The Searchers (19 page)

Many years later Carter, in his detailed but melodramatic account of the skirmish, would claim that the warrior was Quanah. The claim might be categorized as just another post-incident Quanah myth, except for the fact that Quanah himself later affirmed publicly that he had killed Gregg.

He wheeled his horse around and galloped away with his warriors. At first Carter wondered why, but then he saw Tonkawa scouts riding to his rescue, bearing down toward his position; right behind them were Mackenzie's troopers.

The Comanches, supplied with fresh mounts by their women atop the canyon walls, shouted down taunts and insults. But they did not attack. By the time Mackenzie's troops made it to the top, the Quahadis had melted away.

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.

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 prohibited 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.