Chief Quanah Parker’s
ruthless successes
following the debacle
at Adobe Walls
extinguished white
patience and signaled
the end for the
nomadic tribes of the
South Plains.
report. Though several hundred strong, the Indian force
simply found themselves out-gunned.
Following the debacle at Adobe Walls, incensed
and infuriated, the Indians unleashed a bloody summer
onslaught against white settlers along the frontier that
spread terror for a thousand miles.
“Attacks were made as far north as Medicine Lodg e in
Kansas,” Gywnne wrote. “The entire frontier was forced
to ‘fort up.’ Stages were attacked; stations were burned.
Parties of hide men were tortured and killed. Men were
staked out naked on the prairie and women [were] raped
and murdered in terrible ways. The Indian outbreak that
swept the southern plains that summer killed an estimated
one hundred ninety white people and wounded many
more. Its effects were immediate. Hide hunters stopped
altogether. Hunters and settlers and anyone on the edge of
the frontier fled to the protection of the federal forts.”
“This was more like it!” the Indians surely thought
among themselves. Adobe Walls had been a dispiriting
I
Col. Ranald Mackenzie
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
defeat, but now Quanah Parker and Isa-tai had turned the
tables and evened old scores, exacted revenge for what
the whites had done to them since wandering into their
country with covetous hearts. It looked a lot like justice
to these Native Americans who refused to kowtow to the
white faces of Manifest Destiny.
But as the familiar saying admonishes: “Be careful
what you wish for …”
With the Indians’ successes came a frosty shift in the
winds of change, in the hearts and minds of whites who
now were not so keen on holding out “olive branches”
— rather, they wanted an end to the Indian problem once
and for all.
“Unfortunately for Quanah and Lone Wolf and the
others killing white men that summer, their predations
JANUARY 2016
t was in the wind, perhaps in the whisperings of the
tall, quivering grasses. Things were changing for the
free-roaming Comanches accustomed to ruling the
plains of Texas and beyond. The June 1874 Second Battle
of Adobe Walls fought in the Texas Panhandle had ended
badly for the Indians and their leader Quanah Parker,
who was himself wounded, then carried from the field by
incredulous followers. A marksman had blasted his mount
from underneath him at 500 yards out. On the ground he
scrambled behind a buffalo carcass, trying to present as
slight a target as possible, but a bullet ricocheted off his
powder horn and lodged between his neck and shoulder
blade. Though the injury was not serious, it clearly was
not Quanah Parker’s day. It was a glimpse of things to
come.
Superior technology won the day for the 28 white
buffalo hunters and one woman attacked that June
morning as the sun peeked over the eastern horizon,
splaying its yellow rays across hundreds of confident
Indians at the ready, warriors who had complete faith in
the pronouncements of medicine man Isa-tai, who sat
naked and supremely confident atop his horse, man and
beast both painted completely yellow. They would turn
on him once it became apparent his medicine was bad.
In Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and
the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful
Indian Tribe in American History, S.C. Gywnne wrote:
“Nothing he [Isa-tai] had predicted had come true. The
men who were supposed to be slaughtered in their sleep
were now dropping Indians on the field like shotgunned
mallards …”
Within reach of the unfathomable trajectory of the
hunters’ “Big Fifties” (.50-caliber Sharps rifles used to kill
buffalo at a distance), warriors nearly a mile away hit the
ground dead before their confederates even heard the rifle
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