Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The hunter had to use the wind to his advantage. “The buffalo has a very acute sense of smell, and the first scent of man they catch they are off,” Hathaway said. “So in crawling up, the hunter works towards them against the wind if he possibly can. This is hard on a still day. To determine the direction of the wind a handful of grass is thrown in the air. After he has got the direction he starts crawling, at the same time watching the straggling buffaloes. If the nearest animal raises his head, the hunter lays flat on the ground and keeps quiet, out of sight if possible. If the country is rolling, he takes advantage of the ground. In a flat country he is always in sight, and it is very hard to approach a herd and not be discovered.” The buffalo weren’t keen of vision, but they were wary. “If the buffalo discovers a hunter, he will watch him for as long as five minutes some times. If he is satisfied that there is no danger, he will start to feeding again. If, on the other hand, he is not satisfied—and a buffalo is a mighty suspicious animal—he will twist his tail over his back and go. Then it is up to the hunter to find a new herd and start all over again. Patience is a virtue in hunters, as I have seen it take one hour and a half to work up close enough to shoot.”

  Getting in position was just the start, Hathaway said. “After the hunter has worked up to what he considers a good range, say from 150 to 225 yards, he will pick out the bull he thinks is the leader of the bunch, take good aim at the center of the body, just back of the fore shoulder, and blaze away. At the crack of the gun they will all start on the run, though if the shot is a good one, if the animal stops and blood flows from his mouth and nostrils, in a moment he will stagger and fall. Scenting the blood, the rest of the herd will stop. The hunter will then work up a little closer, place the rest sticks for his gun, and kill all the buffaloes he can before they recover themselves.” Rest sticks were props used to hold up the muzzles of the heavy guns. “Sometimes the hunter would get five, ten, or perhaps fifteen buffaloes before the herd moved too far away. I have seen Gardner kill at one stand forty-six. In one of my hunts with Gardner I killed thirty-three.”

  When the shooting stopped, the skinners moved in. This far from civilization, the only part of the animal that could be transported to market economically was the hide, which the skinners swiftly separated from the thousand pounds or so of meat and bone. The hides were stretched taut and pegged to the ground, to dry in the sun and wind of the plains. While the hides were drying, the men molded new bullets from the lead they carried, refilled the spent cartridges with powder, and visited with any other hunters who happened to be in the area. After several days, depending on the weather, the hides were stacked in the wagon and the hunting party moved on.

  IF THE HUNTERS EXPECTED TO RETURN TO A PARTICULAR SITE on the way back to the railroad, where they would sell the hides, they might cache supplies in a hole in the ground. Gardner’s group did this, only to discover, on the return, that wolves had smelled the cache and raided it. Gardner hadn’t wanted to purchase any more supplies, as this far out, merchants charged extortionate prices. But he had no choice, and so sent Hathaway to a trading post at a place called Adobe Walls, near the Canadian River.

  The adobe walls in question were the ruins of a fort built in the late 1840s by private traders hoping to do business with the Comanches and their neighbors. Some Comanches did patronize the fort, but others drove the traders away. In 1864 the walls served as refuge for Kit Carson and a regiment of New Mexican volunteers besieged by thousands of Comanches and Kiowas in one of the largest battles ever fought on the plains. Carson’s heavier armaments, including howitzers, eventually drove the Indians off, but not before the engagement reminded the whites that they were mere intruders in a land still controlled by the Comanches and their allies. Though traders returned to the site several years later, their position at the time of Seth Hathaway’s visit was precarious.

  “Nothing of interest occurred on the trip until I got within a few miles of the place,” Hathaway recalled. “Riding up on a hill, I came in sight of the Adobe Walls, situated in a beautiful valley from a half mile to a mile wide, and sloping each way from the creek out to the hills.” At his distance Hathaway thought he saw dozens of small houses scattered about the valley, but closer inspection proved these to be piles of buffalo hides awaiting transport to the railroad in Kansas, hundreds of miles away. Several other hunting parties had found themselves in predicaments similar to Gardner’s and had sent men to reprovision. Hathaway met some of them in the store of the post, where the proprietor, a fellow named Myers, traded flour, corn meal, bacon, horse feed, and lead for buffalo hides and cash. Hathaway paid cash for the few supplies he needed, and then, the day being too far gone for him to start the return journey, joined the other hunters for recreation. This included shooting-matches, card-playing and “swapping lies with one another,” as Hathaway put it.

