ANOTHER CULTURE CLASH AT ADOBE WALLS

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

The Attack Commences

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

For a moment, the settlement believes the U.S. Army has arrived to rescue everyone, but it is soon recognized that the bugle is just being haphazardly blown by one of the attacking Indians.  Signaling another attack, fifty Indians, led by the warrior nephew of Cheyenne Chief Stone Calf, charge the saloon.  They are again thwarted in breaking into the bar, and as he rides past the northeast corner of the building, the nephew is shot off his mount and killed.  But the defenders lose another man too, when Leonard and Billy Tyler briefly leave the safety of Leonard's store to see how the northwest corner of the stockade is holding up, they are fired at by several Indians on the other side of the wall, one of whom hits Tyler with a mortally wounding round that goes through the hunter's lungs just as he is stepping back inside the store.  Answering the fire with fire, hunter Charlie Armitage will put a round into the bugle Indian, a slug that kills his ability to ever play another note on the musical instrument.  Morning becoming afternoon under the bright Texas sun, the heat inside the buildings becomes oppressive to their inhabitants, and within the Wright & Rath store, one of it's defenders, Andy Johnson, digs six feet into the sandy floor of the building and soon it's occupants have a small well inside from which they can slake their parched tongues.  And the charges aren't quite over as the sixty Indians, led by a Kiowa warrior suddenly sweep down on the big gate leading into Leonard's corral, just to the south of his store ... another attack that is broken up by the bellowing rifles of the buffalo hunters in both Leonard's store and from Hanrahan's saloon (shot after dismounting to open the gate, the Kiowa brave is wounded in three places, suffers a broken hip, and after three hours lying in the sun, beyond rescue or recovery, the warrior sings a death song and shoots himself in the head.  At roughly the same time, twenty braves rush the Rath & Wright's store, and Langton and it's defenders are forced to beat back an attack of twenty warriors trying to knock the door in.

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

The siege continues on the third day of the battle, but to all intent and purposes, it ends with a display of Wild West marksmanship from Billy Dixon.  Stepping outside on Monday morning to see what the day will bring, a small group of hunters congregates in front of Hanrahan's saloon, a spot some of them have used before for shooting challenges.  When the men see a batch of Indians on a distant bluff, the hunters talk Dixon into having a go at them.  A Big Fifty procured with a thirty-four-inch octagonal barrel, Dixon loads the weapon with a special long distance round driven by one-hundred and twenty-five grains of black powder.  Dialing in the weapon's rear peep sight, Dixon steadies himself, aims at the group of riders on the distant bluff, and pulls the trigger of the rifle.  On the bluff, a group of fifteen Indians has gathered to decide what their next course of action should be.  Among the Indians is the wounded Quanah and the medicine man White Eagle.  Waving a lance in the air, White Eagle tells the assembled war chiefs that his powers are still potent and shouting that "Today the victory will be ours!"  No sooner than the statement leaves his lips, a warrior named Ton-han-kah suddenly grunts and falls off his horse (in some tellings of the story, the warrior is killed, and in others, he suffers a damaged elbow and broken left arm).  Over four seconds later, the Indians hear the report of buffalo rifle firing from below in Adobe Walls, Dixon's shot has hit the man from 1,538 yards away ... almost a full mile in distance (though there are many witnesses to the shot, there are even more people that don't believe any marksman of the day can hit a target from the distance Dixon does, but in 1992, gun aficionado and writer, Mike Venturino, using the most modern of equipment will be able to replicate the buffalo hunter's legendary hit).  And with the hit, for the time being the Indians have had enough and seemingly melt away.      

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 

And though he gradually becomes an old man, he is still a lawman in 1909.  In 1895 in New York City, Masterson serves as the personal bodyguard of millionaire railroad tycoon George Jay Gould.  1897 finds Masterson serving as a deputy sheriff for Arapaho County in Colorado.  And after becoming a friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, in  1905, Masterson is appointed a deputy U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of New York by the 26th President of the United States (the position pays $2,000 a year, roughly worth $68,000 a year in 2024 dollars, and the mostly ceremonial jobe will be Masterson's until 1909).  Relocating from Denver to New York City, New York in 1902, the scout, buffalo-hunter, Indian fighter, gambler, saloon owner, and lawman will find one last calling in his life ...writer.  Masterson will become a columnist for the New York Morning Telegram, he will write a series of biographical sketches of some of his Wild West friends for Human Life magazine (studies of Ben Thompson, Wyatt Earp, Luke Short, Doc Holliday, Bill Tilghman, and Buffalo Bill Cody), and for the last 12 years of his life, Masterson will be a sports writer, specializing in prize fighting, for the New York Morning Telegram.  Just done writing what will be his last column, while sitting at his desk, Masterson suffers a massive heart attack and dies in New York City on October 25, 1921 at the age 67; far from the Texas Panhandle where his legend begins, he is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Sports Writer

Masterson Tombstone

Still remembered!

