"I fear," said "Billy" Dixon, half humorously, "that the conquest of savagery in the Southwest was due more often to love of adventure than to any wish that cities should arise in the desert, or that the highways of civilization should take the place of the trails of the Indian and the buffalo. In fact, many of us believed and hoped that the wilderness would remain forever. Life there was to our liking. Its freedom, its dangers, its tax upon strength and courage, gave a zest to living especially to young men, unapproached by anything to be found in civilized communities. Therefore, let it be said that if there was bravery and heroism, it came less by design than it did from the emergencies of accident and surroundings, and that usually it was spontaneous." Though a taciturn man, Mr. Dixon made strong friendships and entertained the warmest affection for the men with whom he had been associated in pioneer days. Mr. W. B. ("Bat") Masterson, writing lately from New York City, said in an appreciative letter: "I first became acquainted with Billy Dixon on the buffalo range in the fall of 1872 and continued to know him well and intimately for several years thereafter. The last time I saw him was at Sweetwater, a small hamlet just off the Military Reservation at Fort Elliott, Texas, then called Cantonment, in the spring of 1876. "Billy Dixon was a typical frontiersman of the highest order. The perils and hardships of border life were exactly suited to his stoical and imperturbable nature. This does not mean that Billy was not a kind-hearted, generous and hospitable man, for he possessed all these admirable qualities to a high degree but he was cool, calculating and uncommunicative at all times. "I was with Billy in the fight at Adobe Walls in June, 1874, between the buffalo-hunters and that fierce band of warriors composed of the best fighting men of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Comanche and Kiowa tribes, numbering fully one thousand braves. Billy and I occupied the same window the first day of the battle and I hope we did our share in the fight. Billy was an extraordinary fine shot with a buffalo-gun and he never overlooked an opportunity that first day to demonstrate his unerring aim whenever and wherever an Indian showed his head. We were scouts together afterwards in General Miles' command which left Fort Dodge, Kansas in the early part of August, the same year, for the Panhandle country where the hostiles were assembled in great numbers. While I was not with him, I am quite familiar with all the details of the fight in the buffalo wallow on the north bank of the Washita River in which Billy and Amos Chapman and four soldiers stood off a large band of hostiles for an entire day. It was largely due to Billy's heroism on that occasion that the party was saved from complete annihilation."