Even by the dubious standards of the frontier, buffalo hunters were a breed apart. In the field they were mechanical killers, spending long days mowing down senseless beasts in assembly-line fashion. They worked, ate, and slept among the fly-infested corpses, bathing in nearby creeks when they bathed at all. The skinners were especially filthy, working daily with the putrefying carcasses, covered in blood, fat, and parasites.
They were the meanest of men, and “the meanest man among them,” according to a fellow hunter, was Billy Dixon. Born in West Virginia in 1850, orphaned at age twelve, Dixon was working as a teamster in Kansas by the time he was fifteen. He wore his black hair long, stringy, and greasy and it all but concealed his dark brown face. He never lacked for the one prerequisite for survival on the Plains: self-assurance. He described himself as “in perfect health, strong and muscular, with keen eyesight, a natural aptitude for outdoor life … an excellent shot [with] a burning desire to experience every phase of adventure to be found on the Plains.”
Life on the High Plains was rugged and cheap, and death was ubiquitous. In Leavenworth City, Kansas, which he made home for a time, Dixon would recall, “Shootings were as common as the arrival of a bulltrain, and excited little comment. The man who was quickest on the trigger usually came out ahead—the other fellow was buried, and no questions asked.”
The buffalo trade gained momentum slowly. At first, tanneries back east complained that the bison hides were too thick and rough to use for fine leather goods. But by 1872, firms in New York and Pennsylvania had imported European methods of softening the hides, creating a keen demand for raw materials and a new incentive for hunters.
So far as William T. Sherman and his right-hand man, Phil Sheridan, were concerned, the timing of this breakthrough was perfect. The two generals set extermination of the vast herds of American bison on the Great Plains as a policy goal in order to deprive Plains Indians of their primary source of food, clothing, and shelter. Professional hunters, trespassing on Indian land, killed more than four million bison by 1874. When the Texas legislature considered a law banning bison poaching on tribal lands, Sheridan journeyed to Austin to personally testify against the measure. He suggested that the legislature might better give each hunter a medal, engraved with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged-looking Indian on the other. The way to solve “the vexed Indian question,” Sheridan told the lawmakers, was by destroying “the Indians’ commissary.”
With a growing market to supply, the buffalo hunter’s arsenal rapidly increased in size and accuracy: muzzle loaders, shotguns, and Springfield rifles gave way to Henry and Spencer repeating rifles. The Sharps Rifle Company paved the way with new models specially designed for killing buffalo, led by the Big Fifty, a fifty-caliber rifle that fired a large bullet from a long shell containing a heavy powder charge—ideal for big game. Buffalo were so plentiful, so slow to move, and so oblivious to danger that an efficient hunter could kill between seventy-five and one hundred a day, an average hunter about fifty and even a poor one twenty-five. “I have seen their bodies so thick after being skinned that they would look like logs where a hurricane had passed through a forest,” recalled W. S. Glenn, who hunted bison across the Plains in the 1870s. “If they were lying on a hillside, the rays of the sun would make it look like a hundred glass windows.”
By 1872, hunters could expect to earn four dollars for each bull hide. A prolific shooter like Billy Dixon would hire two skinners to accompany him on hunts in order to keep up with the frenetic pace he set. Each was expected to prepare up to fifty skins a day. Dixon would pay up to twenty cents a hide to a good skinner.
By the winter of 1872, according to Dixon’s memoir, some seventy-five thousand bison had been killed within a sixty-mile radius of Dodge City, the southern hub of organized buffalo hunting. “The noise of the guns of the hunters could be heard on all sides, rumbling and booming hour after hour, as if a heavy battle were being fought,” he recalled. The outskirts of town were rank with the sight and smell of rotting carcasses. And the herds began to vanish.
Army colonel Richard Irving Dodge recalled that in May 1871 he had come across an endless chain of buffalo over a twenty-five-mile stretch along the Arkansas River. “The whole country appeared one mass of buffalo, moving slowly to the northward,” he wrote.
One year later, “where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”
The Arkansas River in North Texas and Oklahoma was the border south of which no hunter could go. “We gazed longingly across the sandy wastes that marked the course of the Arkansas,” wrote Dixon. “The oftener we looked the more eager we were to tempt fate.” Even the danger of encountering Indians “added spice to the temptation.”
The Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867 prohibited whites from hunting for buffalo south of the Arkansas. Still, after hunters had eliminated most of the great herds north of the river, they began moving south. Even the hunters themselves were under the impression that the army would try to stop them. Only it didn’t. When a group of buffalo men sought his advice, Colonel Dodge offered a cryptic reply. “Boys, if I were a buffalo hunter, I would hunt buffalo where buffalo are,” he told them.
