Indian Wars

Overview

It had been a hot and miserable summer. The nation's centennial celebration had been marred by the news that Custer and more than 210 of his men had been killed in a battle with the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne in a remote area know as Little Bighorn. The nation was shocked and called for immediate retribution. Little if any consideration was given to the broken promises and treaties of the white man - the cause of the "Great Sioux Wars".

Traditional enemies of allied Cheyenne and Sioux - names such as the Pawnee and Crow - took up arms with the soldiers. Colonel Ranald McKenzie, whom at the close of the Civil War had been referred to by General Grant as "the most promising young officer in the Army", had been placed in charge of the 4th Cavalry. McKenzie, loved by his men, had gained a reputation as one of the nation's greatest Indian fighters with victories in Texas and in the Red River War on the Southern Plains. On August 17, 1876 Mackenzie and the 4th were transferred to the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska to manage captured Sioux. But in October he was directed to march north with General Crook, his commanding officer, to locate Crazy Horse. There were many skirmishes between troops and Indians during the summer months at places such as Warbonnet Creek, Spring Creek and Cedar Creek. The intent of the Army was containment but there was little hesitation to use deadly force among not only native warriors, but women and children as well.

It started off as a warmer than usual late fall. On November 14th, 1876 Crooks troops departed Ft. Fetterman, Wyoming for Ft. Reno. In route, General Crook received word from his scouts that a large Cheyenne camp in central Wyoming, not far from present day site of Kaycee, Wyoming. Crook immediately directed Colonel McKenzie to round up the Cheyenne at all cost and march them back to Fort Reno. During the march to the encampment, the weather become brutally cold.

Chief Dull Knife and his people had chosen a remote and beautiful valley in which to winter. The hills were alive with game, and trout were abundant in the Red Fork which crisscrossed the valley floor. It was possible that white men had never seen this valley before. In fact, this was not a normal winter home of the Cheyenne and so appeared secure from the hounding soldiers. The Cheyenne must have wondered who previously had left tepee circles scattered all over the fields. Unknown native brothers had camped there for perhaps several thousand years.

For the most part, recent times had been the better times of overall bad times. With their brothers the Sioux, the Cheyenne had won a decisive victory at Little Bighorn Valley when General Reno had first attacked women picking roots. The Sioux and Cheyenne had not planned the attack - it had just happened. Just a few years earlier, Custer had bravely walked into a Minnesota Cheyenne camp and promised that if the Cheyenne agreed to go to the Black Hills, they would be protected from soldiers and settlers. But that promise was broken when yellow rock was found in the Black Hills. No one trusted Custer and now he was dead.

But Dull Knife suspected that the soldiers might be aware they camped in this valley. He only hoped that the winter months and the remoteness would dissuade them from attacking. Tonight the camp would celebrate. In a skirmish with Pawnees just days before, more than 15 scalps had been taken. Even though the weather was worsening and Dull Knife had advised against it, Last Bull, another Cheyenne leader, chose to maintain tradition and celebrate their victory. Uncharacteristic of the Cheyenne, few men maintained lookout. Just before dawn, celebrations began to subside and most families removed their clothing and went to bed.

It was an excruciating march for the soldiers. They trudged all night, straight thru rugged terrain and box canyons barely wide enough for a single column. Most of the rough country was experienced in pitch dark with worsening weather. In the early morning hours of November 17th, solders could hear the distant celebration of songs and drums.

Just as daylight was breaking and the celebration had subsided, Mackenzie and his men charged the camp. For the most part it was a total surprise. Women and children screamed and cried. The sounds of rifles firing sounded like hundreds of cannons. Most Cheyenne ran and fought naked in frigid temperatures. Immediately the warriors tried to gather and send the women and children, still naked, into the hills nearby the valley. When the Pawnee scouts saw the women and children flee, they began to persu e with the intent of massacre. Upon seeing this, Colonel McKenzie placed solders between the Pawnee and innocents. McKenzie was opposed to indiscriminate killing and had no intention of wiping out the village.

