The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  The next few days were a game of cat and mouse. The Quahadis had fresh ponies and knew intimately the hidden folds and creases of the landscape, but they were carrying hundreds of women and children alongside the warriors. Mackenzie’s men and horses, meanwhile, were reaching the point of exhaustion. The day after the ambush the Tonkawas signaled from atop the bluff that they had found a trail. It took the troops hours to scale the narrow path on their spent mounts. When they reached the top, wrote Carter, they came upon “what appeared to be a vast, almost illimitable expanse of prairie. As far as the eye could reach, not a brush or tree, a twig or stone, not an object of any kind or a living thing, was in sight. It stretched out before us—one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared to the ocean in its vastness.”

  The troopers had come to the edge of the Staked Plains, Quanah’s flat, arid, relentless kingdom. They were three thousand feet above sea level on the limestone plateau in mid-October with a cold north wind howling down the treeless prairie.

  The Quahadis refused to engage, keeping a steady distance between themselves and the troopers as the afternoon faded to darkness and the wind blew in a cold rain mixed with sleet. The soldiers followed a trail of half-burned campfires and jettisoned lodge poles, stone hammers, mortars, pestles, and buffalo skins. Eventually Carter could see the main body of fleeing women and children about a mile in the distance. He awaited Mackenzie’s order to attack, but it never came. Perhaps, Carter surmised, the colonel feared risking his troops against a clever and ruthless enemy some one hundred miles beyond his supply lines, or perhaps he did not have the stomach for slaughtering women and children on a cold October night. Within minutes, the village was gone, its escape hidden by the darkness.

  The soldiers were left to huddle in the storm. Mackenzie himself, suffering in immaculate silence from his old war wounds, shivered from exposure until someone threw a buffalo robe over his shaking body.

  Faced with flagging morale, tired horses, and a dwindling supply of food, Mackenzie decided to turn back east to Fort Richardson. He was finished, for now, with Quanah, the Staked Plains, and the Quahadis.

  But the Quahadis were not quite finished with him. As the column once again pushed its way through Canyon Blanco, someone cried out, “Indians! Indians!” The Tonkawa scouts broke away from the column, racing toward a small ravine where they had spotted two Comanches leading their horses up the canyon trail. The Tonkawas sealed off the area and went into the ravine for the kill. Mackenzie grew impatient and dismounted. “Just then, a sharp swish, a thud, and a spiked arrow buried itself in the upper fleshy part of Mackenzie’s leg,” wrote Carter. “He hurried back to the rear and had the spike cut out and the wound dressed.” The old warrior had been wounded again.

  Mackenzie’s troop staggered back into Fort Richardson on November 18, 1871, in the midst of a blizzard. The men had been in the field since May 1 and they were cold, exhausted, and starving. Total war had faltered. Quanah and the Quahadis still roamed free.

  7.

  The Surrender (Comancheria, 1874–1875)

  Even by the dubious standards of the frontier, buffalo hunters were a breed apart. In the field they were mechanical killers, spending long days mowing down senseless beasts in assembly-line fashion. They worked, ate, and slept among the fly-infested corpses, bathing in nearby creeks when they bathed at all. The skinners were especially filthy, working daily with the putrefying carcasses, covered in blood, fat, and parasites.

  They were the meanest of men, and “the meanest man among them,” according to a fellow hunter, was Billy Dixon. Born in West Virginia in 1850, orphaned at age twelve, Dixon was working as a teamster in Kansas by the time he was fifteen. He wore his black hair long, stringy, and greasy and it all but concealed his dark brown face. He never lacked for the one prerequisite for survival on the Plains: self-assurance. He described himself as “in perfect health, strong and muscular, with keen eyesight, a natural aptitude for outdoor life … an excellent shot [with] a burning desire to experience every phase of adventure to be found on the Plains.”

  Life on the High Plains was rugged and cheap, and death was ubiquitous. In Leavenworth City, Kansas, which he made home for a time, Dixon would recall, “Shootings were as common as the arrival of a bulltrain, and excited little comment. The man who was quickest on the trigger usually came out ahead—the other fellow was buried, and no questions asked.”

