by S. C. Gwynne
The effect on the Indians was devastating. It was not so much the carnage—fifteen were killed that day and many more wounded—as the shocking failure of Isa-tai’s medicine. That was the first great demoralizing blow. The second was the wounding of Quanah, who was rescued by his people and brought back out of range of the buffalo guns. As we have seen, the killing or wounding of the leader was almost invariably a signal for retreat. By four o’clock the Indians had given up. The whites emerged from their buildings and collected trinkets and souvenirs. Though the Indians remained nearby for the next several days, taking occasional shots at the sod walls of the trading post, they never attacked again. The battle was over. On the third day Billy Dixon made what became the most famous single shot in the history of the West. A party of about fifteen Indians had appeared at the edge of the bluff, at a distance of probably fifteen hundred yards, or almost a mile. As Dixon recalled, “some of the boys suggested that I try the big ‘50’ on them. . . . I took careful aim and pulled the trigger. We saw an Indian fall from his horse.”41 He was the last casualty of what would become famous in frontier history as the Second Battle of Adobe Walls, where a handful of doughty white men held off a buzzing horde of Indians that has been variously estimated at seven hundred to a thousand, though two hundred fifty is closer to the truth. Astonished and terrified, the rest of the Indians fled.
The rest was anticlimax. The whites, strengthened by the arrival of more than seventy hunters who were now afraid to be alone on the plains, eventually decided it was safe to go about their business. After burying their four dead comrades (one died accidentally) and the scalped Newfoundland dog that had died with the drovers, the whites beheaded the dead Indians and stuck their heads on stakes outside the walls. They placed the thirteen headless bodies on buffalo hides and dragged them away along with the dead horses (the Indians had killed them all), which had begun to reek.
Meanwhile the Indians drifted off, furious, helpless. Once again, bad medicine had been their fatal weakness. They could not help themselves. Reverse the roles to see what might have happened. The whites would have surrounded the buildings and kept up the attack. They would have come by night and caved in the walls. They would have accepted far greater losses to achieve the objective than Indians ever would. Indians never understood the concept of seizing and holding a small piece of real estate, or of calculating the grim cost-benefit ratio of a siege. Failing all this, the white men would have simply starved the Indians out, waiting patiently for them to get so thirsty they would have to choose between dying and fighting.
Though the hide men had escaped Quanah’s army with their skins intact, the rest of the frontier wasn’t so lucky. After their failure at Adobe Walls, the enraged warriors formed smaller groups and struck blindly in all directions at western settlements from Colorado to Texas.42 Kiowas under Lone Wolf crossed the border into Texas. Cheyennes and Comanches under Quanah struck first to the east, driving the herd of buffalo hunters’ horses, and destroying a wagon train in the Indian territory, then attacking settlements in Texas. Little is known of these raids. Some said Quanah ventured as far north as southern Colorado. He himself later allowed only that, following Adobe Walls, “I take all men, go warpath to Texas.”43 Attacks were made as far north as Medicine Lodge in Kansas. The entire frontier was forced to “fort up.”44 Stages were attacked; stations were burned. Parties of hide men were tortured and killed. Men were staked out on the prairie and women raped and murdered in terrible ways. The Indian outbreak that swept the southern plains that summer killed an estimated one hundred ninety white people and wounded many more. Its effects were immediate. Hide hunting stopped altogether. Hunters and settlers and anyone on the edge of the frontier fled to the protection of the federal forts. Adobe Walls may have failed. But the summer raids accomplished exactly what Isa-tai and Quanah had wanted: massive revenge against the white people that caused panic and terror for a thousand miles. Amid their feelings of rage and frustration, the summer killing must have given them satisfaction. It represented justice to them, the evening of old scores.
