Billy Dixon was a 23-year-old buffalo hunter pinned down inside a sod saloon at Adobe Walls, Texas, on the morning of June 27, 1874, when roughly 700 Comanche, Kiowa, and Southern Cheyenne warriors thundered toward the tiny trading post. Only 28 men and one woman were inside the walls that day, and they had been caught completely off guard. Outnumbered more than 20 to one, the hunters’ only hope was to hold out behind the thick adobe walls and pray the warriors would break off their attack. The attack had been brewing for months.
Dixon was born in West Virginia in 1850 and orphaned by the age of 12. He went to live with an uncle in Missouri but left within a year, determined to make his own way west. By his late teens, he was working as a freighter along the Santa Fe Trail, and by 1870, he had joined the booming buffalo hide trade. The hides were worth real money—a single successful hunt could bring in thousands of dollars—and men like Dixon were willing to risk their lives for the payday.
In the spring of 1874, Dixon and dozens of other hunters rode south from Dodge City into the Texas Panhandle, deep into territory that had been set aside for Native Americans under the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. The treaty had promised the tribes food, housing, and protection in exchange for vast tracts of land, but the government never delivered on its promises. The promised provisions never arrived, and white hunters were allowed to invade tribal lands unchecked. By 1874, the buffalo were vanishing, and the Comanche were growing desperate.
The hunters set up camp at the ruins of Adobe Walls, an old trading post that had seen conflict before. In 1864, Kit Carson had been forced to retreat from the same spot after an attack by roughly 1,400 warriors. The ruins had sat abandoned for a decade, but the hide hunters saw opportunity there because buffalo were plentiful. They built a couple of stores, a saloon, a corral, and a blacksmith shop, and settled into a routine of hunting, skinning, and hauling hides back to the post.
There had been warnings. Four hide hunters were found dead and scalped in the weeks before the attack, but the men refused to leave such a rich hunting ground. They began traveling in larger groups and tried to stay north of the walls, assuming the Comanche were in their summer camps to the south. After a short time, they all but forgot about the four dead men.
Dixon later admitted there was not the “slightest feeling of impending danger. ”
On the night of June 26, 1874, Dixon and the other hunters at the walls were celebrating their return to the range. They stayed up late telling stories around the saloon, and the night was sultry and quiet. Sometime around two in the morning, they were jolted awake by what sounded like a rifle shot.
They investigated and found a cracked ridge pole over at Hanrahan’s Saloon, which they immediately began repairing to keep the roof from collapsing. By the time they finished, it was too late to go back to sleep, so Dixon began packing his wagon for an early start. That decision likely saved their lives. As Dixon turned to pick up his gun, he noticed a large body of objects moving vaguely in the dusky dawn toward the stock and the walls.
Then the black mass suddenly spread out like a fan, and a single, solid war whoop split the morning air. Hundreds of warriors were charging. Dixon dove headfirst into the saloon just as bullets began whipping up dust around him. He was joined by the saloon owner, James Hanrahan, a 20-year-old Bat Masterson, and six others.
The rest of the defenders spread out between the two stores. The warriors got so close that they were able to strike the outside of the saloon with the butts of their rifles before the defenders drove them back. Dixon later wrote that time and again the Indians charged, only to sustain greater losses than they were able to inflict. The warriors had been told by a Comanche holy man named Isa-tai that his medicine would stop the white men’s bullets and that all they had to do was knock the hunters on the head with sticks.
It was a prophecy that quickly proved false. The warriors made a few more half-hearted attempts, but by late afternoon, they had pulled back out of rifle range. The fight was not over, though. The hunters had a finite supply of ammunition, and all but a handful of their horses had been killed or run off.
They had no choice but to stay inside the walls and hope for help. Only three hide hunters had been killed in the initial charge, and they were quickly buried. On the following day, the two sides exchanged fire from a distance, but the warriors kept their distance. On the third day of the siege, June 28, 1874, Dixon made a shot that would become frontier legend.
A party of about 15 warriors appeared on the side of a bluff east of Adobe Walls Creek. Some of the boys suggested Dixon try his big . 50 caliber rifle on them. The distance was not far from three-quarters of a mile.
Dixon took careful aim and pulled the trigger. He saw a warrior fall from his horse. The others dashed out of sight behind a clump of timber. A few moments later, two warriors ran on foot to where the dead man lay, seized his body, and scurried to cover.
The distance was later measured at around 1,500 yards—nearly a mile. Hitting a target at that distance with open sights is extraordinarily difficult even today, let alone with a heavy buffalo rifle in 1874. A modern editor for Guns magazine once attempted to re-create the shot with 13 experienced shooters firing 151 rounds at a sheet of plywood set up at 1,500 yards. None of them struck the target solidly until late in the afternoon, and only then with a lucky bounce.