Sometime about noon, the battle ended with about seven soldiers and twenty-five Cheyenne killed and many more wounded. Efforts were made to round up the warriors, women and children that escaped into the hills with no progress. This is when the real tragedy of the battle began. In an effort to escape, the refugees attempted to trudge north to meet up with the Sioux. Unfortunately the temperatures dropped to 40 degrees below zero. Many of those injured as well as women and children froze to death. Many were still naked to the elements. Stories were past down of the few ponies they possessed being cut open so that women and children could climb in to survive.

After days and weeks of walking, the few survivors made their way to the Sioux encampment. But for all practical purposes, the way of the Cheyenne died in those fields. Eventually, the Sioux and Cheyenne were rounded up and sent onto reservations with little regard for signed treaties of the past.

Soldier Accounts of the Dull-Knife Battle

From the perspective of the charging soldiers and scouts, most of the Northern Cheyenne village lay to the south of the eastward flowing Red Fork. Smoke curled up from the tipis, which, arranged in an ellipse, stretched for nearly one half mile along the thickly fringed banks of willow and cottonwood trees. In the frosty morning light the soldiers could discern steep, sturdy, redstone hillsides on the northern and southern flanks of the village. On the west, the terrain sloped gently toward the surrounding mountains.

Just before the white men and their Indian allies heard the command to charge, Lieutenant John Bourke later recalled, "all the discontent and disquietude engendered during that night of cold and anxiety came . . . our eyes nervously scanned the battlements behind which hostile sharp-shooters might within the next few hours be taking position. It might be our misfortune to have to fight our way back - who could tell?"

Among those so preoccupied was Private Smith, who briefly mused on Custer's fate under similar circumstances earlier that year, but then realized . . .

At the head of the thundering column rode the Shoshone and Bannocks on one side, with the Pawnee on the other, and the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoes in the center. Within several hundred yards of the village, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie ordered Major Frank North and his Pawnee scouts to cross from the south bank of the Red Fork to the north in order to join the main body and to avoid the dangers of dividing the force. This, North later complained, slowed the charge, particularly when some Pawnee ponies became mired down in the creek bed, allowing the Northern Cheyenne more precious time to evacuate their families. Meanwhile, Private Smith hurried back toward the village after relaying his message to the white soldiers to quicken their pace:

As the sun rose over the battlefield, various companies took position to prevent the Cheyenne from slipping in behind the troops and attacking the invaders from the rear. Others stormed through the village to force out sharpshooters still within, while another company occupied a small fringe of timber just beyond the village. Frank North and the Pawnee took possession of the mostly abandoned village itself. Although, as Smith noted, nearly all the women and children had been spirited out of the lodges and into the surrounding hills, the Cheyenne fighters did not retire from the field altogether. Instead, they held onto their natural fortifications in the high rocks, continued to level their careful aim at the soldiers and their allies, and waited for nightfall when they might withdraw their families under cover of darkness. In the meantime, Private Smith and the other orderlies were released from their duties:

While Smith slept, Mackenzie, determined to save ammunition, gave stringent orders to stop all the firing except at close range. During the long standoff only occasional exchanges of gunfire broke the eerie quiet. One soldier lifted his head and shoulders and immediately attracted the attention of Cheyenne rifleman who, in Lieutenant Bourke's words, "put a bullet through his jaws; knocked him senseless against the bank in front of him. The blood from his wound poured down his throat and chocked him to death. "

Even more dramatic was an event that Private Smith did not apparently witness but that greatly impressed Lieutenant Bourke (and perhaps ignited his imagination in retelling it for publication):

A small, grassy plateau separated soldiers from Cheyenne. When Private Smith awoke from his nap, he too raced his horse across this flat:

By this time everyone knew clearly that the Northern Cheyenne did not intend to surrender. After consulting with officers and Indian allies, Mackenzie decided to move all captured ponies and destroy the village. Although tempted to charge up the mountain in order to drive the Northern Cheyenne out of the rocks, Mackenzie weighed the possible gains of such a move against the loss of human lives. Deciding against such a strategy, he sent for help from Crook and the infantry, whose more powerful rifles could be brought to bear upon the Cheyenne in the strongholds, should they still be there the next morning and the days after that.

