by Clavin, Tom
There were immediate casualties, however. Two brothers named Shadler had been caught in a freight wagon and were killed. Trapped in the buildings, the hunters watched them die. The warriors were all over the structures now, looking for any openings to ride or jump through. Flaming arrows landed on the roofs.
The defenders were helped greatly because the buildings were mostly made of sod, and thus, despite the Indians’ relentless efforts, they would not catch fire. Also, the way the structures were positioned allowed those in the saloon to provide flanking fire to relieve some of the pressure on the men in the other two buildings. Still, sheer numbers might be the deciding factor, with Indian forces outnumbering the whites by at least ten to one. With the Indians right outside the doors and windows and on the roofs, the Sharps rifles were not of much use. Bat and the others relied on their pistols and even knives and bare hands when warriors managed to work their way inside.
Their leader, Quanah Parker, was relentless, too, backing his horse into doors to try to break them down and leaping onto rooftops to fire his rifle down into the buildings. The men inside piled boxes and tables against the doors to make them harder to force open, and prayed they weren’t standing in the wrong spot when a bullet came from above.
“So close would they come that we planted our guns in their faces and against their bodies through the portholes, while they were raining their arrows and bullets at us,” Bat later recounted. “At times the bullets poured in like hail,” Billy Dixon later reported, “and made us hug the sod walls like gophers when an owl is swooping past.”
No owl would be as dangerous as Quanah Parker. But he and his warriors began to be withered by the firepower of the Sharps rifles and pistols before many could get close enough to the buildings, and the defenders had a virtually inexhaustible supply of bullets, especially the .50-caliber kind. The same bullets that could kill a buffalo weighing a ton could do incredible damage to a man, and it had to be disheartening for the Indians to see their fellow warriors—and their horses—shredded as well as killed.
One of the hunters in the Myers and Leonard store, Billy Tyler, was shot in the chest. During brief lulls in the shooting, the men in the saloon could hear him pleading for water. Bat grabbed a pail. To get to the well, he would have to expose himself to the attacking Indians. Just as Bat was about to throw open a door, an older man, Bill Keeler, persuaded Bat that he should go because he was well known among several tribes and might not be killed. Accompanied by his dog, Keeler ran to the well. He was wrong about not being shot at, but he returned unwounded with the water. Not as lucky was the dog, who died.
Bat focused on firing as fast and as accurately as he could. Dixon would later write, “Bat Masterson should be remembered for the valor that marked his conduct. He was a good shot, and not afraid.”
He and the other good shots combined to turn the tide of the battle. When Quanah Parker’s horse was shot out from under him, at around 10 A.M., the attackers withdrew.
The raid had not produced the expected result. The medicine man had convinced the Comanche and their allies that they were invincible against the white man’s bullets, and the damage of the Sharps rifles had proved him dreadfully daft. To make matters worse, after the Indians had retreated to what they thought was a safe distance, a bullet found Quanah Parker, hitting him in the shoulder, and another bullet killed the medicine man’s horse. They kept retreating farther, and the white men’s sharpshooting still found them. Several hunters later corroborated Billy Dixon’s claim that he shot an Indian off his horse at fifteen hundred yards, meaning the victim was too far away to even hear the shot and literally didn’t know what hit him.
Among the many casualties the attackers suffered were fifteen dead, or this was the number of bodies the Indians had failed to carry off with them. With Parker wounded and the Indians not wanting to come within range of the powerful rifles, the battle was over. Bat and the others could now tend to their own wounded, repair damage to the buildings, and bury their own dead. There would be a fourth fatality, when a few days after the attack, with Indians still surrounding Adobe Walls, William Olds, while descending from the roof of Rath & Wright’s, accidentally shot himself in the head. More hunters arrived to swell the population of the settlement, and finally the discouraged Indians and their wounded leader rode away.
The event had been a transforming experience for Bat, as the young man had faced death and displayed courage equal to or greater than that of the older, more experienced men. As Dixon wrote about his friend, “He was a chunk of steel and anything that struck him in those days always drew fire.”
