6/27/1874 - Tired of the continuing slaughter of the wild bison that provide food and shelter to the indigenous peoples of the region, approximately seven hundred Comanche (the high estimate will be twelve hundred braves), Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho and Kiowa warriors, under the leadership of Quanah Parker, attack the small Texas Panhandle trading post of Adobe Walls (now a ghost town, the site is in Hutchinson County, Texas, about seventeen miles to the northeast of the small town of Stinnett), and are bested by twenty-eight men and a single woman (Hannah, the wife of store clerk William Olds) ... thanks in large part to the guns and marksmanship of a group of buffalo hunters, and one of the most famous single shots in Wild West history.
The Battle Begins
The site of two battles between Native Americans and white intruders into the area, Adobe Walls comes into being near the Canadian River when the trading firm of Bent, St. Vrain & Company expand their business dealings southward from their operations at Bent's Fort in what is now southeastern Colorado. Establishing seasonal trade with the regional Indians in 1835, the company first does business at the site out of a handful of teepees and a few temporary log cabins. Business good (the company will one day own stores in Santa Fe and Taos, and run a series of trading posts throughout the West that cater to Plains Indians, Hispanic, French, and American mountain men, and teamsters, settlers, and others passing over the Santa Fe Trail) for the owners of Bent, St. Vrain & Company (Charles Bent, Ceran St. Vrain, and Bent's brother, William Bent), in 1843 the company builds a log structure on a trickle of wet now known as Bent Creek. Two years later, business still booming, the log structure is replaced by an eighty foot square adobe brick fort with a single entrance, surrounded by nine foot tall walls. Indian depredations in the area close the fort by 1848, and a disgruntled William Bent blows up the interior of the compound in the spring of 1849.
Charles & William Bent
St. Vrain
Just ruins of the fort remain by the 1860s, when the First Battle of Adobe Walls takes place between members of the 1st Regiment New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry under the leadership of legendary American frontiersman, Colonel Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson (under orders of Brigadier General James Henry Carleton, Carson's command consists of two hundred and sixty horsemen, seventy-five infantry soldiers, and seventy-two Ute and Jicarilla Apache scouts, supported by two mountain howitzers directed by Lt. George H. Pettis, a first-aid ambulance, and twenty-seven supply wagons carrying forty-five days of rations, ammo, and equipment) and a force of between sixteen-hundred and three-thousand Comanche, Kiowa, and Plains Apache warriors on November 25, 1864. The goal to stop Indian attacks on travelers moving along the Santa Fe Trail that have increased as Federal troops have been transferred to the east to fight in the Civil War, Carson marches out of Fort Bascom, New Mexico Territory on November 10, 1864, intending to make Adobe Walls, a site he is familiar with from his days as a fur trapper working for the Bent brothers, his base of operations. Launching a morning attack on the one-hundred-and-seventy-eight lodge encampment of Kiowa chief Dohasan (Little Mountain), Carson is forced to fall back on Adobe Walls (one corner of the ruins becomes Carson's field hospital) when enraged Indians in the area combine into a force of over three-thousand warriors, all looking for payback (the force is led by Dohasan, the Kiowa Satank, which translates as Sitting Bear, and the Kiowa Satanta, which translates as White Bear). An epic defeat avoided as Carson is able to fight his way back to Fort Bascom due to the long range accuracy of Pettis' two artillery pieces, and strategic backfires set by the former mountain man when the Indians set the plains afire to burn to death their antagonists. Quiet returning to the area, for the next ten years the ruins serve as a warning to travelers entering the region that they are moving into dangerous Indian territory, which is codified with the signing of the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, designating the area between the Arkansas River and the Canadian River as Indian hunting grounds.
