The Searchers (20 page)

He and Quanah succeeded in organizing a sun dance for all the Comanche bands. They gathered sometime in May along the Red River near the mouth of Sweetwater Creek. They even built a mock fort and tore it down in a practice battle. The older chiefs agreed to send their young men on the attack, and they wanted the first target to be Adobe Walls.

As Quanah later recalled, the chiefs told him, “You pretty good fighter, Quanah, but you not know everything. We think you take pipe first against white buffalo hunters—you kill white men [and] make your heart feel good. After that you come back, take all young men and go to Texas warpath.”

It was Isatai who turned the plan into a grand scheme to eliminate whites altogether and save the remaining buffalo herds, and who came up with medicine he claimed would protect them from the white man's bullets. “God tell me we going to kill lots white men,” Isatai told them, according to Quanah's account. “Bullets not penetrate shirts—we kill them just like old woman.”

More than two hundred warriors—the number is still in dispute among historians—rode west for several days, then stopped in the late afternoon, made medicine, painted their faces, donned war bonnets, and crossed the Canadian River. They approached the trading post on
foot; some slept for a few hours while others stayed awake talking and smoking. Then, just as daylight began to creep through the eastern sky, they mounted their horses.

THE NIGHT OF JUNE 26 was sultry and dry, part of the prolonged drought that gripped the southern plains that summer. Inside Adobe Walls twenty-eight men and one woman—Mrs. William Olds, who had come from Dodge City with her husband to operate a dining room in the rear of the trading store—bedded down after midnight following some spirited carousing. All of the doors and windows were left wide open in the hope of catching a breeze. Billy Dixon slept on the ground outside to be near his wagon and horses. At around 2:00 a.m. pressure from the heavy sod covering the roof of Hanrahan's saloon cracked the cottonwood ridgepole in its center, producing a loud, sharp report like a gunshot. Hanrahan ordered everyone out of the building for fear it would collapse.

Dixon helped shore up the roof. By the time they got the ridgepole back in place, the sky was growing red. Figuring it was too late to get back to sleep, Dixon decided to move on. He picked up his rifle and sauntered toward his horses. Just beyond them, at the edge of the tree line, he could make out objects moving in his direction. “Then I was thunderstruck,” he recalled. “The black body of moving objects suddenly spread out like a fan, and from it went up one single, solid yell—a war-whoop that seemed to shake the very air of the early morning.” Then came the thundering roar of Indian ponies and more bloodcurdling war cries.

Dixon dashed for his saddle horse, tied it to his wagon, aimed his rifle and fired off one quick shot, then fled toward the closest shelter, Hanrahan's saloon. He sprinted through the door just before a wave of Indians engulfed the compound. Two brothers, Jacob and Isaac Scheidler, were not so lucky. They had been asleep in their wagon and had no chance to run. The warriors hacked them to pieces, scalped them, and even cut a piece of hide from the bloody corpse of their black Newfoundland dog.

The sleep-deprived defenders in three buildings grabbed their guns, threw up makeshift barricades of sacks of flour and grain and packing crates, and opened fire. Many fought the entire day in their underwear.

The first half hour was a close-in gun battle. Quanah and his warriors punched holes in the adobe walls of the saloon and tried to break down
the doors, but a steady rain of gunfire forced them to retreat. Next they tried to climb the roof, but once again the gunfire was too intense. Isatai's medicine failed to protect them from the hunters' bullets. “I am sure that we surprised the Indians as badly as they surprised us,” Dixon recalled.

After the defenders fought off the assault, the warriors pulled back and laid siege to the compound throughout the day, launching periodic attacks on the buildings but never breaking through. The hunters, despite their small numbers, simply wielded too much firepower.

Wearing his long, flowing war bonnet, Quanah circled the site on his gray pony, seeking to rally the warriors. He fell from his horse during heavy gunfire and took shelter behind an old buffalo carcass. While lying there, he felt a searing stab of pain between his shoulder blade and his neck. It felt like he had been hit by a rock, but he realized quickly it must have been a ricocheting bullet. He crawled to a plum thicket, where other warriors pulled him to safety. “The white men had big guns,” Quanah would recall, and Isatai's magic proved to be “polecat medicine.”

