A Cold Day in Hell

by Terry C. Johnston

  I do not think any of the principal bands will move in unless there is some strong power brought to bear to cause them to be obedient.

  It was a sentiment shared by Sherman, Sheridan, and Crook.

  Because the army had been receiving reports that three major camps would be wintering in the Powder River country—one band under Crazy Horse, another of Sans Arc, and a third of Northern Cheyenne—for weeks now Mackenzie made himself a nettlesome burr under Crook’s saddle, irritating the commanding general with dispatches from Camp Robinson, the likes of which:

  A great many Indians have I think gone north quite recently and I wish that you would either come here or order me to get them together.

  In the end Crook gave in and called Mackenzie to Laramie to plan this swift, decisive action against the agency Sioux.

  Because he was certain the “friendlies” were harboring renegades responsible for raids off the reservation and would never cooperate with the Indian Bureau’s civilian authorities, Mackenzie had long espoused that the agency should be sealed off and that all communication with the resident bands be prohibited except through the military. It was a recommendation wholeheartedly agreed to by Sherman on down.

  The Fourth Cavalry was now free to clamp down with whatever means were necessary.

  Then, while Mackenzie was conferring with Crook at Fort Laramie for his march over to this northwestern corner of Nebraska bent on unhorsing and disarming the bands—a time consumed in requesting Winchester magazine arms for his men, a request the quartermaster corps never approved—the jumpy agent suddenly telegraphed his growing anxiety when those two troublesome bands under Red Cloud and Red Leaf just up and moved some twenty-five miles away from the agency, camping in the vicinity of Chadron Creek.

  When Major George A. Gordon of the Fifth Cavalry, the commander at Camp Robinson, ordered the bands back, the stubborn chiefs turned a deaf ear to the soldier chief. From the rebellious camps there was even some grumbling talk of war, which made Crook fear the bands were preparing to flee north in whole or in part. Unknowingly, the Indians had just handed Sheridan, Crook, and Mackenzie the ideal raison d’être for the coming action. Now the Fourth could move.

  Only problem was that, to Donegan’s way of thinking, the government and the army were in cahoots once more to make the tribes out to be the villains—just as they had schemed to do almost a year before when they had ordered the wandering bands back to their reservations or suffer military action. Once more the white officials were dealing with the tribes using two faces: on the one hand, Washington had dispatched its blue-ribbon commission to treat with the reservation Sioux to sell the Black Hills; while the other hand was dispatching army units to impoverish those very same reservation bands.

  This morning’s action against Red Cloud’s and Red Leaf’s runaways had been specifically designed by Sheridan, Crook, and Mackenzie to cripple, if not geld, that peace commission.

  As well as designed to strengthen the military’s hand before Crook’s army marched north into the teeth of winter to capture Crazy Horse once and for all.

  * Black Sun, Vol. 4, The Plainsmen Series.

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

  Chapter 13

  23 October 1876

  Trouble at Red Cloud Agency;

  CHEYENNE, October 21.—Advices from Red Cloud Agency on the 20th are as follows: Immediately after the commissioners left the agency, recently, the Indians moved and camped about twenty-five miles away, sending in only squaws and a few bucks on issue days to draw rations. They were so far away that no information could be had as to their movements and doings, and doubtless many of them were off on raiding and plundering expeditions. Word was sent to them by Captain Smith, acting United States Indian agent, to come into the agency. To this they paid no attention. Meanwhile General Crook and several of his staff arrived there, and word was immediately sent to these Indians that no more rations would be issued till they came into the agency where they belonged and remained. Yesterday was issue day and very few Indians were present. Red Cloud was present, but none of his band, and he refused to receive rations. The ultimatum sent them will not be receded from in the smallest degree, and unless it is complied with trouble is anticipated. Lieutenant Chase, with 1,000 cavalry, left Fort Russell yesterday to intercept the raiding parties operating in the vicinity of the Chug.

  He heard a dog barking, snarling, growling somewhere at the south side of camp, where the pony herd was grazing.