Colonel Carson
First Battle Of Adobe Walls
Medicine Lodge Discussions - 1867
By 1874 however, the treaty is abrogated by buffalo hunters entering the area after the bison north of the Arkansas are almost slaughtered into extinction. Seeking to increase the amount of luche he already has banked, in clear violation of the treaty, saloon owner James Hanrahan puts together an expedition to turn Adobe Walls into a viable trading post once more. Using men and supplies from Dodge City, Kansas (one-hundred-and-seventy-five miles to the northeast), a new complex is built about a mile away from the site of Carson's battleground. The outpost that arises at Adobe Walls consists of a handful of adobe and wood buildings built roughly in a row, all facing to the east ... on the south end of the row is a general store belonging to Charles Rath and Robert Wright (a structure with two feet thick walls that is thirty feet by sixty feet, behind which is a huge pile of fifteen-thousand buffalo hides the business has acquired in trade (selling in Dodge City, the hides go for between $1.00 and $3.50), next in line is the newest saloon of liquor entrepreneur Hanrahan (also with two feet thick walls, the imbibing business is in a building eighty feet long and twenty-five feet wide), and beyond Hanrahan's is another general store belonging to Charlie Myers and Fred Leonard (a thirty feet by seventy-five feet wooden and mud structure with ten feet thick walls) that serves as the northeast corner of a large picket stockade (two-hundred-and-fifty feet by three-hundred feet enclosed by numerous non-chinked wooden poles extending seven to thirteen feet above the ground) that also includes a mess house in the compound's southwest corner along with a well, and a few paces north of the saloon is the blacksmith establishment of Tom O'Keefe. Up and running by the spring of 1874 despite a few individual hunters in the area being caught by Indians and scalped (two hunters perish on the nearby Chicken Creek and two more are killed on a tributary of the Salt Fork Red River north of the present day city of Clarendon, Texas), an expedition from Dodge City arrives at the site on Friday, June 26th, a motley group of experienced plainsmen and hunters that includes Dutch Henry Brown, the Stuttering Kid, Light-Fingered Jack, Hurricane Bill, Bull Whack Joe, the Hoodoo Kid, Shoot 'Em Up Mike, Prairie Dog Dave, Dirty-Face Charlie, twenty-four-year-old future Medal of Honor winner William "Billy" Dixon, and the youngest member of the party, twenty-year-old Bartholemew William Barclay "Bat" Masterson. Use to the dangers of the lives they've chosen and confident in their fighting abilities, the group goes to sleep in various buildings without posting any guards or sentries.
Hanrahan
The Layout Of Adobe Walls
Masterson
Hoping to graphically show the businessmen and buffalo hunters the error of their ways and send a warning to other invaders by exterminating everyone at Adobe Walls is a conglomeration of free ranging Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho warriors. Acting together instead of against each other, the Indian force comes into being as a result of a Sun Dance on the Red River among the bands in which Comanche medicine man Quenatosavit (White Eagle) promises a victory against their foes, made possible by magic immunity from the white man's bullets (White Eagle also claims that the Great Spirit has given him the ability cure the sick, bring back the dead, control the weather, make bullets fall to the ground, and that he can belch up ammunition when needed ... considered a fraud when hunter slugs drop multiple Indians and their mounts, and his own horse is shot out from under him, he will claim his magic is corrupted by a Cheyenne warrior killing a skunk just before Adobe Walls is attacked ... savagely beaten after the battle, Quanah Parker will accuse the prophet of having only "polecat medicine," the Comanche will rename the ostracized medicine man Isatai'i, which roughly translates as either Coyote or Wolf Vulva, with other translations being Coyote Droppings, Rear-End-of-a-Wolf, and Coyote Anus). Leading the force of warrior braves is twenty-nine-year-old Kwahadi Comanche, Quanah Parker, the son of Chief Peta Nocona ("Lone Wanderer") and Cynthia Ann Parker, a Indian captive (at the age of nine in 1836 during a raid on Fort Parker, Texas in which her grandfather, an uncle, and her father are all killed) who is adopted by the Nokoni Comanche (the couple will have two more children before Death comes a calling for both parents). A full warrior standing over six-feet-tall by the time he is fifteen, Parker establishes the Quahada band of the Comanche nation (they are known for mixing their ferocity with deadly cunning) in the 1860s and is on hand for the negotiations that lead to the Medicine Lodge Treaty (which he refuses to sign). His plan is to sweep down on the invaders just as dawn is breaking and overwhelm the slumbering inhabitants of Adobe Walls at close range before they can fully wake up (leading the Kiowa contingent of warriors is Chief Lone Wolf, and the Cheyenne horsemen are led by Chief Stone Calf and Chief White Shield). The night of the 26th hot and still, waiting for first light, the Indians gather on a bluff overlooking the Canadian River, arrayed in a rainbow of painted colors, wearing an assortment of magical talismans and war-bonnets, armed with rifles, bows and arrows, war clubs, tomahawks, knives, pistols, and lances, carrying buffalo hide shields, atop horses decorated by red, vermillion, and ochre paints, bright feathered tails and manes, ornaments of silver and brass, and bridles from which the scalps of men, women, and children dangle ... the finest horsemen on the continent west of the Missouri River (Quanah is armed with a carbine, a pistol, and a nine-foot-long lance adorned with eagle feathers and tipped by eighteen-inches of sharpened steel, and wears beaded deerskin moccasins and leggins of well-tanned leather, on his right wrist is a small square musical musical instrument about five inches across, his shirt is buckskin fringed with leather laces, on the cheek strap of his riding bridal is a scalp two inches in diameter, the shield he carries on his left arm consists of two thicknesses of hide from the neck of a Buffalo bull stuffed with feathers, emblazoned with an ochre full moon and group of stars and rimmed with soft buckskin from which hangs eagle feathers, the bill of an eagle, the claws of a bear, and the scalp of blond man, crowning his head is a war bonnet of eagle feathers and beads with a buckskin tail of more feathers that stretches to the warrior's heels, while flowing behind him from his shoulders is red Indian blanket).
