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

From the moment Crook’s command had returned to Fort Laramie, Seamus had been with them both constantly, forgoing most of his nocturnal visits to the sutler’s saloon, choosing not to join the other scouts and soldiers in their noisy camaraderie in these last few days before embarking on Crook’s Powder River Expedition. Instead, to Sam it seemed that her husband hungered only for the companionship of his family across what hours and days were left him before Mackenzie’s Fourth would plunge north into the winter wilderness, the spear point of George Crook’s desperate last-chance campaign to find and capture Crazy Horse.

“Soon enough I’ll have only male voices around my ears,” he had tried to explain when she asked him why he hovered close, why he didn’t wander over to Collins’s saloon.

Again he had tried to explain the life of an army on the march: only the bray of mules and the snort of horses, the squeak of frozen saddle and the jingle of frosted bit—to touch, instead of loved ones, only the memories of these two most important people in his world, alone and trying desperately to keep himself warm with those memories as a second winter campaign swallowed him whole.*

“If Crook captured the Sioux chiefs,” Samantha began now as she watched him pace with the child, “why would he even bother to talk with them at all?”

Shifting the infant from his shoulder, Donegan laid his little son across his left arm and adjusted the tiny blanket around the boy’s head and face as he said, “What he had to say to that gathering of chiefs was most important, Sam. You see, Crook had the power—then and there, plain as paint before all the headmen and once-mighty warriors—to remove Red Cloud from his throne.”

“Red Cloud? You mean the same chief who commanded all those warriors you fought in that northern country ten years ago … the same chief who you told me drove the army out in sixty-eight? You’re telling me Crook’s made sure he is no longer chief of the Sioux?”

With a slight shrug Seamus nodded. “For all that it matters to the Injins staying close to their agency. Crook told them all he was determined to punish Red Cloud for running off from the reservation, for making his camp a place where warriors could come and go from the Powder River country. And then Crook capped the ball when he announced he was making Spotted Tail chief of all the Sioux.”

“Spotted Tail—isn’t he the one whose daughter died and is buried near this post?”

“The same chief,” Donegan answered. “Long ago, as his daughter was dying, she made him promise her two things: that he would place her scaffold near the white man’s Laramie fort, and that he would remain faithful to the white man’s wishes. Spotted Tail never broke the promise he made to her.”

“What of the other bands you say have been restless at the agency?”

“The Cheyenne and the Arapaho sat in on the conference with Crook. The general figured it would help to impress upon them his power to punish, as well as his power to reward. Crook finished his council by telling the bands what he expected of them from here on out.”

“I imagine he demanded they all stay at home and become farmers,” Sam replied with a sneer, then winked at her husband when he went to scowling at her. “Really, Seamus—I can no more see any of those redskins digging at the ground than I can see you living the rest of your natural years as a sodbuster.”

Finally he grinned at her, then turned at the corner of the room and started back toward the bed with slow steps as he gently rocked the sleeping infant troubled this evening with another bout of colic. “Crook told the chiefs that the government was feeding their people, putting clothes on their backs—so the government and its army was damn well entitled to the tribes’ loyalties. But what’s the government got for all the flour and rifles, bacon and bullets? I’ll tell you: Sioux warriors and all the rest have been acting like murderers and thieves off the reservation, then fleeing back to take refuge on the agency. Now it was time, Crook told them, to show their friendship with more than empty words. From now on the chiefs are going to be held accountable for the actions of their young men.”

“Sounds like Crook enjoyed playing the part of a stern father to them.”

Seamus smiled. “I damn well know he relished the role—telling the chiefs and headmen that if they did not toe the line this time, they would soon rue the day they acted so foolishly. He told them that if they all came in and began their lives as stock raisers, their troubles would end at once.”

“But what of the others you’ve told me about, Seamus?” she asked. “The ones like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull? The ones who have never come in?”

“Crook told the chiefs he was going after the last of the hostiles, those holdouts still roaming the wild country. He vowed the army would find them and drive them in.”

“And those they can’t drive in?” she asked dolefully.