Life and Adventures of 'Billy' Dixon

On one of the reins, about ten inches from the bit, was fastened a scalp, which evidently had been taken from the head of a white woman, the hair being dark brown in color and about fifteen inches in length. The scalp was lined with cloth and edged with beads. Several other scalps were found that day. One was on a war shield.

My attention likewise had been attracted by an object at the rear of the little sod house west of Rath's store. We had fired at it over and over until we had cut a gap in the corner of the sod house. The object finally had disappeared from sight. For a considerable time we had seen feathers whipping round the corner in the wind, and had thought that probably three or four Indians were concealed there. Every time I had turned loose my big "50" I had torn out a chunk of sod.

When I reached the sod house, I was startled at what I saw. There sat a painted and feathered warrior in a perfectly upright position with his legs crossed and his head turned to one side in the most natural way imaginable. His neck was broken and he was as dead as they ever made 'em. I am bound to admit that I jumped back, fearful that he was alive and would bore me through and through before I could pull down on him.

What we had been shooting at so frequently was the dead warrior's lance, which was covered with webbing and adorned with black feathers at intervals of every five or six inches. The lance had been stuck upright in the ground, and had been shot in two, which caused the feathers to disappear – the upper part had doubled over across the dead Indian's legs. I added the lance to my "prizes of war."

The object that I had seen crawling along the edge of the tall grass was the third that demanded my attention. I found a dead Indian lying flat on his stomach. He was naked, save for a white cloth wrapped round his hips. His six-shooter was in his belt. The Indian had been shot through the body, and one knee had been shattered. I could plainly see the trail he had made by the blood on the grass. A short distance away lay a shot pouch and a powder horn; there were about fifteen army cartridges in the pouch. A few steps further, was his 50-caliber needle gun, an army Springfield. Next, were his bow and his quiver. I confiscated the whole outfit.

One of the noisiest and most active spectators of the fight was a young crow which some of the hunters had captured shortly after our arrival at Adobe Walls. The crow had been petted by every man in camp. All of us were acquainted with the old superstition that the crow is an omen of death. During the worst of the fight this crow flew from one building to another, in and out of the open windows, calling "Caw! Caw! Caw!" in the most dismal way. It would alight on some object in the room, and sit there calling and cawing until somebody, tiring of the noise, would shout, "Get out of here, you black rascal!" and then chase him from the building. The crow would fly to another building and repeat his performance. Despite the bullets, this crow was never injured and, save our horses, was the only thing left outside.

There were several dogs at the Walls, but all of them cut for tall timber when the fighting began and did not show up for several days. All our horses were killed or run off. The five horses that had been left in the stockade were quickly shot down, the Indians poking their guns between the cottonwood pickets. Four head tied to a wagon near Rath's were cruelly killed. I saw the Indians when they first rode up and tried to cut the rope with a butcher knife. One was a gray mare that was notorious for her vicious kicking. She would not let the Indians approach her, so all were shot. My own saddle horse, which I had owned for years and highly prized, was among the first to be shot, and still lay tied to the wagon when I found him.

The Indians were not without military strategy. They had planned to put every man of us afoot, thereby leaving us without means of escape and powerless to send for aid save as some messenger might steal away in the darkness, to traverse on foot the weary distance and the dangerous and inhospitable region that lay between us and Dodge City. By holding us constantly at bay and keeping fresh detachments of warriors rallying to the attack they probably thought it possible to exhaust our strength, and then overwhelm us. It should be remembered that Adobe Walls was scarcely more than a lone island in the vast sea of the Plains, a solitary refuge uncharted and practically unknown. For the time we were at the end of the world, our desperate extremity pressing heavily upon us, and our friends and comrades to the north ignorant of what was taking place.

At the first dash, the Indians had driven off all the horses they had found grazing in the little valley, and which Billy Ogg had gone in the dusk of dawn to round up preparatory to our departure for the hunting grounds. We counted fifty-six dead horses scattered in the immediate vicinity of the buildings, some with arrows sticking in their bodies, and others bored with bullets. Of these ten head belonged to the hunters. Added to this slaughter were the twenty-eight head of oxen that belonged to the Shadler brothers. In nearly every instance, a horse that had been wounded far from the buildings would stagger in our direction, apparently to get as close as possible to his friends. There they would stand in agony until the Indians shot them down, which happened in every instance.

