Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (49 page)

The raid on the trading post should have been an outright slaughter. The night was warm and sultry and most of the people at the post—twenty-eight men and one woman, scattered among two stores and a saloon—were sleeping outdoors. There was no hotel, no rooms for rent. Those who were under roofs were in buildings whose doors were wide open. Isa-tai knew this from a scouting party he had sent out, and had confidently promised his men that they would sweep down on the
taibos
and club them to death in their sleep. It was a good plan. In principle, anyway. In the early-morning hours of May 26, 1874, the Indians under Quanah’s command massed on a high bluff beside the Canadian River. They waited. Among them was the messiah, Isa-tai, stark naked except for a cap of sage stems, and painted completely yellow, as was his horse. Yellow meant invulnerable. Most of the other braves and their horses were painted yellow, too, along with other colors. They all believed, or they would not have been there, that Isa-tai had true
puha,
that they would be immune to the white man’s bullets. After all, a man who could ascend into the sky, and who could burp up a load of cartridges, would have little trouble with a small band of the hated buffalo men. The assembled Comanches, Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Arapahos believed that this was a moment of destiny and that their redemption was at hand.

But the massacre of sleeping
taibos
never happened. That was because the owner of the saloon, a transplanted Pennsylvanian by way of Dodge City named James Hanrahan, fired his gun in the middle of the night, waking many of the hunters, skinners, merchants, and drovers. He told his guests, and they apparently believed him, that the loud noise they had heard had been made by the cracking of the ridgepole, the main beam holding up the sod roof of the saloon. Such an event would mean death, injury, or at the very least extreme inconvenience for the people underneath it. Fully awake now, the men then pitched in and spent the rest of the night replacing the ridgepole.

In fact the ridgepole was fine. Hanrahan had invented the story about the roof falling in because he had been informed several days before that the Indian attack was coming and had not wanted to hurt his business and thus hadn’t told anyone. When the men had finished their task, Hanrahan, refusing to come clean about the attack but afraid to let anyone go back to sleep,
offered them free drinks. At four a.m. Thus many of them were wide awake when the Indian war party swept down from the bluff just before dawn on June 27.

The Indians drove down into the valley with a fury. Quanah recalled later that the horses were moving at a gallop, throwing dust high in the air, and that some of them tripped on the prairie-dog holes, which sent men in feathered headdresses and horses rolling over and over in the semidarkness.
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At the settlement they crowded around the buildings, firing their carbines at windows and doors. Inside, the buffalo men barricaded themselves as best they could, piled up sacks of grain, and found that they were fairly well protected behind two-foot walls of sod. Sod would not burn, either, which would have offered the Indians an easy victory. The attackers flattened themselves against the walls. Quanah backed his horse into one of the doors, trying unsuccessfully to break it down, and later climbed up on the roof of one of the buildings to shoot down at the occupants. At one point he picked up a wounded comrade from the ground while seated on his horse, a feat of strength that astounded the men inside the buildings. In the early minutes of the fight both sides were using six-shooters. For the white men inside, the fury of the attack was terrifying. The buildings were full of smoke; people were shouting and screaming; the air was full of singing lead. Billy Dixon recalled that “At times the bullets poured in like hail and made us hug the sod walls like gophers when an owl is swooping past.”
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This is Quanah’s own account, filtered through the memory of his friend J. A. Dickson:

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.
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Three white men had been killed in the early moments of the raid, but the others had managed to hold the Indians off.
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The flanking fire from the saloon protected the people in the two mercantile buildings, most of whom had been asleep. The whites learned that by poking holes in the sod they could create gun ports for themselves, and thus drive back the Indians from
the other side of the wall. The hide men, moreover, were an unusually tough bunch, even by plains standards. In addition to various hunters, skinners, and wagon drivers, they included Billy Dixon, a famous buffalo hunter who would win a Congressional Medal of Honor later that year fighting Indians; William Barclay “Bat” Masterson, a gambler and gunman who later became legendary as the sheriff of Dodge City; “Dutch Henry” Born, later the most feared of the professional horse thieves on the Great Plains; and James “Bermuda” Carlyle, later killed when a posse in White Oaks, New Mexico, tried to arrest Billy the Kid and his gang.
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The Indians were driven back. They discovered that, even though many among their ranks had repeating, lever-action rifles, they were yet again at an enormous disadvantage in firepower. Inside those buildings were not just hardened and determined men with considerable experience of violence, cocooned inside thick walls of mud and grass. They also had a virtual arsenal of ammunition and weaponry at their disposal, most notably the brand-new Sharps “Big Fifties,” rifles of astonishing power, range, and accuracy that had made the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo possible in the first place. The merchants had whole cases of brand-new Sharps rifles, plus at least 11,000 rounds of ammunition. The Big Fifties were single-shot weapons with octagonal 34-inch barrels that used huge cartridges: .50-caliber, 600-grain bullets driven by 125 grains of black powder. They were so powerful that they could knock down a 2,000-pound buffalo at 1,000 yards. In the hands of the buffalo hunters, they were horrifically effective against horses and human beings. The rifles’ ranges were far longer than the Indians’ carbines could possibly reach.

