NOVEMBER 2015
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
Continued from page 11
Mackenzie, who’d become a hero
to the Texans for his earlier campaigns against the Indians, gave up
the search for Quanah and the Quahadis mid-year 1872. The vast, almost
featureless expanse of the Llano
Estacado — which today includes 33
Northwestern Texas and four New
Mexican counties, or 32,000 square
miles — provided a perfect backdrop
for the feathered phantoms the Quahadi had become. On the plains, the
Indians were in their element, while,
clearly, the cavalry sent to subdue
and remove them was not. The home
field advantage made all the difference.
But time marches ever onward,
leaving in its wake change that in
hindsight has the look of inevitability. Droves of buffalo hunters descended upon the plains and began to
decimate and nearly exterminate the
southern herds, the mainstay of the
Comanches.
According to the Texas State
Historical Association: “Buffalo, their
lifeblood, provided food, clothing,
and shelter… . They bartered buffalo products, horses, and captives
for manufactured items and foodstuffs. The familiar Plains-type tepee
constructed of tanned buffalo hide
stretched over sixteen to eighteen
lodge poles provided portable shelter
for the Comanches. Their clothing,
made of bison hide or buckskin,
consisted of breechclout, leggings,
and moccasins for men, and fringed
skirt, poncho-style blouse, leggings,
and moccasins for women. Buffalo
robes provided protection from cold
weather.”
The calculated obliteration of the
buffalo sounded an alarm Quanah
heeded. He and a medicine man
named Isa-tai organized a multi-tribal
alliance some 700 warriors strong
and on the morning of June 27, 1874,
attacked 28 hunters and one woman
at Adobe Walls, a trading post center
established in the north central area
of the Texas Panhandle in 1843 by
traders hoping to strike up commerce
with the Comanche and Kiowa Indians. The warriors believed Isa-tai’s
medicine to be powerful and were
24
Charles Goodnight
confident they were invincible going into battle. He promised the
whites would be killed in their sleep. When the large war party
arrived at a little creek skirting Adobe Walls, a worse-for-wear
collection of rough buildings just northeast of present-day Borger,
Texas, Isa-tai had the warriors so stoked they could hardly wait for
the sun to rise so the attack could begin.
Most of the hunters were awake and working to repair a broken
ridgepole when at dawn the Indians charged in for the kill. The
hunters and the woman present scrambled to take cover in three
of the dilapidated buildings and returned fire. Only two of the
defenders were killed in the initial attack, with a third lost in subsequent charges and a fourth dying from a wound sustained when
his own weapon went off. The waves of mounted attackers ebbed
and flowed until noon when the Indians ceased their assaults and
commenced a five-day siege of the encampment, firing upon the