A Cold Day in Hell

by Terry C. Johnston

  Box Elder continued. “As I sat staring at that holiest of directions, I saw a mighty vision of soldiers and their Indian scouts riding toward our camp, moving out of the rising sun into this valley.”

  Morning Star swallowed, hesitating to ask for any more revelations from so powerful a mystic. “These soldiers—*

  “The soldiers and the Indian scouts charged through our camp and killed many of our people.”

  He could see that Box Elder’s rheumy old eyes were tearing now.

  The ancient one said, “Now I must go and find my son, Medicine Top, who will call for the camp crier.”

  “Yes,” Morning Star agreed, rising beside the old visionary. “Bring the crier to me so that I can tell him to alert the families that this camp will be attacked early tomorrow morning.”

  Quickly the chief bent to sweep up one of his warmest blankets before he reached the lodge door, where Box Elder cried out, his face lifted slightly toward the smoke flaps, his cloudy eyes unable to see anything but his fateful vision.

  “You must have the women and children go to the ridges and bluffs, into the high cliffs surrounding our camp,” Box Elder explained. “There they must raise up breastworks. There they should stay in hiding. Then they will be saved. See that our people do this—or we will all die.”

  By the time the sun had poked its head over the eastern rim of the valley that morning, the camp crier had spread the word and the village pulsated with activity. Ponies were being brought in, the first lodges were being unpinned, stakes torn from the frozen ground, buffalo robes rolled up around important family treasures that would be loaded upon the travois.

  While this was happening, Brave Wolf and a handful of other older warriors had gone into the sloping crevices of the ground west and north of the village to locate some places where the women and children could pile up rocks for breastworks—just as Box Elder’s vision had commanded of them. The People could abandon the village for the night and stay in the surrounding hills, where they would be safe.

  “You must leave your lodges standing!” the camp crier instructed the People when he learned that the village was being dismantled. “Do not take down your lodges! The soldiers must believe we are still in our beds when they come! Leave your lodges standing!”

  The plan might work, Morning Star believed. If the soldiers believed the village deserted, they might not go in search of the women and children in the hills. But if they did, then the warriors could then fight a holding action while their families fled.

  Now the camp’s attention turned instead to taking warm clothing, robes, and blankets with them into the hills. There were many newborns, infants, and young children. They would need to be protected from the painful, life-robbing cold that night as they waited for the white man to come sneaking in upon them.

  But before any of the women could herd their children into the hills, the Kit Fox Society crier loped through camp, shrilly calling out that Last Bull’s warriors would prevent anyone from leaving the village—just as the angry war chief had commanded yesterday.

  “Forget what the old chiefs have told you,” the crier announced. “The Kit Foxes will protect you and drive the soldiers away after our great victory is won! Look around you: our warriors now control camp—not those old men who have grown as frightened as old women! No one will be allowed to leave. It is the decree of Last Bull!”

  Some families waited for the crier to pass them by, then resumed their preparations to flee into the hills. But the rider came through camp a second time, shouting that anyone who disobeyed Last Bull’s orders to stay put would be punished. Suddenly there was the Kit Fox chief himself, darting through the sprawling village on his war pony, brandishing a long rawhide and elk-antler quirt he swore to use on anyone he caught attempting to leave. Beside him rode Wrapped Hair, second chief of the Kit Fox Society.

  Together they waded into a small group of those who were throwing robes onto their ponies.

  “Cut their cinches!” Last Bull demanded.

  From the crowd around them burst half a dozen warriors tearing their knives from their belts. Boldly they hurled the men and women aside, slashing at the cinches holding travois to the ponies’ backs, cutting saddles from the ponies’ girths, freeing rawhide strips tying up blankets and buffalo robes.

  “No one will leave!” Last Bull screamed, his lips flecked with spittle, his eyes spiderwebbed with red.

  Wrapped Hair echoed his shrill defiance of the village chiefs. “Tonight all the People will dance to celebrate our victory over the Snake—and tomorrow at dawn we will have our victory over the soldiers!”