Meanwhile, Private Smith decided to take one more stroll through the village:

Altogether, one officer and six enlisted men died in the engagement, while twenty-five soldiers and Indian scouts were wounded. The number of Northern Cheyenne killed and wounded was more difficult for army officials to determine, but Colonel Mackenzie reported twenty-five enemy dead, while Lieutenant W. P. Clark estimated two Cheyenne women and fourteen men were killed. The most crushing to the Cheyenne, however, came with the destruction of their village at the hands of the army and its Indian allies. Colonel Mackenzie had learned on the southern plains the importance of thoroughly destroying villages as a wartime measure. Now he brought that lesson to wintry Wyoming, where it would have an even deadlier effect.

This village consisted of about two hundred lodges, most of them canvas, some of them buffalo hide. Bourke maintained that each was a virtual "magazine of ammunition, fixed and loose, and a depot of supplies of every mentionable kind." He was a military man with an ethnologist's sensitivities, and so he understood that every lodge was also a Cheyenne home and a place of beauty. As the soldiers and scouts began their ruinous purpose on the afternoon of November 25, Bourke lamented that men "detailed upon a work of destruction have no time for indulgence in the contemplation of the aesthetic development of savages . . . wiping off the face of the earth many products of aboriginal taste and industry which would have been gems in the cabinets of museums." They hastily dismantled the tipis, split the lodgepoles into smaller fragments, and flung them onto the fires, Bourke wrote, "it is no rhetorical flourish to call them funeral pyres of Cheyenne glory.

To the Northern Cheyenne, who watched their homes burn from the vantage of their rimrock refuge, the scene must have deepened their growing sense of despair. In the frightful excitement of the soldiers, stampeded at dawn, most women and children secured safe positions in the mountains above the village, but as they fled their homes they had failed to grab robes and blankets for protection from the cold. Brave Wolf and others eventually built fires to provide for those who were nearly half frozen. As they huddled near the flames, then, they watched the soldiers and Indian allies below burn their tipis, their winter provisions, their robes, their clothing - everything they owned.

At this point, the Northern Cheyenne turned to the power of the Sacred Arrows. Men and women gathered around Black Hairy Dog, Sacred Arrow keeper, who found a vantage point above the village. There he spread white sage on the ground, took the Sacred Arrows from their kit-fox - skin wrapping, and laid them in a row upon the sage so that the arrows faced the distance enemy soldiers and scouts.

Black Hairy Dog stamped the ground four times and made noises reminiscent of a buffalo, while the others shouted in defiance and stamped the ground as well. These sounds encouraged the other Cheyenne, who fought with renewed courage, for they now knew the power of the Sacred Arrows was turned against their foe.

At one point during the battle, a lone Indian rode out from the ranks of the invaders, carrying a large amount of ammunition. He reached a knoll not far from where Black Hairy Dog was pointing the Sacred Arrows toward the enemy. The Cheyenne recognized him as Old Crow, on of their own, one of the esteemed Council of Forty-four, who was now scouting for the soldiers. Old Crow shouted, "I must fight with [i. e. against] you, but I am leaving a lot of ammunition on the hill." Later the Cheyenne found a huge pile of cartridges there, but for years after they scorned this chief, who they believed had betrayed his own kinsmen.

Of these human dramas, Private Earl Smith remained oblivious. To him, the Northern Cheyenne were anonymous targets. He did not know their names, their faces, their families, or their pasts. Nor did they know his. It was only when confronted with an individual Cheyenne, the old woman in her lodge, that he at least momentarily grasped their humanity. And in that brief collision with reality in the form of a decrepit woman unable to flee for her life, he encountered his own humanity, for he could not bring himself to kill her, even though she was, ostensibly, an "enemy." One can only speculate what he thought of the "boys" who did kill her "to get the buffalo robe."

