Ranald Mackenzie
NOVEMBER 2015
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
buildings from various locations.
On the second (or third) day of the siege the besieged defenders spied a string of 15-20 mounted Cheyennes atop a mesa nearly
a mile distant overlooking Adobe Walls. As if to underscore the
advantages of superior technology, crackshot Billy Dixon knocked
one of the astonished Indians off his pony. It must have seemed
magical to the Indians that the Sharps buffalo rifle killed before
they even heard the shot, only the thud and crack of lead breeching bone. Though it came to be known as “the most famous single
shot in t he history of the West,” Dixon never claimed credit for the
shot. Regardless, the Indians had ample opportunity to witness the
awesome “thunder sticks” of the hunters and U.S. Army.
By the fifth day, in excess of 100 hunters from the surrounding areas had poured into Adobe Walls. Frustrated and feeling the
battle a complete failure, Quanah’s people retrieved his wounded
body from the field of battle, taking
him out of range of the devastating
.50-calibur Sharps.
While Quanah Parker left the
scrape standing intact, the whole
affair cast Isa-tai in a dubious light;
suddenly his medicine seemed ineffectual. Emotions ran high.
“In the distance, Isa-tai sat on his
horse, naked and bright ochre, watching the epic failure of his medicine,”
Gwynne wrote. “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 shot-gunned
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. Killing people threequarters of 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.”
Fifteen warriors died that day, and
numerous others were wounded. After the hunters buried their four dead
and a scalped dog, they displayed the
severed heads of the dead Indians on
stakes. The headless bodies, tossed
onto buffalo hides, were dragged off
to rot.
The hide hunters emerged from
the Second Battle of Adobe Walls
relatively unscathed, but the frontier
paid a dear price for the hunters’ victory.
“After their failure at Adobe
Walls, the enraged warriors formed
into smaller groups and struck blindly
in all directions at western settlements
from Colorado to Texas,” Gwynne
wrote.
Quanah recuperated and led his
warriors east, destroying a wagon
train in Indian Territory, then turning
south into Texas to raid the Texans,
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