                       

          

                  

A TRAGEDY OFF IBERIA - 6/1/1943

6/1/1943 - Believing they are attacking a military aircraft (later there will be rumors that the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, has identified British Prime Minister Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill as being on board), a flight of eight Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 88C-6 fighter-bombers out of Bordeaux, France, on submarine patrol over the Bay of Biscay, pounce on a civilian Douglas DC-3 making one it's weekly runs from neutral Lisbon, Portugal to Whitechurch Airport outside of Bristol, England.  Sending the aircraft into the Atlantic Ocean, all seventeen people aboard British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) Flight 777A, thirteen passengers and four crew members, are killed in the downing (the youngest is passenger Carolina Hutcheon, only eighteen months old), the most famous being English actor, director, producer, and writer, the man screen legend Humphrey Bogart will name his only daughter after, "Gone With The Wind's" Ashley Wilkes, Leslie Howard Steiner.

Leslie Howard

Renowned future actor, Leslie Howard, is born on April 3, 1893 in the Forest Hill section of London, England to 30-year-old Hungarian-Jewish immigrant father, Ferdinand Steiner (an office working who supplements his meager salary by playing piano accompaniment for young lady clients in London ... a fortuitous calling that introduces him to his wife), and his mother, 23-year-old British mother, Lilian Blumberg (dropping their Germanic roots and Jewish religious practices, her family is just two generations removed from its antecedents in the East Prussia Duchy of Courland).  The union not accepted at first by Lilian's parents, the couple, with 5-year-old Leslie in tow (the marriage will also produce sister Irene in 1903 and brother Arthur in 1910 ... like their older brother, both will work in the entertainment industry with Irene becoming the casting director on a prestigious array of films over four decades that include 1944's "Henry V," 1959's "Ben Hur," 1965's "Doctor Zhivalgo," and 1972's "The Great Waltz," while Arthur will become a character actor in a number of film and television roles that include appearances in two Alfred Hitchcock, two Pink Panther, and a James Bond movie) will live in Vienna, Austria where Leslie learns how to speak German.  The family eventually accepted by the Blumbergs, moves back to Great Britain in 1903, buying the house next-door to that of Leslie's mother's parents.  Shy and somewhat withdrawn after enduring living in a new country and having to learn its language and customs, battling for the affections of his family and dealing with the family changing its name from the Germanic Steiner to the more acceptable sounding Stainer and Ferdinand becoming Frank), Leslie is first educated in England at a Upper Norwood prep school where he shows a flair word play and develops dreams of one day becoming a writer ... dreams his father tries to dissuade and his mother encourages (she is a frustrated would-be actress). 

Leslie At Two

Lilian With Her Children - 1903

Converting a small box room in the attic of his parent's home into a study he calls "Allandale," he spends hours in his sanctuary dreaming and writing, writing with substance that sees one of his Christmas plays (written in Latin) performed at his school when Leslie is only 13, and other works published in The Penny Weekly and other London magazines.  Soon, Leslie, with the encouragement and participation of his mother, along with a handful of friends that name themselves "The Upper Norwood Dramatic Club," begin staging the youngster's works in the Stainer's living room and giving musical concerts in the backyard (Leslie's specialty is ragtime piano), eventually moving to .  Already producing, writing, and directing his words, with the example of his mother, and two acting uncles, he also becomes a stage actor.  The audiences and productions quickly too big to be confined to a living room, the group moves to South Norwood's Stanley Hall in 1912, putting on their first show there, a production of Leslie's "The True Artist" and T. W. Robertson's "Ours" on December 26th.  Successful and satisfying work for Leslie, his "calling" also creates major arguments within the family over the future of the Stainer's oldest son, with Frank wanting him to find a viable profession and his mother backing his artistic pursuits 100%.  Father the apparent winner of the tug-of-war over the direction Leslie's life will take as the youth drops out of school (Dulwich College) and takes first a position as a junior clerk in a purser's office of a Thames River steamboat company and then a position arranged by Frank with the Whitehall branch of a Cox and Company bank, where he struggles with absolute boredom keeping track of columns of numbers.  The youth's slip into respectable anonymity takes a major turn elsewhere however when World War I begins between Great Britain and Germany on August 5, 1914.