What he did record was a poem that allowed him to transcend thoughts of bloodshed, tragedy, and even murder in order to present the battle as a heroic event. To see the day's activities as honorable, moral, and even noble certainly met the psychological needs of Private Smith and some others who fought with him. Smith and the other soldiers had functioned as professionals who found personal and group actions worthy of glorification. They avenged the death of other Anglo-American soldiers. They did their job, were victorious, and perhaps most significantly, they survived unharmed.

The army troops fought, the poem argues, not to force Cheyenne surrender of the Powder Rover country so that Anglo-Americans might claim it, but to avenge George Armstrong Custer and his soldiers. Lest one think this interpretation was the stuff of only enlisted mens' folklore, Lieutenant Bourke's account included a detailed listing of all artifacts found within the Northern Cheyenne Village that implicated some of these in the June 25 fight on the Little Bighorn, as well as the scalps of two young girls (one Caucasian, and the other a Shoshone), a buckskin bag containing the right hands of twelve Shoshone babies, and necklace of human fingers. To the American soldiers, and to the Shoshone auxiliaries, these articles alone justified the punishment meted out to the Northern Cheyenne that day.

To be sure, the Northern Cheyenne did not see matters the same way. The saddles and canteens branded with Seventh Cavalry insignia, the scalps, the necklace - all represented Cheyenne victories over constant enemies who had, on other occasions, done the same to them. Some of their enemies scalped Northern Cheyenne on this day as they lay upon the battlefield.

And what, some may have thought, could be more cruel than destroying Cheyenne homes in the winter and putting the torch to all their beautiful things? "Never again," wrote one historian, "would Northern Cheyenne material culture reach the heights of richness and splendor that the people knew before that bitter day in the Big Horn's."

As night fell, the Pawnee assumed their post in the ransacked village where sharpshooters from the mountainside allowed them little sleep. The Shoshone scouts did not rest either as they wept and sang. They were grieving because they reasoned (from things found in the village) that they Cheyenne had just returned from destroying one of their villages in the Wind River range. Finally, Private Smith and Colonial Mackenzie, too, spent a troubled, restless night in the valley of the Red Fork:

Native American Accounts

The following represent accounts of the Dull-Knife Battle as shared by various members of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Tribe.

Iron Teeth

Various Cheyenne Recollections

Beaver Heart

Black White Man

Iron Teeth

In the middle of the summer we heard that all of the soldiers had been killed at the Little Bighorn River. . .

My husband said we should [leave Red Cloud Agency and] go join our people there. We went, and all of our people spent the remainder of the summer there [Montana], hunting, not bothering any white people nor wanting to see any of them. When the leaves fell, the Cheyenne camp was located on a small creek far up the Powder River.

Soldiers came (November 25, 1876) and fought us there. Crows, Pawnee, Shoshone, some Arapahoe, and other Indians with them. They killed our men, women, and children, whichever ones might be hit by their bullets. We who could do so ran away. My husband and sons helped in fighting off the soldiers and enemy Indians. My husband was walking, leading his horse, and stopping at times to shoot. Suddenly, I saw him fall. I started to go back, but my sons made me go on, with my three daughters. The last time I ever saw Red Ripe, he was lying there dead in the snow. From the hilltops we Cheyenne saw our lodges and everything in them burned.

We wallowed through the mountain snows for several days. Most of us of us were afoot. We had no lodges, only a few blankets; there was only a little dried meat food among us. Men died of wounds, women and children froze to death. After eleven days of this kind of traveling we found a camp of Oglala Sioux. They fed us, but the rest of that winter was a hard one for all of us.

