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

And the rest agreed. They decided to select four wolves to investigate what the tracks truly meant. The Old-Man Chiefs instructed the two Servant Chiefs to handpick certain young men with specific talents to go on this important mission. The Servant Chiefs went first to the lodge of Hail. There they took the young man by the arms and brought him to the Council Lodge. Again they went out and returned with Crow Necklace, one of the most respected Crazy Dog little chiefs. Again they went out and brought back Young Two Moon. Finally they returned to the Council Lodge with the last of the sacred four, High Wolf.

When the wolves were seated in a line before the old chiefs, Morning Star explained, “We have selected you four because we know we can depend upon you to go out and follow the trail Yellow Eagle and the others discovered to the south. When you find the trail, stay with it. Do not leave it until you learn who made the tracks, and where they are going. Why they are in this country.”

Then Little Wolf said, “Perhaps the trail will meet another party somewhere. As Morning Star has said, we are depending upon you to find out the answers to all our questions and to return with what we must know. Now, go catch up your strongest ponies, but return to this lodge before you set out on your journey.”

When the four had returned with their horses, weapons, blankets, and coats, the chiefs led them through the village in a long procession behind the Old-Man Crier who sang out, “Behold! I come with four young men for whom we will look in the days to come. For whom our ears will listen in the days to come. They are going out to look for the tracks of those who have sneaked into our country. This sacred four will return here when they have news of these enemies!”

The four companies drawn from units of the Fourth, Ninth, and Twenty-third infantries to man Reno Cantonment certainly enjoyed their visitors and did all they could to join in on the revelry those first two days after Crook’s men were paid and all hell broke loose. The carouse allowed Pollock’s men a brief respite from the ongoing construction expanding the warehouses, cavalry corrals, teamster shed, blacksmith shack, and the company mess kitchens, each one built of logs “half-above-ground.”

During the night of the nineteenth three shots were fired in the raucous camp, leading Colonel Dodge to call upon General Crook to have the sutler’s saloon closed. Dodge came back to the infantry camp grumbling and cursing the general: Crook had refused because he was a personal friend of the trader, and together they were partners in an Oregon sheep ranch.

So rowdy was the nonstop celebration that Dodge himself went to appeal to Pollock, asking that the cantonment commander close down the trader’s saloon. Little did the officers know that the sutler was in cahoots with another civilian who had set up an awning over his peddler’s cart some distance upstream in a copse of cottonwood, where many of the horse soldiers had been going to cut and peel the cottonwood bark to feed to their mounts as the snowstorm continued into the night.

More shots were fired in the cavalry camp by drunken soldiers after moonrise. Investigating, some of Dodge’s officers discovered the whiskey peddler, confiscated his goods, and knocked in the tops of the kegs with their rifle butts, spilling all that heady saddle varnish across the frozen ground.

Still, they were too late for one of the Fifth Cavalry troopers who had already stumbled away from the scene by himself, down to the icy bank, where he tripped and fell into the Powder River. Soaked to the gills, he belly-crawled onto the muddy bank, exhausted and unable to move any farther. At sunrise his bunkie awoke and went looking for the missing trooper, finding him dead in the frozen mud beside the river. His company scratched a hole out of the unforgiving, icy ground and laid their comrade to rest late that afternoon of the twentieth as the howling gales of wind-driven snow began to taper off, there to sleep through eternity beneath the flaky sod of Indian country.

That afternoon a party of thirty-four starving Montana miners stumbled into the cantonment. Just days before, the blizzard had caught them out and unprepared. For better than forty-eight hours they had trudged on through the jaw of the storm, the mighty winds at their backs, pushing them farther and farther south. Perhaps remembering how well some Montana prospectors had served him so ably at the Battle of the Rosebud, Crook graciously supplied the hungry civilians with some of Quartermaster John V. Furey’s rations, blankets, and tents for shelter.

Throughout the night of the twentieth the gusty winds continued to bully the land with snow flurries, keeping most of the men huddled close to their wind-whipped fires. Nonetheless, Crook’s auxiliaries were far from deterred in expressing their new friendship for one another—holding mutual feasts, dancing, and serenades far into the night.