Published

Stanley Hall

Caught up in the patriotism and excitement of war being declared, and sensing an escape from the boredom of his existence is possible, 21-year-old Leslie and a friend, enlist in the Northamptonshire Imperial Yeomanry (a mounted territorial regiment), though neither knows how to ride.  Five months of training later, Leslie receives a commission as a second lieutenant.  Unsure what to do with cavalry in a war that will feature machine guns, tanks, and long range cannons, the regiment spends ten more months training in the English countryside near the small town of Colchester, where Leslie meets 21-year-old Ruth Evelyn Martin while she is dining on sponge cake and milk at a local tea room.  Love at first sight for both individuals, the couple will marry three weeks later in March of 1916 at the town's St. Mary at the Walls Church in a union that lasts, despite many affair disruptions, until Leslie's death in 1943 (the couple will have two children, Ronald "Winkie" Howard in 1918 and Leslie Ruth "Doodie" Howard in 1924 ... though never as famous as their father, both siblings will also catch the acting bug, with Ronald capturing the television roll of Sherlock Holmes in a 39-episode series of the same name filmed in France). 

Wedding Site

Marriage

Family

Finally sent to France in 1916, Leslie's regiment is just in time to experience all the many horrors of the Battle of the Somme, a terrible clash of 140 bloody days in Northern France in which 95,675 British soldiers will perish or go missing to gain six miles of German occupied territory (an additional 324, 325 English soldiers become wounded casualties).  With a detachment of men, crossing a length of open country between a reserve battalion and the British front lines, Leslie is caught in a long pounding of German cannon fire that leads to a disabling bout of "shell shock" neurasthenia.  Released from the military and sent back to England for rest and recovery, Leslie will deal with "night terrors" for the rest of his life.  Rest and rehabilitation the goal as Leslie and his bride live with first his parents (Ruth has a poor paying job with the War Office), and then in a tiny flat with no telephone, instead of the peace he seeks, the former soldier unfortunately finds himself in another tug-of-war with his parents over what he should do next, with his father once more pushing for a banking job that has been kept open for Leslie to return to, and his mother, who thinks he should follow his heart and write, with acting first paying the bills.  In the second and final tug-of-war between the threesome, the young veteran's mother wins out and Leslie comes under the guidance of London theatrical agent Ackerman May, who arranges an audition with a traveling company performing the play, "Peg o' My Heart."  A handsome man of blue eyes and golden hair standing six feet tall, Leslie gets the part (waiting for his audition, Leslie sees the play every night until he has memorized every word of the production) of Jerry, and his wife is hired as an understudy to the women  in the play, positions guaranteeing weekly play for the production's duration.

In Uniform - 1915

The Battle Of The Somme Begins

After The War

Drawing excellent reviews for his work in "Peg," Leslie next wins a part in the play "Charley's Aunt," an entertainment that has been playing in Great Britain for over two decades.  Though he is bored by the production and his role in the comedy, Leslie once again receives praise for his performance as one of the play's lead characters, Jack Chesney.  In 1917, he appears in the part of Rollo in the silent film, "The Happy Warrior," and for the rest of his career he will juggle roles in theatrical productions on the stage and appearing in film roles.  Deciding he needs to make it as an actor in London and not out on the road, endless touring, he rents a small house for he and his pregnant wife, and begins going after acting jobs in Great Britain's capital city.  1918 finds the young actor appearing as Ronald Herrick in the play, "The Freaks," and though the play only lasts for fifty-one performances, Leslie again receives good notices and is off and running in his pursuit of stardom.  He will appear in six more London productions in 1918, two in 1919, and five in 1920 (along with assuaging parts in four silent films in the same year), with excellent reviews of his work continuing (it is also the year in which he announces he will henceforth be known as Leslie Howard).  Success achieved, he will find the stardom he seeks when he crosses the Atlantic and begins performing on Broadway in New York City.

Howard starts with playing the Honorable Sir Calverton Shipley in "Just Suppose" at Henry Miller's Theatre and between November of 1920 and February of 1926, the actor will appear on the boards of twelve different New York theaters in fifteen productions.  After a brief return to London in 1926 for the play, "The Way You Look At It," Howard will return for four more plays in the United States, go back to Great Britain for four more plays in 1928 and 1929, and will close out the decade back in New York City in recreating two of his London successes in Broadway productions of "Candle Light" and "Berkeley Square."  And despite all the acting jobs now coming his way, he also continues to write, direct, and produce when those opportunities present themselves (Howard will be inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981). 

