You who live your lives in cities or among peaceful ways cannot always tell whether your friends are the kind who would go through fire for you. But on the Plains one’s friends have an opportunity to prove their mettle.
—WILLIAM F. “BUFFALO BILL” CODY
Bat was glad to be back in Dodge City. Unlike some of the others from Adobe Walls who wanted to return there while it was still hunting season and the army had Quanah Parker and the Comanche occupied, Bat intended to stay put.
Not that Dodge City was an oasis of calm in the summer of 1874. Many people were frightened by the outbreak of violence and the threat of marauding Indian bands. It was said that over a hundred white people had been killed between the Arkansas River and the Rio Grande, a high enough total that some homesteaders and hunters sought the shelter of Fort Dodge. Bat wasn’t about to do that, either. The Adobe Walls adventure had left him without nearly as much money as he had anticipated, and he had to do something about that. For a time, that something was gambling.
But Bat’s luck must have been all used up by surviving the Battle of Adobe Walls and the subsequent trip back from the Panhandle to Dodge City with his scalp still attached to his skull. Though short of his twenty-first birthday, Bat was mature and experienced enough to know that a man down on his luck could get into a lot of trouble in Dodge City. Thus, in August, when his friend Billy Dixon signed on as an army scout, Bat decided to do the same.
The campaigns being waged by Colonel Mackenzie and affiliated commands meant such scouts were in high demand. Nelson Miles was in charge of eight cavalry companies and four companies of infantry being organized at Fort Dodge. Miles had risen to the rank of general during the Civil War and had been wounded in battle four times, his actions during the Battle of Chancellorsville had earned him the Medal of Honor, and when Lee surrendered to Grant in April 1865 he was, at just twenty-six, an infantry corps commander. Now a colonel—after the war, many officers were reduced in rank or lopped off the active list altogether—Miles was about to lead a force from Fort Dodge south and he needed scouts who knew Indian Territory. Bat and Billy did, and they were welcomed. In turn, the young men welcomed the pay of seventy-five dollars a month plus the possibility of bonuses if the campaign was successful.
There would be thirty-seven scouts working for Miles, twenty of them Delaware Indians. Most of the seventeen white men were former buffalo hunters. They joined the Bluebellies on the banks of the Arkansas River, and on August 11, 1874, they crossed over and began the journey across the Cherokee Strip and into Texas. It was a hot, dry summer, especially for men whose horses kicked up choking dust from sunup to sundown. Still, it didn’t seem very long before Bat and Billy were in familiar surroundings.
While hunting Comanche and Apache war parties, Miles and his force paid a visit to the Adobe Walls settlement. At least a dozen hunters were still there. Not much hunting was being done, because a war party could appear at any moment, but the hunters, with plenty of supplies and whiskey, figured they were better off inside the walls than making a run for it across the Panhandle. Bat agreed with the wisdom of this when he observed two hunters who had gone out to pick wild plums only to be attacked, with the Indians managing to kill one of them.
With the inhabitants in relatively good shape, the army soldiers moved out, heading west and south, away from Adobe Walls. The battle there in June had earned Bat the admiration of his fellow hunters. The adventure he was about to undertake would earn him his first taste of true frontier fame.
Near the Canadian River the soldiers and scouts fought their first engagement. It was a minor one against a small group of Indians, with one being killed and another wounded. Believing that more hostiles must be close by, Miles’s command picked up the pace the last week of August. This made for tough going for men and horses, as the territory being covered was even hotter and drier than in Kansas, with temperatures sometimes topping 110 degrees. Saloon ceiling fans and ready access to water and whiskey back in Dodge City must have seemed very appealing to Bat and Billy.
Finally, soon after sunup on August 30, the hard-riding scouts found a large force of Indians. More accurately, the Indians found them. As Bat and the others were riding on a trail between two lines of bluffs, at least two hundred warriors appeared above them and opened fire. The scouts jerked their carbines out of their saddle holsters and jumped off their horses. From the ground and behind rocks and withered brown bushes they returned fire. It was touch and go until the cavalry arrived and routed the Indians.
Helping them do that was a recent addition to the firearms of the West, a Gatling gun. The Indians were astonished as the ancestor of the twentieth-century machine gun, bolted onto a baggage wagon, spewed bullets faster than a dozen men could shoot. Once again, the technological advances of the white man forecast the ultimate defeat of the Southwest and Plains tribes.
The scouts got back on their horses and the chase was on. For twenty miles they and the army were in hot pursuit—too hot, as men suffering from incredible thirst and heat exhaustion fell by the wayside. Still, Bat and those with stronger stamina persisted, day after day, with the army soldiers and their exhausted horses trailing behind them.
Finally, the chase ended. The whites were in an area known as the Staked Plains, so named because of a series of poles or stakes that had been driven into the ground to mark a route for cowboys to direct their herds to sources of water. Miles ordered that camp be made there. He hadn’t scored the decisive victory he sought, but he wasn’t going to retreat, either.
A few days turned into a few weeks. Miles sent scouts to Camp Supply inside the Cherokee Strip with dispatches on his lack of progress, and they returned with supplies. One of these trips was taken by four troopers guided by Dixon and the grizzled Amos Chapman, who had warned the merchants at Adobe Walls back in June that Quanah Parker was organizing an attack. At a site called Buffalo Wallow the six men were ambushed by over a hundred Comanche and Kiowa. This time there was no cavalry on the way, so the scouts and soldiers kept firing as fast as they could, keeping the Indians at bay until nightfall, when they retreated. One soldier was killed and the others were wounded, including Chapman, who lost a leg. It was for his bravery and deadly accuracy with his rifle during this engagement that Billy Dixon would receive the Medal of Honor.