Dixon did it on the first try. The shot may have been the straw that broke the Comanche’s will. They were already demoralized by their failure to secure an easy victory. One of their top fighters, Quanah Parker, had been wounded, and Isa-tai had his horse shot out from underneath him.
Watching a man fall from nearly a mile away was bad medicine. From that point on, the fight was essentially over. The hunters soon began straggling in from the outlying camps, and by day six, they had about 100 men to help hold off any remaining hostiles. But there was one additional fatality.
A defender named William Olds accidentally blew his head off while climbing down a ladder. His wife, the only woman at the walls, rushed in from an adjoining room just in time to see her husband’s body roll from the ladder and crumple at her feet. Dixon wrote that he would rather have faced all the Indians from the Cimarron to the Red River than have witnessed the terrible scene. Olds was buried that same evening about 60 feet from where he was killed.
Less than three months later, Dixon found himself in another fight for his life. He had taken a job as a civilian scout under General Nelson Miles. He and four soldiers, along with another scout named Amos Chapman, were delivering dispatches when they ran into a force of about 100 Comanche and Kiowa warriors about 20 miles from present-day Canadian, Texas. Completely surrounded with nowhere to hide, they dismounted right there on the prairie and tried to make a stand.
Private George W. Smith took a bullet through the lung and was presumed dead. Their horses were stampeded, and everyone else, including Dixon, was wounded. Dixon spotted a shallow depression in the ground where buffalo had wallowed, called a buffalo wallow.
He ran for it at top speed, bullets whizzing past him at every jump, and made it through unharmed. He shouted for his comrades to join him, and they all ran for the wallow, digging desperately with their butcher knives and hands to throw up dirt around the sides. The ground was sandy, so they made good headway, though they were constantly interrupted by the need to fire at the warriors dashing within range. Dixon then rushed out to save his fellow scout, Amos Chapman, tossing the wounded man across his back and carrying him to the wallow under a hail of bullets.
He also tried to retrieve Smith, but it was too hot. For the next few hours, the men lay baking under the hot Texas sun, holding off the warriors as best they could. A rainstorm later that evening quenched their thirst, but it also brought in a blue norther, and the temperature plummeted. They were running low on ammunition.
Private Peter Roth ran out to grab Smith’s rifle and ammunition and was shocked to discover Smith was still alive. Dixon ran out to help, and they carried him back to the wallow. But Smith would succumb to his wounds later that night. By morning, the Comanche had broken off their attack.
Dixon set out on foot looking for help and located several companies of the Eighth Cavalry under Major William Price. Price had a surgeon check their wounds and handed out hardtack, but he left them there without bullets or spare horses, promising only to inform General Miles of their whereabouts. Dixon and his comrades were forced to spend another day in the wallow before finally being rescued. For his actions, Dixon was recommended for the Medal of Honor.
The award was later rescinded by Congress because he was a civilian, but the Army reinstated it in 1989, well over a century later. Dixon continued scouting until 1883, when he returned to the Texas Panhandle and established a homestead within spitting distance of Adobe Walls. He married Olive King about a decade later, and they had seven children. Over the following decades, Dixon worked as a sheriff, rancher, justice of the peace, land commissioner, and postmaster.
The family moved to Cimarron, Oklahoma, in 1906. On March 9, 1913, at the age of 62, Billy Dixon died of pneumonia. Before his death, he dictated his memoirs to his wife, Olive. She spent the rest of her life preserving and promoting his legacy, going into debt to publish his memoirs and placing a small monument at the site of the Buffalo Wallow fight.
On June 27, 1929, exactly 55 years to the day after the Second Battle of Adobe Walls, Olive had her late husband’s body reinterred on the battleground. Billy Dixon rests there to this day, not far from the men he had helped bury. Olive died a year later, quietly passing away on her daughter’s shoulder after a meal of Texas barbecue. In his memoirs, Dixon reflected on the conquest of the Southwest with complexity.
He wrote that if there was bravery and heroism, it came less by design than from the emergencies of accident and surroundings. He acknowledged that the Indian’s resistance was natural and justifiable from his point of view, noting that the Indian firmly believed the country was his, as it had been from the beginning, and that the white man was cruel, merciless, and wrong in depriving him of his old home. Dixon himself admitted he would gladly live the frontier life all over again, feasting on buffalo meat and sourdough biscuits cooked on a campfire, but he conceded that those days were gone forever. One legend has persisted about the Second Battle of Adobe Walls.
According to the story, Hanrahan was tipped off to the impending attack days prior but told no one because he thought it would hurt his business. The morning of the attack, he supposedly grew nervous and fired off his rifle to wake everyone up, then made up the story about the cracked ridge pole. Dixon himself claimed that he and several other hunters examined the ridge pole and never found a crack or a split, lending some weight to the theory, though it has never been proven.