Hill Of Buffalo Skulls
White Eagle
Parker Circa 1890
Quanah' s Force - True West Magazine
Expecting to surprise the buffalo hunters, it is instead Quanah's force that is startled when their charge reaches Adobe Walls. Greed or blatant good luck the culprit, the occupants of the settlement are wide awake when Quanah's attack begins as a result of a rotten cottonwood beam in the roof of Hanrahan's bar snapping just before the attack (either an extremely fortuitous circumstance or the end game of Hanrahan's efforts to keep his trade goods protected by keeping the hunters in place when he has been warned by an army scout married to a Cheyenne woman named Amos Chapman that an attack is coming in the morning). Shortly after 2:00 in the morning, there is a loud crack heard in the settlement (there will be talk later that the noise doesn't come from a beam breaking, but is the result of Hanrahan firing a warning shot into the roof ... Dixon will later report that he sees no damage evidence whatsoever to the beam). "It's going to collapse," Hanrahan shouts, pointing at the suspect beam and men are immediately up and working to lighten the weight of the sod roof and stabilize the cottonwood support. By the time the work is done it is almost dawn and since the various hunters had planned to get an early start looking for bison, the now woke men decide to stay up and wolf down early breakfasts (a round of free drinks from Hanrahan are the businessman's reward for the work the men have done on the bar's wounded support beam). Riding forward without alignment, twenty-five abreast and more deeper, the Indian horde is spotted approaching when it is roughly six-hundred yards away; just far enough away to allow enough time for the warning "Indians" to be shouted and hunters to scramble into the nearest shelters, barricade doors and windows, and take up their arms, out-numbered massively. As the battle for Adobe Walls begins, there are six men and Mrs. Olds within the Rath & Wright store, there are eleven men in Myers & Leonard store, and within the saloon are Hanrahan, Dixon (sleeping outdoors to protect his goods, he is able to sprint to the shelter just before the Indians arrive, as does blacksmith Tom O'Keffe and his dog, who reach the Myers & Leonard store) Bat Masterson, and six other hunters. Expecting to get an early start back to Dodge City, sleeping beside their freight wagon, only brothers Ike and Shorty Shadler, along with their dog (a Newfoundland pooch), are unable to get inside a building in time and their slowness results in the deaths and scalping of all three (a hunter called Old Sam Smith, not wearing any pants, but carrying his rifle in one hand and a cartridge belt of ammo in the other, is the last man to reach shelter).
Amos Chapman
As the Indians sweep down on the settlement, Hanrahan calls out to the men in his saloon to hold their fire until the native horsemen are thirty yards away, which the men in the bar do with devastating effect and as the Indians drop from the front of their charge the happy voice of a marksman calls out a line used at Dodge City dances, "Gents to the right and ladies to the left!" Swirling about the settlement, the Indians send arrows and bullets into the various buildings, but are kept outside of each of the main structures by the extremely accurate fire from revolvers and single-lever Winchester and Henry rifles (even Mrs. Olds grabs a gun and participates in the defense of the settlement), and the Indians' attempts to fire the buildings fail as burning arrow after burning arrow go out upon contact with the structure's mud brick walls. Surviving the volley, in the vanguard of the charge, Quanah sees the door to the Myers & Leonard store is open, and he wheels his horse towards the entrance. The Comanche is only a few yards away when the door slams shut and his horse crashes against the closure (for the next several hours, Indians will try and breach the doors of the buildings by slamming into them at a gallop, backing into them, by kicking at them with the hooves of their rides, and by simply pummeling on the closures with the butts of their rifles). Pounding on the door with his rifle, Quanah is taken out of the clash when he is hit by a round fired at him from the saloon, a slug that hits the buffalo horn the warrior is wearing on a necklace and ricochets into the Comanche halfway between his shoulder and his neck (he will creep away into nearby tall grass, where he is rescued by fellow members of his band). Inside Leonard's store, the shop keeper breaks open a heavy wooden box and hands out eight brand new "Big Fifty" (named for the powerful 50-90 charge the weapon fires, a .50 caliber ball of lead powered by 90 grains of black powder, the most powerful buffalo rifle on the prairie's of 1874) long range Sharps rifles to the men inside. Thinking they are about to count coup and experience an easy victory, a large group of Indians dismounts behind the Rath & Wright store and begin a celebratory war dance ... spotted by the establishment's manager, James Langton, the warriors will be rapidly quieted by a volley of rifle fire from the men inside. And then, just after Hanrahan drops an Indian attempting to take his horse from where it is picketed, from the northwest, the loud call of a bugle can be heard blowing.
