D
ESPITE THE ESCAPE
from Mackenzie, Quanah knew that his days of freedom were dwindling. Secure in the Llano Estacado, he waged a relentless guerrilla war on the Texas settlers, but his band was small, and the army was everywhere. Raiding was getting to be a tiresome and dangerous life. And he had changed his tactics. Believing that it was important to stop the settlement of Comanche land, and knowing that he was unable to kill all the Anglos who were pouring into Eastern Texas, pushing relentlessly against the barrier the Comanche presence had created, he started concentrating his efforts on destroying homesteads and sparing the settlers.
On raid after raid, he would ride up to the house, alone, his hand raised in truce, and use the little English at his disposal to warn the residents to flee. Then, even before they were out of
sight, he would give a whoop and summon the rest of his band, who would descend on the homestead, run off the stock, and burn the buildings to the ground. He had never been disposed to brutality and torture, like some of the other Comanche chiefs, but now he seemed even more restrained.
At first it baffled his warriors, but they had too much respect for him to challenge his approach. There were whispers that he had seen a little girl who reminded him of his mother and, realizing what her ordeal must have been like, chose not to inflict it on another child, or leave another grieving family wondering what had happened to a son or daughter. And he knew there was nothing to be gained by pointless killing.
Soldiers and buffalo hunters were another matter, however. He had no qualms about waging war against men who could defend themselves, especially the hunters.
Even though Quanah had not signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty, he knew of its provisions from those who had. He knew that buffalo hunting by whites had been outlawed in Texas. But the hunters, anxious for the two dollars and fifty cents a good hide would bring, flooded into Texas by the hundreds.
The buffalo were dwindling, and in 1871 alone, by conservative estimates, more than a million hides made their way east. And Quanah was not alone in his hatred for the buffalo men. Some of the Kiowa chiefs who had refused to
stay on the reservation, especially Satanta, newly pardoned by the Governor of Indian Territory and released from prison, were determined to drive the hunters from the plains by any means necessary. And if they resisted, so much the better.
One evening in early May, a medicine man named Isatai, who had been building a following with his teaching that the white man could be driven from Comanche land, came to Quanah’s lodge.
After smoking a pipe, the two men began to talk. “You know,” Isatai said, “that I have seen the Father of all red men.”
Quanah nodded. He had heard the story from many warriors, some of whom believed the medicine man, and some of whom were skeptical. “So it is said,” Quanah answered.
“And you know that I have strong medicine. I can swallow the white man’s bullets, and I can cough up bullets for the Comanche guns. I can stop bullets from hitting our warriors.”
Once again, Quanah nodded.
“I have had a vision,” Isatai went on. “I have seen a great battle between white men and red men. In this battle, the white men, buffalo hunters, are trapped behind stone walls, and the red men come and kill them all, and the buffalo return to the plains. The white men leave Indian land, and the Comanche go back to live in the old way with no white men to interfere with their living.”
“You believe this vision, Isatai?”
It was the medicine man’s turn to nod. “I believe it,” he said. “I think we should have a council. I think we should invite the Kiowa and the Arapaho, and the Cheyenne. We should invite all the red men who hate the buffalo hunters and want the white men to give us back our lands.”
“This battle,” Quanah said, “do you know where it is fought?”
Isatai described the vision in detail, and by the time he was through, Quanah thought he knew the place the shaman was talking about. There was an old fort, built by William Bent and long abandoned, known as Adobe Walls. It had been a fort for three generations, abandoned, rebuilt and abandoned again. Now, it was drawing buffalo hunters, who were using it as a staging area for their illegal hunts. Stores had been built inside the ruined walls, and the hunters came there for their supplies and to drink whiskey between hunts. They shipped their skins from the fort and it was a place where they all met to exchange stories and information about the location of the huge herds on the Texas Plains.
Quanah was more than willing to agree to a council with the express purpose of attacking the hunters and driving them from the plains. Word went out, and in the middle of May, nearly a thousand warriors gathered at Elk Creek on the North Fork of the Red River. Comanche hosted
Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, and among the chiefs in attendance were Satanta, White Horse, Lone Wolf, Howling Wolf, and White Shield. Along with Quanah, Para-o-coom represented the Comanche.
