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

While the government continued to press the “friendlies” to sell away the Black Hills as a condition for receiving their annuities of food, blankets, and ammunition, Sheridan nonetheless demanded that those same agency Indians were dismounted and disarmed. No two ways about it. If the winter roamers who were still out making trouble would ever be resupplied with ammunition and weapons to press on with their war, those supplies would have to come from the “friendlies” who had stayed behind at the reservations. To make sure Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the rest were cut off from all such aid, Sheridan ordered Crook into action against the agency bands.

The little Irish general was positive that the hostiles could never have defeated Custer without aid from the agency Sioux. He expressed his steadfast belief in this position to William Tecumseh Sherman:

Our duty will be to occupy the game country and make it dangerous and when they are obliged from constant harassing and hunger to come in and surrender we can then dismount, disarm and punish them at the Agencies as was done with the Southern Indians in the last campaign.

Phil Sheridan had a staunch ally in Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. He too believed that the hostilities would all be over by the spring of 1877, provided that the hostiles were corralled and the “friendlies” forced to surrender their arms and ponies, the animals then sold on the open market and the funds thus acquired used to purchase cattle for the agency bands. Never disguised as an attempt to civilize the Sioux into becoming gentleman farmers, Sheridan’s plan was unashamedly to deny all mobility to the horse-mounted Lakota warriors.

Years before on the Staked Plain of West Texas, Seamus had come to admire Mackenzie’s patient even-handedness in pursuing his relentless war on the Comanche.* Yet, in many subtle ways, it was a different, a changed Mackenzie who last August marched eight companies of his Fourth Cavalry north to join in this grand Sioux campaign. Many times over dinner, or in officers’ meetings, in those off-the-cuff comments expressed to his cadre of scouts, the colonel made it exceedingly clear in so many subtle ways that he was no longer the same man: no more would he believe anything an Indian told him, nor could he believe that an Indian would honor his own word to a white man.

According to Mackenzie all this rumination and discourse over selling the Black Hills back to the government was nothing more than a waste of time—it was plain to see that the Indians had stalled the protracted negotiations at the agencies while their free-roaming brethren pursued their own hostile intentions in secret.

Like Sheridan, Mackenzie now believed the time for talk had come and gone with absolutely no lasting result.

For the colonel, one thing had grown more clear across the last five years in campaign after campaign against the hostiles—whether they were Kwahadi, Southern Cheyenne, or Red Cloud’s Sioux, what the Indian understood better than talk was force—might of arms, a cost in blood. He made no secret of the fact that he believed that the presence of the peace commissioners “unsettles the minds of these Indians.”

Upon his return to Camp Robinson, where more than 982 cavalry, infantry, and artillery soldiers had been marshaled to dismount the Sioux, he had wired Crook his recommendation that his command should indeed proceed with the capture of the two villages:

I do not think any of the principal bands will move in unless there is some strong power brought to bear to cause them to be obedient.

It was a sentiment shared by Sherman, Sheridan, and Crook.

Because the army had been receiving reports that three major camps would be wintering in the Powder River country—one band under Crazy Horse, another of Sans Arc, and a third of Northern Cheyenne—for weeks now Mackenzie made himself a nettlesome burr under Crook’s saddle, irritating the commanding general with dispatches from Camp Robinson, the likes of which:

A great many Indians have I think gone north quite recently and I wish that you would either come here or order me to get them together.

In the end Crook gave in and called Mackenzie to Laramie to plan this swift, decisive action against the agency Sioux.

Because he was certain the “friendlies” were harboring renegades responsible for raids off the reservation and would never cooperate with the Indian Bureau’s civilian authorities, Mackenzie had long espoused that the agency should be sealed off and that all communication with the resident bands be prohibited except through the military. It was a recommendation wholeheartedly agreed to by Sherman on down.

The Fourth Cavalry was now free to clamp down with whatever means were necessary.