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

Nelson Miles did not roust his weary command until dawn and did not have them marching northeast out of their miserable bivouac until nine A.M. With what scouts he had along reporting no sighting of hostiles, the colonel dispatched some of his soldiers in small hunting parties, hoping to discover some of the numerous buffalo in that country.

Having already covered some sixteen miles that day, just past midafternoon the advance called out that the wagon train had been spotted in the distance. Within minutes Miles was eagerly shaking hands with Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis when they met on the east bank of Custer Creek, some five miles upstream from the Yellowstone.

Together they went into bivouac for the night on the banks of Cherry Creek, just as the sun fell late in the afternoon. While the combined columns raided the willow bogs for firewood or collected dried buffalo chips to heat up their coffee and supper, Miles held a conference with the weary commander of the Glendive Cantonment.

After Otis gave a full report on his running fight with Sitting Bull’s warriors, Miles ordered him to proceed on with the supply train to Tongue River the next morning, while the Fifth took up the pursuit of the Hunkpapa.

“We’re strong enough to punish them,” Nelson vowed before his officers. “By Jupiter, we’ll make them pay this time.”

Well after dark, Nelson trudged through camp to find the unit placed in charge of his single piece of artillery. Dismantled, the Rodman gun had covered the last two days strapped on the backs of a pair of mules. Those Napoleon guns assigned to the regiment he had simply deemed far too bulky and immobile for campaigning in rugged Indian country such as this.

He spent a few minutes visiting his nephew George and his company before deciding he would take a few minutes that evening to write more to Mary—perhaps to detail for her his frustrations in hearing so much about Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa, knowing they were somewhere close along the Yellowstone, but not yet having caught a single glimpse of that elusive chief of the winter roamers who had wiped out Custer’s five companies.

“Where are you, you red bastard?” he whispered as he turned back toward his bivouac, really nothing more than a gum poncho tied over some willow branches where his bedroll had been thrown out. “I know you’re out there, you wily son of a bitch. My Kelly will find you, then I’ll snare you once and for all. And trust me: when I do catch up to you, I won’t make the same mistakes Custer did, not by a long shot.”

Nelson held strong opinions on everything, especially this Army of the West. To him it seemed that no other commander had taken the trouble to analyze their situation out there on the frontier when it came to fighting horse-mounted warriors. Most commanders truthfully didn’t have the spirit it would take to defeat the hostiles. And those few who might have the gumption to make a fight of it simply lacked one or more of the other necessary traits to pull off the victory they were needing so very badly.

“Alfred Terry,” he murmured as he settled atop his blankets and his dog-robber brought over a steaming cup of coffee.

“Sir?”

“Oh … nothing,” Miles replied. “Just thinking to myself.”

Indeed. General Alfred Terry, commanding the Department of the Dakotas, seemed the best of the lot for all intents and purposes. Yet even he had no experience in fighting Indians. Besides, he was the sort of man who time and again fell under the sway of subordinates with stronger personalities—too much influenced by the likes of the brash George Armstrong Custer and that dullard John Gibbon.

He took out paper and fitted his pen with a new nib, hoping it would not be so cold that the ink would freeze. He much preferred to write Mary with a pen instead of pencil. This night he again told his wife of his frustrations with her uncle at the War Department. Why William Tecumseh Sherman refused to turn the whole matter over to him was beyond Nelson. Then he realized he was starting to seethe more and more these days—like a dog snarling at the end of a long chain. So he wrote Mary that perhaps he should resign from the army, just as he had considered doing last summer—that, rather than endure another long, tedious, and poorly executed circus like the fiasco Terry and Crook had made of the summer’s campaign.

He fell asleep over his writing tablet that night, his pen in one hand, that small cabinet photo of his wife in the other.

The cold that Friday morning, the twentieth, was even more brutal than it had been. As he stomped circulation back into his feet and legs, Nelson took all the more satisfaction with his foresight in equipping the men for what this country could dish out in the way of weather.

“Both officers and men profited by the experience they had been through in the winter campaigns in the Indian Territory,” he had written in his journal weeks ago, “and applied themselves zealously to their equipment in every possible way.”