Leonard & Langton
Fanciful Illustration - Firing From
Inside The Saloon
Defender - Dutch Henry Brown
Low on ammunition by noon, Bat Masterson volunteers to run to Leonard's store for more bullets, but instead, he stays at Hanrahan's while Billy Dixon and Hanrahan make the jaunt to the Wright & Rath store. Making it, Dixon decides he will help with the defense of the store, while Hanrahan makes his way back to his bar weighed down by pockets full of rounds (from his new position, Dixon will first pot a bonneted warrior from seventy-five yards away, and when another warrior exposes himself briefly, takes down another Indian that is eight hundred yards away!). Meanwhile, Masterson will take out a warrior creeping up on the Wright & Rath store. Hearing the mortally wounded Tyler moan for water from Leonard's store, Masterson is about to take a bucket outside to get the requested liquid, when he is stopped by Leonard's cook, Old Man Keeler. Knowing Masterson is a better shot and that he has friends among the Cheyenne that might be reluctant to fire on him, Keeler says simply, "Gimme the bucket," and jumps out of the window Masterson was about to use. Accompanied by his dog, Keeler walks over to the well and slowly pumps water into the bucket he is holding, all the while peppered from sixty yards away by Indians behind the west side of the stockade. Bucket filled, he then walks back to the window and climbs back in, unstruck, but sans his dog, who has been hit by twenty bullets and killed (before closing the window he looks back across the yard at his dead pet, and shaking his head states, "I'd like the devish Injun that shot my dog."). Water now available, Masterson washes the grime off Tyler's face and then gives the wounded man a drink ... moments later Tyler is dead and Masterson returns to his defensive position and begins looking for warrior targets once more. By 2:00 in the afternoon, the Indian charges are over and they withdraw to nearby cover they believe will keep them out of the sights of the white hunters and a siege of sorts begins. Inside the settlement, there are three defenders dead, seventeen Indian corpses that their comrades were unable to remove, twenty-eight dead oxen that belonged to the Shadler brothers, and fifty-six felled horses. Protected by the best marksmen, as the afternoon gives way to evening, their friends wrap the two brothers and Tyler in blankets and bury them in a common grave north of Leonard's store (taking inventory of his store during a lull in the battle, Leonard will discover that all his canned goods have been shot off the shelves where they formerly resided), and then knowing the stench that will soon be plaguing them, with no horses available, begin the disagreeable task of dragging off the corpses to a distance where they can't be smelled, the settlement's dead animals (the men are able to dig a pit and bury twelve dead horses they find between the saloon and the Rath store). And proving they can be just as barbaric as their warrior foes, the hunters move the dead Indians out of range of their noses too, but not before removing the dead men's heads, and as a warning of what fresh attacks will bring, put thirteen of the skulls atop sharpened posts ringing the stockade (happy to be alive, Leonard passes out cigars to anyone interested in having a smoke). Watchful now and sleeping in shifts, the first day of battle ends at around 9:00 p.m., when buffalo hunter O. A. "Brick" Bond, the man paying the Shadler brothers to hunt bison, makes his way into the settlement, unaware of the battle that has taken place (leaving the day before with a huge wagonload of buffalo hides to sell in Dodge City, his wagon bogs down in a sandy spot on the trail and he has to return to Adobe Walls to get help freeing his plunder.
