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

“Forget what the old chiefs have told you,” the crier announced. “The Kit Foxes will protect you and drive the soldiers away after our great victory is won! Look around you: our warriors now control camp—not those old men who have grown as frightened as old women! No one will be allowed to leave. It is the decree of Last Bull!”

Some families waited for the crier to pass them by, then resumed their preparations to flee into the hills. But the rider came through camp a second time, shouting that anyone who disobeyed Last Bull’s orders to stay put would be punished. Suddenly there was the Kit Fox chief himself, darting through the sprawling village on his war pony, brandishing a long rawhide and elk-antler quirt he swore to use on anyone he caught attempting to leave. Beside him rode Wrapped Hair, second chief of the Kit Fox Society.

Together they waded into a small group of those who were throwing robes onto their ponies.

“Cut their cinches!” Last Bull demanded.

From the crowd around them burst half a dozen warriors tearing their knives from their belts. Boldly they hurled the men and women aside, slashing at the cinches holding travois to the ponies’ backs, cutting saddles from the ponies’ girths, freeing rawhide strips tying up blankets and buffalo robes.

“No one will leave!” Last Bull screamed, his lips flecked with spittle, his eyes spiderwebbed with red.

Wrapped Hair echoed his shrill defiance of the village chiefs. “Tonight all the People will dance to celebrate our victory over the Snake—and tomorrow at dawn we will have our victory over the soldiers!”

* Sioux Dawn, Vol. 1, The Plainsmen Series.

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

Chapter 24

24–25 November 1876

Leaving Tom Moore’s pack train behind, with a single company for escort and orders to follow after a wait of two more hours, the Indian scouts led Mackenzie’s command away from Beaver Creek as the sun set behind the Big Horns, while the land was becoming nothing more than a dimly lit, rumpled white bedsheet pocked with the darker heads of sage and the faint trace of willow-lined ravines snaking darkly among the drifts of white. From time to time the column would pass a buffalo skull lying akimbo, half-in and half-out of a skiff of crusted snow. Tracks of an occasional coyote or deer or antelope crisscrossed the rippled, wind-sculpted icing smeared over the rumbling land they climbed and fell with throughout that twenty-fourth of November.

As the command dismounted for the first of some twenty times, each man walking single file and leading his mount so they could squeeze themselves through a narrow ravine into the impenetrable bulk of the mountains, the soldiers coughed, sneezed, grumbled, and cursed—but the troopers and their allies had been ordered to enforce a strict silence, for a column moving into position for the attack, unaware that it has already been discovered by the Cheyenne, is not allowed the luxury of a great deal of noise.

Everything that could be tied down had to be kept from causing racket. Although they were ordered not to smoke, not to light a match for their pipes, many consoled themselves with their favorite briar anyway. By and large the officers turned away without scolding—knowing that for these men forced to endure this subzero march, a bowl of Kentucky burley could be a small but meaningful pleasure.

From time to time orders were whispered back down the column for the troops to reform in columns of twos, but soon came another command for the men to proceed in single-file through the winding, narrow passages they encountered. As the column strung itself out for more than five miles on such occasions, the men were required to stop and wait at times for more than half an hour before they could move on. While many impatiently waited out the backed-up muddle, some of the older hands dismounted and slept right where they hit the ground, reins tied around their wrists. Other men merely dozed in the saddle despite the plunging temperatures. More and more it was proving to be slow going with all the delays, with the rise and the fall of the trail—considering they already had the scent of their quarry in their nostrils and should have been closing in for the kill.