As a final note to the Second Battle of Adobe Walls story, it was the beginning of the end of Quanah Parker’s position as leader and of the Comanche as a feared tribe. The battle was the opening salvo in the Red River War, with Colonel Mackenzie redoubling his efforts against the Comanche. He scored a victory against them that September in the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, which included destroying the tribe’s village there and killing fifteen hundred of their horses, the main source of the tribe’s domination. The following year, with the remaining Comanche harassed and starving, Parker surrendered.
He spent the rest of his life on a reservation in Oklahoma. He lived in some prosperity there, fathering sixteen children, and died in 1911 at age sixty-six. Bat Masterson and Quanah Parker may have met up again seven years before that when Bat’s friend Theodore Roosevelt was being inaugurated for the second time as president and Parker rode in the festive parade seated in the back of a car with the Lakota Sioux leader Spotted Tail and the legendary Apache warrior Geronimo.
SIX
He had always kidded her, in the days when she was a sporting girl in Dodge, that she would end up respectable, though even he couldn’t have guessed that she’d marry a sheriff.
—LARRY MCMURTRY, Lonesome Dove
Wyatt didn’t go to Wichita directly. He still had some wandering and grieving and sorting out to do. In his book Inventing Wyatt Earp, Allen Barra notes, “For a couple of years after the death of his wife, Wyatt Earp was a loner; he would retain some of the qualities of a loner the rest of his life.”
It is indeed likely that he tried his hand at buffalo hunting and met Bat Masterson, Billy Dixon, and some of their colorful colleagues along the way. It was still a way for a man with few skills to make pretty good money, and Wyatt was one who had skills with horses and, inevitably, guns from the years of hauling freight. It was also an occupation for someone who had no other pressing business to attend to.
“I’ll admit that no other buffalo hunter of my acquaintance—myself, least of all—planned his work as a crusade for civilization,” Wyatt told a biographer many years later. “I went into the business to make money while enjoying life that appealed to me.”
It couldn’t have appealed to him that much, because at some point in late 1871 or early 1872 he was back in Illinois, in Peoria, where he lived in a brothel operated by Jane Haspel. Reportedly, Virgil was also living in Peoria, and in February 1872 Wyatt and Morgan were arrested “on a charge of being found in a house of ill fame.” Wyatt would be arrested twice more on the same charge but in different brothels. He may have been a steady customer at these houses of prostitution in Peoria, but it is more likely that he and probably Virgil and Morgan worked as bouncers at such places.
However, at some point in 1873, when he was twenty-five, Wyatt realized he had to quit Peoria and its court system for good. He could go back to buffalo hunting, but soon after he did, he put his nose to the Panhandle breeze and whiffed the scent of a dying industry. He may have also detected the pungent odor of a new one emerging, that of shipping cattle north and east. In their camps, hunters had to notice the trail drives coming up from the south and passing through Texas and Oklahoma to Kansas towns like Wichita and Abilene and others connected by railroad tracks. A young man with a talent for gambling and who could keep a cool head unfettered by whiskey could leave the bloody work behind and strive to make a good living
in one of those towns.
The cow town that Wyatt went to first was Ellsworth. It was smack in the middle of Kansas, north and west of Wichita, connected by the railroad to Abilene. It lay on the treeless banks of the Smoky Hill River, surrounded by tall-grass prairie. In 1871, with the Kansas Pacific Railroad having come through on its gradual way west, Ellsworth had rivaled Abilene as a cattle-shipping town. The railroad had helped to fund the survey of a new cattle trail southeast to the Chisholm Trail, laying out a long welcome mat to Texas ranchers. They took full advantage of it, and in 1873 tens of thousands of cattle were filling the holding pens and railroad cars.
Why Wyatt would travel that far north from the Panhandle is not known, other than that Ellsworth may have appeared a more promising town to try before Wichita and Dodge City became more active cow towns. Until the financial panic back east that year curbed its activities, Ellsworth was a gambler’s paradise and an oasis for cowboys looking for other forms of recreation. The dance-hall girls were kept busy, and a few were pretty formidable gamblers, too. One, known as Prairie Rose, bet a cowboy fifty dollars that she would shed her clothes and stroll down the main street. Never figuring a woman would do that, the cowboy accepted the wager and reported it back to his comrades. At five the next morning a naked Prairie Rose did walk down the street, but she held two cocked six-shooters and shouted out that she would put a bullet in the first cowboy face that appeared in a window.