  The buffalo trade gained momentum slowly. At first, tanneries back east complained that the bison hides were too thick and rough to use for fine leather goods. But by 1872, firms in New York and Pennsylvania had imported European methods of softening the hides, creating a keen demand for raw materials and a new incentive for hunters.

  So far as William T. Sherman and his right-hand man, Phil Sheridan, were concerned, the timing of this breakthrough was perfect. The two generals set extermination of the vast herds of American bison on the Great Plains as a policy goal in order to deprive Plains Indians of their primary source of food, clothing, and shelter. Professional hunters, trespassing on Indian land, killed more than four million bison by 1874. When the Texas legislature considered a law banning bison poaching on tribal lands, Sheridan journeyed to Austin to personally testify against the measure. He suggested that the legislature might better give each hunter a medal, engraved with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged-looking Indian on the other. The way to solve “the vexed Indian question,” Sheridan told the lawmakers, was by destroying “the Indians’ commissary.”

  With a growing market to supply, the buffalo hunter’s arsenal rapidly increased in size and accuracy: muzzle loaders, shotguns, and Springfield rifles gave way to Henry and Spencer repeating rifles. The Sharps Rifle Company paved the way with new models specially designed for killing buffalo, led by the Big Fifty, a fifty-caliber rifle that fired a large bullet from a long shell containing a heavy powder charge—ideal for big game. Buffalo were so plentiful, so slow to move, and so oblivious to danger that an efficient hunter could kill between seventy-five and one hundred a day, an average hunter about fifty and even a poor one twenty-five. “I have seen their bodies so thick after being skinned that they would look like logs where a hurricane had passed through a forest,” recalled W. S. Glenn, who hunted bison across the Plains in the 1870s. “If they were lying on a hillside, the rays of the sun would make it look like a hundred glass windows.”

  By 1872, hunters could expect to earn four dollars for each bull hide. A prolific shooter like Billy Dixon would hire two skinners to accompany him on hunts in order to keep up with the frenetic pace he set. Each was expected to prepare up to fifty skins a day. Dixon would pay up to twenty cents a hide to a good skinner.

  By the winter of 1872, according to Dixon’s memoir, some seventy-five thousand bison had been killed within a sixty-mile radius of Dodge City, the southern hub of organized buffalo hunting. “The noise of the guns of the hunters could be heard on all sides, rumbling and booming hour after hour, as if a heavy battle were being fought,” he recalled. The outskirts of town were rank with the sight and smell of rotting carcasses. And the herds began to vanish.

  Army colonel Richard Irving Dodge recalled that in May 1871 he had come across an endless chain of buffalo over a twenty-five-mile stretch along the Arkansas River. “The whole country appeared one mass of buffalo, moving slowly to the northward,” he wrote.

  One year later, “where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”

  The Arkansas River in North Texas and Oklahoma was the border south of which no hunter could go. “We gazed longingly across the sandy wastes that marked the course of the Arkansas,” wrote Dixon. “The oftener we looked the more eager we were to tempt fate.” Even the danger of encountering Indians “added spice to the temptation.”

  The Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867 proh
ibited whites from hunting for buffalo south of the Arkansas. Still, after hunters had eliminated most of the great herds north of the river, they began moving south. Even the hunters themselves were under the impression that the army would try to stop them. Only it didn’t. When a group of buffalo men sought his advice, Colonel Dodge offered a cryptic reply. “Boys, if I were a buffalo hunter, I would hunt buffalo where buffalo are,” he told them.

  A hunter-merchant named J. Wright Mooar got the hint. In March 1874 he helped organize a train of one hundred wagons loaded with hunters, merchants, and camp followers, including himself and Dixon, and headed southwest from Dodge City. They crossed the Arkansas River into Indian Territory and kept going. They stopped eventually at the confluence of two creeks two miles north of the Canadian River, a gently sloping meadow with fresh drinking water and enough tall trees to provide timber. The site was just a mile from the adobe rubble of an older trading post that had been the scene of a bloody confrontation in 1864 between Colonel Kit Carson’s New Mexico volunteers and Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache warriors. Carson’s small force was lucky to have escaped with their lives. The old trading post was called Adobe Walls.