Various Cheyenne Recollections

The troops came in east up creek. Hairy Hand says they heard the shooting from a long way down the creek, but this is probably wrong, for the soldiers charging the village would be shooting off guns in the air at nothing. Fisher's widow, the aunt-in-law of Willis [Grinnell], says the shooting did not begin until troops or scouts were almost at the village. The men with me [Grinnell] said that Crow Split Nose warned the camp shortly that soldiers were coming, but women say that it was a man named Meat. The camp began about opposite the red butte on north side of stream and near it, and extended up the stream. The lodge occupied by Willis' aunt was close under the clump of box elders still standing on south of stream. Nshka after she was lost by family set out to run toward the breastworks on the north side of river and well up toward head of a little wash and in open plain. As she was running a young man charged down and called to her to turn to her left and run up the stream. He passed her and then turned apparently intending to run by her and pick her up and carry her to safety, but just then her father, Elk River, who was looking for her, came along and took her in charge.

Braided Locks who early in the fight was shot through the body turned to walk away to shelter and as he went the balls fell so thickly about him that to him "it seemed as if I was walking on bullets."

Hairy Hand was fighting with a friend and the soldiers for so close that they had to retreat. Just as they started the friend was shot through the leg just below the knee and fell. Hairy Hand went on a hundred yards and then thought he must not leave his friend there. He turned and ran back and carried his friend away. He did not carry him all the way on his back for the man could hop along a little on his good leg while the other leg swung free.

Crow Split Nose was killed just about where the road passes along under the foot of the butte on which the Shoshone scouts were - south side of the stream - but the stone put there by the Cheyenne to mark the place has been moved. His body was rescued by Dog Hotam e wi (the dog said - or perhaps spoke). When they first charged up to take it away the fire was so hot that they could not take it. They did, however, put about a blanket that they had brought. This wrapping in a blanket seems to be part of a burial ceremony. Ask as to this. The firing at these men was not from the scout on the red butte above them - Shoshone - for the Cheyenne were so close under the bluff as to be out of sight of these men. It must have come from, some other group of troops across the creek. The second time Dog and his men rushed up to take the body they were successful and carried the man off. . .

After getting an idea of the field from the high points, we went down to the valley and after meeting Mrs. Graves, whose ranch was is on the battlefield, we crossed the creek and walked over the field. We saw where Lt. McKinney fell, where Bull Hump fought, where long Jaw was cornered and was helped out by the 20 men in war bonnets, and where 6 young men were killed close under the mountain. Braided Locks had a friend among these young men who was killed after fighting for some time behind a cedar tree. Braided Locks went over there to see if he could find the tree but only found the stump. It has been cut down for fence posts.

Dog and a friend were fighting from a certain point near the northwest corner of the valley and Dog went there to find some shells of his if he could. He found none but he did find one or two of those fired by his friend. These were rather long .35 caliber and of brass. Was there not a Winchester if this size made about that time?

Different members of the party must have picked up 40 or 50 cartridge shells, many of copper and some of brass. Most were centre fire but without a primer. One short rim fire shell looked like and old 14 gr. .44 Henry rifle. One unused shell has a primer in it. It was a Springfield carbine cartridge, I think. Some of these shells might be shown to the Winchester company's expert or experts at Frankford Pa. arsenal.

At the upper - west - end of the valley the stream forks and it was up the northwest branch which flows through a deep narrow canon that the women and children fled. As soon as they had turned to the right and out of range of the bullets, the women stopped and climbed up to the easterly brink of the canon and there began to build breastworks. They seem to have feared that the large body of troops, whites, and Indians intended to follow them up and exterminate them. They therefore made preparations to fight ever foot of the way, and it is not likely that they could ever have been driven from this position. At all events they made ready to fight, but during the night retreated up the mountain side. On a high grassy slope between the forks of the creek, southwest of where of where the women retreated to, there was a large number of horses feeding that had not been disturbed by the battle. They remained here, a few days later and some of the Cheyenne returned and discovered all the horses.