An incident that places Wyatt in Ellsworth in 1873 involved two of the frontier’s more dramatic characters. In June, after a bunch of cowboys had shot up the town, the police department was expanded to five officers. These included the brothers Ben and Billy Thompson, gunmen and gamblers who believed that the police force, headed by Marshal Brocky Jack and his chief deputy, Happy Jack Morco—who had wound up in Ellsworth after leaving behind in Oregon a wife and charges of killing four men—was corrupt and populated by men who were more degenerate than the men they tossed in jail. However, Chauncey Whitney, the sheriff of Ellsworth County, was a respected lawman and a Civil War veteran. The problem for citizens was that Whitney had only limited jurisdiction within Brocky Jack’s territory.
Ben Thompson, in particular, was not a man to aggravate. He had been born in West Yorkshire, England, on November 2, 1843. While he was a child, the Thompson family emigrated to America, settling in Austin, Texas. As a teenager, Ben learned how to set type, and he was bent on becoming a printer. The Civil War changed those plans: two months after the attack on Fort Sumter, he enlisted in the 2nd Regiment, Texas Mounted Rifles, H Company, and somehow his brother, Billy, barely sixteen, managed to join the Confederate Army, too. Ben was wounded during the Battle of Galveston in 1863, but he returned to his regiment, and he and Billy saw further action.
When the war ended, Ben became a mercenary, finding work fighting for Emperor Maximilian in the Mexican Revolution. Along the way Ben acquired a wife. When word reached him in Mexico that his wife had been attacked by her own brother, Ben returned to Texas and beat up the abuser so badly that Ben was tried and convicted of attempted murder and sent to Huntsville Prison. His stay was a short one, though, as he received a full pardon. Ben hit the road as a gambler, working his way up into Kansas, and could be recognized for his fine clothes, mustache, and top hat.
Thompson would soon play a crucial role in Bat Masterson’s life. Years later, Bat reminisced that the debonair gunman “was a remarkable man in many ways and it is very doubtful if in his time there was another man living who equaled him with the pistol in a life and death struggle. The very name of Ben Thompson was enough to cause the general run of ‘man killers,’ even those who had never seen him, to seek safety in instant flight.”
Ben had tussled with lawmen before, including the most feared one: James Butler Hickok. As with Wyatt Earp, Illinois could not contain a restless man, especially one who would earn the name Wild Bill. As a spy and scout in the Civil War, Hickok had fought against the Confederates in Arkansas and Missouri, with many of the rebs being from Texas. Having an understanding of such men was an advantage when he began wearing a badge in the Kansas cow towns and most of the cowboys were from Texas. What helped more, of course, was his tall, lean stature, long auburn locks and mustache, and that he could outdraw any man in a gunfight.
Hickok wore two Colt Model 1851s. Each was a .36-caliber percussion pistol weighing less than three pounds and which had been engraved at the Colt factory by the master engraver there, Gustav Young. The guns were nicknamed “Navy” across the West because of the naval warfare scene depicting a battle between Texas ships and the Mexican navy that was inscribed on the cylinders of the first run produced in 1850. General Robert E. Lee had carried an 1851 Colt pistol during the Civil War, and another owner was Richard Burton, the English explorer. It is not known for certain how Hickok acquired his guns in 1869. One story has them being a gift from Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts when Hickok guided him and friends through the Arkansas River territory. Another has them being presented to the quick-handed lawman by the Union Pacific Railroad as a reward for getting Hays, Kansas, under control. Wild Bill rarely used his left hand to shoot; the second gun was more of a backup in case the right-hand gun misfired or ran out of bullets. One photo shows him wearing the Navy Colts with the butts pointing forward, known as a “crossdraw” style.
The ivory-hilted and silver-mounted pistols impressed the men, and his looks as well as his shirts of the finest linen and boots of the thinnest kid leather impressed the ladies. But what impressed frontier people the most was his shooting. Tales of his legendary accuracy made the rounds, going back to July 21, 1865. On that day in Springfield, Missouri, Hickok was challenged to a duel by Davis Tutt. Standing sideways and seventy-five yards away, Tutt must have assumed he was safe from serious injury and that his honor would be restored. He died honorably, at least, when Hickok shot him through the heart.