  * Sioux Dawn, Vol. 1, The Plainsmen Series.

  * Blood Song, Vol. 8, The Plainsmen Series.

  Chapter 24

  24–25 November 1876

  Leaving Tom Moore’s pack train behind, with a single company for escort and orders to follow after a wait of two more hours, the Indian scouts led Mackenzie’s command away from Beaver Creek as the sun set behind the Big Horns, while the land was becoming nothing more than a dimly lit, rumpled white bedsheet pocked with the darker heads of sage and the faint trace of willow-lined ravines snaking darkly among the drifts of white. From time to time the column would pass a buffalo skull lying akimbo, half-in and half-out of a skiff of crusted snow. Tracks of an occasional coyote or deer or antelope crisscrossed the rippled, wind-sculpted icing smeared over the rumbling land they climbed and fell with throughout that twenty-fourth of November.

  As the command dismounted for the first of some twenty times, each man walking single file and leading his mount so they could squeeze themselves through a narrow ravine into the impenetrable bulk of the mountains, the soldiers coughed, sneezed, grumbled, and cursed—but the troopers and their allies had been ordered to enforce a strict silence, for a column moving into position for the attack, unaware that it has already been discovered by the Cheyenne, is not allowed the luxury of a great deal of noise.

  Everything that could be tied down had to be kept from causing racket. Although they were ordered not to smoke, not to light a match for their pipes, many consoled themselves with their favorite briar anyway. By and large the officers turned away without scolding—knowing that for these men forced to endure this subzero march, a bowl of Kentucky burley could be a small but meaningful pleasure.

  From time to time orders were whispered back down the column for the troops to reform in columns of twos, but soon came another command for the men to proceed in single-file through the winding, narrow passages they encountered. As the column strung itself out for more than five miles on such occasions, the men were required to stop and wait at times for more than half an hour before they could move on. While many impatiently waited out the backed-up muddle, some of the older hands dismounted and slept right where they hit the ground, reins tied around their wrists. Other men merely dozed in the saddle despite the plunging temperatures. More and more it was proving to be slow going with all the delays, with the rise and the fall of the trail—considering they already had the scent of their quarry in their nostrils and should have been closing in for the kill.

  The ranks grew all the more quiet as the darkness swelled around them like an inky, purple bruise until the ground finally smoothed, growing less rugged after they had pierced the outer wall of the mountainside. On the far side of the high peaks above them the sun sank beyond like death’s own grave as soldiers and scouts alike followed the Arapaho Sharp Nose’s trail out of the narrow gorge where they had been strung out for more than half a dozen miles, those eleven hundred men inching along in the coming dusk one at a time as the land began to lead them up, up from the plain into the darkest recesses that would ultimately draw them into the veritable heart of the Big Horn Mountains. No longer were they in the land of the curious prairie dog that would stick its head up from a hole for a peek and a protest at the passing beasts before ducking back into the warmth and darkness of its protective burrow while the frozen men and animals plodded past.

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p; Here the cliffs and towering monuments of stone closed in around them on both sides, seeming to slam shut on their rear too—forbidding any retreat.

  In the west the sky had turned from rose to purple to indigo, lowering as they pushed on through the glittering, frozen darkness, feeling their way step by icebound step in their heaving climb to over thirty-five hundred feet among the juniper, stunted jack pine, and cedar. Every man, horse, and mule of them stumbling, slipping, sliding sideways on icy patches where the sun hadn’t penetrated between the narrow battlements of wind-eroded red rock.

  Every now and then at a particularly difficult ravine an order came back for the column to “close up, close up!” Each time those at the head of a company would report to the troop in their advance that they had successfully made the crossing; the last man of that troop calling out to the company behind them in the dark, bringing them on with nothing more than the encouragement of that voice coming out of the gloom of that oppressive, frozen darkness.

  And with every narrow stream or creek they were forced to cross, the cold, frightened horses splashed the icy water onto their riders, drenching the troopers, leaving every man frozen to his marrow, every animal shuddering in uncontrollable spasms.

  Throughout their long night march the overanxious allies hurried past the slow-plodding soldiers on right flank or left, darting by singly or in pairs, all of them urging their ponies faster than the troopers pushed their big cavalry horses—until every one of the scouts had coagulated at the front of the march.

  Ready to strike.

  As the moonless winter night squeezed down, a man here and there fell out to await the tail of the column—those few who precariously clung to their saddles, careening side to side as if they were about to retch, stricken with that strange and sudden malady known as altitude sickness, perhaps numbed by the endless cold, even those few in any battle-ready regiment who are always taken with a sudden case of unquenchable fear.

  From time to time in the coallike blackness it tried to snow. None of them could really see it snowing, able only to feel the frozen crystals sting the bare, exposed, and stiffened parchment of their cheeks and noses as the wind tossed and gusted through each narrow defile while the column drew closer.

  Closer.

  Again and again the forward scouts whirled back to Mackenzie and his staff through that long, cold night—urging the soldiers to press on, faster, ever faster … morning was coming and the village was near. Impatient were the auxiliaries all to be in position before first light. On and on the scouts prodded the white men to hurry. Morning would soon be upon them. The time for attack.

  “Better that we let our Indians feel their way ahead as far as they want to,” Mackenzie muttered to those around him sometime late that night. “Some itch tells me there may well be a trap laid for us up there, the way those scouts are leading us through these narrow canyons. Perhaps the Cheyenne have a surprise waiting for us.”

  But as much as they feared it, as ready as they were for it, as closely as the soldiers watched the rising tumble of rock around them—there came no ambush.

  So dark and cold and suffocating was the night that Seamus began to believe they were the only creatures stirring in this part of the world. So small and insignificant did he feel here at the bottom of each gorge, beneath a sky so black that it seemed to go on forever, sucking every hint of warmth right out of the earth.

  Donegan could not remember ever seeing as many stars as this back east in Boston Towne. Even away from the cities and the streetlights—never could the sky be as brilliantly flecked, for only here was the air so dry. He licked his fevered lips and remembered the amber jar stuffed in his pocket. Once more he dabbed the cold dribble from his inflamed nostrils with the huge bandanna that hung around his neck, then swabbed more of the tallow over the end of his nose, into the wide, oozy cracks on his lower lip.

  Would they ever get into position to make their charge and begin the attack before daylight?

  Or would they find they had to lay to another day in some pocket away from the village and not be able to have their fight until the twenty-sixth?

  He fretted at their snail’s pace, knowing most of the others must be every bit as anxious as he was to get on with the fight. Now that they were there, now that it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass office monkey, there simply was nothing that could warm a man up like a fight for his life. A good blood-throbbing scrap of it.

  How he wanted to get this over and done with, then home to both of them.

  I’ll figure out the boy’s name on the trip back, he promised himself again. Time enough to do that, Seamus. Get this fight out of the way—and you can name your son.

  Near two o’clock the column squeezed itself again through a narrowing crimson defile the scouts from Red Cloud’s agency called “Sioux Pass.” For more than five miles the column snaked through the tall, rocky canyon, the immense walls of which were stippled with stunted trees. Directly above them glittered no more than a long angular strip of star-studded sky. Ahead in the distance hung the silver-blue quarter of a moon, quickly falling into the west after its own brief ride across the heavens.

  “Eight more miles,” came the whispered word back from the Indian trackers leading them through the darkness.

  Eight miles below the valley where the scouts claimed Mackenzie’s soldiers would find the Cheyenne village, they struck the Red Fork of the Powder River. Out of that bleak, early-morning darkness two horsemen approached the head of the column. They proved to be Red Shirt and Jackass, the two Sioux scouts who had stayed behind to keep an eye on the village. It was plain to see that their ponies were done in: Jackass’s animal stumbled, about with its weary rider and eventually fell. Both men jabbered excitedly about seeing many ponies and even counting a few lodges in the dark. During the brief halt the pair was fed hardtack and cold bacon, then told to rejoin their fellow warriors as the column pressed on into the darkness.

