The First Battle of Adobe Walls took place between the United States Army and Native Americans. The Kiowa, Comanche and Plains Apache (Kiowa Apache) tribes drove from the battlefield a United States column that was responding to attacks on white settlers moving into the Southwest. The battle on November 25, 1864, resulted in light casualties on both sides.
The Battle of Adobe Walls occurred on November 25, 1864, in the vicinity of Adobe Walls, the ruins of William Bent's abandoned adobe trading post and saloon, located on the northern side of the Canadian River 17 miles (27 km) northeast of present-day Stinnett in Hutchinson County. The battle came about when General James Henry Carleton, commander of the military District of New Mexico, decided to punish severely the plains tribes of the Kiowa and Comanche, whom he deemed responsible for attacks on wagon trains on the Santa Fe Trail. The Indians saw the wagon trains as trespassers who killed buffalo and other game the Indians needed to survive. As the American Civil War drained available troops, attacks on the Great Plains worsened, leading in the later part of 1863 to cries from settlers for protection.
Carleton wanted to put an end to the raids, or at least to send a sharp signal to the Indians that the Civil War had not left the United States unable to protect its people. He selected Colonel Kit Carson to lead the expeditionary force as the most seasoned veteran Indian fighter at his disposal. Carson took command of the 1st Regiment New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry, with orders to proceed against the winter campgrounds of the Comanches and Kiowas, which were reported to be somewhere in the Palo Duro Canyon of the southern Panhandle area, on the south side of the Canadian River. The Carson expedition was the second invasion of the heart of the Comancheria, after the Antelope Hills expedition.
On November 10, 1864, Carson started from Fort Bascom with 260 cavalry, 75 infantry and 72 Ute and Jicarilla Apache scouts that he had recruited from Lucien Maxwell's ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico. On November 12 Carson's force, accompanied by two mountain howitzers under the command of Lieutenant George H. Pettis, 27 wagons, an ambulance and with 45 days rations, proceeded down the Canadian River into the Texas Panhandle. Carson had decided to march first to Adobe Walls, which he was familiar with from his employment there by Bent more than 20 years earlier. Carson, long familiar with the Utes and Jicarillas, had confidence in his Indian scouts. They covered his flanks and each morning two of them rode far ahead of the slow-moving column to search for Comanche and Kiowa encampments.
The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) grew from the annexation of Texas (1845) and a disputed border between Texas and Mexico at the Rio Grande. President James K. Polk ordered US troops under General Zachary Taylor into the contested zone; after a skirmish that killed American soldiers, Congress declared war in May 1846. US forces won a series of engagements — Palo Alto, Monterrey, Buena Vista — before General Winfield Scott led an amphibious landing at Veracruz and an overland campaign to Mexico City, which fell in September 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 1848) transferred California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming to the United States in exchange for $15 million and assumption of $3.25 million in claims — roughly 525,000 square miles, a 67 percent expansion of US territory. The war's outcome immediately reopened the slavery question: the Wilmot Proviso, debated throughout the war, proposed banning slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico, foreshadowing the sectional crisis of the 1850s.
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