Shortgrass Country

AS 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.

Frontiersman Billy Dixon, whose legendary rifle shot won the Second Battle of Adobe Walls for the American hunters.

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 legendary Dodge City Sheriff Bat Masterson and some of the most accomplished buffalo hunters in the United States at the time.

It was a sight as fearsome as it was unparalleled: hundreds of the toughest warriors ever to ride, from the most dangerous tribes, uniting in a concerted campaign to wrest control of the Southern Plains from the “white man.” Scout and buffalo hunter, Billy Dixon, recalled that during the fury of the early fighting, the Indians forced their massively outnumbered enemies into the sod structures of Adobe Walls and “bullets poured in like hail and made us hug the sod walls like a gophers when an owl is swooping past.” He expanded on the scene in his autobiography:

There was never a more splendidly barbaric sight. In after years I was glad that I had seen it. Hundreds of warriors, the flower of the fighting men of the southwestern Plains Tribes, mounted upon their finest horses, armed with guns and lances, and carrying heavy shields of thick buffalo hide, were coming like the wind.

Over all was splashed the rich colors of red, vermillion and ochre, on the bodies of the men, on the bodies of the running horses. Scalps dangled from bridles, gorgeous war-bonnets fluttered their plumes, bright feathers dangled from the tails and manes of the horses, and the bronzed, half-naked bodies of the riders glittered with ornaments of silver and brass.

Behind this headlong charging host stretched the Plains, on whose horizon the rising sun was lifting its morning fires. The warriors seemed to emerge from this glowing background.

Quanah, through J. A. Dickson, remembered:

We at once surrounded the place and began to fire on it. The hunters got in the houses and shot through the cracks and holes in the wall. Fight lasted about two hours. We tried to storm the place several times but the hunters shot so well we would have to retreat. At one time I picked up five braves and we crawled along a little ravine to their corral, which was only a few yards from the house. Then we picked our chance and made a run for the house before they could shoot us, and we tried to break the door in but it was too strong and being afraid to stay long, we went back the way we had come.

Kiowa Chief Lone Wolf the Elder, a legendary leader of that famous tribe.

In a stunning—and historic—checking of the Native juggernaut, the defenders and their .50-caliber buffalo guns stacked up numerous Indian corpses, wounded scores more—including Quanah—and the shattered attackers scattered across the north Texas plains. It was a singular feat by one of the frontiersmen that finally sent the Natives packing after three days of determined assaults and siege.

That man was the afore-mentioned Billy Dixon, who lived the last many years of his life on Cimarron County land in the Oklahoma Panhandle, and was one of eight civilians ever honored with the Medal of Honor. At Adobe Walls, he used a Sharps .50-90 rifle to fire the most famous shot in the history of the American West. It killed a mounted Comanche on a rise nearly one mile away.

The enraged, heartsick Indians exploded in a summer-long rampage of vengeance. They robbed, raped, murdered, and tortured from southern Colorado to the Rio Grande. Nearly two hundred white men, women, and children perished. Buffalo hunting, stagecoach travel, railroad expansion, westward settlement itself, were imperiled.

At long last, the U. S. government, corporate America, and the American people alike, clear to the Atlantic, reached their breaking point. Civil War general and President, U. S. Grant, himself unleashed the armed might of the nation’s western armies against the remaining hostile Indians. Within months the final Southern Plains holdouts surrendered.

—John J. Dwyer has taught history at Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma City since 2006. He is the author of numerous books, including the Will Rogers Medallion-winning The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People, Vol. 1. He is a regular contributor to Saddlebag Dispatches.

Comanche Chief Quanah Parker, perhaps the greatest warrior—on any side—in the history of the American West,