by Clavin, Tom
He was glad to be alive but furious at being robbed of everything except the clothes on his back. Putting him in an even worse mood was the decision by the hunters to set out for Dodge City rather than face any of Bear Shield’s warriors, whether there be five or fifty. Bat borrowed a couple of guns. He wasn’t going anywhere. As with that railroad crook Raymond Ritter, he would be patient and exact his revenge. This time, he didn’t have to wait nearly as long.
Accompanied by fellow hunter and friend Jim Harvey, Bat went in search of Bear Shield’s camp. They found it Christmas night, and apparently it was not guarded well, because as the Cheyenne warriors slept, Bat and Harvey made off with a few dozen of the band’s horses. They must have pushed them hard because the men made it to Dodge City before Bear Shield’s irate (and embarrassed) warriors could chase them down. They did try: Bat was later told by a hunter that he had seen forty Cheyenne hurrying in the same direction he and Harvey had just traveled. A providential snow squall slowed them down, and as they drew closer to Dodge City without spotting their prey, the warriors accepted that they were out a herd of horses.
Bat and Harvey sold the horses for twelve hundred dollars. Once again at the Front Street saloon, drinks were on the man who was obviously not to be trifled with.
Though still only twenty years old in March 1874, Bat had acquired some notoriety in the Dodge City area for his dash, perseverance, and pluck. An event that cemented his reputation for courage under fire that year was the Battle of Adobe Walls.
There had already been one Battle of Adobe Walls. It had occurred ten years earlier, during the Civil War. Adobe Walls, north of present-day Amarillo, Texas, had been a trading post then, and rumors reached Kit Carson, the former mountain man and scout who was then a colonel in the Union Army, that Comanche had overtaken it. With few Confederates around to occupy his troops, Carson believed that his mission was to find and kill whatever hostiles were available.
He led three companies of army cavalry and infantry east—335 soldiers and 72 Ute and Apache scouts—along the Canadian River into the Texas Panhandle. There were indeed Comanche at Adobe Walls, and Carson attacked them. Though an experienced frontiersman, he had underestimated the number of Indians—as many as a thousand, and they were angry as hornets—and he was surprised by their ferocity and tenacity. Carson and his troops barely escaped disaster, and they declared victory as they rode back to Santa Fe. He was actually credited as a hero for not having his force annihilated.
In March 1874, an expedition was formed that would go well south of the Arkansas River, across the western strip of Oklahoma, and into the Texas Panhandle, and thus severely trespass on Indian hunting grounds. There was no way around it; this was an incursion, a clear violation of the Medicine Lodge Treaty. But with buffalo becoming more scarce, it was every white and red man for himself. There was a sense of urgency, too, because if the scarcity of buffalo meant their products fell out of favor back east, prices could plunge further than they had during the previous year’s depression. It wouldn’t pay to wait around. This could be the last big buffalo expedition on the frontier.
The endeavor was organized by several Dodge City merchants who wanted to establish a new outpost on the Panhandle. They included James Hanrahan, a saloon owner; Tom O’Keefe, a blacksmith; the already successful duo of Charles Rath and Robert Wright, who needed to keep up a steady stream of hides being shipped from Dodge City; and several storekeepers, including Charlie Myers and Fred Leonard. A trading post had been established in 1845, and an adobe fort had been erected to house it—thus the name Adobe Walls. The small settlement lasted only three years because the Indians kept attacking it. Perhaps, in 1874, they would no longer be as aggressive.
The original handful of merchants and twenty-eight buffalo hunters were supplemented by whiskey haulers and even William Olds and his wife, Sybil (the only woman on the journey), who would seek to open a restaurant at the new trading post. Bat was the youngest participant. Sharing this adventure was twenty-four-year-old Billy Dixon, still a staunch friend. Bat wrote about him in a preface to the Life of “Billy” Dixon, a memoir by Olive Dixon published in 1914: “Billy Dixon was a typical frontiersman of the highest order. The perils and hardships of border life were exactly suited to his stoical and imperturbable nature. This does not mean that Billy was not a kind-hearted, generous and hospitable man, for he possessed all these admirable qualities to a high degree, but he was cool, calculating and uncommunicative at all times.”
