Last night, with each man packing one day’s rations and all of them in light marching order, Mackenzie had moved his troops away under the cover of darkness because the colonel did not want to be spotted by any agency tattletale who might scurry off to Red Cloud’s or Red Leaf’s and Swift Bear’s camps, letting the cat slip out of the bag.
A few hours back Mackenzie had briefly stopped his command at a predetermined rendezvous, where they awaited some riders who were to join up: the North brothers, Lieutenant S. E. Cushing, and forty-eight hardened trackers of their Pawnee Battalion, hurried north from the Sidney Barracks where they had been carried west, horses and all, along the Union Pacific line.
“By the Mither of God! I ain’t seen you since that summer with Carr!” Seamus growled happily in a harsh whisper at the two civilian brothers there in the dark as they waited while some of the Norths’ Pawnee probed ahead into the darkness.
Following the rendezvous, Mackenzie’s march was resumed across that hard, frozen ground, at a trot or at a gallop as the rugged land allowed, until early in the morning when the scouts reached the point where the trail leading north from the agency split: one branch leading to Red Cloud’s band, the other to Red Leaf’s Brule camp only a handful of miles away. It was there that Mackenzie deployed his command: sending M Company of his Fourth Cavalry along with the two troops assigned him from Wesley Merritt’s Fifth Cavalry to follow Captain Luther North and some of the Pawnee in the direction of Red Leaf’s village, that entire force under the command of Major George A. Gordon.
The remaining five troops of the Fourth followed Mackenzie as Major Frank North and the rest of the Pawnee scouts led them on through the darkness toward Red Cloud’s camp.
“That hot July of sixty-nine. Has it been that long?” Frank North replied now, also in a whisper. Mackenzie demanded that none of his surprise be spoiled.
“Summit Springs, it were,” Donegan replied, tugging at his collar, pulling his big-brimmed hat down as he tried to turtle his head into his shoulders. The wind was coming up.
“We had us a grand chase that year, didn’t we?” North asked.
“I rode with Carr this summer.”
“Don’t say,” North said, then stared off into the darkness. “He was a good soldier.”
“By damn if he wasn’t that bloody hot day when we caught ol’ Tall Bull napping,” Seamus replied.*
“Bet you four to one we’ve got Red Cloud and the rest napping this time too.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” the Irishman responded as they watched some of the Pawnee emerge out of the dark.
They sat for close to an hour, waiting for some of the Indian trackers to return. The men were allowed to dismount and huddle out of the wind, but smoking and talk were forbidden. No telling if the Sioux would have camp guards out patrolling.
It seemed like an eternity until the order came to move out once more, marching a few more miles until Mackenzie halted his five troops and the Pawnee Battalion, saying they would wait right there until there was light enough to see the front sights on their carbines. Then they would send the scouts to seize the pony herd while they charged into the village.
So for now those three hundred men waited in the dark and the cold, knowing they had that unsuspecting Sioux camp in their noose.
While the government continued to press the “friendlies” to sell away the Black Hills as a condition for receiving their annuities of food, blankets, and ammunition, Sheridan nonetheless demanded that those same agency Indians were dismounted and disarmed. No two ways about it. If the winter roamers who were still out making trouble would ever be resupplied with ammunition and weapons to press on with their war, those supplies would have to come from the “friendlies” who had stayed behind at the reservations. To make sure Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the rest were cut off from all such aid, Sheridan ordered Crook into action against the agency bands.
The little Irish general was positive that the hostiles could never have defeated Custer without aid from the agency Sioux. He expressed his steadfast belief in this position to William Tecumseh Sherman:
Our duty will be to occupy the game country and make it dangerous and when they are obliged from constant harassing and hunger to come in and surrender we can then dismount, disarm and punish them at the Agencies as was done with the Southern Indians in the last campaign.
Phil Sheridan had a staunch ally in Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. He too believed that the hostilities would all be over by the spring of 1877, provided that the hostiles were corralled and the “friendlies” forced to surrender their arms and ponies, the animals then sold on the open market and the funds thus acquired used to purchase cattle for the agency bands. Never disguised as an attempt to civilize the Sioux into becoming gentleman farmers, Sheridan’s plan was unashamedly to deny all mobility to the horse-mounted Lakota warriors.
Years before on the Staked Plain of West Texas, Seamus had come to admire Mackenzie’s patient even-handedness in pursuing his relentless war on the Comanche.* Yet, in many subtle ways, it was a different, a changed Mackenzie who last August marched eight companies of his Fourth Cavalry north to join in this grand Sioux campaign. Many times over dinner, or in officers’ meetings, in those off-the-cuff comments expressed to his cadre of scouts, the colonel made it exceedingly clear in so many subtle ways that he was no longer the same man: no more would he believe anything an Indian told him, nor could he believe that an Indian would honor his own word to a white man.
According to Mackenzie all this rumination and discourse over selling the Black Hills back to the government was nothing more than a waste of time—it was plain to see that the Indians had stalled the protracted negotiations at the agencies while their free-roaming brethren pursued their own hostile intentions in secret.
Like Sheridan, Mackenzie now believed the time for talk had come and gone with absolutely no lasting result.
For the colonel, one thing had grown more clear across the last five years in campaign after campaign against the hostiles—whether they were Kwahadi, Southern Cheyenne, or Red Cloud’s Sioux, what the Indian understood better than talk was force—might of arms, a cost in blood. He made no secret of the fact that he believed that the presence of the peace commissioners “unsettles the minds of these Indians.”
Upon his return to Camp Robinson, where more than 982 cavalry, infantry, and artillery soldiers had been marshaled to dismount the Sioux, he had wired Crook his recommendation that his command should indeed proceed with the capture of the two villages:
I do not think any of the principal bands will move in unless there is some strong power brought to bear to cause them to be obedient.
It was a sentiment shared by Sherman, Sheridan, and Crook.
Because the army had been receiving reports that three major camps would be wintering in the Powder River country—one band under Crazy Horse, another of Sans Arc, and a third of Northern Cheyenne—for weeks now Mackenzie made himself a nettlesome burr under Crook’s saddle, irritating the commanding general with dispatches from Camp Robinson, the likes of which: