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

Donegan could not remember ever seeing as many stars as this back east in Boston Towne. Even away from the cities and the streetlights—never could the sky be as brilliantly flecked, for only here was the air so dry. He licked his fevered lips and remembered the amber jar stuffed in his pocket. Once more he dabbed the cold dribble from his inflamed nostrils with the huge bandanna that hung around his neck, then swabbed more of the tallow over the end of his nose, into the wide, oozy cracks on his lower lip.

Would they ever get into position to make their charge and begin the attack before daylight?

Or would they find they had to lay to another day in some pocket away from the village and not be able to have their fight until the twenty-sixth?

He fretted at their snail’s pace, knowing most of the others must be every bit as anxious as he was to get on with the fight. Now that they were there, now that it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass office monkey, there simply was nothing that could warm a man up like a fight for his life. A good blood-throbbing scrap of it.

How he wanted to get this over and done with, then home to both of them.

I’ll figure out the boy’s name on the trip back, he promised himself again. Time enough to do that, Seamus. Get this fight out of the way—and you can name your son.

Near two o’clock the column squeezed itself again through a narrowing crimson defile the scouts from Red Cloud’s agency called “Sioux Pass.” For more than five miles the column snaked through the tall, rocky canyon, the immense walls of which were stippled with stunted trees. Directly above them glittered no more than a long angular strip of star-studded sky. Ahead in the distance hung the silver-blue quarter of a moon, quickly falling into the west after its own brief ride across the heavens.

“Eight more miles,” came the whispered word back from the Indian trackers leading them through the darkness.

Eight miles below the valley where the scouts claimed Mackenzie’s soldiers would find the Cheyenne village, they struck the Red Fork of the Powder River. Out of that bleak, early-morning darkness two horsemen approached the head of the column. They proved to be Red Shirt and Jackass, the two Sioux scouts who had stayed behind to keep an eye on the village. It was plain to see that their ponies were done in: Jackass’s animal stumbled, about with its weary rider and eventually fell. Both men jabbered excitedly about seeing many ponies and even counting a few lodges in the dark. During the brief halt the pair was fed hardtack and cold bacon, then told to rejoin their fellow warriors as the column pressed on into the darkness.

Hoar frost from every nostril and mouth hung like a thickening blanket over the entire serpentine column eventually slithering itself out of the rocky gorge, emerging upon a patch of smoother, more open ground some half-mile wide by three miles in length, which the Sioux had long ago named the “Race Course.” Behind them to the east, the first telltale narrow thread of gray light stretched atop the distant horizon.

How close were they now?

While Seamus and the head of the march spread out there where the narrow ravine widened beside the nearby stream tumbling over its icy bed, its faint echo splashing off the canyon walls, the rest of the column came to a halt behind him. The men quieted their animals without instruction from their officers. And listened.

They needed no prodding, for all could hear the distant, throbbing, man-made reverberation wending its way up to them from afar.

“That’s a goddamned drum!” whispered Billy Garnett, Sioux interpreter with the expedition.

“Hell if it ain’t!” said Billy Hunter, half-breed guide serving the North’s Pawnee battalion.

“Shush!” someone ordered nearby.

You could almost feel them hold their breath—eleven hundred of them now. So damned quiet a man could make out the snort of a horse halfway down the entire length of the column, maybe even hear the fart of one of Tom Moore’s mules at the very end of the entire procession.

“Rowland!” Mackenzie called out to his headquarters group.

“I’m here,” the squaw man replied, inching his horse forward.

“Bring some of your Cheyenne,” the colonel ordered. “Have them take us ahead to where we might get us a look at the village.”

Rowland gestured to Roan Bear, Cut Nose, and Little Fish, three of those who sat their ponies behind him. Wordlessly the trio led off as the squaw man and Mackenzie followed until all five were swallowed by the leafless willow choking a bend in the valley ahead.