Hickok became marshal of Abilene in 1871, just as all hell was beginning to bust loose there. He already had enough of a reputation as a gunslinger that he could allow the cowboys enjoying the saloons and prostitutes between trail drives to wear their guns and know that would not instigate trouble. Indeed, using a frontier form of reverse psychology, the intimidating marshal knew the cowboys would figure out that either they would never want to cause trouble while wearing a gun and have to go up against Wild Bill, or the smartest play was to leave their gun belts in their saddlebags.
That same year, Ben Thompson and a partner, Phil Coe, arrived in Abilene and established the Bull’s Head Tavern & Gambling Saloon. Ben’s first brush with the law there was when he painted a huge and lewd bull on the outside wall. Citizens complained, Hickok ordered it removed, and Thompson refused. Instead of going for his gun, Hickok went for a can of paint and a brush and covered the bull. As tough as Thompson was, he was not about to go up against the marshal himself.
A different strategy presented itself when John Wesley Hardin hit town. The precocious gunslinger, then eighteen years old, was on the run from an arrest warrant in Texas. After a few visits to the Bull’s Head, Thompson pointed out to him that Hickok hated rebels and was a damn Yankee who needed killing. Hardin looked Hickok up. However, the young man immediately saw Wild Bill as an idol, and the marshal took a liking to the fugitive kid. He made Hardin a deal: he would pretend he had no knowledge of the Texas warrant if the teenager refrained from killing anyone while in Abilene.
The deal did not last long. One night while Hardin was asleep in the American Hotel, an intruder entered. Not waiting to learn of the man’s intentions, Hardin grabbed his gun and fired, killing him. Also not waiting long enough to even pull on pants, Hardin jumped out a back window as Hickok hurried into the front lobby. Hardin landed in a small wagon, which he drove south, possibly preferring Texas to Wild Bill’s six-shooters. Along the way, he found a cowboy and took his pants and horse. Hardin told the cowboy to return the wagon and “give Wild Bill my love.” He never set foot in Abilene again.
Ben
Thompson would soon have another reason to dislike Hickok. Phil Coe became infatuated by a saloon girl named Jessie Hazel. As it happened, Wild Bill was drawing her under his spell, embittering Ben’s partner. One night during a card game that included Hickok and Coe, there was an accusation of cheating. Coe went for his gun, but his fate was sealed as soon as the marshal’s cleared leather. Unfortunately, Hickok fired more than once, and a stray bullet killed one of his deputies. The marshal was furious. He kicked all the cowboys out of Abilene and patrolled the streets with a shotgun, daring anyone to show himself wearing a weapon.
With his partner in the ground, Thompson decided to relocate, and that is how, with his brother Billy, Ben wound up in Ellsworth. One day in August 1873, the brothers and Happy Jack and another policeman, John Sterling, were gambling in a saloon owned by a man named Brennan. The combination of alcohol and charges of cheating proved combustible. Arguing led to Sterling punching Ben Thompson in the face, which led to guns being drawn. The combatants spilled out into the street and shots were fired. What prevented bloodshed was the appearance of Sheriff Whitney, whom the Thompsons trusted. They agreed to join the sheriff for a drink back in the saloon.
Unfortunately, Billy still held a shotgun with the hammers up. When Happy Jack, unhappy with Whitney’s interference in the dispute, confronted Ben with a brandished pistol, Billy’s immediate (and drunken) reaction was to pull the triggers. He shot the sheriff. According to witnesses, Ben said, “My God, Billy, you have shot our best friend.” Worse than that, the shot would prove to be a fatal one.
Ben told his brother to get on a horse and ride like hell out of town. Billy did just that. The mayor of Ellsworth, James Miller, appeared and told the remaining brother to give up his guns. Ben refused. Brocky Jack, Happy Jack, and another policeman stood with their hands on their guns. Flooding out of the nearby saloons were cowboys eager to fight alongside another Texan. When the standoff continued long enough, the frustrated mayor fired the entire police department. Now what?