Bat and Billy would have the least-interesting names of this wild bunch and the frontiersmen they expected to encounter in the Panhandle. These colorful characters included the Hoodoo Kid, Shoot ’Em Up Mike, Prairie Dog Dave (who, like his namesake, will pop up in this narrative from time to time), Dirty-Face Charlie, Bull Whack Joe, Hurricane Bill, Light-Fingered Jack, the Stuttering Kid, and Dutch Henry Born, who was soon to become a legendary frontier horse thief. While some of these names are probably true, we can also assume that storytellers over the years added and embellished others. The plain-named Dixon would go on to be possibly the only buffalo hunter to win the Medal of Honor, which was authorized for his valor during battles with Indians later that year. No matter what they were called, many of the men soon to set off south were tough and experienced travelers who wouldn’t back away from trouble.
Demonstrating the disrespect for Indians or possibly the foolhardiness of the time, members of the hunting party did not heed the warning of Amos Chapman. As a grizzled veteran of the frontier, he’d had plenty of experience with Indians, and his credibility was even stronger for having a Cheyenne wife who had kept close ties with the tribe. When Chapman heard of the expedition being formed, he took it upon himself to inform the organizers that the Comanche and Kiowa down there were likely to come after the trespassers. The injury was killing their sustenance, the buffalo that remained on the Panhandle, and the insult was the blatant intrusion to do it.
With more bravado than brains, the merchants and the others ignored Chapman. The thinking was that with all these men and guns and ammunition, the Indians were the ones who had to be careful. An attack by hostiles, Dixon later recalled, “meant fighting to the last ditch, and victory to the strong.”
The expedition left Dodge City, cheered on by a crowd that had gathered to bid them farewell. It was smooth going at first, with the clear air mild during the day and chilly at night, with a wide, dark, star-filled sky. The first challenge was to get the wagons across the Cimarron River, which in the spring was a swollen three-hundred-plus yards wide with pockets of quicksand along the shore. The calm and experienced teamsters managed to get the wagons across the churning, ice-cold water, and it was on to the Canadian River country.
The hunting party arrived in Texas without incident. Chapman had either been wrong about the bruised feelings of the Comanche and Kiowa, or their leaders had observed a force too big and with too much firepower to attack. When Bat and the others rolled up to East Adobe Walls Creek, they set up camp there. A few may have been well aware of Kit Carson’s near debacle of a decade earlier. The famous frontiersman, mountain man, and scout had died in 1868, at fifty-eight, at Fort Lyons in Colorado, apparently from grief a month after his wife had died giving birth to their eighth child. (Helping to perpetuate the Carson truths and myths of a trailblazing career well into the twentieth century was a nephew born as William Carson, who took on the Kit Carson name, playing his uncle in circuses and other popular shows. This second Kit Carson died in 1957, at age ninety-nine.)
Not by a long shot were Bat and his companions the first ones to visit the Adobe Walls area since the Civil War. It was a remote area, and at that time of year it was a beautiful one, thanks to the blooming chinaberries, willows, and cottonwoods along the Canadian River and the sand hills to the east. Despite its distance from white civilization (it was 150 miles from Dodge City) and being in Indian country, men had journeyed there seeking treasure. Stories had persisted for many years that centuries earlier Adobe Walls had
been a Spanish settlement. Expecting an Indian attack, the residents had buried chests crammed with gold and silver. The settlement was wiped out, and supposedly the treasure was still there, waiting to be uncovered. So far, it had not been found.
The group from Dodge City didn’t believe or care about the rumors of buried treasure; they had more practical work to do. Using wood and especially sod, new buildings were constructed about a mile from Carson’s battleground, for living in, for storing material, and for a saloon, a blacksmith shop, a restaurant, and a corral. This kept them busy into the end of May, when it was expected the northward-migrating buffalo would appear. Brave or desperate hunters who had gone farther south were already showing up at Adobe Walls with buffalo hides, and they bought ammunition and supplies at the trading post before leaving to go south again. A few, though, having had their fill of killing and with full pockets (and still full heads of hair), went north out of the settlement. Their earnings would further boost the business of the bars, saloons, and brothels in Dodge City.