After that, the warriors pulled back even farther, trading shots with the hunters until evening.

The siege continued for a second day. The Indians killed or ran off all the hunters' horses, leaving them no way to escape or seek help from the outside. But toward the end of the day two teams of hunters punched through the Indian encirclement from the outside and made their way to the compound.

By the third day, the hunters with their long-range rifles began to get a bead on their attackers. Memories and boasts were notoriously unreliable, but Billy Dixon claimed to have taken aim with his .50-caliber Sharps rifle and gotten off three shots at someone crawling in the tall grass some eight hundred yards away. After the battle ended, the hunters found a dead Indian lying flat on his stomach. “They killed us,” Quanah would recall.

By mid-afternoon the Indians retreated. An angry swarm of Cheyennes grabbed Isatai by the throat and demanded he be killed, but the Comanches argued he had been disgraced enough by his failure. Isatai's messiah days were over.

Over the years Isatai offered several explanations for his failure to ward off bullets. He said that on their way to Adobe Walls the warriors had killed a skunk, whose spirit had somehow neutralized the power of his medicine. He told someone else that he had concocted the medicine to sabotage the guns at Fort Dodge and had not considered
that it would not work at Adobe Walls. In truth, he had sold his own myth so powerfully to his fellow warriors that he himself had come to believe it.

Three whites were killed and thirteen warriors were found dead at the site, although the Indians may have carried off the bodies of another dozen. A fourth white man, Mrs. Olds's hapless husband, William, died when he slipped on a ladder with a loaded gun cradled in his arm and blew off his own head. When a relief column finally arrived, the troops found thirteen severed Indian heads staring blindly from the posts of the corral gate.

THE ATTACK ON ADOBE WALLS was the moment the army had been waiting for. Secretary of War W. W. Belknap took the reins off Sherman, instructing him to punish all hostile Indians, including those living on reservations. Sherman, in turn, ordered Sheridan “
to act with vindictive earnestness
and to make every Kiowa and Comanche knuckle down.”

Sheridan dispatched five columns totaling three thousand troops who entered the Panhandle from five different directions in a pincer movement to squeeze the warriors.
A series of fourteen skirmishes
and small battles ensued, known collectively as the Red River War. There were few casualties, but each violent encounter reduced the Indians' supply of food, horses, and shelter.

Ranald Mackenzie's column of 640 men entered the canyon country of the eastern Panhandle in mid-September. A group of newspaper reporters demanded permission to accompany him, but Bad Hand was not interested in publicity. Sherman had called for a full-scale assault. “The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next,” he declared. But Mackenzie believed that the most effective way to defeat the Comanches was not to attempt to mow them down but to destroy their means of survival.

Mackenzie's men beat off an attack by 250 warriors after dark on September 26, at the head of Tule Canyon. Aware that he and his men were being watched, Mackenzie set off after the warriors, who were moving away from Palo Duro canyon. But when darkness fell, he changed direction, pushing his men all night thirty miles south toward the spot where Cita Blanca and Palo Duro canyons meet. At daybreak the troopers stormed the Quahadi winter stronghold on the canyon floor. Most of the Comanches escaped—the soldiers killed only three warriors—but they left behind teepees, food, blankets, saddles, and 1,424 horses and
ponies. Mackenzie ordered the animals slaughtered. It was a crushing blow to the Comanches. When it rained the next night, the Indians were forced to sleep “in puddles of mud and water like swine,” Mackenzie wrote.

For the next two months,
Mackenzie trailed the Comanches
in relentless pursuit of his crippled foe. Through increasing sleet and rain, Mackenzie and his men doggedly stalked Quanah and the Quahadis, who were slowed by hundreds of cold, hungry, and exhausted women and children. “It is important to give the Indians as little rest as possible,” Mackenzie wrote his superiors on October 29. The Comanches eventually retreated into the Staked Plains. Mackenzie followed until sheer exhaustion and lack of food forced him and his men to quit around Christmastime. But unlike the soldiers, the Indians had no safe haven to retreat to.