Isatai was not bashful, and as soon as the Kiowa Sundance was celebrated, he got down to business. He explained that the united tribes had three main goals. “First, we must take revenge of the white men for our Comanche brothers who have been killed in Texas. Then, we must kill the last of the Tonkawa, the eaters of human flesh who still give themselves to the white man and fight against their red brothers. And last, we must take our revenge on the white men who hunt our buffalo and slaughter them for nothing but their skins. The Great Father promised us in the Medicine Lodge Treaty that white men would not hunt buffalo on our lands, and still they come by the hundreds and kill every buffalo they see.”
The assembly grew excited as he continued to rage against the hated enemy, and by the time he explained how he could swallow the white man’s bullets, he had the listeners in the palm of his hand.
A war party was assembled, and Quanah, as host and as the most celebrated of Comanche chiefs, was given the honor of leading the raid.
Adobe Walls was quiet in the middle of the night of June 27, 1874. The three main buildings inside the fortification were Hanrahan’s saloon
which catered to the thirsty hunters, Rath’s supply house, which provided them with most of their needs, including ammunition, and Leonard’s store, where they could get everything missing from Rath’s shelves.
Most of the twenty-odd men inside were sleeping when a sharp crack woke them. No one was sure what it was, but a quick search soon revealed that a beam in Hanrahan’s saloon had snapped. The inhabitants pitched in to replace the beam before the heavy adobe roof could collapse, and it turned into an all-night affair, with Jim Hanrahan catering to the thirsty band of would-be carpenters.
It was near dawn when Billy Dixon went outside to tend to his pony, tethered at the riverbank. As he started back toward the fort, he spotted a huge war party racing toward the fort. Firing his pistol and shouting to wake the hunters and merchants, Dixon raced to the fort with the war party closing on him.
Men spilled out of their bunks still groggy from lack of sleep as Quanah led the warriors right through the gates of the fort, instead of resorting to the usual Indian practice of riding in circles trying to pick off defenders luckless enough to expose themselves at the wrong time.
All of the defenders rushed to one of the three buildings, which were separated one from another by fifty or sixty yards. The Indians stayed on horseback, charging the buildings and returning the sporadic fire of the defenders. In the first
onslaught, the warriors destroyed every window in all three buildings, and opened fire on the dodging hunters, who were armed with their long-range buffalo guns as well as a variety of repeating rifles and pistols.
The hunters, although outnumbered almost twenty-five to one, had the advantage of the sturdy adobe walls and their superior marksmanship. There was plenty of ammunition in the stores, and as the Indians raced around the inside of the fort, the buffalo hunters chose their targets carefully, determined to make it last.
Two men were trapped outside the walls, and the Comanche fell on them with a vengeance, venting their accumulated rage, and the additional anger at their surprise attack being thwarted. Both men were killed and scalped before the attackers dropped back to regroup.
Quanah knew that success had depended on complete surprise, because his warriors were no match for the big buffalo guns. At the range of nearly a mile, one of the warriors was killed as he prepared to join the second assault.
“It is important that no one escapes to go for help,” Quanah warned. “If any of the hunters get away they will bring the army, and we will be forced to break off.”
Leading the second wave back into the fort, Quanah ordered supply wagons burned, along with several wagons full of buffalo hides. The stench of burning hair swirled in thick black clouds as the attack resumed. Trying to get into
the buildings by hacking through the roof, three warriors were killed, and the defenders had used the lull to redistribute ammunition, replenishing the supply at Hanrahan’s. The defenders had briefly considered consolidating their forces into one of the three buildings, but decided that the placement of the structures gave them an advantage by allowing them to fire at the Indians anywhere in the fort from one of the three.
One of Quanah’s warriors dismounted and charged Hanrahan’s on foot, brandishing his rifle, but was hit in the chest, and knocked to his knees by a pistol shot. Quanah, still on his horse, charged straight toward the wooden porch on which the wounded warrior lay, calling to him to get to his knees. As Nightwind rumbled up onto the wooden walkway that ran the length of the saloon, Quanah leaned far over, caught the warrior under the arms and hauled him to safety before dashing away from the muzzles of the Sharps and Spencer rifles.
One of the younger hunters, the not yet widely known Bat Masterson, suggested that he would try to make a break for it and go for help.
“Are you crazy?” Jim Hanrahan asked. “The closest help is Dodge City and that’s two days’ ride. You’ll never make it. There must be a thousand redskins out there.”
“We can’t let them starve us out,” Masterson argued. “We have to do something.”