A hunter-merchant named J. Wright Mooar got the hint. In March 1874 he helped organize a train of one hundred wagons loaded with hunters, merchants, and camp followers, including himself and Dixon, and headed southwest from Dodge City. They crossed the Arkansas River into Indian Territory and kept going. They stopped eventually at the confluence of two creeks two miles north of the Canadian River, a gently sloping meadow with fresh drinking water and enough tall trees to provide timber. The site was just a mile from the adobe rubble of an older trading post that had been the scene of a bloody confrontation in 1864 between Colonel Kit Carson’s New Mexico volunteers and Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache warriors. Carson’s small force was lucky to have escaped with their lives. The old trading post was called Adobe Walls.
The new Adobe Walls became the central staging ground for the new generation of white hunters. The newcomers started constructing a complex of sod buildings, including a store, mess hall, and stable, along with an eight-foot-high picket corral to contain livestock. A competing group arrived about a month later and built another store, corral, and outhouse nearby. And someone added a saloon and blacksmith shop to the complex.
By mid-June teamsters were hauling a thousand hides into the trading post every day. Visitors recalled seeing vast piles near the site. “The first idea I had was that there was a small settlement out there in the wilderness …,” recalled Seth Hathaway. “[But] on getting closer, what I first took for houses turned out to be piles of buffalo hides stacked up and ready to be hauled to the railroad.”
Billy Dixon and the others were now operating in the heart of the hunting grounds claimed by Quanah and the Quahadis. The hunters knew they were pushing their luck by setting up camp inside Comanche territory, but the rewards were too tempting to resist. Instead of two skinners a day, Dixon was now using three, and paying them up to twenty-five cents per skin. He and his men would set up a dugout with a big open fireplace near plenty of water and wood. He would kill thirty-five or forty bulls within a few hours. “No mercy was shown the buffalo when I got back to camp from Adobe Walls,” he would recall. “I killed as many as my three men could handle, working them as hard as they were willing to work. This was deadly business, without sentiment; it was dollars against tenderheartedness, and dollars won.”
Dixon headed back to Adobe Walls to hire more skinners. The Canadian River was flooded and hard to cross. Along the way he got the news that two hunters had been killed by Kiowas fifteen miles downriver. The Indians had mutilated the two men—broken open the victims’ skulls, spilled out their brains and filled the cavities with grass, and cut out their hearts along with their ears, noses, fingers, and toes.
Around the same time, two other hunters, an Englishman and a German, were killed a few miles away.
“Every man of us was dead set against abandoning the buffalo range,” Dixon would recall. “The herds were now at hand. And we were in a fair way to make big money.” The hunters decided to go out together. “I felt uneasy all the time. Something seemed to be wrong. There was Indian in the air.”
THE IDEA OF ATTACKING Adobe Walls started with Quanah, or so he would later claim. His original plan was to avenge the death of a childhood friend who had been killed by Tonkawa Indians, the allies of the Texans. The killing “make my heart hot and I want to make it even,” he said, so he recruited warriors for a raid in the time-honored method, going from camp to camp offering his pipe. Those who smoked with him signaled their agreement to go to battle. Quanah visited the Nokoni band at the head of Cache Creek and the Quahadis near Elk Creek, then the Kiowas and Cheyennes on the Washita River. “I work one month,” Quanah would recall.
He had an unusual partner for his effort. A young Comanche shaman named Isatai was making his bid to become a messiah by claiming that he could make medicine that would render warriors immune from bullets. Isatai—whose name in Comanche meant “Wolf Droppings”—insisted he possessed miraculous healing powers and could even raise the dead. He accurately predicted the harsh spring and summer drought of 1874. He told followers he had ascended to heaven to visit the Great Spirit “high above that occupied by the white man’s Great Spiritual Power” and was empowered to wage war on the whites. He claimed to be able to spit out nearly a wagonload of cartridges at a time—unlimited ammunition for the fighters. To the Comanches, decimated by smallpox and cholera epidemics and running out of options, Isatai’s message was impossible to resist.
He and Quanah succeeded in organizing a sun dance for all the Comanche bands. They gathered sometime in May along the Red River near the mouth of Sweetwater Creek. They even built a mock fort and tore it down in a practice battle. The older chiefs agreed to send their young men on the attack, and they wanted the first target to be Adobe Walls.