  Normally the men would have slept under the stars, but a storm drove most of them into the cramped quarters of the compound. A few others slept in their wagons. Between the weather and the crowding, no one got much sleep. Before dawn a hunter named Billy Dixon, deciding he might as well end the long night, volunteered to go to the creek and round up the horses. The others began preparing breakfast.

  Moments later they heard rifle shots. Dixon arrived back at a run. “Indians, boys, Indians!” he shouted. “Lots of them!” He said he hadn’t seen the Indians but had heard them singing. “I might state here,” Seth Hathaway explained, “that Indians always sing before they go into action, just as white warriors have bands playing to inspire them.” The gunshots were Dixon’s, fired to warn the men in the compound.

  The men began piling flour sacks as makeshift barriers to Indian bullets and peered through the half-light of dawn. “We could see that the savages were riding abreast in a line two deep, which stretched across the valley,” Hathaway recalled. “It was the grandest and most aweing sight I have ever seen. Their many colored blankets and the eagle feathers in their war bonnets waved in the wind as they came riding on at an easy canter, chanting a war song.” Seen together, they appeared to number between three and four hundred, or fifteen to twenty times as many as the hunters who now watched from behind the adobe walls. “When about five hundred yards from the house, they broke into a war cry. It was a sound I shall never forget, that yell of defiance and hate coming from those savage throats.”

  LEADING THE CHARGE WAS QUANAH PARKER. DURING THE previous few years Quanah had come to realize that the buffalo hunters were a greater threat to the independence of the Quahadis than the soldiers. The soldiers could be eluded, but the hunters were killing the buffalo, without which the Comanches would be forced to accept the terms of the federals.

  The buffalo had been under pressure for decades, from before the arrival of the white hunters. Their sheer numbers made them susceptible to population crashes in periods of drought, which occurred at irregular intervals on the plains. The intrusion of horses onto the buffalo range added a competitor species that hadn’t existed before. Introduced diseases, including anthrax, which seems to have jumped from cattle to buffalo, had devastating effects on parts of the herd not unlike the effects new diseases had on many of the Indian tribes. The shift of pedestrian hunters like the Sioux to horseback made the buffalo more vulnerable to human predation, which increased with the Indians’ acquisition of firearms, and increased again when the beaver trade declined and the Sioux and other tribes switched to buffalo robes as a staple of commerce. The arrival of the white hunters supplied the coup de grace, making a bad situation imminently terminal.

  Quanah Parker didn’t know every detail of the chain of causation in the decline of the buffalo, but he understood where it all was leading. And in the early summer of 1874 he laid plans for an attack against the white hunters at the trading post at Adobe Walls. On June 27, the day after Seth Hathaway arrived, the operation commenced.

  The assault force comprised perhaps seven hundred warriors: Comanches, Cheyennes and Kiowas. Beside Quanah rode Isatai, a Comanche
medicine man who claimed to be able to stop the bullets of the white hunters with his magic. “Those white men can’t shoot you,” he declared. “With my medicine I will stop up their guns. When you charge, you will wipe them all out.” Fortified by this promise, Quanah raised the war cry and led the assault. “We charged pretty fast on our horses, throwing up dust high,” he later remembered. The thunder of thousands of hooves shook the walls of the trading post as the Indians surged forward.

  Behind the adobe walls, the hunters waited till the Indians closed to within a hundred yards, then aimed low to hit the horses. Dozens of the animals went down, pitching their riders to the dirt. But the others continued to come, surging forward until they were inside the compound itself. “I got up into the adobe houses with another Comanche,” Quanah Parker said. “We poked holes through the roof to shoot.”