The last victim of their cruelty was a mustang colt owned by Mrs. Olds. This colt had been captured by some of the hunters among a bunch of wild mustangs, and given as a present to Mrs. Olds who had petted the graceful, affectionate little creature until it followed her from place to place like a dog. Some rather romantic stories have been written about this mustang colt and the part it played in the fight at Adobe Walls. The truth, however, unadorned, is the colt remained near the buildings throughout the fight, and when I saw it a feathered arrow was sticking in its back. I never knew whether the colt died of this wound or was afterwards shot to put the poor little thing out of its misery.

When we found that we could move around outside the buildings without danger of immediate attack, we blanketed the bodies of Tyler and the Shadlers and dug a single grave near the north side of the corral. There they lie to this day, without a stone to mark the spot. Many a spring and many a summer have come and gone, and many a winter has sent its blinding snows across the Panhandle since that far-off day. The Indians and the buffaloes have vanished from the scene, and the plow is running over the land where they ranged. After all, the boys are sleeping as quietly and as restfully as if they had been buried in the village churchyard back at their old homes.

Despite the utmost efforts of our savage foes to carry away their dead and wounded, thirteen dead Indians were left on the ground near the buildings, so closely under the muzzles of our guns that it would have been suicide for their comrades to have attempted their recovery. By the time we had buried our three comrades, darkness had come, and we abandoned further outside work and returned to the protection of the buildings, completely exhausted by the strain and excitement of the day's fighting.

What we had experienced ate into a man's nerves. I doubt if any of us slept soundly that June night. Somewhere out there in the darkness our enemies were watching to see that nobody escaped from the beleaguered adobe buildings. Inasmuch as Indians rarely, if ever, attack at night, preferring the shadows of early morning when sleep is soundest, and when there is less chance of their being ambushed, we felt reasonably certain of not being attacked before daybreak. As for myself I dreamed all night, the bloody scenes of the day passing in endless procession through my mind – I could see the Indians charging across the valley, hear the roar of the guns and the blood-curdling war-whoops, until everything was a bewildering swirl of fantastic colors and movements.

All my comrades at Adobe Walls that day showed much courage. It is with pride that I can recall its many incidents without the feeling that there was the slightest inclination on the part of any man to show the "white feather." To be nervous or fearful of death is no sign of weakness – sticking at one's post and doing the thing that is to be done is what counts.

"Bat" Masterson should be remembered for the valor that marked his conduct. He was a good shot, and not afraid. He has worked his way up in the world, and has long been a successful writer for a New York newspaper. He was sheriff of Ford county, Kansas, at Dodge City, in 1876-77. It has always seemed strange to me that finally he should prefer life in a big city, after having lived in the west. I have been told that he has said that he had no wish again to live over those old days, that they no longer appealed to him, but I never believed it. Such a thing is contrary to human nature.

All that long night after the first day's fighting not a sound was heard nor did an Indian come near. Next morning the pet crow was the only living object to be seen in the valley, where he was holding high carnival on the dead horses, flying from one carcass to another.

By this time such an awful stench was rising from the dead Indians and dead horses that we were forced to get rid of them. As we had no teams with which to drag them away, we rigged up several buffalo hides and tied ropes to them, then rolled the bodies onto the hides and pulled them far enough away to prevent the evil smell from reaching the buildings. In this way three or four men could move a horse.

At one place, between Rath's and Hanrahan's, twelve horses lay piled together. We dug a pit close at hand and rolled them in. The other horses and the Indians were dragged off on the prairie and left to the coyotes and buzzards.

On the second day we saw only one bunch of Indians. They were on a bluff across the valley east of us. Some of our men opened up on them at long range; the Indians returned the fire and disappeared. It was plain to them that there was still a lot of fight left in us.

Our situation looked rather gloomy. With every horse dead or captured, we felt pretty sore all round. The Indians were somewhere close at hand, watching our every movement. We were depressed with the melancholy feeling that probably all the hunters out in the camps had been killed. Late that afternoon our spirits leaped up when we saw a team coming up the valley from the direction of the Canadian. This outfit belonged to George Bellfield, a German who had been a soldier in the Civil War.