Second Battle Of Adobe Walls By Kim Douglas Wiggins
Comanche Warriors
On the second day of the clash, both sides keep wary eyes on each other as they spend more time policing the battlefield and deciding on their next moves, one of which is to transfer supplies out of the saloon and consolidate equally all the Adobe Walls defenders in the two stores. In the afternoon, the ranks of the defenders swell slightly when buffalo hunter George Bellfield brings a small group of plainsmen into the settlement where they find Leonard offering two hundred dollars to anyone that will make their way to Dodge City for help (by the time the battle ends, there will be over a hundred men defending Adobe Walls). Veteran hunter Henry Lease takes up the challenge, riding away in the darkness aboard the horse named Henry that Bellfield loans him (he arrives at Fort Dodge late the following evening, where he can't find any authority figures, the officers on duty at the fort, the governor of Kansas, and the United States military commander of the region, Civil War General John Pope (the loser of the Second Battle of Bull Run, who believes the Medicine Lodge Treaty is still valid and that the buffalo hunters are in the wrong), willing to help, so he enlists the aid of other buffalo hunters in Dodge City, who ride off to Adobe Walls under the leadership of Dodge City buffalo hunting legend Tom Nixon (entertaining many citizens of the city that come out to watch, in 1873, he kills one-hundred-and-twenty buffalo in forty minutes, and he will set a record of slaughtering three-thousand-two-hundred of the animals in thirty-five days), an expedition of ten oxen powered wagons protected by fifty-nine armed frontiersmen.
Dodge City
Nixon
Dixon And The Big Fifty
Sighting In - True West Magazine
The Shot - True West Magazine
The Result
Sadly though the battle is basically over after Dixon makes his legendary shot, the defenders of Adobe Walls will suffer one more casualty. By the fifth day of the clash, both stores have lookout posts improvised on their roofs. On Wednesday, July 1st, early morning lookout duty atop the Rath & Wright store belongs to William Olds (a former proprietor with his wife Hannah of a boarding house in Dodge City, the couple has signed on to work for Rath & Wright with William clerking at the businessmen's trading post, while Hannah cooks meals at the settlement that she serves on China imported from Great Britain, she has a special private privy on the Adobe Walls' grounds and the pair stay in private quarters behind the store). When the call of "Indians" is made by another lookout, Williams yells out, "There the red devils come again" (the group Indians are only bravery posturing though prior to leaving the area) before hustling down the access ladder of the observation post to his defensive position inside the store, but slips taking the rungs down and triggers his rifle, an extremely unfortunate occurrence for the man as he is in the line of fire of his weapon. The top of Olds' head taken off by the accidently fired round, the lookout's corpse crashes to the floor of the trading post, right in front of his screaming wife ... the fourth defender death to take place during the battle (Olds death almost also ignites a fight among the defenders when Hannah demands Masterson return the subject rifle he uses in place of his inferior gun before the buffalo hunter is ready ... nerves on edge from the battle, Bat avoids further controversy by returning the weapon to the allies of the widow before he heads back to Dodge City). At dusk of the day, the defenders bury Olds on a small knoll about sixty feet to the southeast of the store.
Where Olds Still Resides At Adobe Walls
Sure that things are finally settling down in the area (though watchfulness and good marksmanship are still crucial to survival, a lesson that a hunter named Huffman does not learn when he leaves the "safety" of Adobe Walls to hunt tasty plums alongside a nearby creek and is killed by a group of Comanches still in the area) the exodus from Adobe Walls begins a few days later when a party of twenty-five defenders that includes Dixon, Masterson, and Hanrahan, begins the long trek back to Dodge City, where upon arriving, they discover that Nixon and his company have already left for Adobe Walls to help most of it's residents back to the relative safety of the prairie town (when a troop of U.S. cavalry led by Lt. Frank D. Baldwin and guided by newly appointed scouts, Billy Dixon and Bat Masterson arrive at the settlement, there are only twelve hunters still holed up in the compound, all of whom happily leave still wearing their hair when the horse soldiers move off to the south, headed for the command of Colonel Nelson Miles on Cantonment Creek. Arriving safely at Dodge City, Hannah Olds will be taken in by her friend, Carrie Rath, the wife of store owner Charles Rath. The Adobe Walls settlement once again abandoned by August, when the Comanche discover the compound empty of merchants and hunters, they burn the place to the ground.