Unfortunately for Quanah and Lone Wolf and the others killing white men that summer, their predations also exhausted the last of the white man’s patience, and ruined forever the arguments of the peace advocates and pro-Indian humanitarians. On July 26, Grant gave Sherman permission to put the agencies and reservations under military control, thus ending five years of the failed peace policy.45 On the same day Lieutenant Col. John W. “Black Jack” Davidson, the commander at Fort Sill, ordered all friendly Indians to register and enroll at the agencies by August 3, and to report for a daily roll call. Grant ordered the army to move immediately and in force. All restrictions were lifted on movements of the army. They were at liberty to pursue the Indians to the front porch of the agency at Fort Sill, if necessary, and kill them there. There would be no safe harbor on the reservation, no forgiveness for those who stayed out. The bluecoats were now, as the über-warrior Grant put it simply and bluntly, “to subdue all Indians who offered resistance to constituted authority.” The plan, for which an enormous amount of army firepower would be brought to bear, was to hunt them all down.
Nineteen
THE RED RIVER WAR
BY THE LATE summer of 1874 there were only three thousand Comanches left in the world. That was the rough estimate made by the agents at Fort Sill, and it is probably close to the truth. Two thousand of them lived on the Comanche-Kiowa reservation in the southwestern part of what is now Oklahoma. These were the tame Comanches, the broken Comanches. The other thousand had refused to surrender. That group included no more than three hundred fighting men, all that was left of the most militarily dominant tribe in American history.1 There were also a thousand untamed Southern Cheyennes and a comparable number of renegade Kiowas and Kiowa Apaches. Probably three thousand “hostiles” in all. Eight hundred warriors, at most, on all of the southern plains.2 Unfortunately for later novelists and filmmakers, they were not arrayed in battle lines on a mesa top, spearheads gleaming in the sun, awaiting the arrival of the bluecoats’ main force. There would be no Thermopylae, no epic last stand. This was guerrilla war. As always, the Indians were scattered in various camps and bands. Along with the hostile outliers of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho on the plains north of Nebraska, they were the last of their kind.
Remarkably, these remnants of once powerful tribes all found themselves in the same place: the northern Texas Panhandle. This was not accidental. The panhandle plains were close to the reservations, whose western boundaries were less than a hundred miles to the east. All of the hostiles (even the Quahadis) had camped on the government’s land at various times. Some had wintered on the reservations. Many of the apparent “reservation” Indians, moreover, were not, as we have seen, really permanent residents. Indians who docilely queued up to receive federal beef in January might well be raiding the Palo Pinto frontier under the summer moon.
But the best reason to camp in the panhandle was that, in all of the southern plains, there was no better place to hide. In the general vicinity of present-day Amarillo, the dead-flat Llano Estacado gave way to the rocky buttes and muscular upheavals of the caprock, where the elevation fell as much as a thousand feet. Into this giant escarpment the four major forks of the Red River had cut deep, tortuous canyons, creating some of the most dramatic landscapes in the American West. The spectacular Palo Duro Canyon, carved out over the geologic aeons by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, was a thousand feet deep, one hundred twenty miles long, between a half-mile and twenty miles wide, and crossed by innumerable breaks, washes, arroyos, and side canyons. This was long the Quahadis’ sanctuary. Nestled in the middle of the panhandle plains, an area roughly the size of Ohio, it offered the last free Indians some small chance of delaying the inevitable reckoning with this burgeoning nation of thirty-nine million that was impatient to get on with its destiny.
In August and September the full might of the western army was finally su
mmoned forth to hunt, engage, and destroy what was left of the horse Indians. Sheridan’s idea was that the Indians would be harried through four seasons, if necessary. They would be given no rest, no freedom to hunt. They would be starved out. Their villages would be found and burned, their horses taken from them. That this action was probably two decades late was irrelevant now. The will was there, and all editorial opinion in the land supported it.