A black flag was flying from one of the buildings, and when Bellfield and his companions saw it they thought we were playing some kind of joke on them. In broken English Bellfield remarked to his men, "Dem fellers tink day's damn smart, alretty." But when he drew nearer and began seeing the dead horses, he put the whip to his team and came in at a dead run.

When asked if they had been attacked by Indians, Bellfield and his men said that they had not seen a sign of one. That same day Jim and Bob Cator came in from their camp north of Adobe Walls.

It was of greatest importance that somebody should go to Dodge City for help. Henry Lease, a buffalo hunter, volunteered to undertake this dangerous journey, Bellfield furnishing a horse. Lease started after dark on the second day. He carefully examined his pistols and his big "50." filled his belts with plenty of ammunition, shook hands with us and rode away in the night. I doubt if there was a man who believed that Lease would get through alive. It was a certainty, however, that there would be a pile of dead Indians where he fell, if he were given a fighting chance for his life.

At the same time we sent out two men to visit the different camps, and warn the hunters that the Indians were on the war path. They were to bring back the news if the hunters were dead.

On the third day a party of about fifteen Indians appeared on the side of the bluff, east of Adobe Walls Creek, and some of the boys suggested that I try my big "50" on them. The distance was not far from three-fourths of a mile. A number of exaggerated accounts have been written about this incident. I took careful aim and pulled the trigger. We saw an Indian fall from his horse. The others dashed out of sight behind a clump of timber. A few moments later two Indians ran quickly on foot to where the dead Indian lay, seized his body and scurried to cover. They had risked their lives, as we had frequently observed, to rescue a comrade who might be not only wounded but dead. I was admittedly a good marksman, yet this was what might be called a "scratch" shot.

More hunters came in on the third day, and as news of the Indian outbreak spread from camp to camp the boys were soon coming in like blackbirds from all directions – and they lost no time making the trip. By the sixth day there were fully a hundred men at the Walls, which may have given rise to the statement so frequently made in after years that all these men were in the fight.

The lone woman who was at Adobe Walls, Mrs. Olds, was as brave as the bravest. She knew only too well how horrible her fate would be if she should fall into the hands of the Indians, and under such circumstances it would have caused no surprise had she gone into the wildest hysterics. But all that first day, when the hand of death seemed to be reaching from every direction, this pioneer woman was cool and composed and lent a helping hand in every emergency.

By the fifth day enough hunters had arrived to make us feel comparatively safe, yet it was expedient that we should protect ourselves as fully as possible, so the men began fortifying the buildings. None of them had been finished, nor had any port-holes been cut in the walls. Our shooting was done from the windows and transoms. With port-holes we could have killed many more Indians. A little inclosure with sod walls was now built on top of Rath's store, and another on top of Myer's for lookouts. A ladder led from the inside to these lookouts.

On the fifth day William Olds was stationed in the lookout on Rath's store, to watch for Indians while the other men were at work. The lookout on the other buildings shouted that Indians were coming, and all of us ran for our guns and for shelter inside the buildings. Just as I entered Rath's store I saw Olds coming down the ladder with his gun in his hand. A moment later his gun went off accidentally, tearing off the top of Old's head. At the same instant Mrs. Olds rushed from an adjoining room – in time to see the body of her husband roll from the ladder and crumple at her feet, a torrent of blood gushing from the terrible wound. Olds died instantly. Gladly would I have faced all the Indians from the Cimarron to Red River, rather than have witnessed this terrible scene. It seemed to me that it would have been better for any other man there to have been taken than the husband of the only woman among us. Her grief was intense and pitiable. A rough lot of men, such as we were, did not know how to comfort a woman in such distress. We did the best we could, and if we did it awkwardly, it should not be set down against us. Had we been called upon to fight for her, we would not have asked about the odds, but would have sailed in, tooth and toe-nail. When we tried to speak to her we just choked up and stood still. We buried Olds that same evening, about sixty feet from the spot where he was killed, just southeast of Rath's store.

The Indians that had caused the alarm numbered between twenty-five and thirty, and were up the valley of Adobe Walls Creek headed east. Finally, they disappeared, and we did not see them again. They may not have belonged to the attacking party, and were merely passing through the country.

