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

Miles stepped back and saluted. “Very good, Mr. Rousseau. Flank left of Major Casey and pitch into them. Have at them! We’ll be watching to see if you need support. Have at them, I say!”

Minutes later, as the lieutenant led his H Company single file up the precipitous slopes of that sharp ridge on the left in the midst of stinging clouds of smoke from all the burning brush and grass, Miles finally reacted to the continued annoyance of the warriors on their right flank. At this time he dispatched Lieutenant Carter’s K Company in support of Captain Lyman’s I Company in driving off the horsemen once and for all from the slope leading out of the brush-clogged ravine where most of his soldiers were beginning to cross beneath the pall of gray-and-brown smoke boiling up from the autumn-cured buffalo grass set to smoldering by the screeching hordes.

“You’ll have their village in no time now, General!” shouted the colonel’s aide, Hobart Bailey.

“What’s bloody left of it,” Miles grumbled, his eyes narrowing on the all but abandoned Sioux camp. The only occupants now were knots of warriors covering the retreat of the last women and ponies they sent scurrying over the hillsides out of harm’s way.

“I figured Sitting Bull was bound to put up a hell of a fight this day” Miles observed minutes later as he came to a stop beside Kelly. By now most of the battlefield lay shrouded with dense, roiling clumps of acrid smoke. “The way they’re running—it’s hard to imagine this is the same bunch that mauled Custer’s Seventh.”

Luther shook his head. “Sitting Bull ain’t a fighting chief, General. My money says it’s Gall leading this fight. He’s the one lost a couple of wives and his children in Reno’s charge at the Little Bighorn.”

“Which means Gall will fight like the devil to protect that village now,” Miles replied.

“I figure Gall thirsts to spill some more soldier blood to atone for the death of his family.”

Miles turned slowly to regard his chief of scouts. For a moment the colonel’s eyes slitted; then he asked, “Sounds like you agree with that red bastard.”

Kelly shrugged. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. You’re the family man, General.” And he reined his horse away without another word.

It didn’t take a plainsman like Luther Kelly to see how the Lakota warriors were maneuvering across the broken landscape in hopes of tying up the soldiers. This was perfect ground for a thousand horsemen to gain tactical superiority against the attacking walk-a-heaps. The main body of the hostiles held the prominent high ground on the north, east, and south. To get to the enemy, Miles would have to commit his forces to plunging into the deep, sharp-sided ravines that now lay between them.

As the infantry struggled forward through the pall of choking smoke, the center of the Hunkpapa line fell back, pulling the soldiers ever onward … hoping to entangle their disordered formations in the brushy, turkey-track coulees where the warriors massing along either side and to the rear of the line of march would pour in on the confused and frightened troops.

With every yard marched, Miles’s formation began to string itself out, began to grow more ragged as his men crossed the rugged, uneven ground beneath and through the thick curtains of wind-tortured smoke and flame. No longer was it a solid, straight formation—but instead became a dark, wavy line snaking up and down across the tortured plain like a writhing serpent until the troops dropped down into the East Fork of Cedar Creek.

Here, for a feverish quarter of an hour, the Sioux struggled valiantly to hold back Miles’s troops. It was here that a warrior swept in, screaming at the top of his lungs and firing his repeater. One of the shots dropped Private John Geyer of I Company, wounding him severely. But in the end the powerful and long-reaching Springfield rifles seized the day against the lighter Henrys, Winchesters, and what Springfield carbines the Hunkpapa had captured at the Little Bighorn.

Gall’s warriors began to fall back.

On the far right side of the disjointed skirmishers companies K and I were the first to reach the outskirts of what had been Sitting Bull’s village. Here and there in the midafternoon light still stood the bare skeletons of dismantled lodges, stripped and robbed of their buffalo-hide and canvas covers, yet within each circle of poles sat piles of robes and blankets, parfleches and scattered clothing dropped in haste. The Lakota had not taken all that much in their precipitous flight. Kettles, saddles, and untanned hides lay clustered about still-smoldering breakfast fires. All of that, and the tons of dried meat, back fat and newly ripened buffaloberries the women had been making into pemmican, storing this precious commodity against the cold of the coming winter.