Essentially, Miles had pinned his own command down, neither advancing to find and engage the Comanche bands nor moving back toward Fort Dodge and offering the Indians an opportunity to raid prairie settlements. Meanwhile, an event back in Kansas would have a powerful effect on Bat Masterson.
Over four years earlier, a man named German and his wife left Georgia bound for Colorado. Accompanying the couple were their seven children, six of them girls. They stopped several times as they made their way west, earning enough money each time to resupply and move on. For the Germans, Colorado was viewed as a dream to be realized.
Their migration turned into a nightmare. The family’s last stop before expecting to reach the Colorado border was in Ellis, Kansas. On the morning of September 11, 1874, their wagon and a few head of cattle left Ellis, expecting an easy trip to Fort Wallace. It wasn’t. The family was ambushed by seventeen Cheyenne Dog Soldiers led by Kicking Horse. As the four youngest daughters watched in horror, their parents, brother, and two older sisters were killed and scalped. Katherine, Julia, Adelaide, and Sophia German, ranging in age from nine to fifteen, were dragged off as captives of the Cheyenne.
When word of this reached Miles and his men, finding the four kidnapped girls became their new mission. The scouts learned that the Dog Soldiers had entered the Panhandle. They also heard that the German sisters had been separated, with two girls going with a band headed by Gray Beard and the other two with Stone Calf. Bat and a few of the other scouts had crossed trails with Stone Calf before, at Adobe Walls, when his son was one of those killed during that June attack.
The Cheyenne bands and the white girls with them proved very elusive as the weeks passed. Especially frustrating was the thought that two or all four of the German sisters had been brought hundreds of miles to Mexico and traded away there. If so, they would never be recovered. The scouts consoled themselves that Cheyenne were not known to go that far south, away from their hunting grounds and familiar surroundings. They kept searching and hoping.
The scouts found Gray Beard’s camp on November 8. A few days earlier, the more experienced ones had speculated that the Cheyenne would follow their routine and begin to set up a winter camp near McClellan Creek. Miles dispatched a contingent of soldiers and scouts to find out. On the morning of the eighth they arrived atop a slope near the creek, and looking down, they spotted dozens of tepees there. When the army soldiers arrived, led by the chief of scouts, Lieutenant Frank Baldwin, another Civil War recipient of the Medal of Honor, an attack was launched. As Baldwin would later write in his report, they rushed down the hills and charged the Cheyenne village “yelling like demons.”
During the brief battle, most of the inhabitants of the village fled. Those left behind were either too petrified to fight or dead. Also left behind, discovered trembling under a buffalo robe, were Julia and Adelaide German. The girls had not been harmed but were as malnourished as many of the Cheyenne children. Bat later recalled that “their little hands looked like bird’s claws.”
For the rest of the fall of 1874 and into the winter, Bat continued to do some scouting for the army as well as working as a teamster hauling supplies to and from the ongoing Miles expedition. The search continued, this time focused on finding the two sisters who were supposedly still with Stone Calf’s band.
That search was derailed by the early and unusually harsh onslaught of winter. Bat’s stamina and luck were put to the test on December 16. The War Department had decided to establish a new outpost not far from Adobe Walls, on Sweetwater Creek. A large train consisting of over a hundred wagons carrying a million pounds of grain and over half a million pounds of other goods was to set out from Camp Supply to travel south of the Canadian River to help establish the new outpost.
It set out well enough, but after only forty miles the men, Bat among them, and their teams of oxen and horses were battered by a sudden blizzard. Some drivers, blinded, veered off and disappeared into the storm, never to be seen again. Disoriented animals froze in their tracks. After the blizzard barreled on, what was left of the wagon train continued, with only a couple of dozen drivers and their supplies reaching their destination. It would be another six weeks before a new supply train tried another trip.
The severity of the winter produced Colonel Miles’s desired result for him. What had become an annual agony for tribes was that many of them were unable to find enough food on the frozen plains, with the women and children suffering the most. As Miles’s troops neared the border with New Mexico, an emissary from Stone Calf appeared, informing the colonel that the Cheyenne band was nearby. Their leader wanted to discuss laying down their arms in exchange for food.
Bat was one of the men who, understanding the risk that it could be a trap, volunteered to talk to Stone Calf. On March 1, 1875, without weapons, they rode into the Indian camp. The scouts could see immediately that Stone Calf must be serious because his people were clearly starving. It was explained to the Cheyenne leader that the German girls must be returned before an ounce of food was provided … if they were still alive. Bat and his companions were brought to a tepee and ushered in. There they found Katherine and Sophia lying on animal skins, as close to starvation as the others in the camp. It had taken almost six months, but all four German sisters were found alive.
Five days later, Stone Calf led eight hundred men, women, and children to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation, where they hoped to be fed. A hero of the Civil War, General Philip Sheridan, who commanded the Missouri District, declared that the Miles campaign “was not only very comprehensive, but was the most successful of any campaign in the country since its settlement by the whites.”
Bat Masterson’s role in it elevated him to hero status. But he had turned twenty-one while living out on the plains, and he had grown weary of that rough and dangerous lifestyle. It was time to ride back to Dodge City.