I always regretted that I did not keep the relics I picked up at Adobe Walls. Mrs. Olds asked me for the lance when I returned to the building, and I gave it to her. The other relics I took to Dodge City, and gave them away to first one person and then another.

CHAPTER X

The warriors that attacked Adobe Walls made an extensive raid. Writing from Cheyenne Agency, at Darlington, in September, 1874, a Government employee gave this information to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs:

"We are informed by Little Robe, White Shield, and other Cheyennes that Lone Wolf, a Kiowa chief, was the first to commence the present Indian trouble, by going with a band of his warriors on a raid into Texas. Big Bow, a Comanche, soon followed. After these parties returned the Kiowas, Comanches, and Cheyennes made the attack upon Adobe Walls. After that fight the combined forces separated into a number of war parties; some went into Texas, others into New Mexico and Colorado, and still others along the Fort Sill and Wichita Railroad and the Kansas border. We have had well-authenticated accounts from Indians and from other sources that the number of individuals killed in New Mexico amounted to 40; Colorado, 60; Lone Wolf's first raid into Texas, 7; Big Bow's first raid into Texas, 4; the Adobe Walls fight, 3; southwest from Camp Supply, buffalo-hunters, 3; between Camp Supply and Dodge, buffalo-hunters, 5; in the vicinity of Medicine Lodge and Sun City, 12; on Crooked Creek, 2; on the trail north from Cheyenne Agency, 5; on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, 4; Washita and Fort Sill agencies and vicinity, 14; Dr. Holloway's son, Cheyenne Agency, 1; Mr. Dougherty, beef contractor for these three agencies reports at least thirty persons recently killed in Texas, 30; total, 190.

"White Shield this day informed me that the Kiowa chief, White Horse, on his last raid into Texas killed eleven persons and captured three children. The children, he states, are now in the Kiowa camps. White Shield says he has heard of several other captives with the Comanches and Kiowas, but these three mentioned are all he has seen."

It has been said that the Indians abandoned the fight because of the wounding of Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief, and again because the "medicine" man found that his "medicine" was bad. To be more exact, the Indians probably came to the conclusion that if they remained long enough, charged often enough and got close enough, all of them would be killed, as they were unable to dislodge us from the buildings.

In the fall of 1877, many of the Comanches became dissatisfied with their life on the military reservation at Fort Sill and fled to their old home on the Staked Plains. Chas. Goodnight was running his cattle in the lower end of Palo Duro, and the Comanches were soon killing beef. When he heard of it, he mounted his horse and rode down to where they were and made a private peace treaty with them, agreeing to give them two beeves a day as long as they remained, if they would not raid his herd. His proposal was accepted, and the compact was kept until the soldiers arrived and compelled the Comanches to return to their reservation.

I met Quanah at that time, having gone out with the troops. As we were riding along one day, he began talking about the fight at the Walls. When I told him that I was one of the men that had fought against him, he leaned over on his horse and shook my hand. We became good friends.

A number of different stories have been related about Quanah's mishaps in the fight. A man who knew him well in later years said that Quanah told him that early in the fight on the first day his horse was shot and killed at a distance of between 400 and 500 yards from the buildings. The horse fell suddenly, pitching Quanah headlong to the ground his gun falling from his grasp and bounding away. When Quanah saw that his horse was dead, he took shelter behind an old buffalo carcass over which wood-rats had piled weeds and grass, making a heap about waist high. Then something happened that Quanah was never able to explain. He was struck a terrific blow between his shoulder blade and his neck. He was badly stunned but managed to gain his feet and ran and hid himself in a plum thicket. At first he thought somebody had hit him with a heavy stone, but as only his own men could have done this, he abandoned this notion and concluded that he had been hit by a spent or deflected bullet. His right shoulder was useless most of the day, and he could raise his gun with difficulty. He left the battleground by riding behind another Indian.

Had it not been for the cracking of the cottonwood ridge pole in Hanrahan's saloon, the Indians would have come upon us unawares and all of us would have been killed, yet we never could find a single thing wrong with the log. Every hunter that came in after the fight, as well as every man at the Walls, examined that cottonwood ridge log over and over to find the break, but it could not be found. The two men who were sleeping in the building declared that the noise sounded like the report of a rifle.