As Quanah later recalled, the chiefs told him, “You pretty good fighter, Quanah, but you not know everything. We think you take pipe first against white buffalo hunters—you kill white men [and] make your heart feel good. After that you come back, take all young men and go to Texas warpath.”
It was Isatai who turned the plan into a grand scheme to eliminate whites altogether and save the remaining buffalo herds, and who came up with medicine he claimed would protect them from the white man’s bullets. “God tell me we going to kill lots white men,” Isatai told them, according to Quanah’s account. “Bullets not penetrate shirts—we kill them just like old woman.”
More than two hundred warriors—the number is still in dispute among historians—rode west for several days, then stopped in the late afternoon, made medicine, painted their faces, donned war bonnets, and crossed the Canadian River. They approached the trading post on foot; some slept for a few hours while others stayed awake talking and smoking. Then, just as daylight began to creep through the eastern sky, they mounted their horses.
THE NIGHT OF JUNE 26 was sultry and dry, part of the prolonged drought that gripped the southern plains that summer. Inside Adobe Walls twenty-eight men and one woman—Mrs. William Olds, who had come from Dodge City with her husband to operate a dining room in the rear of the trading store—bedded down after midnight following some spirited carousing. All of the doors and windows were left wide open in the hope of catching a breeze. Billy Dixon slept on the ground outside to be near his wagon and horses. At around 2:00 a.m. pressure from the heavy sod covering the roof of Hanrahan’s saloon cracked the cottonwood ridgepole in its center, producing a loud, sharp report like a gunshot. Hanrahan ordered everyone out of the building for fear it would collapse.
Dixon helped shore up the roof. By the time they got the ridgepole back in place, the sky was growing red. Figuring it was too late to get back to sleep, Dixon decided to move on. He picked up his rifle and sauntered toward his horses. Just beyond them, at the edge of the tree line, he could make out objects moving in his direction. “Then I was thunderstruck,” he recalled. “The black body of moving objects suddenly spread out like a fan, and from it went up one single, solid yell—a war-whoop that seemed to shake the very air of the early morning.” Then came the thundering roar of Indian ponies and more bloodcurdling war cries.
Dixon dashed for his saddle horse, tied it to his wagon, aimed his rifle and fired off one quick shot, then fled toward the closest shelter, Hanrahan’s saloon. He sprinted through the door just before a wave of Indians engulfed the compound. Two brothers, Jacob and Isaac Scheidler, were not so lucky. They had been asleep in their wagon and had no chance to run. The warriors hacked them to pieces, scalped them, and even cut a piece of hide from the bloody corpse of their black Newfoundland dog.
The sleep-deprived defenders in three buildings grabbed their guns, threw up makeshift barricades of sacks of flour and grain and packing crates, and opened fire. Many fought the entire day in their underwear.
The first half hour was a close-in gun battle. Quanah and his warriors punched holes in the adobe walls of the saloon and tried to break down the doors, but a steady rain of gunfire forced them to retreat. Next they tried to climb the roof, but once again the gunfire was too intense. Isatai’s medicine failed to protect them from the hunters’ bullets. “I am sure that we surprised the Indians as badly as they surprised us,” Dixon recalled.
After the defenders fought off the assault, the warriors pulled back and laid siege to the compound throughout the day, launching periodic attacks on the buildings but never breaking through. The hunters, despite their small numbers, simply wielded too much firepower.
Wearing his long, flowing war bonnet, Quanah circled the site on his gray pony, seeking to rally the warriors. He fell from his horse during heavy gunfire and took shelter behind an old buffalo carcass. While lying there, he felt a searing stab of pain between his shoulder blade and his neck. It felt like he had been hit by a rock, but he realized quickly it must have been a ricocheting bullet. He crawled to a plum thicket, where other warriors pulled him to safety. “The white men had big guns,” Quanah would recall, and Isatai’s magic proved to be “polecat medicine.”
After that, the warriors pulled back even farther, trading shots with the hunters until evening.
The siege continued for a second day. The Indians killed or ran off all the hunters’ horses, leaving them no way to escape or seek help from the outside. But toward the end of the day two teams of hunters punched through the Indian encirclement from the outside and made their way to the compound.
By the third day, the hunters with their long-range rifles began to get a bead on their attackers. Memories and boasts were notoriously unreliable, but Billy Dixon claimed to have taken aim with his .50-caliber Sharps rifle and gotten off three shots at someone crawling in the tall grass some eight hundred yards away. After the battle ended, the hunters found a dead Indian lying flat on his stomach. “They killed us,” Quanah would recall.