Burning Adobe Walls - True West Magazine
A disaster for the Indians in which it is thought that eighty warriors perish and over two-hundred horses are lost, what follows is even worse for the natives. Enraged over continuing violations of the Medicine Lodge Treaty and their defeat at Adobe Walls, the local tribes will go on a rampage through the region, slaughtering isolated settlers and small groups of hunters until the government is forced to respond and launches what will become known as the Red River War. The "peace policy" of the Grant administration over, the United States Army is authorized to use whatever force is necessary to subdue the Comanches, Cheyennes, and Kiowas of the southern plains. On orders from the chief of the Department of the Missouri, Union Civil War horseman hero General Philip Henry Sheridan, five columns of soldiers are sent into the Texas Panhandle to wage continuous war on the Indians until they agree to move into the reservation system of the United States. Three of the five columns are under the overall command of Civil War veteran, Colonel Ranald Slidell Mackenzie (known as "Bad Hand" by his Indian opponents for missing two fingers on his right hand, digits lost during the siege of Petersburg in 1864) ... the Tenth Cavalry under the leadership of Lt. Colonel John W. Davidson riding west from Fort Sill, the Eleventh Infantry marching northwest out of Fort Griffin under the command of Lt. Colonel George P. Buell, and riding north from Fort Concho, the Fourth Cavalry which Mackenzie himself accompanies into the field. The fourth column, consisting of elements of the Sixth Cavalry and Fifth Infantry, moves south out of Fort Dodge under the guidance of Civil War veteran and Medal of Honor winner (for actions during the 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville), Colonel Nelson Appleton Miles (one of the giants of the United States Army, Miles will fight at Antietam, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Appomattox, enters the conflict as lieutenant and leaves the war as a brevet brigadier general of volunteers, survives being wounded four times, then will play a huge role in the pacification of the Plains Indians during the Red River War, after Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn in 1876, cutting off the escape into Canada of Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce in 1877, being in command of the troops that finally capture Geronimo and his small band of Apaches, and then coming out of retirement to become the last Commanding General of the United States Army during the Spanish-American War of 1898, a position that Congress transforms into the office of Chief of Staff of the Army), while the fifth column, the Eighth Cavalry, rides east from Fort Bascom in New Mexico under the direction of Major William R. Price.
Sheridan During The Civil War
Mackenzie & Miles
Attacking, attacking, attacking, with lots of chasing thrown in too, there will be twenty engagements between United States soldiers and Plains warriors before the clash culminates with the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon in which Mackenzie is able to launch a surprise attack on a large village of Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa that sees Federal forces burn down 450 lodges, destroy the Indians winter supply of buffalo meat, and capture and kill a herd of 1,400 horses. Still a powerful force on the Plains despite losing the Second Battle of Adobe Walls, the war is not officially considered over until Quanah Parker and his band of Comanches surrender at Fort Sill in June of 1875. Giving up his warrior ways after the war, the Indian chief will be relocated to the Oklahoma Territory where he transform himself into a wealthy cattle rancher, builds a large two-story ten-room clapboard home surrounded by a picket fence for his large family in Cache, Oklahoma (because of the stars on the roof of the building, the structure will be known as the Quanah Parker Star House), and founds the peyote using Native American Church. During his retirement from warring, Parker will manage to keep eight wives and twenty-eight children happy, while hosting the likes of such frontier celebrities as rancher Samuel Burke Burnett, Sr., Texas surveyor W. D. Twichell, cattleman Charles Goodnight (one of the first men to drive Texas beef north to railroad outlets and the inventor of the chuckwagon), and 26th United States President Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (the pair will hunt wolves together and Parker will ride in the 1905 inauguration parade of new president) at Star House. And among his many pursuits, the warrior acts in several silent movies, including 1908's, "The Bank Robbery," and is elected the deputy sheriff of Lawton, Oklahoma in 1902. He dies in his home on February 23, 1911 at the age of 66.