By ten o’clock the Indians had retreated from the booming buffalo guns. Quanah, who had also fallen back after heroically fighting at close quarters, had his horse shot out from under him at five hundred yards.
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He took shelter behind a buffalo carcass, where he was hit by a bullet that ricocheted off a powder horn around his neck and lodged between his shoulder blade and neck. The wound was not serious. Astonished at the range and accuracy of the guns, the Indians retreated yet farther, only to learn that they had still not gone far enough. A group of them had met to plan strategy at a distance of roughly three-quarters of a mile from the trading post. Undeterred, the hunters began to pick them off one by one. A Comanche named Cohayyah who was among them recalled that he was standing with his friends trying to figure out how to rescue their dead when “suddenly and without warning one of the
warriors fell from his horse dead.” They found a bullet hole in his head. The wind had shifted, and they had not even heard the sound of a rifle shot.
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In the distance, Isa-tai sat on his horse, naked and bright ochre, watching the epic failure of his medicine. Nothing he had predicted had come true. The men who were supposed to be slaughtered in their sleep were now dropping Indians on the field like shotgunned mallards. The Cheyennes were angry at him. One of them struck Isa-tai in the face with his riding quirt; another, the father of a young warrior who had been killed, demanded to know why, if the messiah were immune to bullets, he did not go recover the young man’s body. As if to emphasize Isa-tai’s powerlessness, the man on the horse next to him was shot dead, then Isa-tai’s own horse was shot out from under him. His magic may have failed, but the magic of the Big Fifties worked just fine.
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Killing people three-quarters of a mile away was, by all objective precedent, godlike. Isa-tai’s excuse was that the Cheyennes had killed and skinned a skunk the day before the battle, and thus queered his medicine. His people did not really believe him.

The effect on the Indians was devastating. It was not so much the carnage—fifteen were killed that day and many more wounded—as the shocking failure of Isa-tai’s medicine. That was the first great demoralizing blow. The second was the wounding of Quanah, who was rescued by his people and brought back out of range of the buffalo guns. As we have seen, the killing or wounding of the leader was almost invariably a signal for retreat. By four o’clock the Indians had given up. The whites emerged from their buildings and collected trinkets and souvenirs. Though the Indians remained nearby for the next several days, taking occasional shots at the sod walls of the trading post, they never attacked again. The battle was over. On the third day Billy Dixon made what became the most famous single shot in the history of the West. A party of about fifteen Indians had appeared at the edge of the bluff, at a distance of probably fifteen hundred yards, or almost a mile. As Dixon recalled, “some of the boys suggested that I try the big ‘50’ on them. . . . I took careful aim and pulled the trigger. We saw an Indian fall from his horse.”
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He was the last casualty of what would become famous in frontier history as the Second Battle of Adobe Walls, where a handful of doughty white men held off a buzzing horde of Indians that has been variously estimated at seven hundred to a thousand, though two hundred fifty is closer to the truth. Astonished and terrified, the rest of the Indians fled.

The rest was anticlimax. The whites, strengthened by the arrival of more
than seventy hunters who were now afraid to be alone on the plains, eventually decided it was safe to go about their business. After burying their four dead comrades (one died accidentally) and the scalped Newfoundland dog that had died with the drovers, the whites beheaded the dead Indians and stuck their heads on stakes outside the walls. They placed the thirteen headless bodies on buffalo hides and dragged them away along with the dead horses (the Indians had killed them all), which had begun to reek.

Meanwhile the Indians drifted off, furious, helpless. Once again, bad medicine had been their fatal weakness. They could not help themselves. Reverse the roles to see what might have happened. The whites would have surrounded the buildings and kept up the attack. They would have come by night and caved in the walls. They would have accepted far greater losses to achieve the objective than Indians ever would. Indians never understood the concept of seizing and holding a small piece of real estate, or of calculating the grim cost-benefit ratio of a siege. Failing all this, the white men would have simply starved the Indians out, waiting patiently for them to get so thirsty they would have to choose between dying and fighting.

Though the hide men had escaped Quanah’s army with their skins intact, the rest of the frontier wasn’t so lucky. After their failure at Adobe Walls, the enraged warriors formed smaller groups and struck blindly in all directions at western settlements from Colorado to Texas.
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Kiowas under Lone Wolf crossed the border into Texas. Cheyennes and Comanches under Quanah struck first to the east, driving the herd of buffalo hunters’ horses, and destroying a wagon train in the Indian territory, then attacking settlements in Texas. Little is known of these raids. Some said Quanah ventured as far north as southern Colorado. He himself later allowed only that, following Adobe Walls, “I take all men, go warpath to Texas.”
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Attacks were made as far north as Medicine Lodge in Kansas. The entire frontier was forced to “fort up.”
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Stages were attacked; stations were burned. Parties of hide men were tortured and killed. Men were staked out on the prairie and women raped and murdered in terrible ways. The Indian outbreak that swept the southern plains that summer killed an estimated one hundred ninety white people and wounded many more. Its effects were immediate. Hide hunting stopped altogether. Hunters and settlers and anyone on the edge of the frontier fled to the protection of the federal forts. Adobe Walls may have failed. But the summer raids accomplished exactly what Isa-tai and Quanah
had wanted: massive revenge against the white people that caused panic and terror for a thousand miles. Amid their feelings of rage and frustration, the summer killing must have given them satisfaction. It represented justice to them, the evening of old scores.

Unfortunately for Quanah and Lone Wolf and the others killing white men that summer, their predations also exhausted the last of the white man’s patience, and ruined forever the arguments of the peace advocates and pro-Indian humanitarians. On July 26, Grant gave Sherman permission to put the agencies and reservations under military control, thus ending five years of the failed peace policy.
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On the same day Lieutenant Col. John W. “Black Jack” Davidson, the commander at Fort Sill, ordered all friendly Indians to register and enroll at the agencies by August 3, and to report for a daily roll call. Grant ordered the army to move immediately and in force. All restrictions were lifted on movements of the army. They were at liberty to pursue the Indians to the front porch of the agency at Fort Sill, if necessary, and kill them there. There would be no safe harbor on the reservation, no forgiveness for those who stayed out. The bluecoats were now, as the über-warrior Grant put it simply and bluntly, “to subdue all Indians who offered resistance to constituted authority.” The plan, for which an enormous amount of army firepower would be brought to bear, was to hunt them all down.