By mid-afternoon the Indians retreated. An angry swarm of Cheyennes grabbed Isatai by the throat and demanded he be killed, but the Comanches argued he had been disgraced enough by his failure. Isatai’s messiah days were over.
Over the years Isatai offered several explanations for his failure to ward off bullets. He said that on their way to Adobe Walls the warriors had killed a skunk, whose spirit had somehow neutralized the power of his medicine. He told someone else that he had concocted the medicine to sabotage the guns at Fort Dodge and had not considered that it would not work at Adobe Walls. In truth, he had sold his own myth so powerfully to his fellow warriors that he himself had come to believe it.
Three whites were killed and thirteen warriors were found dead at the site, although the Indians may have carried off the bodies of another dozen. A fourth white man, Mrs. Olds’s hapless husband, William, died when he slipped on a ladder with a loaded gun cradled in his arm and blew off his own head. When a relief column finally arrived, the troops found thirteen severed Indian heads staring blindly from the posts of the corral gate.
THE ATTACK ON ADOBE WALLS was the moment the army had been waiting for. Secretary of War W. W. Belknap took the reins off Sherman, instructing him to punish all hostile Indians, including those living on reservations. Sherman, in turn, ordered Sheridan “to act with vindictive earnestness and to make every Kiowa and Comanche knuckle down.”
Sheridan dispatched five columns totaling three thousand troops who entered the Panhandle from five different directions in a pincer movement to squeeze the warriors. A series of fourteen skirmishes and small battles ensued, known collectively as the Red River War. There were few casualties, but each violent encounter reduced the Indians’ supply of food, horses, and shelter.
Ranald Mackenzie’s column of 640 men entered the canyon country of the eastern Panhandle in mid-September. A group of newspaper reporters demanded permission to accompany him, but Bad Hand was not interested in publicity. Sherman had called for a full-scale assault. “The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next,” he declared. But Mackenzie believed that the most effective way to defeat the Comanches was not to attempt to mow them down but to destroy their means of survival.
Mackenzie’s men beat off an attack by 250 warriors after dark on September 26, at the head of Tule Canyon. Aware that he and his men were being watched, Mackenzie set off after the warriors, who were moving away from Palo Duro canyon. But when darkness fell, he changed direction, pushing his men all night thirty miles south toward the spot where Cita Blanca and Palo Duro canyons meet. At daybreak the troopers stormed the Quahadi winter stronghold on the canyon floor. Most of the Comanches escaped—the soldiers killed only three warriors—but they left behind teepees, food, blankets, saddles, and 1,424 horses and ponies. Mackenzie ordered the animals slaughtered. It was a crushing blow to the Comanches. When it rained the next night, the Indians were forced to sleep “in puddles of mud and water like swine,” Mackenzie wrote.
For the next two months, Mackenzie trailed the Comanches in relentless pursuit of his crippled foe. Through increasing sleet and rain, Mackenzie and his men doggedly stalked Quanah and the Quahadis, who were slowed by hundreds of cold, hungry, and exhausted women and children. “It is important to give the Indians as little rest as possible,” Mackenzie wrote his superiors on October 29. The Comanches eventually retreated into the Staked Plains. Mackenzie followed until sheer exhaustion and lack of food forced him and his men to quit around Christmastime. But unlike the soldiers, the Indians had no safe haven to retreat to.
FACED WITH A WINTER without shelter and with little food, other Comanche and Kiowa bands were calling it quits. Satanta and Big Tree surrendered on October 4, 1874, to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas H. Neill of the Sixth Cavalry, bringing in 145 Kiowa warriors and their families. “I came in here to give myself up and do as the white chief wishes,” proclaimed Satanta. Predictably blaming the Comanches for Adobe Walls, he claimed, “I have done no fighting against the whites, have killed no white men, and committed no depredations since I left Fort Sill.”
Mackenzie returned to Fort Sill in March 1875. One month later, 3 Comanche leaders, 35 braves, and 140 women and children surrendered themselves at the fort with some 700 horses. But the Quahadis were still on the loose.
Mackenzie began preparing for a new spring offensive to hunt them down, but first he wanted to see if he could coax them into surrender. He sent out an emissary: Jacob J. Sturm, the same man who had brought home young Bianca Babb from her Comanche abductors a decade earlier. Sturm was a self-styled “pioneer physician,” Army scout, and interpreter who had married a local Caddo woman. Accompanied by three reservation Comanches, he set out from Fort Sill on April 23. According to Sturm’s journal, it took them a week to travel roughly 250 miles through territory where white men had once feared to tread. Now the land seemed empty of people and wildlife.