  It was black in Red Cloud’s lodge. But looking up to the junction of the eighteen poles, the Oglalla chief could see the paling of the sky. Dawn would come soon. Perhaps the dog had nosed some wild animal out early to find its breakfast.

  Then a second dog took up the warning, and quickly a third. Suddenly dogs were barking throughout camp.

  Throwing his robes aside as his wife sat up beside him, her eyes wide with fear, Red Cloud yanked on the furry buffalo-hide winter moccasins and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. At the doorway he grabbed a belt of cartridges and looped it over his shoulder, then took into his hand the cold iron of the Winchester repeater that stood ready against a frosty pole.

  By the time he ducked his head from the canvas cover and stood upon the old snow that crackled beneath his feet, many of the men in the village were emerging with their weapons. Dogs raced here, then there, as the forms emerged out of the frosty mist hanging like shreds of old, dingy canvas among the leafless trees bordering Chadron Creek.

  Men on horseback! Most of them the Scalped Heads—Pawnee. Long had they been wolves for the soldiers.

  Behind the Scalped Heads came mounted soldiers, their horses snorting great jets of steam from their nostrils, bobbing their heads, pawing the ground, eyes saucering with fright as the white men fought to maintain control of their animals there among the foreign smells of the village.

  A cold rock in his belly told Red Cloud that the Oglalla’s ponies were already in the hands of these Pawnee.

  Somewhere among the ring of blue, bundled white soldiers on horseback a voice cried out, answered by more voices barking their wasichu words. The horsemen came to an immediate halt. Everywhere Red Cloud looked, from side to side, turning slowly to gaze behind him, the village was ringed with these silent sentries on their restive, snorting, frost-wreathed horses. Like filmy, disembodied ghosts taking shape out of the coming of day.

  Then a voice barked more wasichu words and three men emerged from the soldiers’ noose. One was a soldier. And the other white man Red Cloud knew as Todd Randall—a squaw man with a Lakota wife. The third, clearly a half-blood. The soldier said something, and the dark-skinned one nodded before he shouted to the camp in Lakota.

  “You will surrender your camp! You will give over all your ponies to the soldiers. And then your men must give up every gun your people have in this village.”

  Red Cloud swallowed hard, hearing the muttering of so many brave men nearby—his friends and relations—as his mind feverishly grappled with what to do now that they were surrounded.

  Around him he heard the mad rustle as some of the women scurried into the brush with the children. White men shouted, growling like wolves, forcing the women and children back as their big American horses advanced out of the shreds of frozen fog.

  Finally, the chief took a step closer to the half-blood and asked, “If I do not surrender our camp?”

  Atop his pawing pony the half-blood shrugged, and without a word he made a slight gesture that was likely lost on even the white man beside him.

  “I see,” Red Cloud finally replied. “These soldiers and their wolves will murder our women and children, will butcher the old ones in my village.”

  “It is a good thing you understand.”

  “Ah,” the chief answered, still grappling with it, his finger still inside the trigger guard of his repeater, arguing with himself on whether to fight and die where he stood, or whether to listen to what this half-blood said about giving over all their ponies a
nd guns.

  “Well?” the half-blood snapped impatiently.

  With reluctance Red Cloud wagged his head. “If I surrender to these soldiers—what do they offer me in return?”

  “Nothing.”

  “N-nothing?” he stuttered, feeling the severe chill slip beneath the folds of his blanket for the first time since he had emerged from the warm robes and his wife’s body.

  With another shrug of one shoulder, the half-blood scout and interpreter replied, “Perhaps not nothing … at least your people will have your lives in return.”

  “I know him!” one of the warriors suddenly growled as he came to stand behind Red Cloud, pointing at the half-blood. “He is a liar and his scalp should be mine!”

  “Quiet!” the chief ordered. “It matters not if this half-blood is a liar, for we do not have to trust to his words. With our own eyes we can see he brings many, many of his friends to kill us if we don’t do as he tells us.”

