Few today know little of those military seizures on the reservations, wherein we see the army commanders once again persisting in their pattern of marching against those they can punish in a misguided belief that those agency bands were in fact supplying the nomadic hostiles with ponies, weapons, and warriors. In his autumn offensive, Sheridan used more than five thousand troops, those either directly involved or those who stood in reserve at the frontier posts should they be needed … a full fifth of the U.S. Army at that time!
Sheridan was proud to boast that, “For the first time, all the agencies ceased to be points of supply and re-enforcement for the hostile Indians; and henceforth the troops will have only to contend with the Indians hereditarily and persistently hostile.”
The pony and weapon seizures went on into the following year as one small warrior band after another limped in to their agencies to surrender, even after both Crook and Terry were reassigned.
But perhaps the real shame is that of all those ponies seized, the animals drew an average of only six dollars each in auction. Worse still was the fact that of the auction’s receipts, not a dollar was ever used to purchase cattle for the agencies, as had been promised. In military archives those thousands of dollars have never been accounted for.
It was surprising to me to learn that Mackenzie’s 1876 journey to that section of the Big Horn Mountains was not the first. Two years earlier in 1874 Captain Anson Mills of the Third Cavalry marched his Big Horn Expedition almost due north from Rawlins Station on the Union Pacific line, instead of starting out from Fort Fetterman to the southeast. In the fall of that year they had gone as far north as practicable before turning east, eventually reaching the rim of what is today called Fraker Mountain, which overlooks the valley where the Dull Knife Battle would take place. Because there was no way down for their horses and pack mules, Mills’s men were compelled to backtrack several miles until they could find a better way into the valley of the Red Fork. The expedition eventually did pass directly over the site in making their way downstream, exiting the canyon to the east through the same gap Mackenzie’s troops would use in approaching the Cheyenne village.
To better impress upon the reader just how steep and forbidding is the terrain at the upper end of the valley where Morning Star’s people took refuge, built breastworks, and eventually struggled in their nighttime winter climb out of the valley through what is today called Fraker Pass, let me quote that observer who accompanied Captain Mills in 1874:
The situation on the western end of the battlefield area, as I remember it from 1874, … is that of mountains, pure and simple—not “Bad Lands,” as understood by frontiersmen.
I am particularly indebted to the labors of historian Sherry L. Smith in recounting the journal of her relative, William Earl Smith—a private who served as one of Mackenzie’s orderlies during this critical campaign. Through him we have one of those rare firsthand glimpses into not only the day-to-day weather and human interest of the campaign trail, but a very microscopic look at the relations between soldier and officer in the frontier army.
She states:
The relationships among enlisted men, noncommissioned officers, and commissioned officers—[were] relationships characterized at times by affection, at others by brutality. The army caste system is vividly revealed in Smith’s description of the expedition’s daily life. He is acutely aware of a system that allows officers to abuse soldiers verbally and physically with few restraints … Smith’s account (as well as those of his military superiors) undermines the notion of a purposeful, stately, tightly organized campaign.
I am most grateful that William Earl Smith left us another of those terribly personal records we chance upon from time to time, for history is not a dull recitation of historical facts. Instead, history is the record of human events. Not merely the when and where of conflict, but more so the how and why of those clashes. If for no other reason, I want my novels to stand apart from all others for bringing the breath of life and the pain of a human soul to this crucial period in American history. How unfortunate that all too few of us were ever taught a biographical history.
So I am in Sherry Smith’s debt, for she did in her Sagebrush Soldier what more historians should be doing for the reading public, what I attempt to do as I knit together many different accounts of every campaign, every battle, in hopes that through those different points of view we will more closely arrive at what really took place. Unlike what most of the academic historians do in their work—striving to support and defend one point of view—Smith herself says:
Rather than present participants’ accounts separately, this approach aims for greater integration of perspectives. It rests on the belief that such a method lends itself to a closer approximation of the truth.
I’m grateful too for the brief, terse diary left us by Sergeant James McClellan, from whose words I have gleaned some rare nuggets of daily life for the cavalry trooper serving in Crook’s cavalry. He served out his five-year enlistment, receiving his discharge in June of 1877—the back of his certificate noting that he was credited with killing the warrior known as Bull Head.
Over half a century later Motor Travel magazine (published by the American Automobile Club) began running a two-year series of articles on the Powder River Campaign of 1876. Survivors of the battle were contacted to participate, and McClellan himself wrote seven of the articles. Perhaps most interesting to me was that during those two years of renewed interest in the campaign, an era when the motion picture was flickering into its golden age, McClellan publicly stated the time had come to produce a film of the attack on the village. He believed it should be done sooner than later as there were still a few survivors left who could serve as consultants “about the essential details.”
Needless to say, nothing ever came of his personal campaign, and he died soon thereafter in 1936. An interesting footnote to those of you who have been reading the Plainsmen Series from its beginning six years ago is that McClellan served in H Troop, Third Cavalry, under Captain Henry W. Wessels, son of the Henry W. Wessels who marched north to Fort Phil Kearny to relieve Colonel Henry B. Carrington following the disastrous Fetterman Massacre almost a decade before the army defeated the Cheyenne in the valley of the Red Fork.
It comes as no surprise to me, therefore, that history is indeed often a study of converging, diverging, then reconverging currents.
Another interesting footnote to our story is that Red Shirt—one of the seven Lakota scouts who located the Cheyenne village, and one of the two who remained behind to watch for signs of discovery—later joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s wild west show when it sailed across the ocean to England, performing before her Majesty, Queen Victoria.
Because of the cold gloom of that night, because of the cold fog settling in the valley, Red Shirt and the other scouts never got a count of lodges to report so that Mackenzie would know just exactly what he was facing at the moment of attack. Indeed, there has persisted a minor dispute as to the number of lodges in the village. A few accounts state 175 lodges. Lieutenant John Bourke himself states there were 205 lodges, while later in his own account he states there were 200. Another contemporary account, this time by Lieutenant Homer Wheeler, states there were 205 lodges. In Son of the Morning Star Evan Connell’s arduous research states there were “more than two hundred lodges.” But in the end I have chosen to go with the number given by Luther North in his record, since Mackenzie himself sent the North brothers to get him an official count: 173.