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

Somewhere among the ring of blue, bundled white soldiers on horseback a voice cried out, answered by more voices barking their wasichu words. The horsemen came to an immediate halt. Everywhere Red Cloud looked, from side to side, turning slowly to gaze behind him, the village was ringed with these silent sentries on their restive, snorting, frost-wreathed horses. Like filmy, disembodied ghosts taking shape out of the coming of day.

Then a voice barked more wasichu words and three men emerged from the soldiers’ noose. One was a soldier. And the other white man Red Cloud knew as Todd Randall—a squaw man with a Lakota wife. The third, clearly a half-blood. The soldier said something, and the dark-skinned one nodded before he shouted to the camp in Lakota.

“You will surrender your camp! You will give over all your ponies to the soldiers. And then your men must give up every gun your people have in this village.”

Red Cloud swallowed hard, hearing the muttering of so many brave men nearby—his friends and relations—as his mind feverishly grappled with what to do now that they were surrounded.

Around him he heard the mad rustle as some of the women scurried into the brush with the children. White men shouted, growling like wolves, forcing the women and children back as their big American horses advanced out of the shreds of frozen fog.

Finally, the chief took a step closer to the half-blood and asked, “If I do not surrender our camp?”

Atop his pawing pony the half-blood shrugged, and without a word he made a slight gesture that was likely lost on even the white man beside him.

“I see,” Red Cloud finally replied. “These soldiers and their wolves will murder our women and children, will butcher the old ones in my village.”

“It is a good thing you understand.”

“Ah,” the chief answered, still grappling with it, his finger still inside the trigger guard of his repeater, arguing with himself on whether to fight and die where he stood, or whether to listen to what this half-blood said about giving over all their ponies and guns.

“Well?” the half-blood snapped impatiently.

With reluctance Red Cloud wagged his head. “If I surrender to these soldiers—what do they offer me in return?”

“Nothing.”

“N-nothing?” he stuttered, feeling the severe chill slip beneath the folds of his blanket for the first time since he had emerged from the warm robes and his wife’s body.

With another shrug of one shoulder, the half-blood scout and interpreter replied, “Perhaps not nothing … at least your people will have your lives in return.”

“I know him!” one of the warriors suddenly growled as he came to stand behind Red Cloud, pointing at the half-blood. “He is a liar and his scalp should be mine!”

“Quiet!” the chief ordered. “It matters not if this half-blood is a liar, for we do not have to trust to his words. With our own eyes we can see he brings many, many of his friends to kill us if we don’t do as he tells us.”

The interpreter gestured with a thumb over his shoulder and said, “Then I can tell the soldier chief that your people will lay down their weapons and turn over their ponies?”

Red Cloud looked left, then right, and behind him once more as if to remind himself that the entire village was ringed with horsemen, their weapons drawn. With a crushing resignation he turned back to the half-blood and nodded. “Yes. Tell your soldier chief his warriors do not need to kill women and children this morning, nor do they need to trample our old ones with the hooves of their horses before the sun rises. We are at peace with the white man—”

“Then tell these others,” the half-blood demanded as he shifted in the saddle uneasily. “Tell them to drop their guns.”

To his warriors Red Cloud shouted his command, explaining that they had no chance to make a fight of it, that they must think of protecting their families rather than spilling their blood on this ground. This, perhaps, was the hardest to say to his friends—most of whom had remained with him for many a winter.

Together they had risen up out of hiding in the snow and swarmed over the Hundred in the Hand near the Pine Fort.*

Together they had fought a day-long battle against the soldiers and their medicine guns the following summer,†

And together they had driven the soldiers from their thieves’ road cutting through the Lakota hunting ground for what was to be all time.

But the white man had eventually returned to take back his promise, to take back the Black Hills too. Red Cloud’s Bad Face band had little left them now that they lived on this reservation at the largess of the white agent.

Now this morning the white man and his Indian friends were there to take the last of what the Oglalla had—their ponies and their weapons.

As most of the cartridge belts and rifles clattered onto the frozen ground, the half-blood sneered and said, “It is good, old-woman chief. Once you were strong—but now you give up like a woman.”