  A semblance of coordination marked the hunters’ initial volleys, but soon they were firing at random, as quickly as they could reload. “It was each man for himself,” Hathaway said. “The house soon filled up with smoke, and as of course every chink was closed up but the loopholes, it became stifling in the place, and every man perspired freely.”

  The Indians fell back after the first charge, then regrouped and charged again. Hathaway got a clear view of an Indian warrior even younger than himself. “In the second charge, one young Indian, a mere boy, had been shot through the chest. Instead of retreating with the rest, he rode his horse full tilt around the ranch house before he fell dead.”

  The hunters beat back the second charge, and the Indians took cover behind the hide piles outside the walls. From there they sniped at the trading post and kept the hunters pinned down. The latter gained heart, after an hour of the rifle duel, from a welcome sound. “The clear notes of a cavalry bugle sounded in the distance, which raised a cheer from the powder-begrimed, besieged men in the close, bad-smelling ranch house,” Hathaway remembered. “Crouching behind sacks and boxes, every eye was glued to the loopholes to catch the first sight of the rescuers, every nerve and muscle drawn to the fullest tension. The suspense was fearful, as every moment we expected to see a party of cavalrymen dash on to the scene.”

  The Indians, however, seemed unperturbed by the apparent approach of a relief column, and presently the hunters learned why. “One of the men discovered that the bugle blower was a big negro, supposed to be a deserter from one of the colored regiments then stationed at Fort Will, Indian Territory, that had joined the Indians,” Hathaway recalled. The disappointment of the hunters gave way to anger as the turncoat continued to play. “One of the boys said, ‘I am going to shoot that damned nigger the first chance I get.’” The black man mistakenly thought he was out of the range of the hunters’ rifles. “Three shots sounded through the ranch house, and before the reports died away, the bugle notes were cut off as though the instrument had been snatched from the lips of the blower. A man they called Dutch Henry shouted, ‘I got the damned nigger, boys. That will end the music!’ And to him the honor was given. It was a long shot but a good one.”

  By now, though, the hunters had other problems. “The men suffered greatly from thirst,” Hathaway said. “The place was choked with powder smoke, and the men’s tongues began to swell, so that they could only speak in whispers.” The Indians, with access to the water of the creek, appeared willing to wait the men out.

  One of the hunters, refusing to die of thirst, began to dig in a corner of the dirt floor of the house. Most of the others thought he was crazy. But a few took turns digging. At five feet they struck water. “Although there was plenty of alkali in it, the men drank eagerly,” Hathaway said. “The change that came over the men was wonderful. One would not suppose it was the same party. Some tried to sing, others to whistle as well as their parched lips would allow.” They helped themselves to the inventory of the place. “Canned fruit, crackers and other eatables were brought out, and we made quite a meal.”

  Perhaps the changed mood of the besieged men was somehow transmitted to the besiegers. Perhaps the remarkable range of the buffalo guns dispirited the Indians. “One Indian about eight hundred yards off climbed on top of a hide pile and started to dance, but a bullet from one of the buffalo guns ended his career as a dancer,” Hathaway remarked. Evidently the attack had not gone the way the Indians had believed it would. Hathaway and the others learned later of Isatai’s promise that the white men’s bullets wouldn’t harm the attackers. “It was on account of this faith in the strong medicine that they made so fierce a charge,” Hathaway said. When the promise proved false, Quanah and the others reconsidered. “As is well known among those familiar with the Indian mode of warfare, they will not attack at a disadvantage unless they are convinced that the disadvantage of numbers is overbalanced by the potency of their medicine.”

  The Indians now weighed the benefits of starving the hunters out against the costs of doing so, and determined to settle for looting the wagons and stealing the horses caught in the open. “The buffalo hunters were too much for us,” one of the Comanches conceded afterward. “They stood behind adobe walls. They had telescopes on their guns. Sometimes we would be standing way off, resting and hardly thinking of the fight, and they would kill our horses. One of our men was knocked off his horse by a spent bullet fired at a range of about a mile.” The shooter was Billy Dixon, and the wondrous shot would become etched in the lore of the southern plains.

