Famous Indian Battle So Well
Known That Truth, Myth Merge

By David Bowser

CANYON, Texas — History is written by the winners of its battles, but historian Dr. T. Lindsey Baker says even the winners may offer conflicting stories of historical events.

A native Texan, Baker lives in his great grandparents' home in Hill County, where he is director of the Texas Heritage Museum, a museum of Texas military history at Hill College in Hillsboro.

But 20 years ago, Baker worked at the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum here in Canyon, and it was here he became involved with a battle over the battle of Adobe Walls.

"Before dawn on June 27, 1874, a body of approximately 200 Comanche, Kiowa, and Southern Cheyenne descended on the Adobe Walls trading post," Baker says. "A day-long battle ensued."

The incident, well known in its day, has entered the folklore of Texas and assumed legendary proportions.

"As the years passed, the number of attacking Indians grew at each white man's telling of the stories, and the valor of the defenders came to equal that of the Athenians at the Battle of Thermopylae," Baker says.

As a new staff member at the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in 1979, Baker joined Billy R. Harrison, curator of archeology, to excavate and document a historical and archeological study of the 1874 Adobe Walls site.

"I was the junior partner in the project," Baker says.

By the time they finished, Harrison had put in 11 years on it and Baker had put in eight.

"My assignment from Museum Director William C. Griggs seemed straightforward on the surface," Baker says.

He was to find all the information he could on Adobe Walls, then write a history of it and the fight that took place there to go with Billy Harrison's archeological report. They were to make one big book with both the history and the archeology of the site.

"I was naive enough to say, 'Why, I think we can do that," Baker says.

What he had not considered, he adds, is the myth and folklore which had arisen around the events that took place that hot summer of 1874.

"Up to that time, most of the books I had written," Baker says, "dealt with topics so obscure that they didn't merit the creation of too much folklore."

He had occasionally dealt with conflicting evidence

"But never had I come up against analyzing an event like the 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls, where virtually all the evidence disagreed," Baker says.

The Adobe Walls trading post had been established in March 1874 as a branch operation of Dodge City merchants. By the winter of 1873-74, the Kansas buffalo herds had been decimated. The American bison, previously hunted primarily for meat, had become a major source of leather in the U.S. and Europe. Their hides were the plastic of the 19th century.

With the destruction of the Kansas herds, hunters turned south into the Texas Panhandle where the buffalo remained in the tens of thousands. Fearing the loss of the hide hunters' business, the Kansas merchants shifted their attention also to the Texas Panhandle. They established a trading post on the north side of the Canadian River in present-day Hutchinson County.

It included a hide yard, two stores, a restaurant, a blacksmith shop and a saloon. The blacksmith shop was built with pickets, vertical logs placed in a trench and daubed with mud. The saloon and stores were made of sod cut from the ground.

According to often-told stories, about two dozen white men and one white woman defended themselves against repeated attacks from Comanche, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne warriors which continued from early in the morning until about mid-day, Baker says.

"The hide men and the merchants at the trading post were saved from death by the unexplained circumstance of the ridge pole along the roof of the saloon breaking early on the morning of the attack," he adds, or at least that is the most common account.

James Hanrahan, manager of the saloon (and also a state representative for Dodge City in the Kansas legislature), directed repairs and afterwards served rounds of drinks in gratitude for the men who saved his building, so the story goes. Consequently, the hide hunters were awake when the warriors attacked at dawn.

"The generally accepted story of the Adobe Walls fight remained more or less like this for 60 years until all the principle white participants in the fight were dead," Baker says.

But in 1927, former buffalo hunter J. Wright Mooar told historian J. Evetts Haley that he did not agree with the description of the fight as recorded in Billy Dixon's recollections by his wife Olive Dixon.

"According to Mooar," Baker says, "'The ridge pole in that house did not crack that night as is claimed in his book, and some time I'm going to tell about that.'"

Half a dozen years later, Mooar told a conflicting version to the Rev. James Winford Hunt, who edited Mooar's reminisces in 1932 for publication the next year in Holland's Magazine. In 1939, he gave an even more detailed account.

According to Mooar, the ridge pole incident was only a trick devised by Hanrahan to awaken the hunters early because the saloon keeper had received a secret warning from Amos Chapman, an Army scout who lived with the Cheyenne, that warriors would attack. Mooar says Hanrahan fired a shot about 2 a.m. to wake up the hunters and then plied them with drinks to keep them from going back to bed.

Mooar says the warning was delivered to just three men at the trading post: Hanrahan, A.C. Myers and Charles Rath.

Well before the date of the attack, Baker says, Myers and Rath had already returned to Dodge City, according to the Dodge City newspapers.

When Myers returned to Dodge City from Adobe Walls on June 19, he told the newspapers that the Indians were more than plenty.

"He said that the men at the post on the Canadian knew there were 1000 lodges camped within 40 miles," Baker says. "It was an apparent reference to the Southern Cheyenne, who had gathered for their annual Medicine Dance."

Myers told the newspapers that the hunters around Adobe Walls wanted to attack the Indians.

"I never saw a set of men so eager for a fight, so anxious to exterminate the whole race of Indians as the hunters now on the Canadian are," Myers told the papers.

Baker notes that Myers had a vested interest in seeing the Indians exterminated. He owned one of the stores at Adobe Walls and expected to do quite a bit of business with the hide hunters.

According to Mooar, the hide men distrusted Chapman. They suspected him of being a spy for either the Indians or the government. Hanrahan reportedly smuggled Chapman out of Adobe Walls in a wagon driven by Mooar's brother, John Wesley Mooar. Mooar says this is how he and his brother learned of the warning and were able to leave the Panhandle for safety before the attack.

But there is still a third version of the story.

When Amos Chapman visited Adobe Walls in June of 1874, he was with James E. McAlister, Baker says. McAlister in a 1929 interview said that the Indians at Fort Supply were telling everyone they were going down to Adobe Walls to kill buffalo hunters. When Chapman and McAlister passed Adobe Walls on their way to Fort Bascom, N.M., trailing horse thieves, McAlister says they told the buffalo hunters of the Indians' words. According McAlister, the buffalo hunters wouldn't believe them.

Mooar contended the beam was stout and couldn't have cracked. Billy Dixon and others reportedly examined the pole after the attack at Adobe Walls and couldn't find a crack in it.

"The original typewritten manuscript from 1913 and 1914 of "The Life and Adventures of Billy Dixon" contained the statement, 'It has been told that the ridge pole broke. As a matter of fact, when the ridge pole was examined afterwards, it was sound and firm,'" Baker says.

Baker says that probably because it contradicted the rest of the story, the book's editor struck out those two sentences from the manuscript.

"It's preserved only in his personal papers in the Oklahoma Historical Society," he points out.

The two sentences never reached print in either of the two published versions of the book.

"Questions about the roof remain, and the mystery may never be cleared up," Baker says.

There are a number of other conflicting stories surrounding the 1874 battle at the trading post. Some concern the long distance shot made by Billy Dixon that killed a mounted warrior on a bluff east of the trading post. Dixon, according to Baker, never claimed to have made the shot.

Numerous versions of the battle were reported soon after the fight, but no report of the famous shot made print until after the turn of the century.

There is evidence to suggest that a number of the hunters were shooting at warriors sitting atop their horses. When one fell, the hunters argued over who had fired the shot. Nobody seems to know for sure.

Baker says there is even a question as to the distance of the shot. It has variously been reported as anywhere from 1000 yards to more than 1500 yards.

There is even a question as to how many buffalo hunters were at Adobe Walls, and who they were.

Baker says he and Harris, in writing their book, "Adobe Walls: the History and Archeology of the 1874 Trading Post," took the easy way out.

"We left the decision to them," Baker says. "We did our dead level best."