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

Rather than flakes, the storm flung icy pellets at them, coating every man and beast with a layer of white, stinging the eyes and every patch of bare skin. Horses and mules plodded into the shifting winds, their muzzles straining forward with their task, barely able to breathe. Stout-hearted infantrymen struggled forward a foot at a time, hunched over, heads lowered as they covered mile after mile of that high, rolling mesa country. Somewhere past midday the command climbed to the top of the divide, where they finally looked down upon the Powder River Valley. Far to the northwest lay the Big Horn Mountains, all but their base hidden by the storm that failed to let up, icy flakes lancing down from a sky that continued to close in about the column with every passing hour, obscuring all but a frosty ring around the sun and creating that peculiar western phenomenon the frontiersmen referred to as a sun dog.

It was not until the late afternoon that the snow let up and the wind finally died, about the time Crook passed the order to make camp where the men could find room for their bedrolls and graze for the stock along the Dry Fork of the Powder. Some of Tom Moore’s packers had reached the campsite an hour before the first of the column, reporting that they had flushed out a small party of Indians who had scurried off east toward Pumpkin Buttes. The weary, cold men had struggled through another twenty miles of high prairie.

Just after dark two ice-coated frontiersmen showed up at the cavalry bivouac with a trio of Shoshone warriors, asking for General Crook’s camp. Mackenzie came out of his tent and introduced himself in a wreath of frost tinged orange by the nearby fire.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, General Mackenzie,” the taller of the pair replied as he dismounted and walked up to shake hands. “Name’s Tom Cosgrove. This here’s Texas Bob Eckles—but he goes by Yancy. We come to report in to Crook.”

“You’ve brought in the Snakes, I take it.”

“A hundred five of ’em, waiting up the road at Reno Cantonment for you,” Cosgrove declared. “Every last one hankering to get in their licks on Crazy Horse just about as bad as any, I figure.”

“The old chief Washakie with you again this time?”

“No,” Cosgrove said, shaking his head. “Old man’s got a fit of the rheumatiz pretty bad …” and he rubbed his own gloves together. “We both figured it wouldn’t do to have him out in this goddamn cold.”

“No matter—the general will be pleased to know you’re here,” Mackenzie added. “Myself, I’ve heard tell a little of you, Cosgrove.”

“Oh?” The squaw man stopped in his tracks and turned with renewed attention on Mackenzie.

“From a friend of yours who served me two years ago down in Texas.”

“At the Palo Duro?” Cosgrove asked, his voice rising in excitement. “By damn, you must mean that big gray-eyed Irishman Donegan!”

“One and the same.”

“Where would I find him?”

“Likely somewhere over by the packers, I hear,” Mackenzie offered. “Tell me, Mr. Cosgrove—is it true what I’ve heard about him and one of your Shoshone bucks standing over Guy Henry’s body, guarding it with their lives at the Rosebud fight?”*

“If what you heard was that they stood back to back and shot at Sioux until their guns was empty—then they set to swinging those damned rifles like they was war clubs—cracking skulls and breaking bones, pitted agin Sioux bullets … then you heard right, Colonel.”

Breaking camp at daylight on Saturday morning, the eighteenth, the column continued down the valley of the Dry Fork of the Powder through the austere, ocher countryside streaked and pocked with skiffs of icy snow beneath a graying sky. By midmorning, Mackenzie had clearly become impatient to reach Reno Cantonment. He turned to his orderly from Peoria, Illinois.

“Smith, come with me.” Then kicked his horse into a lope.

Together the two jumped ahead of the column through the rest of that morning, anxious to cover the nineteen miles. By early afternoon they had reached the Powder River itself, stopping momentarily at the icy, hoof-pocked ford.

“This is gonna play hell on Crook’s wagons,” Mackenzie muttered, then urged his horse down the graded slope into the water.

Through the sluggish, ice-choked water the two riders pushed their mounts, up the north bank where they plodded slowly through the ruins of old Fort Reno: now nothing more than a jumble of charred timbers, abandoned caissons, and wagon running gears poking their black limbs out of the icy mantle of white.