Sturm’s party eventually encountered a friendly Quahadi band, led by Black Beard, a chief with fifteen to twenty lodges. Black Beard was happy to see Sturm, fed him a dinner of buffalo meat, shared a pipe, and then got down to business, saying he and his followers were tired of war and ready to come to Fort Sill. The main Quahadi camp, he told Sturm, was “two sleeps” away. To cement his friendship and sincerity, Black Beard bestowed upon Sturm any mule of his choice.
It took several more days for Sturm’s little party to ascend the timbered bushland and emerge onto the eastern edge of the empty, windswept Staked Plains—“a barren waste unfit for habitation of civilized men,” according to Sturm. There they finally caught up to the main Quahadi camp, under the leadership of the much-maligned Isatai. Sturm and his men introduced themselves as messengers of peace and shared their supplies of tobacco, coffee, and sugar with the Comanches.
The Indians told Sturm they were no longer seeking to fight anyone and were doing their best to keep out of the way of those whites who still wanted to fight them. Isatai said he was inclined to take his people to Fort Sill, but could not make a final decision until the return of thirty men who were out on a buffalo hunt. He and Sturm met again the next day, and this time he brought along a tall young warrior named Quanah, whom Sturm described as “a young man of much influence with his people.” The young warrior expressed his support for surrendering. Isatai “then told his people they must all prepare to come in to Fort Sill and as his authority seems to be absolute they all agreed to start tomorrow,” wrote Sturm.
They broke camp the next day and started northeast to Fort Sill, leaving a message for the hunters to catch up to them on a piece of buffalo skin stuck on a pole.
It was, Sturm writes, an extraordinary sight: hundreds of warriors, women, and children, trekking through the High Plains in a great snaking line that strung out for miles. They were traveling from their hunting grounds and a harsh, unsustainable freedom to a form of captivity and an unknown future. There was nothing joyous or exciting about the journey; they were making it because they had no choice. They were in no hurry: they killed a handful of buffalo along the way, stripped the corpses of their meat, and waited two days while meat and hides dried in the sun.
At one point near sundown, Sturm spotted a single rider moving through the plains like a sailboat on an open, placid sea, “coming out of this vastness of the great plain, without any path to keep him from getting lost nor road to guide him, but coming up to our camp on a beeline.” It was an Apache who said that more than forty lodges of his tribesmen—perhaps three hundred people—were also prepared to surrender. “I told him I was not instructed to bring in Apaches but was sure that General Mackenzie would be much pleased if they would all come in.”
The next night the Comanches staged a medicine dance—“the last … they ever expect to have [on] these broad Plains.” They were gripped by fear, hope, and resignation. “They say they will abandon their roving life and try to learn to live as white people do,” wrote Sturm.
The next day the caravan climbed a rocky bluff and ascended onto “the great high plain wonderful and grand in its vastness.” It was clear to Sturm that Isatai, not Quanah, was in charge. “When he says move, we move, and when he says stop, we stop, and if I ask any one when we will start they refer me to him always.”
With the main body of Quahadis winding slowly through the plains, Sturm sent an advance party of three Comanches on ahead. They arrived at Fort Sill on May 13. With Horace Jones interpreting, the men told the colonel that the Quahadis would keep their word and surrender as promised. The main body was moving slowly because their horses were weak and there were women, children, and old people among them. But it would arrive in a few weeks.
After the warriors finished, one of them—an unusually tall and powerful-looking man with striking gray eyes—took Jones aside for a lengthy discussion, after which the interpreter turned to Mackenzie and conveyed a highly unusual request. Jones told him the warrior’s name was Quanah and he wanted the colonel’s help in locating his white mother and his sister. As a child he had been called Tseeta or Citra, and these were the names by which his mother might recognize him. Her white name, Jones added, was Cynthia Ann Parker. Jones, who had met Cynthia Ann after her recapture fifteen years earlier and had also spoken with her Comanche husband, Peta Nocona, knew her story well and filled in the details for the colonel.
Mackenzie respected the Quahadis. He admired the fact that, unlike his other Indian foes, they had never played the double game of camping at the reservation for food and shelter during the winter months and then returning to raiding in the spring and summer. He wanted to help them. “I think better of this band than of any other on the reservation as they have been steadily out and now come in at a most unusual time,” he wrote. “I shall let them down as easily as I can.”
Mackenzie listened carefully to Quanah’s request. He said he would try to help.