  The new Adobe Walls became the central staging ground for the new generation of white hunters. The newcomers started constructing a complex of sod buildings, including a store, mess hall, and stable, along with an eight-foot-high picket corral to contain livestock. A competing group arrived about a month later and built another store, corral, and outhouse nearby. And someone added a saloon and blacksmith shop to the complex.

  By mid-June teamsters were hauling a thousand hides into the trading post every day. Visitors recalled seeing vast piles near the site. “The first idea I had was that there was a small settlement out there in the wilderness …,” recalled Seth Hathaway. “[But] on getting closer, what I first took for houses turned out to be piles of buffalo hides stacked up and ready to be hauled to the railroad.”

  Billy Dixon and the others were now operating in the heart of the hunting grounds claimed by Quanah and the Quahadis. The hunters knew they were pushing their luck by setting up camp inside Comanche territory, but the rewards were too tempting to resist. Instead of two skinners a day, Dixon was now using three, and paying them up to twenty-five cents per skin. He and his men would set up a dugout with a big open fireplace near plenty of water and wood. He would kill thirty-five or forty bulls within a few hours. “No mercy was shown the buffalo when I got back to camp from Adobe Walls,” he would recall. “I killed as many as my three men could handle, working them as hard as they were willing to work. This was deadly business, without sentiment; it was dollars against tenderheartedness, and dollars won.”

  Dixon headed back to Adobe Walls to hire more skinners. The Canadian River was flooded and hard to cross. Along the way he got the news that two hunters had been killed by Kiowas fifteen miles downriver. The Indians had mutilated the two men—broken open the victims’ skulls, spilled out their brains and filled the cavities with grass, and cut out their hearts along with their ears, noses, fingers, and toes.

  Around the same time, two other hunters, an Englishman and a German, were killed a few miles away.

  “Every man of us was dead set against abandoning the buffalo range,” Dixon would recall. “The herds were now at hand. And we were in a fair way to make big money.” The hunters decided to go out together. “I felt uneasy all the time. Something seemed to be wrong. There was Indian in the air.”

  THE IDEA OF ATTACKING Adobe Walls started with Quanah, or so he would later claim. His original plan was to avenge the death of a childhood friend who had been killed by Tonkawa Indians, the allies of the Texans. The killing “make my heart hot and I want to make it even,” he said, so he recruited warriors for a raid in the time-honored method, going from camp to camp offering his pipe. Those who smoked with him signaled their agreement to go to battle. Quanah visited the Nokoni band at the head of Cache Creek and the Quahadis near Elk Creek, then the Kiowas and Cheyennes on the Washita River. “I work one month,” Quanah would recall.

  He had an unusual partner for his effort. A young Comanche shaman named Isatai was making his bid to become a messiah by claiming that he could make medicine that would render warriors immune from bullets. Isatai—whose name in Comanche meant “Wolf Droppings”—insisted he possessed miraculous healing powers and could even raise the dead. He accurately predicted the harsh spring and summer drought of 1874. He told followers he had ascended to heaven to visit the Great Spirit “high above that occupied by the white man’s Great Spiritual Power” and was empowered to wage war on the whites. He claimed to be able to spit out nearly a wagonload of cartridges at a time—unlimited ammunition for the fighters. To the Comanches, decimated by smallpox and cholera epidemics and running out of options, Isatai’s message was impossible to resist.

  He and Quanah succeeded in organizing a sun dance for all the Comanche bands. They gathered sometime in May along the Red River near the mouth of Sweetwater Creek. They even built a mock fort and tore it down in a practice battle. The older chiefs agreed to send their young men on the attack, and they wanted the first target to be Adobe Walls.

  As Quanah later recalled, the chiefs told him, “You pretty good fighter, Quanah, but you not know everything. We think you take pipe first against white buffalo hunters—you kill white men [and] make your heart feel good. After that you come back, take all young men and go to Texas warpath.”

  It was Isatai who turned the plan into a grand scheme to eliminate whites altogether and save the remaining buffalo herds, and who came up with medicine he claimed would protect them from the white man’s bullets. “God tell me we going to kill lots white men,” Isatai told them, according to Quanah’s account. “Bullets not penetrate shirts—we kill them just like old woman.”