The final campaign took the form of five mounted columns designed to converge on the rivers and streams east of the caprock. Mackenzie commanded three of them: his own crack Fourth Cavalry was to march from Fort Concho (present-day San Angelo), and probe northward from his old supply camp on the Fresh Water Fork of the Brazos; Black Jack Davidson’s Tenth Cavalry would move due west from Fort Sill; and George Buell’s Eleventh Infantry would operate in a northwesterly direction between the two.3 From Fort Bascom in New Mexico, Major William Price would march east with the Eighth Cavalry, while Colonel Nelson A. Miles, a Mackenzie rival and a man destined to become one of the country’s most famous Indian fighters, came south with the Sixth Cavalry and Fifth Infantry from Fort Dodge, Kansas. They would rely heavily on Mackenzie’s knowledge of the land. In all, forty-six companies and three thousand men took the field, the largest force ever sent against Native Americans.4 Unlike previous expeditions, including Mackenzie’s, they would have permanent supply bases. They would be able to stay in the field indefinitely. In military terms they had other advantages, too, including raw firepower. But the principal, overwhelming edge they had was that their adversaries would be forced to take the field carrying all their women, children, old men, lodges, horse herds, and belongings with them.
What followed became known to history as the Red River War. It loomed large in the national consciousness not because it was a real war—it was more of an antiguerrilla campaign—but because of its grand finality. Over the years people had spoken of the last frontier and dreamed of it, but now that romantic idea came fully into focus: the last frontier. You could see it, grasp it; the end of the horse tribes’ dominion was the end of the very idea of limitlessness, the end of the old America of the imagination and the beginning of the new West that could be measured and divided and subdivided and tamed first by cattlemen and then by everybody else. Within a few years barbed wire would stretch the length and breadth of the plains.
Before that could happen, the Indians had to be found. Even though they were traveling as entire communities, in such a large area the task was still extremely difficult, as Quanah had so brilliantly demonstrated at Blanco Canyon three years before. The five columns stayed in the field for four to five months, crossing and recrossing the various forks of the Red, climbing and descending the caprock, marching and countermarching and following a maddeningly desultory set of trails left by many independent bands of Indians. The soldiers’ mad sorties here and there call to mind the Keystone Kops: much frantic pursuit with little to show for it. The Indians may not have fully understood the nature of the campaign against them, but they absolutely understood that they could not beat any of the columns in open battle. So they avoided them, shadowed them; attacked only when they found a small, detached party; or came at night to stampede horses.
It was thus a war with only a handful of major engagements. Colonel Nelson Miles, first in the field, drew first blood. On August 30 he found and attacked a large body of warriors, mostly Cheyennes, near Palo Duro Canyon. His estimates of the enemy force were wildly exaggerated: He claimed to have fought four hundred to six hundred warriors, which is in retrospect completely implausible, then later to have tracked a village containing as many as three thousand people. The latter is purely impossible. In his inflated reports he was one-upping Mackenzie, with whom he had a sharp rivalry, inventing enormous cohorts of the enemy that did not exist. (Mackenzie did not parry; his reports were terse, understated, and made even dramatic engagements sound boring.) In a running, twelve-mile, five-hour fight, Miles killed twenty-five Indians and wounded more, while suffering only two wounded. He burned a large village.5 In mid-September, William Price encountered a hundred Comanches and Kiowas. A fierce one-and-a-half-hour fight ensued, in which the Indians fought bravely to screen the escape of their families, then withdrew. In October, Buell burned two villages but managed to kill only one Indian. That same month Black Jack Davidson ran down a group of sixty-nine Comanche warriors along with two hundred fifty women and children and two thousand horses. They surrendered to him. In November a detachment of Miles’s Fifth Infantry attacked and routed a group of Cheyennes on McClellan Creek. The unnerved Indians broke and fled out on to the plains, leaving most of their possessions behind. The infantry’s claims of bravery were somewhat muted when they learned that the Cheyennes could not have returned fire if they had wanted to: They had run out of ammunition.6 So it went. The campaign played out mostly in dozens of small actions that stretched over the fall, as the bluecoats and Indians played a vast game of hide-and-seek in the breaks below the caprock. The Indians did not lose all the engagements: On November 6, one hundred Cheyennes under their chief Graybeard ambushed twenty-five men from Price’s Eighth Cavalry, killing two, wounding four, and forcing the whites to retreat.7 The war dragged on across the upper panhandle, through a cold, rainy season so muddy and wet that the Indians called it the Wrinkled Hand Chase.
