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

Suddenly the sergeant had been towering there at Smith’s tent flaps, his big meaty paws jammed down on his hips, his eyes like twelve-hour coals, spitting mad. “If you ever talk to me that way again—I’ll tie you up by the thumbs!”

Earl had seen men tied up by their thumbs for hours at a time, their arms stretched high over their heads, their toes barely scraping the ground, held only by their thumbs to a stout wooden bar overhead.

Too, since joining the Fourth, he had heard reports of soldiers being placed in a big hole in the ground, so deep they had to climb down on a ladder. Or men lashed in a crouch around a stout piece of fence post then gagged for hours. Once Smith had seen that punishment—the soldiers who suffered it unable to move their cramped and tortured muscles once they were released.

On their march north to Fetterman a pair of soldiers had made the mistake of being slow to salute Mackenzie and addressing their commander too informally. That evening in bivouac the colonel promptly had Sergeant Walsh see that the two offenders stood in one place for an hour and a half, unable to move in that frigid weather except for saluting a tree stump for their transgression. A day later a few men in one company were late in relieving others on guard. Mackenzie sentenced those guilty to carry the hundredweight sacks of grain for their horses up and down across a mile of the rugged terrain as their punishment.

God must surely damn this army for putting some men over others, William Earl thought as he angrily jammed his supply of rations into the tiny haversack he would carry north.

Two days back, when the temperature had started to fall through the bottom of the surgeons’ thermometers, one of Mackenzie’s other orderlies—Private Edward Wilson—had gone up to the fort, invited to join Lieutenant Henry Lawton, quartermaster for the expedition’s cavalry wing, as the two of them intended to drain the better part of a whiskey bottle at the sutler’s saloon. As both were in no condition to walk back to their camp situated on the north side of the river, they climbed atop their horses and headed back in the dark and the blowing snow. Somewhere along the wagon road leading down the bluff to the ferry, Wilson’s horse got away from him, prompting Lawton’s horse to gallop off wildly too. As a furious lieutenant came up alongside the orderly, he yanked out his pistol and swung it across Wilson’s face, knocking the private off his horse and unconscious with one blow. Sometime during the night Wilson came to, finding himself half-frozen, wet, and bleeding in the icy mud beside the North Platte. With the help of camp guards, he struggled back to his tent, where he passed out again before the sky grew light.

Although Mackenzie gave Lawton a stern dressing-down for striking a soldier, the colonel did nothing more in the way of punishment. As much as Smith had admired Mackenzie before, to him it seemed the man was really no different from all the other officers who either abused their men, or allowed the abuse by other officers to go on without proper punishment.

“Don’t you see? The colonel can’t bust Lawton down and order him to stay at Fetterman,” said another of Mackenzie’s orderlies. “He needs the lieutenant too damned bad—”

“I don’t give a damn,” Smith argued in a hushed voice. “What Mackenzie needs is to show his soldiers that fair is fair.”

Far up the bluff on Fort Fetterman’s parade that Tuesday morning, the fourteenth of November, a trumpet blared its shrill cry of “Stable Call” on the cold, brittle air:

Oh, go to the stable,

All you who are able,

And give your poor horses

Some hay and some corn.

For if you don’t do it,

The captain will know it,

And you’ll catch the devil

As sure as you’re horn.

“Ain’t it the truth, Soul!” Smith groaned, mimicking again the big Irish sergeant’s brogue. “Ain’t it the truth!”

The cavalry and Indian scouts had been camped down there, already across the North Platte, with a toehold at the edge of enemy territory. Every one of the six days they waited there after marching north from Laramie, the sky had seemed to lower that much more, spitting cruel, sharp-edged ice crystals out of the belly of those clouds. While the cold Canadian winds came sweeping out of the north, the troops sat out their boredom.

Each having a winter campaign of his own under his belt, both Crook and Mackenzie understood the importance of equipping their men properly for the task at hand. Sheridan had promised them that the men of the Powder River Expedition would want for nothing. For once that was a promise kept.