Second Battle of Adobe Walls

On June 27, 1874, Comanche fighters clashed with a party of twenty-eight Texan buffalo hunters holed up at Adobe Walls, a settlement situated in what today is Hutchinson County, Texas. This clash became known as the Second Battle of Adobe Walls. As one account put it, Adobe Walls amounted to little more than an isolated speck within the enormous expanse of the Great Plains, a hidden and largely forgotten haven.

Battle and siege

Leaving Dodge City, Kansas on June 25, 1874, Hanrahan led a group of hunters toward Adobe Walls. The next day, at Sharp's Creek some 75 miles southwest of Dodge, they crossed paths with a band of Cheyenne who made off with their entire cattle herd. Undeterred, the group linked up with a wagon train heading for the Walls and rolled in just hours before the fighting erupted. By then, roughly 28 people occupied the settlement, among them saloon proprietor James Hanrahan, twenty-year-old Bat Masterson, William "Billy" Dixon, and the lone woman present, the spouse of cook William Olds.

Just after two in the morning on June 27, a loud crack split the night air, the sound of the ridgepole giving way under the saloon's sod roof, though a couple of nearby men swore it resembled gunfire. Certain accounts claim Hanrahan himself fired a shot to rouse the camp, later blaming the noise on the ridgepole. Supposedly he already knew trouble was coming but kept quiet, worried that word of an impending attack would send customers fleeing and cost him business. Regardless, the whole saloon crew plus several townsmen pitched in to fix the damage, meaning most residents were already alert and moving about when dawn brought a combined force of Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa fighters sweeping across the open plain, bent on wiping Adobe Walls off the map.

Dixon later described the spectacle in vivid terms: never had he witnessed anything so magnificently savage, and he counted himself fortunate to have seen it. Hundreds of warriors, the finest fighting men the southwestern Plains tribes could muster, rode their best horses bearing guns, lances, and thick buffalo-hide shields, charging like a gale. Red, vermillion, and ochre streaked both riders and racing horses. Scalps swung from bridles, elaborate war bonnets caught the wind, bright feathers streamed from manes and tails, and the half-naked bronze bodies of the warriors shone with silver and brass. Behind this thundering wave stretched the plains themselves, where the rising sun kindled its early light along the horizon, and from that glow the attackers seemed to materialize.

Estimates put the Indian force at more than 700 warriors, commanded by Isatai'i alongside Comanche chief Quanah Parker, whose mother Cynthia Ann Parker had once been a captive white woman. Their opening assault nearly succeeded outright, warriors closing in so tightly they beat on doors and window frames with rifle butts. Combat unfolded at such close range that the long guns favored by the hunters proved worthless, forcing them instead to rely on pistols and lever-action Henry and Winchester rifles. Once that first wave broke, however, the defenders switched to their heavy Sharps rifles, whose range and caliber let them hold the attackers at a distance. The defenders were scattered across three buildings: nine, including Masterson and Dixon, sheltered in Hanrahan's saloon, eleven held Meyer's and Leonard's Store, and seven occupied Rath and Wright's Store.

Four hunters ultimately died, three of them on that opening day. The Shadler brothers, caught sleeping in their wagon, were killed in the first rush, while Billy Tyler took a fatal shot through the lungs entering a doorway as he pulled back from the stockade. Five days later, William Olds died after accidentally discharging his weapon into his own head while climbing down a ladder inside Rath's store. When the defenders searched the grounds after the initial clash, they discovered fifteen dead warriors lying so near the buildings that their comrades had been unable to retrieve them.

By midday the warriors had abandoned their charges, instead clustering in scattered groups and keeping up steady gunfire on the structures. Around two in the afternoon they withdrew beyond range near the hills, and by four o'clock those trapped inside began emerging to collect relics and see to burying the Shadler brothers. The attackers lingered at a distance, weighing their next move, effectively turning the standoff into a siege of Adobe Walls.

On the second day, defenders worked at burying or hauling away dead horses. Reinforcements trickled in, George Bellfield's outfit among them, along with Jim and Bob Cator. Henry Lease offered to ride for Dodge City, while two other hunters rode out to nearby camps to spread warning that Indians had taken to war.

Three days after

Aftermath

In that stretch of country, the buffalo hunt came to a halt "just as the Indians had planned." Though the fighting at Adobe Walls looked, on the surface, like a win for the warriors involved, it left them spiritually broken, and the episode pushed the army toward its final campaign to subdue the tribes for good. Inside a year, the drawn-out conflict between settlers and Indians in Texas would come to an end.

Three months afterward, in September, an army detail made up of Dixon, the scout Amos Chapman, and four troopers of the 6th Cavalry found themselves surrounded by a large joint force of Kiowas and Comanches. In what came to be called the Battle of Buffalo Wallow, the men used steady, well aimed fire to keep their attackers at bay through an entire day of fighting. When night fell, a bitterly cold rainstorm settled in, and the Indians, discouraged by the weather, gave up the siege. By then every man in the party had been wounded, and one trooper had lost his life. Dixon and the rest of the survivors later received the Medal of Honor for their conduct in this engagement.

The clash carries lasting significance because it helped set off the Red River War of 1874-75, which ended with the Southern Plains Indians being pushed permanently onto reservations in present day Oklahoma. In 1924, the Panhandle-Plains Historical Society placed a monument at the site where Adobe Walls once stood.