  The attackers concluded that against such firepower they had no chance. By twos and threes they slipped away, firing to keep the hunters’ heads down. By the end of the day they had disappeared.

  “All the boys went out into the fresh air and looked around,” Hathaway said. “In front of the Adobe Walls lay seven dead Indians, and from ten feet out to a thousand yards in all directions lay any amount of dead and crippled horses.” The Indians normally carried away their dead, but these were too close to the house to retrieve. The hunters lost three men dead, including one who had been caught out in his wagon and whose corpse had been mutilated, and several wounded.

  THE INDECISIVE OUTCOME OF THE BATTLE SIGNALED THE beginning of the end of Comanche control of the southern plains, and indeed of Comanche independence. Quanah Parker could see the buffalo dwindling and the white presence on the plains swelling, and in failing to annihilate the hunters at Adobe Walls, he lost his last chance to keep these twin dangers at bay. During the following months Phil Sheridan and the U.S. army mounted a new campaign to force the Comanches onto a reservation. As always, the bluecoats hit the Indians at their most vulnerable point: burning their villages and destroying their food supplies. They also shot Comanche horses. The approaching winter held nothing but hunger, exposure and disease, especially for the women and children of the tribe. Some accepted Sheridan’s terms and took refuge on a reservation near Fort Sill, in the southwestern corner of Indian Territory.

  Quanah Parker and a band of diehards hung on for several months more. But in the summer of 1875, they too acknowledged the inevitable and rode onto the reservation.

  40

  LOST RIVER

  QUANAH PARKER AND CRAZY HORSE, WHILE ULTIMATELY losing their battles against the soldiers, won the respect of many in the United States for their courage and resourcefulness. The leader of another resistance movement, by contrast, became a watchword for treachery.

  Captain Jack was the name whites used for a chief of the Modoc people of southern Oregon and northern California. The Modocs had been relatively unaffected by the migration to the Willamette Valley that ravaged the Cayuse and resulted in the Whitman massacre. And they survived the transit of Oregonians to California upon the discovery of gold on the American River. But after gold was discovered in southern Oregon, they became part of the cycle of killing, reprisal, escalation and atrocity that left whites and Indians feeling reciprocally aggrieved. The Indians of southern Oregon determined to defend their homelands; whites who had lost friends and kin would have been happy to exterminate the whole lot of the natives. Numbers, always growing, f
avored the whites; knowledge of the terrain helped the Indians.

  In time the same factors that wore down Indians elsewhere took hold in southern Oregon, and by the 1870s nearly all the tribes had been compelled to sign away most of their lands and settle on reservations. The last holdouts were Captain Jack’s band of Modocs. Jack resented the whole reservation system, but especially the failure of the government to honor its treaty promise to furnish supplies and protect the Modocs from the larger tribes on the reservation they all were supposed to share. In protest, Jack led his several dozen warriors and their wives and children to their ancestral lands along the Lost River on the border of Oregon and California. Those lands were occupied by white settlers, who complained to the government. The army launched a campaign to force Captain Jack and his followers back to the reservation.

  The campaign proceeded by skirmish and negotiation. The Modocs didn’t seem numerous enough to justify an all-out war. But the negotiations broke down at critical moments, from bad faith and misunderstanding on one side and then the other. The settlers, for their part, wanted no compromise. Neither did diehards among the Modocs, who preferred death in battle to confinement on the reservation.

  In protest of the failure of the talks, Captain Jack led his band into some lava beds beside Tule Lake in northernmost California. The lava beds—a local expression of the tectonic forces that shaped the rest of the West—made an impenetrable stronghold, their frozen waves of stone forming nooks, crannies, caves and clefts. The soldiers chased the Modocs into the beds, only to be picked off by rifle fire from shooters they never saw.

  The army regrouped, and the government reconfigured its peace commission. Alfred Meacham, a Methodist minister and superintendent of Indian affairs for Oregon, headed the commission; he was advised by General Edward Canby, the army commandant for the Pacific Northwest, and Eleazar Thomas, another minister. Frank Riddle and his wife, Tobey, a Modoc woman, served as interpreters.