A Cold Day in Hell (67 page)

N
ear noon that Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, it began to snow again, whipped out of the north on a cruel and cutting wind as Mackenzie’s column struggled east. By the time the command went into bivouac for the night after ten tortuous miles, the snow lay two feet deep on the level and the wind was consumed in laying up immense drifts.

As his troops were going into camp and dismounting, Mackenzie rode over to pay a call on his Indian allies. There among the scouts, Donegan watched the colonel tell of his gratitude for their service against Dull Knife’s Cheyenne. For each of
the two Sioux and two Arapaho scouts who were credited with discovering the enemy camp, Mackenzie declared that he was giving them four of the captured ponies of their choice. To the North brothers’ battalion of forty-eight Pawnee scouts, he gave sixty ponies. For any acts of individual bravery under fire, Mackenzie donated an extra animal. And for all the rest, Mackenzie stated they would be allowed to choose one horse for themselves before they departed for their agencies.

Theirs was a shabby bivouac: hardly any wood to speak of for their supper fires, fires meant to keep at bay the marrow-robbing cold as the sun dropped out of sight and the temperature fell beyond human endurance. Because of their struggle for footing on the crusty snow, the trail-weary animals had little strength left to fight down through the icy drifts for what meager grass might be found. As the stars came out in those few patches of clear sky overhead, it was a quiet, melancholy camp of many men crowding around what few fires were kindled—surrounded by their herds of morose cavalry mounts, pack mules, and captured Cheyenne ponies.

For the past few days Seamus had become gravely concerned for the bay. Already its ribs were flung up beneath its heavy winter coat the way a brass head rail might poke its spindles beneath a bedsheet. If these big American horses did not get grain, and soon, the soldiers might just be limping back to the wagon camp afoot. He shuddered, remembering the horrors endured in their horse-meat march last September;
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then recalled how he had struck a bargain with another horse during that ordeal—vowing that he would do everything he could not to allow it to go down, unable to get back up.

Man and animal alike hung their heads that night, all God’s creatures struggling to keep from freezing during that tortured, sleepless night until dawn finally arrived. They had no wood left for breakfast fires. No coffee to boil anyway. Only hardtack and cold bacon, and what good water they might find in their canteens.

Still, every man knew they would reach Crook’s wagon camp before nightfall. And that hope was enough to get these frontier warriors to their feet and pushing on at daylight. Another ten miles brought them into sight of the pickets Dodge had thrown out on the surrounding heights. The forward cavalry
command hailed the infantry, and the word instantly shot back through the column like a bolt of summer lightning.

“I see ’em!” one man yelled at the head of that first troop. “The tents! The tents!”

Cheers and huzzahs went up as the weary, frozen men straightened in their saddles and joyfully slapped the trooper riding stirrup to stirrup beside them on the back. The warmth of those tents drew on them like iron filings to a lodestone as the hundreds of infantry fell out to watch the return of Mackenzie’s victorious horse soldiers. Dodge’s men cried out their congratulations, cheered, and tossed their hats in the air as the long column snaked over the hills and down to the banks of the Crazy Woman.

There was a lot to be thankful for. Many of the cavalry received mail that day, news of home and loved ones. There were even two letters from Samantha for him. More than hot food or a chance to get out of the wind beneath some heavy army canvas—simply to read her words, to touch those pages she had held in her hands days ago, to smell of those letters for the faintest breath of her fragrance … all of it warmed the Irishman as twilight fell.

That evening by the light of a fire kindled right outside a tent he shared with Frank Grouard and two others, Seamus sharpened his stub of a pencil with his folding knife and put it to paper. The weather was far too cold for him to dare writing her in ink, he told Sam, praying she would forgive him the inelegance of the lead pencil.

But after no more than the first three sentences, Donegan fell fast asleep over the borrowed field desk. And did not awaken until he caught himself shivering in the gray, seepy cold of dawn.

Finding himself among the raspy, throaty snores of rough and unlettered men, long-haired, bearded, and caked with the stench of horses … instead of awakening within the warm bosom of his little family.

For Young Two Moon there was nothing warm about the last two mornings. As they moved out of the mountains into the foothills, it snowed off and on throughout the day, and each night it grew so cold even he found it hard to move come the dawn.

Yet some of the young warriors had managed to locate some game. This, like the horse meat that had sustained them, the women would throw onto the glowing red bed of coals in the
fires, as they had no cooking utensils. Using their belt knives, the men occasionally would turn over the strips and slabs of meat until they were properly roasted. The old folks and the little ones were always fed first. And with what was left, the women and warriors finally ate at every stop. Never was there anything left but hoof and hide.

Joining Yellow Eagle, Turtle Road, Beaver Heart and a few others, Young Two Moon had mounted some of the stronger ponies and left the main group behind as they skirted the foothills to the south. These young men intended to see once more where the soldiers were going, and possibly steal back some of their captured herd from the Indian scouts.

Early in the evening the warriors caught up with the soldier column after it had settled in for the winter night—fires glowing, men talking, many of the
ve-ho-e
attempting sleep beneath their blankets. Some distance beyond the head of the soldier march the warriors discovered the pony herd, this night watched over by the
Tse-Tsehese
men who were scouting for the soldiers.

On that subfreezing night, those guards had little idea they were watched by the ten warriors as the herders went to the mouth of a draw where they would be protected from the wind and built themselves a shelter from dried brush, bark, and grass. Inside, the herd guards built a fire. It was not long before Young Two Moon and the others—waiting silently in the snow and the cold—heard the snoring of the guards.

“Those ponies will remember our smell?” Yellow Eagle asked in a whisper.

“It does not matter. We move among them slowly,” Young Two Moon asserted, “they will come to know our smell.”

“Then we can take them home to our people,” Turtle Road declared.

It was as Young Two Moon had said it would be. They went among the unguarded herd, stroking the ponies, breathing in the nostrils of some of the mares, then slipped horsehair ropes around the necks of ten ponies. These few the young warriors led up the long slope to the north. In the dark, silvery silence of that winter night, many of the herd followed obediently.

And once beyond the hilltop, Young Two Moon signaled the others.

“Now we ride!”

With quiet yips of excitement, the warriors leaped to the backs of the ponies they had brought to this place from the Peopic’s
march and quickly got the herd of eight-times-ten moving into the snowy night.

“It is a blessing upon us!” Little Wolf cried out as the ten warriors returned just before dawn with the horses. “Now more of the old ones and the ones crippled with cold can ride.”

They continued that day down Lodgepole Creek
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all the way until the People reached the “Big Lake”
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before following their scouts over the divide to the head of Crow Standing Creek,
†
where darkness caught them for a third cold night, forced to huddle out of the wind and snow, taking shelter down in the coulees and draws near the frozen streambank.

It was to this camp early in the morning that Big Head and Walks Last returned from their ride with five others back to the burned village in the Red Valley. They had gone back to search for any ponies that might have run off into the hills then wandered back to the People’s camp once the soldiers deserted the canyon. None of the seven warriors brought in any horses.

The white man had taken them all.

The fight in that red canyon would eventually claim one last victim—its daring cavalry commander.

But for now, ever since returning to the Crazy Woman camp, rumor had it Crook was going to return the troops to winter quarters. There’d be no more god-awful chasing around in the cold and the snow.

For Richard I. Dodge, it was just about the best news he had heard through this whole insufferable campaign.

Then at eleven
A.M
. that Thursday, 30 November, one of Crook’s men came by to pay a courtesy on the colonel, informing Dodge that the general was dispatching twenty-five of the best men on the strongest horses to follow up the rumor that there was a large band of Cheyenne warriors in the neighborhood under a chief called White Antelope, ready to attack the wagon camp. Earlier that morning Crook had sent out Luther North and four Pawnee to push north through the deep snow to Clear Creek, where they were to look for sign of the fleeing village.

Then at noon what cavalry wasn’t on guard duty turned out to solemnly commit five of their number to the frozen, rock-hard Wyoming ground. Between two long double lines of silent mounted men, the thirty pallbearers trudged with their blanket-wrapped corpses to the common grave. Nearby sat the sad-eyed spectators—Sioux, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Shoshone and the others—in all their wild finery as they witnessed this most final of the white man’s rites.

All morning long soldiers had struggled in relays to force open the breast of the earth just enough to admit these five young soldiers. As the hundreds fell silent, two officers read from the Book of Common Prayer, then Crook said a few words over
the grave. In the end seven guns were fired in three relays, the last sharp rattle disappearing over the windswept hills before a lone trooper took up the mournful notes of “Taps.” As the quiet returned to the valley of the Crazy Woman, one of the men from the Third played a sad dirge on his tin fife, each plaintive note quickly carried off by the stiffening wind.

Lieutenant McKinney’s body rested in the back of a freight wagon—to be returned east by way of wagon and rail, there to be buried among his people.

Yet for all the excitement of Mackenzie’s return, and later the melancholy of the burial, for once there wasn’t all that much for his infantry to do that afternoon but rotate the guard and watch the cavalry troops grain and water their horses, besides wolfing down their poor Thanksgiving dinner of fried bacon and flapjacks.

Clutching a cup of steaming coffee, Dodge returned to his tent and his diary, where he confided his first intimations of a troubled Ranald Mackenzie, who seemed to be plagued by second thoughts about the success of his Dull Knife fight.

Indeed, for much of last night and into today, Dodge found Mackenzie consumed with chastising himself for not pressing the warriors once the Cheyenne encapsulated themselves in the rocks. While both Crook and especially Dodge offered their words of encouragement, the cavalry commander nonetheless appeared to be snared in a deepening well of despair, delusion, and melancholia.

Dodge went on to pen in his diary: