carcasses of buffalo, some of the beasts becoming lodged at the upper end of the islands or pinned against piles of driftwood. Some were creatures that had drowned, having broken through the river’s icy crust the previous winter. Even more had been captured by the quicksands, slowly sinking to their death. Buzzards and magpies, coyotes and wolves, even grizzlies feasted upon such rich carrion tangled with the trash-wood snarled along the banks each spring.

Together with their father and others, the Jackson boys had trapped the Milk, Deep Creek, the Judith, and the Musselshell both spring and fall, returning to the post for the winter. By the time they were in their teens, American soldiers had begun to occupy the old fort, making their presence known among the tribes of the northern plains. One by one a long line of stores, hotels, and saloons went up nearby, almost overnight, after gold was discovered in the nearby country. Their father decided it was time to move downriver, away from the goldfields.