1889 In White Man Attire
Star House
Parade - Parker Is Center Indian, With Dark Figure
Next To Him Being Geronimo
Also participating in the Red River War will be Billy Dixon and Bat Masterson. Making it back to the safety of Dodge City, the two men, now lacking buffalo hunting jobs, sign up to scout for the United States Army as it begins it's campaign against the southern plains Indians. On the morning of Saturday, September 12, 1874, Dixon is part of a small group of men (Sergeant Zachariah T. Woodall, the man that tried to warn Adobe Walls of the pending Indian raid on the settlement, civilian scout Amos Chapman, Private Peter Roth, Private John Harrington, Private George W. Smith, and Dixon) carrying dispatches from an army encampment on McClellan Creek to a Colonel Miles outpost in the Cherokee Outlet (now Oklahoma) called Camp Supply. Near the confluence of Gageby Creek and the Washita River, the group is suddenly confronted by over 125 Comanche and Kiowa warriors. Following standard procedure for such an encounter, the men grab their guns and dismount, with Smith responsible for holding the mounts of the men, but only for seconds as he is shot through the lungs and drops the reins of the horses he is holding, which proceed to run off, taking the men's extra amo, canteens, coats and other supplies with them. Caught on the open plains with only the ammunition they are carrying on their persons, instead of simply riding down the men and killing everyone in one fell sweep, the group is toyed with by their foes like a cat playing with a mouse meal prior to dining. Charge, retreat, and repeat, in a matter of minutes Chapman is crippled by a bullet strike that shatters his left knee (he will later lose the lower portion of the leg), Woodall, Roth, and Harrington are all hit, and Dixon suffers a slight wound to his calf. A great asset to have in a fight, ignoring his own wound, Dixon will have the group move to a ten foot wide nearby buffalo wallow, that the men improve for defense by digging into the earth with their bare hands and a couple of personal knives, while also keeping the Indians away. Several times Dixon tries to bring Chapman to the buffalo wallow (Chapman is also forced to listen to several of his former Indian friends taunting him with yells of, "Amos, Amos, we got you now, Amos!"), but he keeps being driven back by accurate fire from the warrior. Dixon keeps trying though, and in the afternoon he eventually succeeds in carrying the scout back to "shelter." Burnt by the sun, thirsty, hungry, and in pain from their wounds, the five men in the wallow receive a brief respite from their awful situation when a Blue Norther thunderstorm rolls over the area in the late afternoon, providing mouthfuls of wet and dampening the scalping passions of the Indians (with no protection from the big drop in temperature that comes when the wind hits the wallow, the men soon have a new suffering to endure). During the rains, Roth climbs out of the wallow to recover Smith's guns and ammunition, and discovers the private is still alive and calls out to Dixon for help bringing the wounded soldier over to the wallow ... and once again the former buffalo hunter muscles a man to the buffalo wallow (sadly, Smith will succumb to his wounds in the evening). When night arrives, Roth volunteers to find the wagon road to Camp Supply, but returns to the wallow a few hours later having failed to find the trail to safety.
Rescuing Chapman
The Buffalo Wallow Fight
When light returns to the plains on Sunday morning, the men discover that sometime in the night the Indians have withdrawn from the area. Taking up the task that Roth failed at, Dixon leaves the wallow and goes for help; succeeding in a short time in first finding the supply road, and then spotting a command of troopers moving over the trail (the men are the fifth column of Major Price out of New Mexico). Rescue imminent it would seem, the men of the wallow endure yet another disappointment when Price, claiming he has no supplies to spare or wagons to take the wounded to Camp Supply (his horse shot out from under him when the column is mistaken for another Indian charge, the upset medical officer for the column gives a minimal amount of care to the wounded men) and can't leave any troopers behind should the Indians return, rides on for Camp Supply, promising he will advise Colonel Miles of their situation (a handful of passing troopers will throw canteens, hardtack, and beef jerky to the men in the wallow as they move off ... for his acts at the wallow, Price will receive a recommendation from Colonel Miles for a "severe censuring" and effectively has his military career ended). On their own once more, the wallow fighters will not be rescued until it almost midnight. At Camp Supply, the survivors finally receive hearty meals and adequate medical help (Smith is buried in the wallow), with Colonel Miles recommending that they all receive Congressional Medals of Honor for their conduct during the fight, including the dead Smith (awards approved, Dixon will get his medal from the hand of Miles later in the year when the column he is riding with camps among the ruins of Adobe Walls ... because they are civilians, Dixon and Chapman will have their medals rescinded by Congress in 1917, but will them be reinstated by an Army Board of Correction of Records in 1989). Many adventures yet to come for the frontiersman, Dixon will retire from the Army in 1883 and eventually build a home near Adobe Walls. Putting roots down there, he will be a postmaster for twenty years, become the first sheriff of the newly formed Hutchinson County, and also will serve the region as a state land commissioner and justice of the peace. He also manages to find time to marry Olive King Dixon in 1894 (for three years she will be the only female living in Hutchinson County) in a coupling that produces seven children. He dies of pneumonia on March 9, 1913 and is buried at Adobe Walls (Hutchinson County's Dixon Creek is named in honor of the buffalo hunter, he is listed on a 1924 monument honoring the defenders of Adobe Walls, there is a Billy Dixon Masonic Lodge in the Texas town of Fritch, his Medal of Honor is on display at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, with a plaque commemorating the award formally dedicated in 1992, his name, one of six, appears on a 1925 monument erected at the site of the Buffalo Wallow Fight, and in honor of his long shot, each year ion England, the Historical Breechloading Small Arms Association holds a marksmanship competition using black-powder cartridge rifles fired at targets 1,000 yards away).
