Only a year after the fight Harmon Fraker came in to homestead the valley. The mountain that forms the north rim of the site is named Fraker Mountain for that first settler. Then in 1901 a rancher by the name of Charles N. Graves came to Wyoming out of Nebraska, gaining title to the valley five years later. Through the twenties and into the thirties, both he and his son, Frank O. Graves, witnessed numerous visits to the battle site by many of the old soldiers and aging Indians who had taken part in the tragic struggle. Next to take over operations was Norris Graves, and now his son and daughter-in-law, Ken and Cheri, run cattle and sheep in that ruggedly secluded corner of the Big Horns.
This is the famous “Hole in the Wall” country of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Climbing close to five thousand feet above sea level, you reach the valley by a long, twisting stretch of dirt road that winds through some stunning blood-red mountains dotted with one variety or another of emerald evergreen. As you draw closer, the walls begin to rise dramatically to a height of a thousand feet or more above 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 there. Going to the place myself, so that I can factually, accurately translate the countryside, the very feel of a piece of sacred ground like this for the millions of readers who will never get a chance to be there themselves.
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 Ohmeseheso stood, watching their greatness spiral into the cold blue sky overhead with the oily black curl of smoke rising from every burning lodge. Then finally to mount up and ride on to the far upper end of the valley, there to get a feel of the steepness of the slope as the survivors scurried hand and foot, scrambling ever higher toward Fraker Pass, hoping for safety from the soldiers.
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 real riding: almost straight up or straight down in places! So you better believe that the following day, my Ol’ bones were cussing me but good!
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.