Artwork For The Freaks

In the 1930s, Howard will also become a movie star in productions such as Outward Bound (1930), A Free Soul (1931 - receiving second billing underneath Norma Shearer, but above Lionel Barrymore and Clark Gable), Berkeley Square (1933 - for which Howard receives a Best Actor Academy Award nomination), the title role in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Of Human Bondage (1934 - opposite Bette Davis), The Petrified Forest (1936 - opposite Bette Davis again and against Humphrey Bogart in the star making part of desperado Duke Mantee, a role that Howard insists go the Bogart after the act had created the role on Broadway ... the decision will make the men life long friends and in honor of Howard, Bogart will name his only daughter, Leslie Howard Bogart in 1952), Romeo & Juliet (1936 - as Romeo and opposite Shearer again), It's Love I'm After (1937 - opposite Olivia de Havilland), Pygmalion (1938 - as Professor Henry Higgins in the non-musical version of George Bernard Shaw's famous play, a role that garners the actor another Best Actor Oscar nomination), and Intermezzo (1939 - opposite Ingrid Bergman in her screen debut).  But it is his other screen role of 1939 for which he is most well known and still remembered playing the role of the tragic southern Georgian gentleman, George Ashley Wilkes, in producer David O. Selznick's telling of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 Pulitzer winning novel, Gone With the Wind (when adjusted for monetary inflation, still the highest grossing film in history).  During the thirties he will also appear in the plays, The Animal Kingdom (1932), The Petrified Forest (1934), Romeo & Juliet (1936), and Hamlet (1936).

The Petrified Forest With Bogart and Davis

As Ashley Wilkes In Gone With The Wind

With war clouds on the horizon, not impressed with the way Hollywood movie studios operate, in support of the country of his birth, Howard returns to Great Britain in 1939.  Supporting England's war efforts against Nazi Germany, Howard will star opposite Laurence Olivier and Raymond Massey in the 1941 war drama, The 49th Parallel (believing in the importance of the film, Howard, Olivier, and Massey all agree to work on the picture for half their normal fees), recreate his "Pimpernel" role in 1941's "Pimpernel" Smith (this time as a "Pimpernel" rescuing inmates from Nazi Germany concentration camps, plays the real life designer of the Royal Air Force's Submarine Spitfire fighter plane, Reginald Joseph Mitchell in the 1942 biographical film, The First of the Few (starring with his friend, actor David Niven).  For "Pimpernel" Smith and The First of the Few, Howard will also co-produce and direct both pictures.   Wanting to make an even bigger impact on Britain's war efforts, in May of 1943, Howard makes three trips to neutral Portugal to promote his film projects (his latest is producing the film, The Lamp Still Burns starring Rosamund John, Stewart Granger, and Godfrey Tearle, staying at the Hotel Atlantico in the Portuguese Riviera town of Estoril on the 1st through the 4th, the 8th through the 10th, and the 25th through 31st, using the four-time weekly service of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to back-and-forth between Bristol, England and Lisbon, Portugal ... a route that Luftwaffe fighters of Fliegerfuhrer Atlantik (based near Bordeaux, France) attack on November 15, 1942 and on April 19, 1943 (the Ibis survives hits to it's port wing, engine nacelle, and fuselage from a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter in the first attack, and survives the second attack when it dives away from six Luftwaffe fighters and escapes only feet above sea level into a bank of low hanging clouds).