For Bat, this may have been an idyllic time. He was exploring new, picturesque territory in the company of older, experienced men, there was plenty of whiskey and food, the days were growing long and warm, the fragrant nights offered a view of seemingly every star in the universe, and the arrival and killing of buffalo would be a bounty for all. A bonus was a sense that the Indians either didn’t know or didn’t care about the trespassers from Dodge City.
About that last part, they were very wrong. The Comanche and Kiowa and even Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho had taken notice and were not inclined to be gracious hosts. Worse for the white intruders, the tribes determined that this deliberate violation of their land would make the perfect example of justified Indian retaliation. It was as if a line in the sand as well as the Arkansas River had been crossed. To keep their sovereign land and remaining hunting grounds, it wasn’t enough to chase the white invaders back to where they came from. They had to be exterminated.
To that end, the tribes did something unusual—they banded together to fight a common foe, and under one leader: Quanah Parker. He would be assisted by a medicine man who some Comanche believed was also a magician. He sent out a call for warriors to converge for a Sun Dance, a ceremony that includes singing and drumming as well as dancing. Many answered the call, congregating on the Red River. The “star,” though, the one who would lead them into battle, was the half-breed warrior Parker.
Chances were the Dodge City party did not know who he was, though they probably knew the widely circulated story of his mother, Cynthia Ann Parker. At the age of nine in 1836, she had been captured by Comanche warriors raiding a fort in East Texas. She grew up living with the tribe and married one of its leaders, Peta Nocona. The couple had three children, with Quanah being the oldest. In December 1860, during the Battle of Pease River, U.S. Army soldiers captured Cynthia Ann and her daughter, Topsana, and they were sent east to live with white family members. Both were dead within a decade, Topsana in 1863 and Cynthia Ann in 1870. Peta Nocona was killed in a battle in 1864. While still a young man, Quanah formed the Quahada band of the Comanche, known for their cunning and ferocity.
In 1867, at age twenty-two, Quanah had attended the final negotiations for the Medicine Lodge Treaty but refused to abide by it. Though still not yet thirty in June 1874, he was already a respected and dramatic leader, a warrior who inspired other Comanche, and members of his band were veterans of skirmishes and battles with white migrants and army soldiers. As the recognized leader of the Comanche, he was naturally the one to lead the coalition as well because they deferred to the especially aggressive and powerful tribe who claimed, with some justification, to be the finest horsemen west of the Missouri River.
By 1874, the most visible enemy of the Comanche and their allies was Colonel Ranald Mackenzie, and his presence ratcheted up the tension between Indians and whites. He had been sent by the Ulysses Grant administration as head of an army force to kill or capture Indians who had refused to live on reservations. He knew who Quanah Parker was, and he vowed to catch him. To that end, Comanche and members of other tribes who were found by Mackenzie’s troops were being killed.
On top of the injury and insult, the inhabitants of the new Adobe Walls settlement were targeted as revenge for Mackenzie’s raids. The Dodge City party had put themselves in the wrong place at a very wrong time, and prospects for a long life were dimming.
At the end of May, as several hundred members of the tribes rallied to Quanah Parker and he prepared to lead their attack—which included teaching warriors assault tactics he’d witnessed used by the U.S. Cavalry—Bat and the other hunters were busy killing and skinning the buffalo who had traveled in the forefront of the northern migration. Early wagering suggested that this could turn out to be one of the most successful hunting expeditions ever.
But then in June there were rumors of Indians attacking settlements and other hunting camps in the Panhandle. A man named Joe Plummer arrived to tell those at the new Adobe Walls settlement that his two hunting partners at a nearby camp had just been killed and scalped and their bodies mutilated beyond recognition. Another man told a similar story a few days later. More hunters arrived, having left their camps, favoring their lives over future profits.
