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

Turning upstream, Mackenzie and Smith crossed the last three miles to reach the Reno Cantonment, established in mid-October as a supply base for the army’s expeditions when Crook decided to press his advantage against the winter roamers. Situated on a low stream terrace some ten feet above the floodplain on the west bank of the Powder, the post sat nearly opposite the mouth of the Dry Fork in a big, gentle bend in the river. Here the soldiers could be close to water as they went about constructing their log and dugout structures on fairly level land.

Reno Cantonment also added a military presence here at the southern edge of those hunting grounds most fiercely defended by the Sioux and Cheyenne, while Nelson Miles’s Tongue River Cantonment established an undeniable presence at the northern edge of the traditional hostile territory. As far as the War Department saw the situation, it appeared they had the enemy surrounded and contained, if not corralled. All that was left was mopping things up.

A Pennsylvanian by birth, Captain Edwin Pollock of the Ninth Infantry had first joined the volunteers to fight the rebellion in the South, becoming regular army after the Civil War. An officer whom the carping Dodge characterized as “the most conceited ass that every existed. He thinks he can give advice to the Almighty and talks to General Crook and everybody else as if he tolerated them….” Pollock commanded the army’s new supply base on the Powder River, nothing more than fifteen log dugouts scraped out of the nearby embankments, along with a crude hospital and cavalry corrals—all of them the barest of shelter thrown up against the horrendous thunderstorms and the blinding blizzards that frequented that country. Nonetheless, here they were within sight of the Big Horn Mountains.

Earl Smith found the captain to be no different from most other officers—tolerable at best. Presenting themselves at the commanding officer’s quarters, Mackenzie introduced himself and asked Pollock to recommend a site for the cavalry camp.

“About a mile below the fort,” the captain replied, gesturing downstream. “There’s level ground enough for your battalions, with a high embankment that will block most of the wind coming out of the north and west. Close by, your stock will find good grazing along the bottoms and up on the benches.”

The first of the command reached the ford at midafternoon, the wagon train hoving into sight soon thereafter. But true to Mackenzie’s fears, the teamsters had their worst struggle of the journey so far in getting those 168 wagons and 7 ambulances down the icy corduroy of the south bank, and across the soupy quagmire of the river bottom, where the half-frozen gumbo seized hold of the wheels and refused to let go.

The cold air turned an icy blue as the sun began to fall into the last quarter of the southwestern sky, soldiers and civilians alike cursing, whipping, flogging the animals, throwing their shoulders against those wagons, icy water swirling about their thighs as the men struggled to muscle the first freighters across. The process only grew steadily worse as the river bottom became all the more churned with hooves, wheels, and boots. At last Mackenzie organized his men together in relays, throwing ropes around the struggling teams and hauling each wagon across the Powder by sheer willpower alone.

As each wagon clattered up the north bank onto the flat ground, a cheer went up from the exhausted relay that would now get a few minutes of rest while another twenty men slid down the icy bank, locked their frozen hands around the inch-thick ropes, then set their feet in the rutted mud and laid their backs into the task at hand.

One by one by one, Crook’s supplies crossed the murky Powder. From here on out, the expedition was firmly in this last great hunting ground of the Sioux and Cheyenne. Ten summers before, Red Cloud had warned the army that it would forfeit every soldier who crossed the Powder. But after a decade Red Cloud had become a toothless old lap dog, corralled at Camp Robinson.

Yet somewhere north of here lay the village of Crazy Horse.

From the way Smith saw Mackenzie staring into the distance that twilight, the colonel must have been trying to sense where he would find his elusive quarry—as he had done time and again chasing down the slippery Quanah Parker.*

Never before had the Fourth Cavalry marched so far north to fight an enemy. For Ranald Mackenzie the stakes had never been so high.

* Reap the Whirlwind, Vol. 9, The Plainsmen Series.

* Dying Thunder, Vol. 7, The Plainsmen Series.

Chapter 19

18–19 November 1876

“Don’t you agree, Seamus?” John Bourke asked that Saturday evening at their fire near the packers’ camp as icy shards of snow danced and pirouetted on a capricious wind about their bivouac. “That God is on the side of the heaviest battalions?”

“Sounds like a god-blamed army maxim.” Donegan answered in turn.

“Napoleon,” Bourke replied.