Dixon In His Later Years
As for Bat Masterson, surviving Adobe Walls, he goes on to become one of the most famous persons in all of Wild West lore. Scouting for Colonel Miles, Masterson will be part of a group of men that rescue four captive sisters (ages nine to fifteen) from a group of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers. Scouting days over, killing Corporal Melvin King, in January of 1876, he survives his first gunfight (over the affections of Sweetwater, Texas' Mollie Brennan) and wounded in the pelvis, will acquire his trademark cane to get about town. In 1877, Masterson becomes a lawman (along with his brother Ed who is elected Dodge City's marshal ... killed in 1878, Bat will shoot down his brother's killer, cowboy Jack Wagner and severely wound Wagner's boss, cattleman Alf Walker) for Ford County, Kansas. During his tenure in office he will arrest train robbers "Dirty" Dave Rudabaugh and Ed West, and he leads a posse that includes Wyatt Earp and Bill Tilghman, in taking into captivity the killer of dancer Dora Hand, James Kenedy (during the arrest, Masterson provides the incentive for surrender by plugging Kenedy in the left arm). During the Royal Gorge War of 1879 over railroad rights to lay track through Colorado's Royal Gorge, at the behest of the Santa Fe Railroad, Masterson will be the person that puts together a group of over thirty gunfighters that includes Doc Holliday, Josh Webb, Ben Thompson, "Mysterious" Dave Mather, and former foe, "Dirty" Dave Rudabaugh to battle against men supporting the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad (the court system of the time will eventually settle the matter). After receiving a telegram requesting his help from Ben Thompson, in 1880, Masterson, with a big assist from "Buffalo Bill" Cody, rescues Thompson younger brother Billy from being lynched by a Ogallala, Nebraska mob. Also in 1880, he reunites with his friend, Wyatt Earp, and with gunfighter Luke Short, the threesome become faro dealers at Tombstone, Arizona's Oriental Saloon (he misses being involved in the O.K. Corral gunfight when he goes back to Dodge City to support his brother Jim, in Jim's feud with his former partner in the city's Lady Gay Saloon and Dance Hall, Alfred Peacock, and Peacock's brother-in-law, bartender Albert Updegraff ... stepping off the train he has returned to Dodge City on, Masterson will immediately be in a gunfight that breaks out in the center of town that will go down in history as the Battle of the Plaza (lots of shooting but not many hits, Masterson will wound Updegraff in the battle, get arrested by the town's mayor, get fined $8.00 for discharging his weapon within the city limits, and get kicked out of town along with his brother. From 1882 to 1883, he will serve as the city marshal of Trinidad, Colorado, where he also deals a lot of faro, so much so that he is voted out of office at the next election, 637 votes to 248 votes. Later in 1883, when Masterson's friend, Luke Short, is kicked out of Dodge City by mayor Lawrence Deger and loses his stake in the town's Long Branch Saloon, Masterson returns to town as a member of the Dodge City Peace Commision, which gets Short his bar back without the need for any gunfire, principally because the commission is composed of quick draw artists William Harris, Short, Masterson, William Petillon, Charlie Bassett, Wyatt Earp, Frank McLean, and Neil Brown (Short will sell his ownership in the Long Branch later that year and move to San Antonio). Looking for a friendly city in which to gamble, in 1886, Masterson relocates from Dodge City to Denver. For a time he will deal Faro at the town's Arcade gambling house, he becomes the manager and owner of the Palace Variety Theatre, meets and marries Indian Club swinger and singer, Emma Moulton, and it is Denver that he becomes a friend and sometime business associate of con man Soapy Smith. And in Denver, he develops a huge love of prize fighting that will carry him about the country for championship bouts ... in 1889 he is ringside for John L. Sullivan's championship match in Richburg, Mississippi against Jake Kilrain (he is the designated timekeeper for Kilrain, he is at the 1892 championship bout in New Orleans in which Sullivan loses his heavyweight title to "Gentleman" Jim Corbett (winning a large sum of money on Corbett's win), he is a second in the corner of Charlie Mitchell when the boxer loses to Corbett in Jacksonville, Florida in 1894, he will become president of a boxing club in Colorado in 1899, and he will be the timekeeper in Havana, Cuba on April 5, 1915, when Jack Johnson and Jess Willard fight for the heavyweight championship, and in 1921, Masterson is on hand for boxing's first million dollar gate in which Jack Dempsey retains his crown against Georges Carpentier in a New Jersey bout.
The Royal Gorge
The Peace Commission - Gunslinger Luke Short
Is In The Light Hat In Back Row With Masterson On His Left -
Charlie Bassett Is In The Light Coat Sitting Next To Wyatt Earp
Sports Writer
Masterson Tombstone
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