Several of the hunters wanted to take what had been harvested so far and head back to Dodge City. The merchants talked them out of abandoning Adobe Walls. They pointed to how good the hunting was, which would result in fuller pockets when they did return home later in the summer. Of equal or more concern was not wanting to have to clear out and leave behind merchandise not yet sold or traded. The twenty-eight hunters, several of the merchants, and Bill Olds and his wife agreed to stay. Everyone else packed up their wagons and pointed them toward the Arkansas River.
It was not a good sign when that prophet of doom Amos Chapman showed up at Adobe Walls. He was acting as a scout for an army sergeant and four troopers who were tracking horse thieves. Chapman met privately with the remaining merchants to inform them that according to the post trader at Camp Supply in the Cherokee Strip—the horizontal sliver of Oklahoma just south of Kansas—the word was that the Comanche and their allies were to attack at the next full moon, which was a few days away. Using the excuse that more supplies were needed from Dodge City, the merchants hastily began the trip north toward the safety of Kansas. Either the nervous merchants drew straws or he couldn’t bear to abandon his wares, but James Hanrahan stayed behind as the caretaker.
The hunters were not stupid men—well, some of them weren’t—and they recognized people high-tailing it when they saw it. Bat and the rest didn’t follow, but they were extra vigilant.
It was on the night of June 26 that the gleaming white full moon hung in the seemingly endless North Texas sky. Fortuitously for the small army led by Quanah Parker, the night was hot with just the barest breeze. It was expected that the doors and windows of the handful of buildings would be open. If they were quiet, as soon as there was enough light the raiders could ride down from a bluff above the Canadian River and be upon the sleeping white men before they became aware of an attack. The men and one woman, it would seem, had only minutes until suffering a violent death. The lucky ones would be those who died the quickest.
That this did not happen is either because of a faulty ridgepole or the remaining merchant who almost got himself and the others killed by being too clever. At about two in the morning, a sharp crack echoed loudly in the saloon. Hanrahan shouted, “It’s going to collapse!”
The men jumped up and set right to work shoveling dirt off the roof to lighten the load and cutting poles to support the supposedly failing ridgepole, the saloon’s main support beam. Why “supposedly”? Some accounts suggest that Hanrahan couldn’t bear to abandon his saloon and its contents by informing the hunters of Chapman’s warning, yet he couldn’t risk them being slaughtered in their sleep, either. The ridgepole may have been perfectly fine—Billy Dixon, for example, reports in his memoir that when he exami
ned it, the pole was intact—but Hanrahan’s shouting and what may have been a rifle shot simulating the sound of a cracking wooden pole and the resulting rescue of the saloon had everyone wide awake. Thus, when the first light of dawn licked the eastern horizon, the inhabitants of Adobe Walls could see that coming down at them, offering a Technicolor display of war paints and armed with rifles, lances, knives, and shields of thick buffalo hides, were hundreds of warriors led by Quanah Parker.
According to Dixon’s memoir, the Indians “were coming like the wind. Over all was splashed the rich colors of red, vermillion and ochre, on the bodies of the men, on the bodies of the running horses. Scalps dangled from bridles, gorgeous war-bonnets fluttered their plumes, bright feathers dangled from the tails and manes of the horses, and the bronzed, half-naked bodies of the riders glittered with ornaments of silver and brass. Behind this headlong charging host stretched the Plains, on whose horizon the rising sun was lifting its morning fires.”
It was easier for Dixon writing decades later to appreciate all that dangling and the scenery surrounding the attackers. At the moment, however, the urgent task for Bat and his hunting brethren was to not get killed.
Most of the men acted quickly by slamming doors and barricading the other openings in the buildings with grain and flour sacks, leaving just enough space to poke the barrels of their Sharps and other rifles through. Knowing they had an abundance of ammunition, they began blazing away from all three main buildings. Bat, one of the nine hunters in Hanrahan’s saloon (the others were divided up between the two stores), was especially effective because he had excellent eyesight and he had learned to shoot by firing at moving animals, not ignorant, nearly motionless buffalo. The tables had been turned: now it was the Indians startled by the ferocity of the Adobe Walls defenders.