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

The ranks grew all the more quiet as the darkness swelled around them like an inky, purple bruise until the ground finally smoothed, growing less rugged after they had pierced the outer wall of the mountainside. On the far side of the high peaks above them the sun sank beyond like death’s own grave as soldiers and scouts alike followed the Arapaho Sharp Nose’s trail out of the narrow gorge where they had been strung out for more than half a dozen miles, those eleven hundred men inching along in the coming dusk one at a time as the land began to lead them up, up from the plain into the darkest recesses that would ultimately draw them into the veritable heart of the Big Horn Mountains. No longer were they in the land of the curious prairie dog that would stick its head up from a hole for a peek and a protest at the passing beasts before ducking back into the warmth and darkness of its protective burrow while the frozen men and animals plodded past.

Here the cliffs and towering monuments of stone closed in around them on both sides, seeming to slam shut on their rear too—forbidding any retreat.

In the west the sky had turned from rose to purple to indigo, lowering as they pushed on through the glittering, frozen darkness, feeling their way step by icebound step in their heaving climb to over thirty-five hundred feet among the juniper, stunted jack pine, and cedar. Every man, horse, and mule of them stumbling, slipping, sliding sideways on icy patches where the sun hadn’t penetrated between the narrow battlements of wind-eroded red rock.

Every now and then at a particularly difficult ravine an order came back for the column to “close up, close up!” Each time those at the head of a company would report to the troop in their advance that they had successfully made the crossing; the last man of that troop calling out to the company behind them in the dark, bringing them on with nothing more than the encouragement of that voice coming out of the gloom of that oppressive, frozen darkness.

And with every narrow stream or creek they were forced to cross, the cold, frightened horses splashed the icy water onto their riders, drenching the troopers, leaving every man frozen to his marrow, every animal shuddering in uncontrollable spasms.

Throughout their long night march the overanxious allies hurried past the slow-plodding soldiers on right flank or left, darting by singly or in pairs, all of them urging their ponies faster than the troopers pushed their big cavalry horses—until every one of the scouts had coagulated at the front of the march.

Ready to strike.

As the moonless winter night squeezed down, a man here and there fell out to await the tail of the column—those few who precariously clung to their saddles, careening side to side as if they were about to retch, stricken with that strange and sudden malady known as altitude sickness, perhaps numbed by the endless cold, even those few in any battle-ready regiment who are always taken with a sudden case of unquenchable fear.

From time to time in the coallike blackness it tried to snow. None of them could really see it snowing, able only to feel the frozen crystals sting the bare, exposed, and stiffened parchment of their cheeks and noses as the wind tossed and gusted through each narrow defile while the column drew closer.

Closer.

Again and again the forward scouts whirled back to Mackenzie and his staff through that long, cold night—urging the soldiers to press on, faster, ever faster … morning was coming and the village was near. Impatient were the auxiliaries all to be in position before first light. On and on the scouts prodded the white men to hurry. Morning would soon be upon them. The time for attack.

“Better that we let our Indians feel their way ahead as far as they want to,” Mackenzie muttered to those around him sometime late that night. “Some itch tells me there may well be a trap laid for us up there, the way those scouts are leading us through these narrow canyons. Perhaps the Cheyenne have a surprise waiting for us.”

But as much as they feared it, as ready as they were for it, as closely as the soldiers watched the rising tumble of rock around them—there came no ambush.

So dark and cold and suffocating was the night that Seamus began to believe they were the only creatures stirring in this part of the world. So small and insignificant did he feel here at the bottom of each gorge, beneath a sky so black that it seemed to go on forever, sucking every hint of warmth right out of the earth.