  Hoar frost from every nostril and mouth hung like a thickening blanket over the entire serpentine column eventually slithering itself out of the rocky gorge, emerging upon a patch of smoother, more open ground some half-mile wide by three miles in length, which the Sioux had long ago named the “Race Course.” Behind them to the east, the first telltale narrow thread of gray light stretched atop the distant horizon.

  How close were they now?

  While Seamus and the head of the march spread out there where the narrow ravine widened beside the nearby stream tumbling over its icy bed, its faint echo splashing off the canyon walls, the rest of the column came to a halt behind him. The men quieted their animals without instruction from their officers. And listened.

  They needed no prodding, for all could hear the distant, throbbing, man-made reverberation wending its way up to them from afar.

  “That’s a goddamned drum!” whispered Billy Garnett, Sioux interpreter with the expedition.

  “Hell if it ain’t!” said Billy Hunter, half-breed guide serving the North’s Pawnee battalion.

  “Shush!” someone ordered nearby.

  You could almost feel them hold their breath—eleven hundred of them now. So damned quiet a man could make out the snort of a horse halfway down the entire length of the column, maybe even hear the fart of one of Tom Moore’s mules at the very end of the entire procession.

  “Rowland!” Mackenzie called out to his headquarters group.

  “I’m here,” the squaw man replied, inching his horse forward.

  “Bring some of your Cheyenne,” the colonel ordered. “Have them take us ahead to where we might get us a look at the village.”

  Rowland gestured to Roan Bear, Cut Nose, and Little Fish, three of those who sat their ponies behind him. Wordlessly the trio led off as the squaw man and Mackenzie followed until all five were swallowed by the leafless willow choking a bend in the valley ahead.

  Now the nearly four hundred Indian allies visibly became restless, muttering and restive, barely able to contain their prima
l excitement. Most of them took this moment to pull off to one side or another, leaping from their ponies. Donegan had seen the whole process many times before, yet it never ceased to make his heart leap in anticipation—to watch these Indians go about their toilet, pulling out paints and grease, bringing forth feathers and amulets, those stuffed birds and animal skins they would tie in their hair, smearing their braids with white earth or hanging empty brass cartridges in their black tresses, every last one of them mumbling to the spirits and invoking his private war medicine now that they were within earshot of the enemy.

  Now that every last one of them knew they would not have to wait out another day.

  This was the morning of the attack.

  There were Northern Cheyenne in there. While the various Lakota bands might eventually be whipped in detail and driven back to the agencies—the Northern Cheyenne were known to fight to the last man.

  As Sharp Nose rode among the Red Cloud scouts, whispering low, signing with his quick hands, the scouts dropped to the ground, adjusting their reins and pad saddles.

  Behind Donegan the soldiers were now ordered out of their McClellans, instructed that here they would tighten cinches, check the loads in their .45-caliber single-action Colt revolvers with the seven-and-a-half-inch barrels. Make sure they had handy the hundred rounds of ammunition each of them carried for his .45/70 Springfield carbine.

  The Indians went among one another, talking low, touching hands, pounding one another on the shoulders, making low cries of the wolf or some other creature which would provide its spiritual protection now that they stood on the brink of battle.

  Donegan knew they were reminding one another that this would be a glorious day—perhaps a great day to die. Knowing that these Northern Cheyenne would put up a fight truly worthy of a warrior’s reputation.

  He fingered the buckle on his bridle, then nervously loosened both pistols in their holsters, checking next the lever and trigger action on the Model ’73 Winchester, and finally allowed himself to turn, looking up the darkened canyon whence came that low, steady hammer of a great war drum. The enemy was awake. And perhaps they were ready for the attack.