With Actress Mary Morris In "Pimpernel" Smith

Hotel Atlantico

Last Photograph - Howard & Spanish Actor

Jose Nieto

Under the auspices of KLM, BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) Flight 777A uses the brown-green camouflaged Douglas DC-3-194 named "Ibis" for its 6/1, seven hour, 1,000 mile civilian flight from Lisbon (Portela Airport) to Bristol (Whitchurch Airport).  The Dutch crew of the plane is composed of 48-year-old Captain Quirinus Tepas OBE (the pilot and first in command of the flight), Captain Dirk de Koning (co-pilot and second in command), wireless operator, Cornelis van Brugge, and flight engineer, Engbertus Rosevink.  The thirteen passengers for the morning flight consist of Howard and his business manager, 43-year-old Albert Chenhalls (their war priority status allows the men to take precedence over other passengers and results in the "bumping" off the flight of the 6-year-old son of a British diplomat, Derek Partridge, and his nanny, Dora Rove), 35-year-old British journalist Kenneth Stonehouse and his 22-year-old wife, Evelyn Peggy Margetts Stonehouse, 38-year-old Rotha Violet Lettie Clarke Hutcheon, and her two daughters, Petra (11) and Carolina (18 months), 51-year-old Tyrrell M. Shervington, the director of the Shell-Mex and BP Oil Company of Lisbon, Ivan James Sharp, a senior official with the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation, 43-year-old Anglo-German Jewish activist Wilfrid Berthold Jacob Israel, 67-year-old civil engineer, Francis German Cowlrick, Cecilia Amelia Falla Paton (on her way to a consulate secretarial job in England), and British Consulates Inspector Gordon Thompson MacLean.  Four crew members and thirteen passengers, seventeen souls in all (it is a total mystery as to why actor Raymond Burr will claim to have lost his wife, Scottish actress Annette Sutherland in the tragedy ... there is no record of the woman being among the victims of the tragedy ... OR OF HAVING EVER EXISTED), the flight is full and people are turned away, including British Squadron Commander, bomber pilot Wallace "Wally" Lashbrook.  One lucky young lady that doesn't make the flight is the 7-year-old daughter of WRNS Chief Officer Gladys Octavia Snow OBE, Anne Chichester-Constable ... booked to return to her mother, at the last minute her guardians in Portugal decide the little girl is too tired to make a long trip on June 1st (another lucky traveler is Roman Catholic English College Vice-President Father A. S. Holmes, who gets off the flight when he is advised that he needs to call the British Embassy right away).  Scheduled to takeoff at 7:30 in the morning, there is a five minute delay as Howard gets off to pick up a package he left behind at the customs station, a box containing several pairs of silk stockings for the actor's wife, daughter, and other female friends).  DC-3 reboarded, Flight 777 is outbound at 7:35 a.m., and Whitechurch airport receives a departure acknowledgement that the plane is on its way (ground personnel will be in contact with van Brugge until shortly after 10:54 a.m., when the radio operator sends out a message that the flight is being followed by a group of German fighter planes).  Shortly afterwards, the air waves go silent.    

Portela Airport - 1943

Ibis

Tepas
    

Also in the sky that morning, flying a routine patrol to escort two U-boats out to sea are eight Junkers Ju88C-6 heavy fighters (each plane is equipped with five aerial cannons and three machine guns) from the German Luftwaffe base near Bordeaux, under the command of Oberleutnant Herbert Hintze.  In the air by 10:00 a.m., the escort mission they are on is quickly called off due to poor weather and the unit instead makes a general patrol of the skies in the area.  Searching from a formation that has six Ju88s flying abreast, about fifty yards apart from each other, with two more fighters above providing cover to the larger group.  From his position above the other planes in the patrol, Leutnant Albrecht Bellstedt is the first to spot Flight 777 as a "grey silhouette" flying north at an elevation of roughly 9,000 feet.  Radioing his comrades, "Indian at 10 o'clock, AA" (meaning enemy aircraft ahead slightly to the left, attack, attack!).  Followed by the rest of the patrol, Bellstedt immediately goes after the camouflage painted plane and scores hits that set the DC-3's port engine and wing on fire.  Arriving moments later, Hintze immediately recognizes that the transport bares civilian markings and calls off the attack, but it is too late as Bellstedt has mortally wounded the aircraft.  Circling like vultures as the DC-3 goes down, the Germans watch as three passengers jump out of the plane, but perish when their parachutes fail to open, while a fourth jumps to their death with the parachute on fire.  No one else emerges from the plane, which crashes into the sea, floats for a few moments, and then goes beneath the waves about 200 miles from the northwest coast of Spain.  There are no survivors. 

