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

Ahead of him and behind as well stretched Crook’s Powder River Expedition, perhaps the best prepared and equipped force ever to plunge into this forbidding wilderness. Especially at this season. It made quite a sight: far out on each flank the hundreds of Indian auxiliaries, the neat column of infantry, ahead of them the wagon train and Tom Moore’s four hundred mules, then the white scouts riding with Crook’s headquarters group, and in the lead marched Mackenzie’s cavalry.

As the day aged, the weather warmed too much to make for good marching. The wind had piled the snow too deep at the sides of ridges and hillocks for easy passage, while the sun continued to relentlessly turn the snow to slush in open places, making for treacherous footing for the infantry following in the wake of all those wagons sliding this way and that as the drivers barked and cajoled, whipped and cursed their teams.

Dodge halted his infantry at the camping ground on Sage Creek after slogging eleven grueling miles. Mackenzie and the teamsters were obliged to push on another four miles before they could find sufficient water in Sage Creek for their animals—what there was had collected in ice-covered pools of brackish, soap-tinged water. As soon as the horses were unsaddled, the men spread out to scare up what they could of firewood. All they found was the smoky greasewood. Nor was there much in the way of grass for the animals. Fortunately, Crook had freighted both firewood and forage.

Shortly after taking up the march the morning of the fifteenth, some of the Pawnee discovered the tracks of three horses. Due to the condition of the ground, it proved difficult to determine if the animals wore iron shoes or not—so the trackers put their noses to the trail and took off at a lope.

“Cant help but think we’re being watched by Crazy Horse’s scouts,” Crook mused that afternoon as they kept an eye on the horizon, watching for the return of those Pawnee.

In the afternoon two of the soldiers riding on the right flank were run in by four Indians, who gave the pair quite a fright with all their whooping and gunfire, but it wasn’t until after the column made camp on the South Fork of the Cheyenne River, having put fifteen hard miles behind them, that the trackers returned to report that the trio of riders they had trailed all day had turned out to be white men.

“Miners, I’d wager,” Seamus declared.

“More’n likely horse thieves,” Dick Closter argued. The white-bearded packer spat a stream of brown tobacco juice out of the side of his mouth as he knelt to stir some beans in a blackened pot that steamed fragrantly, then smeared some of the brown dribble ever deeper into his snowy whiskers.

That night the entire command—cavalry, infantry, wagon and mule train, along with the Indian auxiliaries—all camped together for the first time, spread out along the Cheyenne where they could find enough room to graze the animals and throw down their bedrolls against the dropping temperatures as the stars winked into sight, the sheer and utter blackness of that clear winter sky sucking every last gesture of warmth from the heated breast of the earth.

Each night Seamus did as most of the others, bunking in with another man to share their blankets and body heat, after spreading their saddle blankets over “mattresses” fashioned from what dried grass and sagebrush they could gather to insulate them from the frozen ground.

At first light the column moved out again on the sixteenth, with Mackenzie’s cavalry once more beating the fuming Dodge onto the trail the horses churned into a sodden mush for the foot-sloggers. Less than an hour after starting, all hands were halted and turned out to get the wagons and ambulances hauled up an especially bad stretch of the Reno Road, where the narrow iron tires skidded out of control on the icy prairie, unable to gain any purchase. Grunting and cursing side by side with the teams, muscling the laden wagons up a foot at a time by rope, the men finally reached the top of the long rise where they could at last gaze at the distant horizon, north by east at the hulking mounds of the Pumpkin Buttes. For the rest of the day most of the column was in plain sight of the rest of the outfit, even though it was strung out for at least five miles or more.

“Make no mistake about it,” the old mule-whacker told Donegan that night at camp after another eighteen exhausting miles, “we’re in Injun country now, sonny. How’s your belly?”

“Just a touch of the bad water, Dick,” Seamus replied. He lay by the fire, an arm slung over his eyes, feeling the rumble of that dysentery bubble through his system. “I’ll be fine by morning.”

Donegan wasn’t alone. Almost half the command suffered diarrhea to one degree or another already, forced to drink from the mineral-laced streams. The horses fared no better, many of them suffering the same symptoms, which made for a messy stretch of trail for the infantry forced to plod along behind them.