The Battle of Adobe Walls myth vs reality: the facts have been twisted over the years, but the real story is still astounding

Guns Magazine, June, 2005 by Mike Venturino

Every student of American Western history has heard of The Battle of Adobe Walls The general conception goes this way. On June 27, 1874 a horde of Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa warriors descended on a trading post in the Texas panhandle but were defeated by only 28 white men and one woman. The primary reason such a small band of defenders could overcome a large party of experienced warriors is attributed to the fact the 28 men were buffalo hunters. That meant they were expert marksmen equipped with the finest long-range rifles of the day. Consequently they were able to keep the warriors at bay, inflicting numerous casualties on them in doing so. At the end of the battle the famous buffalo hunter/marksman Billy Dixon shot an Indian off his horse at the amazing distance of 1,538 yards.

Reality was a bit different. The "horde" of Indians probably amounted to no more than 200 to 300 warriors, many of them youngsters on their first warpath. Of the 28 buffalo hunters/expert marksmen, about half were professional hunters. The rest of the white men present were skinners, cooks, bartenders, blacksmiths, clerks, and wagon drivers. In fact, the actual number of white men at Adobe Walls when the Indians struck cannot be ascertained exactly, despite a granite monument in place there with names on it. That's because after the danger was over and the fight had been proclaimed a great victory everybody who had been in the vicinity and many who had not been anywhere near said they had fought there. Some names on the monument should not be there and some not there should be.

Casualties?

Exact Indian casualties were not and never will be known but the most informed estimates amount to between one and two dozen dead and an undetermined number of wounded. Billy Dixon, one of the first whites to see the oncoming charge of the feathered warriors that dawn of June 27, 1874, said it was a sight he would never forget and was glad he had experienced it. Later many of the Indian participant, s said that fighting buffalo hunters was a bad business and didn't seem all that nostalgic about it when reviewing the day's events in later life.

It should also be noted that the Battle of Adobe Walls was a multi-cultural affair. White participants included Americans and German-, English-, and Irish-born men, while the fighting warriors were from the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne tribes. There were even said to have been some Arapaho along to watch, but smart enough to stay back and not get shot. Additionally there was at least one black man present. He was a deserter from the U.S. Army, attested by the tact that he carried a bugle and knew how to play the various military calls on it. That amazed the defenders in the beginning, who thought they were being saved by U.S. troops, and then angered them when they realized the black man was riding with the Indians. One buffalo hunter got a shot into the deserter and stopped his music.

Handguns Rule

Those 29 whites were not saved by long-range "buffalo rifles" but instead by fast-firing metallic cartridge revolvers. When the Indians flooded in around the buildings there was no time to get the big buffalo rifles into play. Besides, a single-shot rifle isn't the best choice of weapon when the adversaries are just on the other side of small, cottonwood logs sticking their Winchesters through the chinking to let fly at you. Most of the white men at Adobe Walls that morning were sleeping out of doors due to the Texas heat. At the sound of shouting, war hoops, and shooting they ran for the cover of walls, many unholstering sixguns as they ran. Barely making it through the doors as the Indians arrived, they returned fire through windows and chinking with Colt and Smith & Wesson .44s.

The fighting was said to have been extremely furious during that first charge. Indians dismounted and were banging on doors with rifle butts, and mounted ones were trying to back their horses through doors. Some Indians shoved revolvers through cracks in the walls and emptied them. This did the whites no physical harm, but no doubt gave them reason for posttraumatic stress later in life. None of the three white men killed during the Adobe Walls Battle died while fighting behind walls. In fact there is no record that anyone was even hurt once they got behind walls. The Scheidler brothers, Issac and Jacob--German emigrants--died in their wagon box where they slept. (Often their name is Americanized to Shadler.) According to various sources, Billy Tyler took a bullet through either the back, neck, or chest during either a run from one building to another or as he turned when dashing through a door so he could let loose one more shot at the Indians. Different eyewitnesses wrote it differently. One thing all agree on is that he died.

1,538 Yards? No

Even if Billy Dixon did shoot an Indian off a horse at long range it almost certainly was not at 1,538 yards. Billy Dixon himself never said so. On the third day, the story goes, after the battle a small group of horseback Indians exposed themselves on a distant butte, and Billy Dixon rested his borrowed Big .50 Sharps and dropped one of them. Supposedly, some years later Dixon related this story to his wife Olive K. Dixon who then included a single paragraph about it in her book The Life and Adventures of Billy Dixon, published after his death in 1913. In the first edition (1914) of that book the distance is said to be 1,200 yards. According to Adobe Walls; the History and Archeology of the 1874 Trading Post by T. Lindsay Baker and Billy R. Harrison, a Texas surveyor measured the range in 1924 and determined it was 1,028 yards. The second edition of Olive K. Dixon's book published in 1928 changed the range to 1,538 yards.