The women say the greatest suffering of the fight was the climbing the mountain at night. A man led each group of women and children that struggled up the steep ascent.

Beaver Heart

"[We learned] ahead of time that soldiers were coming," recalled Beaver Heart. "Many people meant to go into the mountains. Fox soldier chief, Last Bull (the man charged with defending the camp), says, 'No, we stay here.' So we stayed." In the light of later events, this was a tactical error. The camp knew Mackenzie's column was coming up stream. Yet, strangely, the Indians spent the night of November 25 [November 24] dancing. It was nearly dawn when they broke up and went to bed.

Gray light was seeping into the canyon when the charge came. The thunder of hoofs and the war chants of the enemy scouts awoke the village. Rifles and pistols took up their song of death.

"I rush from my lodge," Beaver Heart is signing. "I am naked. It is very cold. I run for my life. Soldiers everywhere. No time to snatch up even a robe. Pawnee and Shoshone shooting at me. I run faster up the canyon toward the mountain side. Many of my people dead. Others run with me."

The story of that rout will live as long as red children listen to the old men's tales around gleaming camp fires.

Beaver Heart's account jibes with written history. . He probably was in the lower end of the camp when the attack was launched. The Cheyenne's heaviest loss was suffered here as the Pawnee scouts poured deadly volleys into teepees, killing without discretion all whom they contacted. A few of the warriors in the upper end of the village had time to buckle on cartridge belts and seize their guns. These organized a resistance and held off the invaders until women and children got to improvise breastworks on the mountain side. There the fight continued until darkness and then began a retreat as heroic as any in history.

Cut off from their horse herds, their village in smoking ruins, without food and burdened with women, children and their wounded, these red soldiers eluded their pursuers and marched for three days before they got help.

Even as he spoke, ,shadows came into Beaver Heart's eyes. Those were terrible days. The nights were alive with the cries of men tortured with wounds and women and children dying of cold, During the fighting at the village, Two Moons the younger sneaked into a lodge and picked up three buffalo robes. These were the only coverings for the women and their little ones. Gravely, Beaver Heart recalled how children were warmed back to life by stuffing them into the stomachs of butchered horses.

On the first morning three of the fugitives ran off some Pawnee scouts and recovered about 75 head of their horses. Without these the party probably would have perished. There was no food except horse meat. Cooking utensils had been left behind and destroyed by the soldiers. The meat had to be roasted on beds of coal while sentries watched against fresh attacks.

Many white authorities of such standing as Major North, commander of the Pawnee scouts, say the Indians went down the Powder River to the camp of Crazy Horse. Beaver Heart, and his account fits in with Grinnell's [The Fighting Cheyenne], has a different version. He claims the band followed the ridges of the Big Horn [Mountains] until they reached Lodge Pole creek. They went down this stream to a lake and then crossed to Prairie Dog, or Crow Stand Creek, and followed that to the Tongue River. Here, freezing and half starved, they were found by Crazy Horse's scouts and brought to the Sioux chieftain's village on the Tongue.

Black White Man

Black White Man was in Dull Knife's village in 1876 when it was captured. His son, a boy, had then returned from a war party against the Snakes shot in the buttocks, the ball coming out through right thigh.

When the troops charged the village that morning the balls hitting lodges sounded like hail-stones. Black White Man was obliged to saddle the horse for his wife and son. He put them on a horse and told the two to ride away while he ran toward the troops. When he reached a little ridge and looked over he could see the soldiers on the other slope of the ridge crawling up toward the top on their bellies. The Indians fired at them and the soldiers fell back a little. He turned about and looked back at the village and there in front of his lodge. which stood close to the river, he saw a number of his horses that he had tied up the night before running back and forth trying to break their ropes. He ran back to his lodge to cut the ropes and then on foot drove the horses towards the breastworks. On his way he overtook a little boy and went on with him, bullets hit in front and even between his legs, but neither he nor the little boy were hit. He cannot explain how it was. At length they reached the breastworks.