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Dull Knife’s Last Fight

(from Paul I. Wellman,
Death on Horseback: Seventy Years of War
for the American West)

IN THE BEGINNING Dull Knife counseled peace with the whites, but then, in 1864, Black Kettle’s peaceful camp at Sand Creek was massacred. The fighting parson, Colonel John Chivington, was the perpetrator of this crime. For Chivington, commander of the vengeful Third Colorado Volunteers, the best Indians were dead Indians. Before the massacre he talked of “collecting scalps” and wading in gore. “I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.” One morning his militia attacked Black Kettle’s sleeping camp of six hundred Cheyennes. Most warriors were away hunting buffalo. Two thirds of those remaining were women and children. When Chivington’s mounted men charged the encampment, Black Kettle stood in front of his tepee under the American flag and a white flag, calling to his people not to be afraid.

Left Hand, with his followers, tried to reach the flag for protection. When he saw the troops, he stopped, and stood still with his arms folded, because he knew they would not harm him. The mounted men shot him dead. Left and right they shot and sabred the huddled masses beneath the flag. Whoever could, fled. Blood-crazed, the militia scalped and obscenely desecrated the Indian bodies. The count: 105 women and children dead; 28 men dead; 7 captured. Dull Knife never forgot.

Dull Knife fought in the Cheyenne-Arapaho War of 1864. His people participated in the battle of the Rosebud (June 17, 1876) and the annihilation of Custer (June 24, 1876). In November 1876, the army attacked his winter camp on the Powder River. He surrendered the next spring and was forced to march south for a hundred days—along with 40 men, 47 women, and 37 children—to Indian Territory—there his people suffered from malnutrition and disease. “Our people died, died, died, kept following one another out of this world.”

Openly, Dull Knife declared his intent to return to his homeland. One night in September 1878, Dull Knife’s and Little Wolf’s bands broke away, heading north to seek asylum on Red Cloud’s reservation. Pursued but never caught, Dull Knife finally surrendered at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, thinking he would be permitted to remain. Upon learning of this treachery, Dull Knife and his people escaped from Fort Robinson. After the breakout, the survivors split up; though Dull Knife was concealed by white and Indian friends and lived, most of his people were killed.

From Death on Horseback: Seventy Years of War for the American West, by Paul I. Wellman, the story begins at Fort Robinson as Dull Knife learns that he has been betrayed. Here is the last cry of a cornered people when their choice was living death or death itself.

 

TREACHERY

WITH THE 1ST OF JANUARY a blizzard covered the ground deep with snow and sent the mercury far below zero. It was weather for staying close indoors. Yet on January 5th [Captain Henry] Wessells received as a reply to his message containing Dull Knife’s plea, a peremptory order to march the captives, without delay and with proper escort, to Fort Reno, far to the south, over the same trail they had traveled with such pain coming north.

Wessells saw the terrible mistake. The swivel-chair bureaucrats in the Indian Department could not. But duty was duty. He had the three chiefs, Dull Knife, Wild Hog and Crow brought to him and explained the order. Dead silence greeted his words. Only the wild beast glare in their eyes told the suppressed passion which was making infernos of their hearts. It took Dull Knife minutes to control himself so he could speak with a steady voice. His reply, quiet and cold was: “It is death to us. If the Great Father wishes us to die—very well. We will die where we are. If necessary by our own hands.”

But Wessells could only obey orders. He gave his ultimatum: Unless they agreed, he would cut off all their fuel, food and water. In stony silence the chiefs heard their sentence; then went back to their people.

Days passed—five days of bitter cold and hunger in the wooden barracks where shivered the half-clad Cheyennes. Day and night their despairing death songs sounded, with even the little children joining their weak treble voices in the chants. The Indians had made up their minds to die of cold and hunger rather than submit. At last, on January 9th, Wessells sent again for the chiefs. But this time the people would not let Dull Knife go. Strong Left Hand took his place.

For an hour the Cheyennes paced the floor of their barracks, straining their ears. Then they heard a sudden wild, desperate war whoop. It was Wild Hog’s voice and it told its own story. Strong Left Hand ran in. The two others had been seized and put in irons. Wild Hog had defied Wessells. And he had stabbed and all but killed a guard before he was overpowered. That wild, ringing cry was his warning and farewell to his people. From the prison barracks rose the answering yells of the Cheyenne men, the cries of women and even the shrieks of little children.

Doors and windows were barricaded. From under the floor were taken the five rifles and the revolvers which had been smuggled in. Floors and iron stoves were broken up to make clubs. Every man who had a gun gave his knife to another who had no weapon. The Cheyennes expected an immediate attack, but none came. The night of January 10th came on, still and frightfully cold.

Just as the last tremulous notes of “Taps” sounded, a shot rang from the barracks, startlingly clear and sharp. A sentry pitched forward in the snow. Three more shots in a rapid rat-tat-tat. Two more guards were down. Then from the doors and windows of the barracks poured the heroic last fragment of the Dull Knife band.

Starved, despairing, they nevertheless acted with coolness and clear judgment. The dead sentries, Corporal Pulver and Privates Hulz and Tommeny, were stripped of their arms. While the few braves formed a rear guard, the Indians ran out of the fort and started across the snow-clad plain.

