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S TWO CIVILIZATIONS BRUTALLY fought for control of this harshly beautiful American West, the body count of men, women, children, and even buffalo—especially buffalo—multiplied. By 1874, the U.S. Army had mostly muscled the fierce plains tribes onto reservations in present-day western Oklahoma. Defiant factions
among these Natives, however, often using western Indian Territory and even their own reservations as both staging grounds and places of refuge, proceeded to unleash enough firepower that the Southern Plains grew more, rather than less, violent for American settlers—and the railroads. On June 27 of that year, several hundred Comanches, Cheyenne, and Kiowa thundered into the buffalo hunting operation at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle. They included legendary Comanche Chief Quanah Parker and Kiowa Chief Lone Wolf—the elder— who both hailed from modern-day Oklahoma. At the same site as an 1864 battle between Kit Carson’s Union troops and Plains Indians, these Natives shot it out with a small but wellarmed band of tough white frontiersmen that included future FRONTIERSMAN BILLY DIXON, WHOSE LEGENDARY legendary Dodge City RIFLE SHOT WON THE SECOND BATTLE OF ADOBE Sheriff Bat Masterson WALLS FOR THE AMERICAN HUNTERS.
