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8. The Messenger
- University of Nebraska Press
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With McPhail’s cautious troops pulled back, there was now little hope by the men of the burial expedition of rescue. The silence of the night was punctuated by cries from the wounded for water and food. Despite the overcast skies and the heat lightning, it did not rain, and the men sipped dishwater in an effort to slake their thirst, which had been aggravated in the act of biting powder cartridges to double-load their muskets. All during the night they were instructed again and again not to fire their weapons before the expected attack at dawn. Back at Fort Ridgely Sibley’s militia men, still recovering from the twenty-two-mile forced march to the fort only days before, had just sat down to a light supper when Lieutenant Sheehan brought the news of the Birch Coulie disaster. Sibley organized a relief expedition of a thousand men to leave immediately . The men were each given two pieces of hard bread. By 6:00 p.m., they were in line for another long march, this time sixteen miles through the dead of night to Birch Coulie. 8. The Messenger the messenger . . 79 At midnight Colonel Sibley’s relief column from Fort Ridgely reached McPhail’s campsite three miles east of Birch Coulie. If Sibley reprimanded McPhail for the latter’s extraordinary caution, it was not recorded anywhere. Instead, confident that the Indians would wait until dawn to launch their attack, Sibley told the men to get a good night’s sleep. After two long and tiring forced marches, the men dropped onto the prairie grass and immediately fell dead asleep. The Dakota warriors continued to come and go from their posts in order to eat at their campfires while the head soldiers laid their battle plans for dawn. In the attack of the day before, the Dakotas had come at the encampment in four separate salients. Inside the encampment Grant and Brown had countered by moving soldiers from one side to the other as the pressure points changed. It had been a tactic that had helped save the day for the white soldiers. This time the Dakotas resolved initially to retain the north, south, east, and west divisions of their troops, but then they would merge the warriors into a continuous force of attackers , mounted and on foot, who would circle and circle in an ever-tightening noose. It was a tactic that would preserve the mystery of where the final penetration would come. It would come from everywhere. In the end the Dakotas would sweep through the breastworks and be inside the encampment. But before they attacked and wiped out the remaining soldiers, they resolved to offer safe passage to the half-bloods among Grant’s men. Having killed whites and mixed-bloods indiscriminately, having dismissed “cut-hairs” and “breeches Indians” as turncoats, Dakota motives for offering safe passage to Grant’s half-bloods were murky. Indeed, the absence during the discussion of some of the chiefs who remained at their battle stations or retired to eat made the decision appear to lack consensus. Still, in the minds of some of the Dakota leaders, who were guilty of the same caution that [3.238.142.134] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:02 GMT) 80 . . the messenger had stopped McPhail in his tracks, Dakota superiority was marginal since only a few more soldiers from the Upper Agency had joined the Indian forces at Birch Coulie that night. It thus made sense to try to remove nearly a dozen of the enemy from inside the Birch Coulie breastworks in one stroke before the final attack. It was the most spectacular sunrise many of the white soldiers had ever seen. It began as just a dim glow that seemed to come out of the trees of Birch Coulie, suggesting that the coulie itself was the origin of all light. Then the glow lifted itself above the trees like a rose-colored fog. Finally, there it was: the bright, paper-thin, blood-red circle of the sun. At 5:00 a.m., in the first dim light of that rising sun, Captain Grant and his men could just make out the Dakotas stretched in a long line that moved like a snake constricting silently around the camp. Suddenly, the line of Dakotas began whooping as they moved, half-dancing, half-marching. The men who had been drifting in and out of sleep in their rifle pits were wide awake now. Each...