  The interpreter gestured with a thumb over his shoulder and said, “Then I can tell the soldier chief that your people will lay down their weapons and turn over their ponies?”

  Red Cloud looked left, then right, and behind him once more as if to remind himself that the entire village was ringed with horsemen, their weapons drawn. With a crushing resignation he turned back to the half-blood and nodded. “Yes. Tell your soldier chief his warriors do not need to kill women and children this morning, nor do they need to trample our old ones with the hooves of their horses before the sun rises. We are at peace with the white man—”

  “Then tell these others,” the half-blood demanded as he shifted in the saddle uneasily. “Tell them to drop their guns.”

  To his warriors Red Cloud shouted his command, explaining that they had no chance to make a fight of it, that they must think of protecting their families rather than spilling their blood on this ground. This, perhaps, was the hardest to say to his friends—most of whom had remained with him for many a winter.

  Together they had risen up out of hiding in the snow and swarmed over the Hundred in the Hand near the Pine Fort.*

  Together they had fought a day-long battle against the soldiers and their medicine guns the following summer,†

  And together they had driven the soldiers from their thieves’ road cutting through the Lakota hunting ground for what was to be all time.

  But the white man had eventually returned to take back his promise, to take back the Black Hills too. Red Cloud’s Bad Face band had little left them now that they lived on this reservation at the largess of the white agent.

  Now this morning the white man and his Indian friends were there to take the last of what the Oglalla had—their ponies and their weapons.

  As most of the cartridge belts and rifles clattered onto the frozen ground, the half-blood sneered and said, “It is good, old-woman chief. Once you were strong—but now you give up like a woman.”

  “What … what are you called?” Red Cloud demanded in a loud, clear voice that hung in the sharp, cold air above them all, halos formed with every syllable from his lips.

  “Me?” asked the half-blood. “I am called Grabber by your people.”

  “Yes. I thought so,” Red Cloud said sadly as he bowed his head and closed his eyes to more than the sting of the cold.

  “Then you know of me, old-woman chief?”

  Red Cloud opened his eyes and said with what strength there remained in his tired body, “You are the one who turned your back on Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. And now you bring these soldiers here to take what little my people have left.”

  To Donegan’s way of thinking, Red Cloud sure had picked one hell of a bad time to assert his independence, even if all the old chief had sought to accomplish was to move his people away from the agency to avoid what he could of the hostilities clearly looming on the horizon.

  Once he had the Oglalla men under the muzzles of his guns, Mackenzie ordered the women in camp to be about taking down their lodges and packing up their few earthly goods for the trip back to the agency. But no matter that Frank Grouard translated the soldier chief’s order into their Lakota tongue, the women in that village refused to obey.

  “Goddammit!” Mackenzie roared. “If they don’t comply, you tell them I’ll put this whole place to the torch. Then they won’t have a thing to drag back to the agency!”

  Clutching the cold brass receiver of the new Winchester, Donegan watched as Grouard’s words fell here and there among the sad-eyed, motionless women like slaps with a braided rawhide quirt. Still, they stoically stared at the soldier chief, refusing to budge.

  “Are they daring me, Grouard?” demanded Mackenzie, his face flushing with anger.

  “Can’t say, General,” Frank replied, scratching in his beard and extracting a louse he cracked between two fingernails and pitched aside.

  “Tell them they have five minutes to begin complying or I’ll start burning.”

  “I’ll tell ’em if you want me to,” Grouard said. “But these are people who don’t have no idea of what a minute is, five minutes, or a hull goddamned day.”

  “Jesus Christ!” snapped the exasperated officer all but under his breath. “Mr. Dorst,” he called his adjutant forward. “Call up Captain Lee’s men. Tell him to start with that lodge … right over there.”

  “Yes, sir, General!” cried Second Lieutenant Joseph H. Dorst.