“There’s plenty of food in Leonard’s. Besides, word’ll spread all by itself, and we’ll have help pretty
soon without you taking a fool chance like that.”
Masterson was skeptical, but several of the hunters ganged up on him and their combined arguments convinced him to wait.
Quanah pulled his men back again, frustrated at their inability to crack the defense. He knew that he was waging the most important battle of his life and, if he failed, that Comanche dominance in the Llano would be at an end.
Once more, he ordered an attack, and once more the huge war party swept through the shattered and yawning gates of the old adobe battlements. Once more, the defenders laid down a withering fire that kept the warriors at bay. It was near dark, and the attack was short-lived. Quanah pulled back to wait for dawn.
During the night, one of the hunters, Henry Lease, slipped out the back of Hanrahan’s, climbed over the walls and disappeared into the darkness without being seen. He headed for Dodge, knowing that it was just a matter of time before the attackers managed to overwhelm the fort.
On the way, he met a party of hunters, told them what was happening, and pushed on for the border and Kansas. The hunters spread the word, and raced to the fort. All night long, the buffalo men streamed in, fighting their way through the small bands of warriors patrolling the area.
By dawn, there were nearly a hundred men inside, and virtually every one of them was
armed with a buffalo gun. But Quanah could not afford to give up just yet. There was too much at stake, and if this attack failed, there would never be another chance.
As the sun rose, the Comanche led the war party back into the battle, but this time they were unable even to get inside the walls, since the defenders now had enough men to line the walls with sharpshooters. Again and again, the thunder of one of the big guns rolled across the plains, and another Indian fell.
Knowing it was useless, Quanah called off the attack and led the war party back into the Llano. By the time relief forces arrived from Dodge, there was no sign of the attack except for a dozen Comanche heads arranged in a row of stakes driven into the ground beside the gates.
Heading back into the vastness of the plains, Quanah knew that he had failed. He knew, too, that it was now only a matter of time before every Quohada warrior was either dead or confined to a reservation.
There had to be a way to change that, he kept thinking. There had to be. But there was none, and he knew it.
Autumn 1874
G
EN. WILLIAM SHERMAN WAS CONVINCED
that an all-out war on the remnants of plains Indian resistance was the only way to bring the Indian wars to a successful conclusion. He knew that many of the hostile bands were using the reservations as hiding places, raiding at will, and returning to the protection of the various agencies afterward, where they would mingle with those who had never left. They were being fed by the government, Sherman believed, to make war on that very same government and its people.
Accordingly, he argued vigorously with the administration in Washington for permission to put troops in the field full time until the last hostile bands were forced to come in and sue for peace. It was a difficult battle, because there were many in the nation’s capital who understood that even though the conflict between red and white was costly, and had taken a considerable
toll in settlers’ lives, ravaged property, and untold millions of dollars, all the wrong was by no means perpetrated by the Indians.
The peace faction recognized that the Indians had been double-dealt, that treaties had been broken almost at will and often before the ink had dried. They argued that fair treatment was the only way to end the wars permanently.
But Sherman prevailed. By the beginning of autumn, he had gotten the authorization he sought, and immediately passed word to Gen. Philip Sheridan to proceed. The first part of Sherman’s grand design called for all Indians, peaceful and hostile alike, to be told that any Indian found off a reservation without permission would automatically be considered hostile and would be fair game for the military.
As soon as the message was disseminated, many of the chiefs who were ambivalent about further resistance recognized that while there was little to be said for life on a reservation, there was little or nothing to be gained by continuing to prosecute a war they could not win. The continual hostilities were taking their toll on women and children. With the incessant slaughter of the buffalo, which saw more than two million hides shipped eastward in 1873 and 1874 each, food was increasingly hard to find. It was apparent to many of the holdouts that their best chance was surrender.
The next step for Sheridan was to dispatch troops to the field, and he devised an elaborate,
five-pronged pincer campaign designed to surround the hostiles and gradually contract around them. From Camp Supply in the northern reaches of Indian Territory, one column headed into action under the command of Col. Nelson A. Miles. A second column was commanded by Col. John W. Davidson, and departed from Fort Sill, heading west.
Maj. William Price followed the valley of the Canadian River from New Mexico, with orders to prevent flight to the west. Fort Griffin was the point of departure for a fourth deployment, under the command of Colonel G. P. Buell and the last was led by Colonel Mackenzie, still smarting from his last encounter with Quanah and his Quohada Comanche band.
In the vast wasteland surrounded by these units, bands of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne still managed to fend for themselves, striking occasionally at small military units, harassing homesteads and saving the worst of their fury for the hunters who continued to flood the plains and ignore the provisions of the Medicine Lodge treaty.
The overall commander of the campaign was Colonel Mackenzie, and he was determined not to allow another fiasco like Blanco Canyon to prevent him from completing his mission. Each of the five columns had intermediate objectives, and Mackenzie’s first concern was the Blanco Canyon vicinity. He intended to flush out all of the hostiles between the parallel valleys of the Pease and Red rivers.
Miles was operating in the vicinity of Antelope Hills when he stumbled on a trail that led him into a Comanche maelstrom. But his men were well supplied and heavily armed, including several gatling gun units, which gave him overwhelming superiority in firepower.
Buell and Richardson also encountered scattered bands of hostiles, but the Indians, realizing the insuperable odds, chose to hit and run rather than stand and fight a pitched battle they could not win. They knew the terrain far better than the army, and they were more mobile, but they were hampered immeasurably by the fact that they had their families along. Any battle fought on Indian land exposed the women, children, and old people to the indiscriminate fire of the attacking soldiers, so the hostiles resorted to life on the run, sending small bands of warriors in a dozen directions, swooping down on detachments to exchange scattered gunfire, run off a few horses and vanish back into the emptiness of the plains.
But time was running out, and the chiefs knew it. One after another, they faced the inevitability of their destruction if they continued to resist, and chose surrender to annihilation. But no one had seen Quanah and his Quohada. They seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.
It wasn’t until late September that Quanah made his presence felt, and then nearly defeated Miles and his column in a surprise attack during
the middle of the night. But Price was nearby, and Miles had had the good sense to arrange his supply wagons in a defensive perimeter, and Quanah broke off the engagement and disappeared once more.
Everyone knew that the Comanche had a hiding place, one that was large enough to accommodate hundreds of people, and remote enough that no white man had ever seen it. But no one had any idea where it might be. Mackenzie was convinced that the key to subduing Quanah and his Quohada was finding that redoubt. But the ceaseless wanderings of his scouts turned up not a hint as to its whereabouts.
Mackenzie knew he needed a stroke of luck, and when the weather started to turn cold, he despaired of getting it. It was the beginning of the coldest Texas winter anyone could remember, and snow and freezing rain began in mid-September and continued on week after week. The men alternately froze and slogged through impossible mud whenever there was a momentary thaw. Morale was crumbling, and the horses were being worn to the nub by the incessant pressure and grueling conditions.
But Mackenzie had been right, he needed luck, and he got it from an unexpected source. A patrol had stumbled on a group of Comancheros, and after a stiff fight, managed to capture José Tafoya before the rest of the Comanchero band made its escape.
Lt. Byron Mitchell, who commanded the
squadron, immediately took Tafoya to Mackenzie’s tent.
“What have we got here, Lieutenant?” Mackenzie asked, looking up from his camp desk.
“Comanchero, sir.”
“Oh really?” Mackenzie put down his pen, stood up, and circled the desk to stand in front of the defiant Comanchero.
“Do you speak English, señor?”
“Si,” Tafoya replied.
“What is your name?”
“José Tafoya.”
“Is this true, what Lieutenant Mitchell just told me? Are you a Comanchero?”
Tafoya shook his head in the negative.
“Speak up, man, are you?”
Once more Tafoya shook his head no.
“Do you know where the Comanche are holed up, señor?”
Tafoya refused this time even to shake his head.
Mackenzie rocked back on his heels. “I’ll ask you one more time, Señor Tafoya. Do you know where the Comanche are holed up?”
Once again, Tafoya declined to respond.
“Very well, then. Lieutenant …?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Hang him.”
Tafoya opened his eyes wide, but still said nothing.
“Excuse me, Colonel,” Mitchell said, not certain he’d heard correctly.
“Hang him, Lieutenant. Now!”
“But there aren’t any trees tall enough, Colonel.”
“You’ll think of something. Use a wagon tongue if you have to, but when I come out of my tent, I want to see this man swaying in the breeze.”
“Yes, sir.” Mitchell snapped a salute and dragged Tafoya from the tent. Once outside, he detailed half a dozen men to rig a gallows with a wagon tongue lashed to the metal hoops of a pair of wagons. It took fifteen minutes to set up the makeshift gallows, and another two to get a rope around Tafoya’s neck. He was hauled off his feet and suspended in the air, gagging and gasping for air.
