The Second Battle of Adobe Walls was fought on June 27, 1874, between Comanche forces and a group of 28 Texan bison hunters defending the settlement of Adobe Walls, in what is now Hutchinson County, Texas. "Adobe Walls was scarcely more than a lone island in the vast sea of the Great Plains, a solitary refuge uncharted and practically unknown."
Adobe Walls was the name of a trading post in the Texas Panhandle, just north of the Canadian River. In 1845 an adobe fort was built there to house the post, but it was blown up by traders three years later after repeated Native attacks. In 1864 the ruins were the site of one of the largest battles ever to take place on the Great Plains. Colonel Christopher "Kit" Carson led 335 soldiers from New Mexico and 72 Ute and Jicarilla Apache Scouts against a force of more than 1,000 Comanche, Kiowa and Plains Apache. The Natives forced Carson to retreat, though he was acclaimed as a hero for successfully striking a blow against the Natives and for leading his men out of the trap with minimal casualties. This is known as the First Battle of Adobe Walls.
After the "enormous slaughter" of the buffalo in the north during 1872 and 1873, the hunters moved south and west "into the good buffalo country, somewhere on the Canadian . . . in hostile Indian country". In June 1874 (ten years after the first battle) a group of enterprising businessmen had set up two stores near the ruins of the old trading post in an effort to rekindle the town of Adobe Walls. The complex quickly grew to include a store and corral (Leonard & Meyers), a sod saloon owned by James Hanrahan, a blacksmith shop (Tom O'Keefe) and a sod store used to purchase buffalo hides (Rath & Wright, operated by Langton), all of which served the population of 200–300 buffalo hunters in the area. By late June, two hunters had been killed by Natives 25 miles (40 km) downriver, on Chicken Creek, and two more were killed in a camp on a tributary of the Salt Fork Red River north of present-day Clarendon. "The story of the Indian depredations had spread to all the hunting camps, and a large crowd had gathered in from the surrounding country" at the "Walls".
The remaining free-ranging Southern Plains bands (Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa and Arapaho) perceived the post and the buffalo hunting as a major threat to their existence. The 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty reserved the area between the Arkansas River and Canadian River as Indian hunting grounds. Yet, since 1873, several buffalo hunting parties operated in the area, in violation of the treaty, prompting Indian outrage. In the spring of 1874, the Indians held a sun dance. Comanche medicine man Isatai'i promised victory and immunity from bullets to warriors who took the fight to the enemy.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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