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

Seamus slept fitfully that night as the sky closed down upon them, dreaming of holding Sam again, of clutching his son to his breast, smelling the babe’s breath after it had suckled Sam’s warm milk.

Dear God in heaven—make this a swift strike. Keep your hand at my shoulder as you have always done, I pray. For their sake … for their sake and not for mine.

That night of the sixteenth as William Earl Smith worked at the mess fire with two other orderlies, a courier rode in from Fetterman carrying parcels bursting with mail for the men. All those smoky, glowing fires fed with greasewood helped to hold back the gloom as men read one another their news from the States, greetings from loved ones back East, or clippings from newspapers many weeks old. Spirits ran high, despite the plummeting temperatures as the wind quartered out of the north, rank with the smell of snow in the air.

One man was far from buoyant at that campsite halfway to Reno Cantonment. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge figured he had taken just about all he could of the brash and arrogant Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, and stomped over to the cavalry camp to have matters settled once and for all.

After presenting himself at Mackenzie’s tent, the colonels had themselves a good heart-to-heart—finding more in common than Dodge had supposed. The cavalry commander offered the infantry commander the use of two of his orderlies for the remainder of the march, besides suggesting they alternate days taking up the lead. In that way they would eliminate entirely the competition to be the first to arrive at the good camping grounds. Mackenzie’s largess must have relaxed Dodge, for they soon began to confide in one another their common complaints about their superior.

“General Crook passes for a Sybarite,” the high-fashioned and fastidious Dodge whined, “who is utterly contemptuous of anything like luxury or even comfort—yet he has the most luxurious surroundings considering the necessity for short allowance that I have ever seen taken to the field by a general officer.”

“I suppose I’ll have to agree with you,” Mackenzie admitted, an officer who took pride in his uniform and the dashing figure he cut. “The way he dresses himself—you couldn’t tell him from the lowliest man along.”

“There is no doubt of Crook’s courage, energy, will,” Dodge continued, “but I am loath to say I begin to believe he is a humbug—who hopes to make his reputation by assuming qualities foreign to him. One thing is most certain. He is the very worst-mannered man I have ever seen in his position, though his ill manners seem to be the result rather of ignorance than of deliberate will. I believe him to be warm-hearted, but his estimate of a man will, I think, be discovered to be founded not on what a man can or will do for the service, but what he can or will do for Crook.”

“He does have his own way about things, doesn’t he?” Mackenzie observed wryly. “Far different is he from the man I served in the Shenandoah.”

“Quite. Yes,” Dodge snorted sourly. “I arrived here an hour before my men this afternoon to hunt up a good campsite and reported to the general for instructions. He sent me on my way to hunt for myself—all the choice spots already appropriated for his Indians and his mules.”

“I’ve got the feeling those Indians and mules are Crook’s favorite hobbies,” Mackenzie observed. “Hobbies he plays with while we are about the business of making war on the hostiles.”

“It disgusts me that those damned redskins wash the entrails from the beef carcasses in the creeks where our men are forced to drink somewhere downstream. He scarcely treats you and me with the dignity we deserve,” Dodge grumped, “while he’ll talk for hours with a stinking redskin or one of his dirty scouts.”

By the time the two colonels shook hands and the infantry commander parted for his bivouac, it was clear to William Earl Smith, that unlettered former railroad brakeman from Peoria, that Dodge loathed the general while Mackenzie merely tolerated Crook until the time arrived for him to break off on his own with the cavalry. That very evening two men had forged a bond that would last out the waning of the Powder River Expedition.

Wind and icy snow returned to batter the command with the gray light of false dawn the morning of the seventeenth. Horses and mules stood facing south, their rumps and tails tucked into the freezing gale. Crook sent the wagons to the front of the march while the cavalry hung back in camp until nearly nine A.M. Fires were all but futile as the horse soldiers shivered and stomped about, finally allowed to break camp and set out on the road into the teeth of the growing fury.