The fight at Adobe Walls broke up buffalo-hunting in that section just as the Indians had planned. This was the last buffalo-hunting I ever did as a business. Hanrahan owned a big outfit and lost everything.

We were now so strong in numbers and so many days had passed without the coming of relief from Dodge that we organized a party of about twenty-five men to go up there and find out why help was not coming. Jim Hanrahan, the oldest man among us, was placed in command. It had now been about a week since the fight.

A serious row was barely averted the night before we pulled out for Dodge. Guns were scarce, and after the death of Olds "Bat" Masterson had borrowed the Olds gun, a better gun than the one used by Masterson who had lent his gun to another man. When it was learned that we were going to Dodge, Mrs. Olds sent for her husband's gun. "Bat" sent back word that he wanted to keep the gun until morning, promising that he would promptly return it at that time. This was not agreeable to Mrs. Olds, and she sent a man named Brown to Hanrahan's to get the gun without further talk, as she feared that she might lose the gun.

Brown made a few mistakes in his language in discussing the matter with Hanrahan, the latter having said several times that he would be personally responsible for the gun and would guarantee that it was returned to Mrs. Olds. Brown crowded matters until Hanrahan grabbed him by the neck, shook him as a bulldog would a rabbit, and then threw Brown out of the saloon, saying, "Get out of my building, you – , – "! Hanrahan drew his own gun and had Brown covered, ready to pull the trigger, which I believe he would have done, if several of us had not disarmed him, and then reasoned with him not to go any further, because if shooting began there was no telling what might happen, as both men had friends. Next morning "Bat" returned the gun to Mrs. Olds.

The row spread ill feeling among a number of the men, and though blood that had been spilt in fighting for each other was scarcely dry on the ground, yet some were now ready to begin fighting each other. This was the way of the west in those times – every tub had to stand on its own bottom every minute of the day. It was the code that every able-bodied man had to live by. If, however, a man should fall sick or be in bad luck or crippled, the boys stuck to him until he was able to take care of himself. The quarrel caused a little embarrassment to me, for as we rode away next morning and were passing Leonard & Myers store, the men there yelled out, "Goodbye, we don't care for any of you leaving, except Billy Dixon."

We went up Short Creek until we got out on the Plains, where we left the main-traveled freight road and bore more to the west, as we felt that the Indians might be watching this main road. We made it to the head of the Palo Duro the first day and went into camp. By making a long ride our next camp was San Francisco Creek. Here we found where buffalo-hunters had built a camp, and the body of Charley Sharp, who had been killed by the Indians. He had been dead about a week, and the body was shockingly mutilated. Sharp was a partner of Henry Lease, and had remained in camp while Lease went to Adobe Walls for supplies. Sharp bore the nickname "Dublin." Sharp's Creek in Beaver County, Oklahoma, bears his name. We buried the body where we found it.

Bearing to the northeast, we came into the Dodge City and Adobe Walls road at the Cimarron River. Another day's ride brought us to Crooked Creek. We were now out of dangerous country, and reached Dodge City safe and sound.

Ours was the first crowd to reach Dodge City after the fight at Adobe Walls, and the whole town turned out to see us. Everybody was anxious to learn the particulars, and we were asked thousands of questions. News of what had happened at the Walls had driven most of the buffalo-hunters to Dodge City, their camps stretching up and down the Arkansas near town.

We learned that a relief party, composed of buffalo-hunters and residents of Dodge, had started south in command of Tom Nixon. There were about forty men in the party. Nixon was killed a year or two later by "Mysterious Dave" Mathews. He was a well-known frontiersman.

We did not take life nor ourselves very seriously those days, and were soon entering into the fun at Dodge with the greatest enthusiasm, forgetful of the perils and hardships that so lately beset us. Things at Dodge were run for the fullest enjoyment of the present – there was not much material to occupy students of ancient history. The town had changed little since we had gone away. Several of the men who had come north from the Walls went straight to the depot and bought tickets for their homes in the east. They had enough of the Indians to last them several years, and were not ashamed to stand up and say so. Most of us were "locoed" with the sports and pastimes of the land where the wool was long and the customs wild. Drouth, scarcity of water-holes, "northers," rattlesnakes, Indians, even the United States Army, could not have driven us east of the ninety-ninth meridian of longitude.