  More than two hundred warriors—the number is still in dispute among historians—rode west for several days, then stopped in the late afternoon, made medicine, painted their faces, donned war bonnets, and crossed the Canadian River. They approached the trading post on foot; some slept for a few hours while others stayed awake talking and smoking. Then, just as daylight began to creep through the eastern sky, they mounted their horses.

  THE NIGHT OF JUNE 26 was sultry and dry, part of the prolonged drought that gripped the southern plains that summer. Inside Adobe Walls twenty-eight men and one woman—Mrs. William Olds, who had come from Dodge City with her husband to operate a dining room in the rear of the trading store—bedded down after midnight following some spirited carousing. All of the doors and windows were left wide open in the hope of catching a breeze. Billy Dixon slept on the ground outside to be near his wagon and horses. At around 2:00 a.m. pressure from the heavy sod covering the roof of Hanrahan’s saloon cracked the cottonwood ridgepole in its center, producing a loud, sharp report like a gunshot. Hanrahan ordered everyone out of the building for fear it would collapse.

  Dixon helped shore up the roof. By the time they got the ridgepole back in place, the sky was growing red. Figuring it was too late to get back to sleep, Dixon decided to move on. He picked up his rifle and sauntered toward his horses. Just beyond them, at the edge of the tree line, he could make out objects moving in his direction. “Then I was thunderstruck,” he recalled. “The black body of moving objects suddenly spread out like a fan, and from it went up one single, solid yell—a war-whoop that seemed to shake the very air of the early morning.” Then came the thundering roar of Indian ponies and more bloodcurdling war cries.

  Dixon dashed for his saddle horse, tied it to his wagon, aimed his rifle and fired off one quick shot, then fled toward the closest shelter, Hanrahan’s saloon. He sprinted through the door just before a wave of Indians engulfed the compound. Two brothers, Jacob and Isaac Scheidler, were not so lucky. They had been asleep in their wagon and had no chance to run. The warriors hacked them to pieces, scalped them, and even cut a piece of hide from the bloody corpse of their black Newfoundland dog.

  The sleep-deprived
defenders in three buildings grabbed their guns, threw up makeshift barricades of sacks of flour and grain and packing crates, and opened fire. Many fought the entire day in their underwear.

  The first half hour was a close-in gun battle. Quanah and his warriors punched holes in the adobe walls of the saloon and tried to break down the doors, but a steady rain of gunfire forced them to retreat. Next they tried to climb the roof, but once again the gunfire was too intense. Isatai’s medicine failed to protect them from the hunters’ bullets. “I am sure that we surprised the Indians as badly as they surprised us,” Dixon recalled.

  After the defenders fought off the assault, the warriors pulled back and laid siege to the compound throughout the day, launching periodic attacks on the buildings but never breaking through. The hunters, despite their small numbers, simply wielded too much firepower.

  Wearing his long, flowing war bonnet, Quanah circled the site on his gray pony, seeking to rally the warriors. He fell from his horse during heavy gunfire and took shelter behind an old buffalo carcass. While lying there, he felt a searing stab of pain between his shoulder blade and his neck. It felt like he had been hit by a rock, but he realized quickly it must have been a ricocheting bullet. He crawled to a plum thicket, where other warriors pulled him to safety. “The white men had big guns,” Quanah would recall, and Isatai’s magic proved to be “polecat medicine.”

  After that, the warriors pulled back even farther, trading shots with the hunters until evening.

  The siege continued for a second day. The Indians killed or ran off all the hunters’ horses, leaving them no way to escape or seek help from the outside. But toward the end of the day two teams of hunters punched through the Indian encirclement from the outside and made their way to the compound.

  By the third day, the hunters with their long-range rifles began to get a bead on their attackers. Memories and boasts were notoriously unreliable, but Billy Dixon claimed to have taken aim with his .50-caliber Sharps rifle and gotten off three shots at someone crawling in the tall grass some eight hundred yards away. After the battle ended, the hunters found a dead Indian lying flat on his stomach. “They killed us,” Quanah would recall.