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

“It’s been a good chase, General,” the scout answered, taking up his rein and beginning to lead his horse away with the other scouts. “We’ll catch Sitting Bull yet.”

Monday. Some time after midnight. Twenty-three October. Damned cold too, here beside the frozen fog rising off Chadron Creek.

Keep the talk at a minimum were the orders. And no smoking.

Just after dark, Mackenzie led his command away from Camp Robinson and into the cold, clear winter night—more stars overhead than Seamus could recall seeing since last winter on the Powder River.

Since arriving on the central plains last August, the Fourth Cavalry had been quartered in three temporary cantonments: Camp Canby, the original Sioux Expedition cavalry camp; Camp Custer; and Camp of the Second Battalion. Earlier in the month, while Mackenzie was gone to Laramie conferring with Crook on the coming seizures of Sioux arms, his regiment had been reinforced by some 309 new recruits shipped in from Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, bringing the companies up to full strength. Besides drilling three times a day with and without their mounts, the men of the Fourth Cavalry had been kept busy cutting, hauling, and trimming logs for their crude log barracks, mess halls, and storage rooms.

Last night, with each man packing one day’s rations and all of them in light marching order, Mackenzie had moved his troops away under the cover of darkness because the colonel did not want to be spotted by any agency tattletale who might scurry off to Red Cloud’s or Red Leaf’s and Swift Bear’s camps, letting the cat slip out of the bag.

A few hours back Mackenzie had briefly stopped his command at a predetermined rendezvous, where they awaited some riders who were to join up: the North brothers, Lieutenant S. E. Cushing, and forty-eight hardened trackers of their Pawnee Battalion, hurried north from the Sidney Barracks where they had been carried west, horses and all, along the Union Pacific line.

“By the Mither of God! I ain’t seen you since that summer with Carr!” Seamus growled happily in a harsh whisper at the two civilian brothers there in the dark as they waited while some of the Norths’ Pawnee probed ahead into the darkness.

Following the rendezvous, Mackenzie’s march was resumed across that hard, frozen ground, at a trot or at a gallop as the rugged land allowed, until early in the morning when the scouts reached the point where the trail leading north from the agency split: one branch leading to Red Cloud’s band, the other to Red Leaf’s Brule camp only a handful of miles away. It was there that Mackenzie deployed his command: sending M Company of his Fourth Cavalry along with the two troops assigned him from Wesley Merritt’s Fifth Cavalry to follow Captain Luther North and some of the Pawnee in the direction of Red Leaf’s village, that entire force under the command of Major George A. Gordon.

The remaining five troops of the Fourth followed Mackenzie as Major Frank North and the rest of the Pawnee scouts led them on through the darkness toward Red Cloud’s camp.

“That hot July of sixty-nine. Has it been that long?” Frank North replied now, also in a whisper. Mackenzie demanded that none of his surprise be spoiled.

“Summit Springs, it were,” Donegan replied, tugging at his collar, pulling his big-brimmed hat down as he tried to turtle his head into his shoulders. The wind was coming up.

“We had us a grand chase that year, didn’t we?” North asked.

“I rode with Carr this summer.”

“Don’t say,” North said, then stared off into the darkness. “He was a good soldier.”

“By damn if he wasn’t that bloody hot day when we caught ol’ Tall Bull napping,” Seamus replied.*

“Bet you four to one we’ve got Red Cloud and the rest napping this time too.”

“We’ll know soon enough,” the Irishman responded as they watched some of the Pawnee emerge out of the dark.

They sat for close to an hour, waiting for some of the Indian trackers to return. The men were allowed to dismount and huddle out of the wind, but smoking and talk were forbidden. No telling if the Sioux would have camp guards out patrolling.

It seemed like an eternity until the order came to move out once more, marching a few more miles until Mackenzie halted his five troops and the Pawnee Battalion, saying they would wait right there until there was light enough to see the front sights on their carbines. Then they would send the scouts to seize the pony herd while they charged into the village.

So for now those three hundred men waited in the dark and the cold, knowing they had that unsuspecting Sioux camp in their noose.