  D Troop came forward from that circle surrounding Red Cloud’s camp beside Chadron Creek. For a moment things grew very tense as the warriors grumbled angrily when a trio of the soldiers pulled back door coverings and invaded their homes, re-emerging with firebrands they held aloft, flames sputtering, crackling in the dim gray light of an icy dawn. As the warriors shuffled and stirred over the weapons lying at their feet, the rest of Lee’s company held their carbines on the anxious Oglalla, who glared back at the soldiers with deadly hate.

  Captain John Lee barked, repeating his order. The trio turned to the three nearest lodges and went about attempting to set the frozen buffalo hides and frosted canvas on fire.

  Women shrieked, their tongues trilling in a call to their men. Weary and weakened old men began to keen death songs and stamp around on arthritic legs in tiny circles. Here, then there, a young man began singing his war song—strong and clear, faces turned in prayer toward the morning sky.

  The hair rose on Seamus’s neck to hear the men call for the mysteries to intervene, to hear so many women crying pitiably, to feel the babbling squall of frightened children and babies scrape down his backbone—reminding him he too was now a father.

  Mackenzie’s men sat atop their mounts like stone griffins, watching as a lone woman rushed forward, with her bare hands attempting to beat out the first flames licking up the side of her lodge. Two of the soldiers lunged over her, pulling the screaming woman back with great effort, dragging her legs through the snow as she collapsed, sobbing and wailing, tearing at her hair.

  Here and there among the camp one of North’s Pawnee burst from a lodge with a great and gleeful gush of chatter, holding a captured trophy aloft for all his comrades to see.

  The flinty eyes of the Oglalla chief registered only hate. Never before in Red Cloud’s life had he been talked to by a white man in the stern matter in which Mackenzie had addressed him. He was, after all, the chief who had brought the army to its knees in the two years preceding 1868 when the government finally cried uncle and gave up the Bozeman Road. Up until the dawning of this day, the white soldiers and treaty-talkers had all negotiated with Red Cloud.

  But dealing with this Bad Hand Kenzie was something altogether different, Seamus brooded. Instead of any pretense at diplomacy, the colonel told Red Cloud the way things would be, and that was that. Never before had the infamous Oglalla chief been made to feel he was in the presence of his superiors—until now.

  At long last the chief spoke again, this time not to Grouard. But to his own people. Although the Irishman did not understand Red Cloud’s tongue, it was plain that his voice
rang strong, confident, filled with uncompromising pride. And when the Oglalla leader had finished, his people visibly seemed to sag collectively before turning as one, returning to their lodges where they went about doing what they had been ordered by the soldier chief.

  In the process Mackenzie’s men counted over 120 men of fighting age among some 240 of Red Cloud’s people in that village, yet from those warriors they confiscated no more than fifty serviceable rifles. Outside camp the Pawnee finished rounding up 755 ponies after firing a few shots over the head of one brave herder, a young boy who attempted to save a bunch of the horses by driving them off. While the soldiers allowed the women to select enough of those captured ponies to drag their travois for the return trip to the agency, only the old and the infirm, those too young or simply too feeble, were allowed ponies to ride on the journey. The rest were forced to walk on the fringes of their travois animals, completely surrounded by a slow-moving procession of soldiers dressed in their long, thick blue-wool caped coats.

  A few miles down the trail Mackenzie rendezvoused with Major Gordon’s battalion come from capturing the Brule camp of Red Leaf, chief of the Wazhazha Lakota for more than ten summers. Together the two villages accounted for more than three hundred lodges and some four hundred people being driven in under the muzzle of those army rifles.

  Red Cloud himself likely suffered the heaviest personal loss: four family lodges, in addition to seven prized horses and one light wagon—gifts presented him during his recent visit to see the Great Father in Washington City. Clearly the old chief was coming to learn that what the Great Father gave, the Great Father could take away.

  At sundown that Monday, Mackenzie determined that he would again divide his forces. After a brief halt Major Gordon was given charge of a battalion of four companies who would hurry on to Camp Robinson with the captured men of fighting age. Meanwhile, the colonel’s battalion would follow at a slower pace, escorting the women, children, and the infirm, intending to reach their destination by the following noon.