you. And then, before you’re really prepared, you are suddenly thrust around a bend and down the slope into the valley itself, which measures some two miles long and from a quarter of a mile to about a mile wide in places.
The Morning Star camp was pitched for the most part along some flat ground on the south bank of a gentle, trickling stream running from west to east all year long because it was fed by a warm spring that prevented the stream from freezing (a fact heretofore neglected by the historians). Here, where the village stood, the valley is its widest. Downstream to the east, where Mackenzie’s cavalry burst through the gap, the valley is at its most narrow.
This is truly a dramatically spectacular symbol of some of God’s finest sculpturin’s!
And there was no finer way to see such sculpturin’s than on horseback, accompanied by the two most knowledgeable guides I could have wanted. Ken Graves saddled us up just before sunrise on this anniversary date as I trudged over to the corral and got to know his part-time ranch hand, Mike Freidel—a historian in his own right and athletic coach over at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. Mike’s been coming over to the place for better than fifteen years now, and—believe me—Ken and Mike know every square foot of that valley, from far out of the east gap where the cavalry came in, formed up, and began their charge, to the breastworks and the narrow escape canyon at the other end of the valley, and on up the mountainsides where the Cheyenne fled into the winter night toward Fraker Pass.
More important, for all those years the two of them have traveled the ground by horseback, in and out of that maze of rocky walls, trackless ravines, and well-used game trails, coming to know exactly where Mackenzie’s scouts led the soldiers into the valley, just where Cosgrove and Schuyler led their Shoshone single file up the steep and precarious mountain path to reach the top of what is today called Mackenzie Mountain. So if I was forced to choose in a disagreement between an academic historian and these rancher-horsemen on how an army was going to march into the east gap and on into the valley, you can bet your last twenty-dollar gold piece I’d lay everything I had on Ken Graves and Mike Freidel showing me just where Mackenzie’s horse planted its hooves back in 1876.
And those fellas did just that. They led me all the way east to that flat area the Sioux scouts called the race ground, where Mackenzie stopped his scouts and troopers and sent ahead his small band of spies while they listened to the Cheyenne drum echo down the canyon. From there we rode into the valley as the charging cavalry would have, picking our way across the narrow feeder creeks and down into the willow bogs, just as those cavalrymen would have done. Finally onto the flat where we hugged the long, low plateau at the base of Fraker Mountain until we stopped, getting our first magnificent view of the valley itself.
Just as Mackenzie would have seen his first view. The village is arrayed on our left in a crude horseshoe. Ahead of us, as the Shoshone open fire and the Pawnee hurl themselves against the fringe of lodges, the enemy is already bolting out of the upper end of the village, some of the warriors sprinting into a deep ravine—a large band of them hurrying across the open ground to seize some of their ponies before the herd can be captured.
These are the ponies Mackenzie does not want to lose.
“Would you like to ride it the way McKinney’s men charged that morning?” Ken asked.
Already my eyes were misting, and I had one hell of a lump in my throat. “You damn bet I would!” I croaked.
Without another word, those two horsemen suddenly spurred themselves away, leaving room between them for me as we rolled those three eager horses into a full, windblown gallop that whipped the cold breeze across my cheeks, the tears from my eyes. On and on over the gently rolling ground we raced, heading for the knoll where the Cheyenne riflemen were setting up shop. Then suddenly—
Ken and Mike reined up just ahead of me, shouting for me to do the same. If I hadn’t stopped when I had, your author would have been faced with choosing to jump his horse across an impossibly wide ravine, or slam into the far side, where I would have eaten a few yards of the Wyoming landscape for breakfast.
I came to see firsthand how Lieutenant John A. McKinney and the men of his M Troop failed to see the ravine until they were all but on top of it—at the moment the Cheyenne warriors rose out of the bowels of the earth like screaming demons and fired point-blank into those blue ranks.
Believe me, the more I travel these battlefields, I become all the more a believer that there is no substitute for being
Ken and Mike showed it all to me from horseback, around the Red Butte behind which the surgeons set up their field hospital and near which private Baird was buried by the willows in an unmarked, unknown grave. We rode halfway up the precipitous slope of the rocky outcrop Mackenzie used as his command post during the hottest of the fighting. With them I circled around toward the twin buttes, which stood near the final northernmost end of the soldier line. Then we climbed the horses up the front of the ridge where the sharpshooters sat in the snow, the very top of which was occupied by the women and others singing the strong-heart songs to their warriors.
What a thrill it was for me to dismount, moving carefully among the piles of rocks frozen hands placed one on top of another more than a century ago! To stand there where the
By the time we returned to the corrals near the ranch house, the three of us had been out in the saddle for more than five and a half hours. Unlike those two saddle-hardened veterans, this Ol’ boy doesn’t get much of a chance to do that kind of
We had lunch with Cheri and the Graves daughters, then spent part of the afternoon sharing more stories of that battle, tales of Custer and the Indian wars in general, and with me just wanting to get a feel for what winter was like in that beautiful, silent valley. For, you see, the only problem with our ride this anniversary day was that I looked out of the Graves’s ranch-house window, but I didn’t see any snow.
That afternoon on the way back to Buffalo, Wyoming for the night, the local radio weatherman said there was a major winter storm expected late tomorrow. Ain’t that the luck? But it’s something I’ve come to expect in this country. Here I came down on the battle’s anniversary: sunny, almost shirtsleeve weather … and tomorrow there’s going to be at least a fifty-degree drop in the temperature, and a major amount of snow blowing in! Just what the old frontiersmen came to know about this country—you better be prepared for anything, because you’re bound to get it in the way of fickle weather.
In the months to follow, Ken and Cheri Graves, as well as Mike Freidel, kindly answered my numerous questions, all three of them putting up with me until I could finally send them both big “overnight” packages filled with the appropriate chapters on the battle—asking for their corrections and suggestions. I can’t thank them enough for allowing me to impose upon them at a particularly busy time of the year as I finish this afterword— March is, after all, recruiting season for Mike, and it’s when the lambs and calves are dropping for Ken and Cheri.
I especially want to express my gratitude to Mike Freidel for his repeated work with me on the battlefield map. From those first days of the four of us going over the maps done for previous works on the Dull Knife fight— when Ken, Cheri, and Mike pointed out errors and discrepancies—to coming up with our own crude pencil sketches, and finally to working over a dining-room-table-sized USGS topographic map … all that labor just so we could give the reader as much a feeling of being right there as we could. Ken and Cheri and Mike all had a big hand in helping me make this battle come to life for you.
Long will I be in their debt.
Being on private land, where this fourth generation of a ranching family works at making a living the same way as those who came here in the years immediately following the battle, I get an immense amount of pride just from knowing folks like these. Hardworking, straight-talking, God-fearing, and life-loving people who possess what all too few today don’t—a genuine love for the land, and a love for what that land has always meant to those who passed this way to share in God’s bounty.
So again to Ken, Cheri, and Mike, I say thanks for welcoming me into your hearts and your homes, and for teaching me all that I needed to know so I could write the book that would tell not only an accurate story, but the