His hands were free and he clawed at the rope, but couldn’t manage to get his fingers inside the noose.
In desperation, he waved an arm to Mitchell. The lieutenant approached slowly while Tafoya, his tongue lolling, signaled that he had changed his mind. With the rope still around the prisoner’s neck, Mitchell had him dragged back to Mackenzie’s tent, where he proceeded not only to tell where the Comanche hideout was located, but to draw a detailed map of the layout. He spent more than an hour with the colonel, and when he was finished, Mackenzie not only knew the location, he had a fairly clear idea of the surrounding terrain, including the limited escape routes available to the Comanche who, as it happened, were camped in Palo Duro Canyon.
Mackenzie dispatched scouts to verify Tafoya’s intelligence, and when they were gone, he told the Comanchero, “Señor Tafoya, I certainly hope you’ve been honest with me. Because if you haven’t, I will personally haul your greasy ass into the air and this time you will not come down from that gallows alive. Do you understand me, señor?”
Rubbing his neck, which still bore scrapes from the rope and glowed a bright red in the lamplight of Mackenzie’s tent, Tafoya nodded. “Si, Colonel. I understand.”
Scouts confirmed Tafoya’s story, and Mackenzie wasted no time. Two days’ forced march brought him to the brink of Palo Duro Canyon. The precipitous pink walls ran for miles along the river, and the canyon floor was thick with cedars and lush grass. It was an ideal position to defend, because the only access was down dangerous trails a quarter mile in length, and any troops attempting the descent would be easy targets. They would have to move slowly and in single file.
But for some reason, perhaps lulled into a false sense of security by the seemingly impregnable defense provided by the canyon walls, the encampment was unaware of the army’s approach. Mackenzie started down immediately, having reached the rim just after daylight. Scouts found a buffalo trail that wound down the walls, and the troops started down on foot, leading their horses.
Tipis lined the river, but the camp seemed to be asleep. The column managed to avoid discovery until it was on a grass-covered plateau on the canyon floor. Finally, an Indian sentry saw them and fired his rifle to sound the alarm. Almost immediately, dozens of Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne warriors spilled out of their lodges and the fight was on.
But with a significant army force already on the canyon floor, the battle had already been lost. The Indians fought fiercely, using every rock and cedar tree for cover as they pinned the soldiers down. More troops were still making the descent, and Mackenzie was forced to slow his assault to cover them.
But the only way out for the defenders was up the canyon walls, because the mouth of the canyon was cut off by troopers, and the Indians realized they were in a desperate situation. Their herd of more than two thousand horses was useless, and they were forced to abandon it as they fell back, fighting desperately to allow the women and children time to climb up and out of the cul de sac.
The huge village, and everything in it, was abandoned to the advancing troopers. Mackenzie did not wait for the fight to finish before ordering everything burned. He knew the fleeing Indians were on foot, and that they had nothing. He also knew the weather would work against them. Food, clothing, lodges, everything was burned.
Taking control of the captured herd, Mackenzie then made a bold decision.
“Shoot the horses,” he ordered. It was almost unheard of for a military commander, especially a cavalryman, to issue such a command. His officers balked initially, but Mackenzie was adamant. “Shoot them all,” he insisted.
The troopers set about the bloody business with grim faces and more than a few tears in their eyes. The warriors, clinging to the precipitous trails, saw what was happening, and many of them began to wail horribly at the senseless slaughter. But, hanging on the towering stone walls, helpless to do anything but watch, they saw more than two thousand animals massacred by incessant firing from the blue coats.
When the smoke had cleared, Mackenzie filed his report, and the casualties among the Indians, given the circumstances, were surprisingly few. He reported only four killed. His own casualties were light, and yet, whether he knew it or not, he had accomplished what Sheridan had ordered him to do. He had broken the back of Indian resistance.
Quanah was camped just a few miles away, but was not in the canyon. Had he been there, things might have turned out differently. It is difficult to imagine Quanah permitting such lax vigilance. But the damage had been done, and it was beyond repair, and Quanah knew it.
Still, Mackenzie knew that his principal quarry had eluded him once more. But Quanah knew
that the war was effectively over. It was now just a matter of time.
All through the winter, skirmishes continued, but Palo Duro Canyon was the last major battle of the Indian Wars on the plains of Texas.