Out of the barracks poured the troops, half-clad but shooting. Under the heavy fire the gallant Cheyenne rear guard melted fast. But the main body was well on its way to the hills, where a high, precipitous divide separated Soldier Creek from White River, three miles from the fort.

That was a forlorn hope if ever there was one. Within the first half mile of the awful running fight, more than half the Cheyenne fighting men were shot. But as the warriors fell, their weapons were seized by half-grown boys, tottering old men, even women. Often the advance guard of the soldiers and the rear guard of the Indians fought hand-to-hand. The women fell as thickly as the men.

A mile from the fort the troops, many of them badly frozen, were called back to get their clothing and horses. Across the frozen river and up the steep hill toiled the Indians. The cavalry caught up again as the ascent was being made. At the foot of the bluffs the shattered rear guard drew up for a last resistance. The cavalry charged. Back it was hurled. Dull Knife’s daughter, known as the “Princess,” fighting in the front rank was killed. So were several others. But the precious minutes gained allowed the rest of the people to climb the cliff.

Further pursuit ended for the night. On the way back to the fort the soldiers marked the line of retreat by the huddled bodies in the snow. Buffalo Hump, the chief ’s son, lay on his back with arms extended and face upturned. In his right hand he held a small knife. The blade was no more than a quarter of an inch wide at the hilt, and yet, the only weapon this magnificent fighter could command in this, his last fight for freedom! As a soldier passed, he rose to a sitting posture and aimed a fierce blow at his leg with his knife, then fell back and lay still…dead.

As the soldiers returned to their warm quarters, the surviving Cheyennes struggled on through the bitter night. For seventeen miles they traveled without a halt. Even well-fed, well-clothed troops would have considered it a wonderful march under the circumstances. Yet it was made by women, children, old men and wounded men, half-clad and weak from five days’ starvation.

The limit of even a Cheyenne’s endurance finally came. They camped back of a knoll and prepared an ambush—fighters to the very last. In the morning, Captain Vroom’s pursuing troop stumbled right into the trap. The spiteful crackle of fire emptied three saddles. The cavalry retreated, dismounted and surrounded the knoll. All that day they fought a long-range battle. As night fell the troops built decoy fires around the knoll and marched back to the warmth of the fort. But Dull Knife’s scouts were not “decoyed.” They laughed grimly at the white man’s transparent trickery and walked over the decoy fires to continue their retreat.

THE FINISH

Thirty-seven Cheyennes were dead and fifty-two, mostly wounded, captured by the night of January 10th. Next day the remnant was brought to bay in a difficult position to attack, far up Soldier Creek. During the fighting that day a troop horse was killed. At night the Indians sneaked out and from the carcass of that horse the poor wretches got the first mouthfuls of food they had eaten in seven days. The troops withdrew, so taking what little flesh was left on the dead horse, the Cheyennes slipped away for six miles more and entrenched themselves in the bluffs, dogged and defiant.

Wessells brought a twelve-pounder Napoleon gun from the fort that day. It arrived at noon and all afternoon its sullen boom was the dominant sound in the snowy wastes. Forty rounds of shells were thrown into the Cheyenne position. The Indians could not reply. Yet Wessells failed to dislodge them. Flattening themselves in the shallow depression they dug in the frozen ground, they endured as well as they could the concussions of the bursting shells.

Toward evening Wessells sent James Rowland, an interpreter, close to the lines, to tell them to surrender. Here was something the Cheyennes could reach with their guns. Rowland was glad to get back to his own lines with his life. No surrender yet.

Wessells was growing worried. The Indians were working toward the cattle country where they could find food and horses. He doubled the guard around their position. But on the morning of the 14th the Cheyennes were gone as usual. Somehow they had slipped through the cordon once more and gone up Hat Creek.

For six days more, it continued. Day after day the Cheyennes fought. Night after night they used their matchless skill to slip away from the encircling lines of soldiers. Each day their numbers grew smaller.

The inevitable came at last. The Cheyennes made their last stand in the Hat Creek Bluffs, forty-four miles southwest of Fort Robinson, on the morning of January 21st, 1879. Worn out, most of them wounded, practically all suffering from frozen hands and feet, they lay in a wash-out, shoulder-deep, on the edge of the bluffs.

A last summons to surrender. It was answered by three scattering shots from the washout. Those three shots were the last cartridges the Cheyennes had. Forward rushed the soldiers, up the very edge of the washout. Not a shot was fired by the Indians. Into the huddled mass the troops poured a single crashing blast of flame. Without waiting to see the execution done, they leaped back to reload.

And now they saw a strange, uncanny apparition. Over the edge of the washout clambered three awful figures. Smeared with blood they were, their starvation-pinched features looking like living skulls. One carried an empty pistol. Two had worn knives. Tottering on their weak limbs, they poised for a moment on the edge of the grave of their people—the last three warriors of the unconquerable Cheyennes. Then with quavering war cries they madly charged, right into the muzzles of three hundred rifles.

With a shattering roar the fire leaped from those muzzles. The three warriors collapsed, literally shot to bits. They were the last fighters of their people. The Odyssey of the Cheyennes was ended.