The most important battle—one that was deserving of the name—was fought by Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry. The converging columns had been his idea in the first place: In theory, the Indians would be driven by one force into another, cornered and destroyed. That was more or less what happened in late September, beneath the spectacular red, brown, white, and ochre battlements of Palo Duro Canyon.
Mackenzie’s troops had taken the field on August 23, marching north from Fort Concho in columns of four: 560 enlisted men, 47 officers, 3 surgeons, and 32 scouts—642 in all. They had gone to their old supply camp in Blanco Canyon, on the Freshwater Fork of the Brazos. Then they turned north, up the familiar trail that ran along the razor edge of the Llano Estacado, where Quanah had schooled them three years before in the fine art of escape. The summer had been dry and brutally hot; as the men marched they were enshrouded in a fog of dust. On their first night out, a howling wind sent sparks from their campfires into the desiccated grass, setting it afire and almost destroying their camp. They were used to this now. Because of their experience in the field, and because of Mackenzie’s relentless drilling, the Fourth had become the toughest, most seasoned force ever to fight Plains Indians.8 He was supported by two crack commanders: Captain Eugene B. Beaumont, a veteran of the mauling of Shaking Hand’s village on the North Fork of the Red in 1872, who had fought at Gettysburg and had marched with Sherman through Georgia; and Captain N. B. McLaughlin, a Civil War brigadier general who had been the hero of Mackenzie’s attack on the Kickapoo village in Mexico in 1873.9 Because of Mackenzie’s intimacy with the terrain—the other commanders followed the roads he blazed during his 1872 expeditions, now known as the Mackenzie Trail—he was given enormous freedom to do what he wanted. “In carrying out your plans,” he was informed by his commanding officer in Texas, General C. C. Augur, “you need pay no regard to Department or Reservation lines. You are at liberty to follow the Indians wherever they go, even to the agencies.” If the Indians fled to Fort Sill he was “to follow them there, and assuming Command of all troops there at that point, you will take such measures as will ensure entire control of the Indians there.”10
Mackenzie’s troops had scouted for more than a month, fought a few small actions with Comanches who melted away into the canyon lands, and braved torrents of rain that had begun in September and turned the ground into a glutinous mud. Mackenzie was irritable and, as usual, impatient. Riding long distances took a tremendous toll on his shattered body. He drove the men hard, snapping the stumps of his fingers and railing against the conditions that kept his wagon train mired in knee-deep sludge. At dawn on September 25, with his wagons stuck in mud, he left them be
hind and headed northwest. Walking part of the way to preserve the horses, his men marched twenty grueling miles to Tule Canyon, another starkly beautiful formation etched into the edges of the Llano Estacado, cut by Tule Creek, which flowed north to join the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red in Palo Duro Canyon. At sunset one of his scouts rode in with the news Mackenzie had been waiting for: Up ahead, among the many trails leading crazily off in all directions, there was one very big one, made by about fifteen hundred horses. It led east.
Though his men were bone-weary from the long and muddy march, Mackenzie ordered them back in their saddles. They rode on in darkness, a long dark column moving under a bright harvest moon through thick buffalo grass that muffled the horses’ hooves.11 They followed the trail for five miles, expecting attack at any moment. Mackenzie was aware that his quarry was all around him, silent and elusive as ghosts. When his troops camped for the night, the horses were picketed under a strong guard. The men slept with their boots on and their weapons to hand. Mackenzie stayed in camp the next day, waiting for his supply train to catch up with him. That night, remembering the painful lessons of Blanco Canyon and Shaking Hand’s village, and sensing the presence of many Indians, Mackenzie redoubled his precautions. Under his orders, each horse was not only hobbled, meaning that its front legs were tied together, but also cross-sidelined, meaning that forefeet were tied to opposite hind feet. The horses were then secured with thirty-foot, one-inch-thick ropes, which were tied to fifteen-inch iron stakes driven deep into the ground.12 In addition, “sleeping parties” of twelve to twenty men each were posted around the horse herd.13 Mackenzie was taking no chances.