Junkers Fighters

Hintze

The next day, still hoping to find survivors, a Sunderland seaplane piloted by 26-year-old RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) Flight Lieutenant Colin Braidwood Walker is sent into the area in which Flight 777 vanished the day before, and it too is beset by eight Ju88 fighters.  Bombs and depth charges dropped and the aircraft brought to full power, the Sunderland is able to defend itself, firing at it's tormentors as Walker dances it about the sky.  In 45 minutes of attacks, Walker and his crew of ten are able to shoot down three fighters (manning a gun, 20-year-old Sergeant Alfred Eric Fuller will be awarded a Distinguished Flying Medal), severely damage three more, and chase off the final two with fire from Sunderland gun stations in the plane's nose and upper turret, starboard and port gallery guns, and it's tail, but not without the plane and crew being damaged also ... in an estimated forty enemy passes, the plane's port engine is shot up (the prop will come off later in the fight), a P4 compass is shattered, a cockpit fire breaks out, the port outer fire extinguisher is knocked out, the base of the rear turret gun (forcing the gun to be aimed and fired by hand for the rest of the encounter), both the plane's elevator and rudder trimming controls will be severed (the strength of both the pilot and co-pilot will be needed to maneuver the Sunderland), the radio transmitter and receiver will be knocked out, and the intercom system receives a direct hit which will cause the crew to communicate with each other using hand signals ... in all the Sunderland will be hit 400 times by machine gun bullets and receive 12 cannon strikes.  Within the crew, 27-year-old First Flight Engineer Officer Edward "Ted" Charles Ernest Miles is killed manning the starboard gallery gun, the navigator, 28-year-old Flight Lieutenant Kenneth McDonald Simpson is wounded in the leg (he will be awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross), broken glass cuts up the face of 23-year-old radio operator, Flight Sergeant Harold Arthur Miller, the pilot suffers burns to his hands, chest, and face (for his actions, Walker will receive a Distinguished Service Order), as does 34-year-old co-pilot, Flight Officer Wilbur James Dowling (Dowling will be awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross), and 34-year-old tail gunner, Flight Sergeant Ray Marston Goode (he will receive a Distinguished Flying Medal) is knocked unconscious for five minutes and suffers a concussion firing the Sunderland's tail gun.  Finally alone in the sky when the Germans return to their base, the crew lightens the Sunderland by getting rid of over a ton of supplies and gear, then heads for home, a 300 mile journey back to England that has the seaplane making the return on it's two inner engines and landing in a 7-foot sea off the port city of Penzance before coming to rest on the sandy beach of Praa Sands in Cornwall, shortly after 10:00 in the evening.(coming ashore, the survivors will be greeted by the locas bearing hot chocolate and cakes). 

Walker

Sunderland

No bodies or wreckage ever found, after the world briefly laminates the loss of Howard and the others on the flight, new "wrong place at the wrong time" tragedies take the disaster's place in the headlines and the incident is mostly forgotten by the time the next century begins, but to this day there are numerous theories that the destruction of Flight 777 was no accident at all.  

Flight Memorial - Galacia, Spain

The #1 conspiracy theory that is put in play almost immediately is that the Germans shoot down Howard's flight because they believe English Prime Minister Winston Churchill is aboard ...Churchill is of course not on the flight and by that time in the war, only moves about with military escorts.  He is however in the region, about ready to return to England from a conference with Allies in Algiers (Churchill will later admit regrets that spies trying to throw off the Germans as to the prime minister's actual route of return to England might have led to the flight being targeted, and why not when the English leader returned to England from Bermuda the year before under an alias on a commercial flight, and Flight 777 does bear an overweight cigar smoker, Howard's business manager, Alfred Tregear Chenhalls).  There is also a theory that the plane is shot down because Germany thinks Howard is a spy and simply wants to be done with the man (and Goebbels wants him gone to end the war propaganda films the actor is responsible for), whether he is a spy or not.  And in continuing the motif of idiot spies with poor eyesight that Lisbon seems to be filled with, it is thought that maybe Howard has been misidentified as flight engineer Reginald J. Mitchell, designer of the Submarine Spitfire fighter, the man Howard played in the movie "The First of the Few," and one that the Third Reich has wanted gone for a long time.  Then there are the theories that the target wasn't Howard at all, but other passengers aboard the flight ... in these scenarios, the Germans go after the flight to stop the efforts of either Tyrell M. Shervington, the oil executive that after the war is also exposed as British intelligence officer H100 of the Special Operations Executive's Iberian operations, or to put an end to former German businessman Wilfrid Israel, who helps over 10,000 Jewish children escape the clutches of the Third Reich after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, and is about to do the same for another 1,500 Jewish refugees trapped in "neutral" Spain. 

Not Churchill - Alfred Chenhalls

Mitchell & Israel

All the players now gone, no documentation to the contrary found, the world is left with the simple fact of seventeen deaths taking place when Flight 777 is sent into the sea, and that one of them is the famous actor, Leslie Howard ... rest in peace to all those aboard the Ibis that never made it to their destination on June 1, 1943.

Headlines

A Bit Of Debris Photographed By The Germans

After The Plane Goes Under