The Battle of Adobe Walls

The Battle of Adobe Walls

(Picture on top - Comanche
Medicine man Ish-Ta-Ma)

This battle between buffalo hunters
and approximately 700 Comanche, Kiowa,
and southern Cheyenne warriors resulted
in an Indian defeat, one among several during
the course of the large-scale military operation
known as the Red River War of 1874-75.
Inspired ba a recent Sun Dance and Comanche
medicine man Ish-Ta-Ma`s promise of easy victory,
the warriors sought to inflict a mortal blow
against the hated buffalo hunters who were
destroying the vast southern herds in Texas Panhandle.

The young Comanche Quannah Parker joined Ish-Ta-Ma
as nominal leaders of the raid against
the twenty-eight men and one woman residing in Adobe Walls,
a small complex of trading stores
and a saloon in present-day Hutchinson Country, Texas.



During the early dawn hours of June 27, 1874,
the Indians attacked the residents,
quickly killing two hunters who were sleeping in a wagon.
The others were alerted immediately because they had
remained awake during the night while repairing
a broken bearn in the saloon. They held off
several assaults, losing only two other defenders -
one to Indian gunfire and one to the accidental
discharge of a rifle. The siege continued for five days.
Indian casaulities mounted to several dozen,
and faith in Ish-Ta-Ma`s power faded.
On the second day of the siege, Billy Dixon
fired his fabled shot, hitting a mounted warrior
fully eight-tenths of a mile away.
Following abandonment of the Adobe Walls settlement
six weeks later, the Indians burned it to the ground.
Yet the battle had been a bitter setback for them,
and it presaged the larger defeat that would soon
follow at the hands of the army.

from M.L.Tate
(University of Nebraska at Omaha)