The Battle of Yellow House Canyon was a battle between a force of Comanches and Apaches against a group of American bison hunters that occurred on March 18, 1877, near the site of the present-day city of Lubbock, Texas. It was the final battle of the Buffalo Hunters' War, and was the last major fight involving the United States and Native Americans on the High Plains of Texas.
The 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty reserved the area between the Arkansas River and the Canadian River as Indian hunting grounds. Yet, since 1873, several buffalo hunting parties operated in the Texas Panhandle, supplied out of Adobe Walls, Texas by Charlie Mayer and Charlie Rath. These incursions already led to the Second Battle of Adobe Walls in 1874.
In December 1876, a group of Comanche under Black Horse received a permit, through the Indian agent at Fort Sill, to allow them to hunt in Texas. But Black Horse had other interests in mind; he was angry that overhunting by settlers had radically thinned herds of American bison (buffalo), and planned to camp in Yellow House Canyon and attack whatever hunters he saw. Earlier in the winter of 1876, buffalo hunter Marshall Sewell had, along with a group of skinners, set up camp below the Caprock in Garza County, near the head of the Salt Fork Brazos River. On February 1, 1877, Sewell discovered a herd of buffalo, and after setting up the station, picked the animals off one-by-one with his rifle before running out of ammunition. Black Horse witnessed this, and with his warriors, surrounded the hunter on his way back to camp. They tortured and double-scalped him before cutting open his stomach and placing pieces of his rifle tripod in the wounds. The action was witnessed by the three skinners who had accompanied Sewell and by another hunter. They hurried to Rath City, the nearest settlement of any size, to report the murder.
Sewell appears to have been popular among local buffalo hunters, and as a result, the reaction came quickly; about 40 men rode to the site of the murder and buried the hunter, after which they picked up the Comanches' trail. The two parties met in a brief skirmish, in which a mixed-race warrior named Spotted Jack was wounded by the Texans, who then returned to Rath City. Black Horse took close to 170 warriors, among whom was captive Herman Lehmann, and began plundering hunters' camps in the region. Among those targeted were Pat Garrett and Willis Glenn. Needless to say, the affair caused great consternation among buffalo hunters, and they demanded action be taken.
A group of 46 American militiamen men set out from Rath City on March 4, with the express purpose of finding Black Horse and his men. Jim White was elected captain; a former comanchero from New Mexico, named José, acted as guide. Twenty-six of the men rode horses; the others came by wagon. Two nights into the journey, White began to suffer from bleeding in his lungs, and he was required to turn back to Rath City; one of his lieutenants, Jim Smith, was elevated to captain. The band found the site where Sewell had been captured and there picked up the Comanche's trail, following it westward to just northwest of the present-day city of Post; here, the guide predicted Black Horse and his Comanches would be found in Yellow House Canyon. They did, and they entered the canyon at the site of Buffalo Springs Lake, where they killed a sentry. Scouts sighted the Comanche camp later that same day, and the band began an overnight march to reach it, in the process leaving provisions and wagons at the spring.
The frontier period of the American West (roughly 1865–1900) was defined by cattle drives, mining booms, railroad construction, and the violent suppression of Indigenous resistance. Texas longhorn cattle drives north along the Chisholm Trail to railheads in Kansas brought beef to eastern markets from the 1860s through the 1880s. Mining rushes to the Black Hills (1874), Colorado (1858–1859), and the Comstock Lode in Nevada attracted tens of thousands of prospectors and boom towns that rose and collapsed within years. The range wars between cattle ranchers and homesteaders, vigilante justice, and the careers of figures like Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid became mythologized in dime novels and later in film. The Dawes Act (1887) and the opening of Oklahoma Territory to homesteading (1889) completed the legal dismantling of Indigenous land tenure in the West. By 1890 the US Census declared the frontier effectively closed, and the era of open-range cattle drives ended with the introduction of barbed wire fencing across the plains.
This page covers Battle of Yellow House Canyon — Rangers vs Comanche. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Wikipedia source.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.