FACED WITH A WINTER without shelter and with little food, other Comanche and Kiowa bands were calling it quits. Satanta and Big Tree surrendered on October 4, 1874, to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas H. Neill of the Sixth Cavalry, bringing in 145 Kiowa warriors and their families. “I came in here to give myself up and do as the white chief wishes,” proclaimed Satanta. Predictably blaming the Comanches for Adobe Walls, he claimed, “I have done no fighting against the whites, have killed no white men, and committed no depredations since I left Fort Sill.”

Mackenzie returned to Fort Sill in March 1875. One month later, 3 Comanche leaders, 35 braves, and 140 women and children surrendered themselves at the fort with some 700 horses. But the Quahadis were still on the loose.

Mackenzie began preparing for a new spring offensive to hunt them down, but first he wanted to see if he could coax them into surrender. He sent out an emissary: Jacob J. Sturm, the same man who had brought home young Bianca Babb from her Comanche abductors a decade earlier. Sturm was a self-styled “pioneer physician,” Army scout, and interpreter who had married a local Caddo woman. Accompanied by three reservation Comanches,
he set out from Fort Sill
on April 23. According to Sturm's journal, it took them a week to travel roughly 250 miles through territory where white men had once feared to tread. Now the land seemed empty of people and wildlife.

Sturm's party eventually encountered a friendly Quahadi band, led by Black Beard, a chief with fifteen to twenty lodges. Black Beard was
happy to see Sturm, fed him a dinner of buffalo meat, shared a pipe, and then got down to business, saying he and his followers were tired of war and ready to come to Fort Sill. The main Quahadi camp, he told Sturm, was “two sleeps” away. To cement his friendship and sincerity, Black Beard bestowed upon Sturm any mule of his choice.

It took several more days for Sturm's little party to ascend the timbered bushland and emerge onto the eastern edge of the empty, windswept Staked Plains—“a barren waste unfit for habitation of civilized men,” according to Sturm. There they finally caught up to the main Quahadi camp, under the leadership of the much-maligned Isatai. Sturm and his men introduced themselves as messengers of peace and shared their supplies of tobacco, coffee, and sugar with the Comanches.

The Indians told Sturm they were no longer seeking to fight anyone and were doing their best to keep out of the way of those whites who still wanted to fight them. Isatai said he was inclined to take his people to Fort Sill, but could not make a final decision until the return of thirty men who were out on a buffalo hunt. He and Sturm met again the next day, and this time he brought along a tall young warrior named Quanah, whom Sturm described as “a young man of much influence with his people.” The young warrior expressed his support for surrendering. Isatai “then told his people they must all prepare to come in to Fort Sill and as his authority seems to be absolute they all agreed to start tomorrow,” wrote Sturm.

They broke camp the next day and started northeast to Fort Sill, leaving a message for the hunters to catch up to them on a piece of buffalo skin stuck on a pole.

It was, Sturm writes, an extraordinary sight: hundreds of warriors, women, and children, trekking through the High Plains in a great snaking line that strung out for miles. They were traveling from their hunting grounds and a harsh, unsustainable freedom to a form of captivity and an unknown future. There was nothing joyous or exciting about the journey; they were making it because they had no choice. They were in no hurry: they killed a handful of buffalo along the way, stripped the corpses of their meat, and waited two days while meat and hides dried in the sun.

At one point near sundown, Sturm spotted a single rider moving through the plains like a sailboat on an open, placid sea, “coming out of this vastness of the great plain, without any path to keep him from getting lost nor road to guide him, but coming up to our camp on a beeline.” It was an Apache who said that more than forty lodges of his
tribesmen—perhaps three hundred people—were also prepared to surrender. “I told him I was not instructed to bring in Apaches but was sure that General Mackenzie would be much pleased if they would all come in.”

The next night the Comanches staged a medicine dance—“the last … they ever expect to have [on] these broad Plains.” They were gripped by fear, hope, and resignation. “They say they will abandon their roving life and try to learn to live as white people do,” wrote Sturm.

The next day the caravan climbed a rocky bluff and ascended onto “the great high plain wonderful and grand in its vastness.” It was clear to Sturm that Isatai, not Quanah, was in charge. “When he says move, we move, and when he says stop, we stop, and if I ask any one when we will start they refer me to him always.”