When the West was youngBechdolt, Frederick R. (Frederick Ritchie)
History
When the West was young
Bechdolt, Frederick R. (Frederick Ritchie)
West (U.S.) -- History
These three who follow in boots, jean breeches, and Oregon shirts are
Billy Tyler and the Shadler brothers, members of that company of
twenty-eight buffalo hunters who made the big fight at Adobe Walls.
The sun was just rising when Quanah Parker, Little Robe, and White
Shield led more than eight hundred Comanches and Kiowas in the first
charge upon the four buildings which stood at the edge of the Llano
Estacado, one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest settlement. The
Shadler boys were slain in their wagon at that onslaught. Tyler was
shot down at midday as he ventured forth from Myers & Leonard's store.
Before the afternoon was over the Indians sickened of their losses and
drew off beyond range of the big-caliber Sharp's rifles. They
massacred one hundred and ninety people during their three months'
raiding but the handful behind the barricaded doors and windows was
too much for them.
Private George W. Smith of the Sixth Cavalry is passing now. You would
need to look a second time to notice that he was a soldier, for the
rifle under his arm is a long-barreled Sharp's single shot and he has
put aside much of the old blue uniform for the ordinary Western
raiment. That was the way of scouting expeditions, and he, with his
five companions, was on the road from McClellan's Creek to Fort Supply
when they met two hundred Indians on that September morning of 1874.
Up near the northeast corner of the Texas Panhandle, where the land
rises to a divide between Gageby's Creek and the Washita River, the
five survivors dug his grave with butcher-knives. They pulled down the
banks of a buffalo wallow over his body in the darkness of the night;
and they left him in this shallow sepulcher, unmarked by stone or
headboard. There his bones lie to this day, and no man knows when he
is passing over them.
The six of them had left General Miles's command two days before. At
dawn on September 13, they were riding northward up the long open
slope: Billy Dixon and Amos Chapman, two buffalo hunters serving as
scouts, and the four troopers, Sergeant Z. T. Woodhull, Privates Peter
Rath, John Harrington, and George W. Smith. You could hardly tell the
soldiers from the plainsmen, had you seen them; a sombreroed group,
booted to the knees and in their shirt-sleeves; all bore the heavy,
fifty-caliber Sharp's single-shot rifles across their saddle-horns.
The bare land rolled away and away, dark velvet-brown toward the
flushing east. The sky was vivid crimson when they turned their horses
up a little knoll. They reached its summit just as the sun was rising.
Here they drew rein. Two hundred Comanches and Kiowas were riding
toward them at the bottom of the hill; the landscape had tricked them
into ambush.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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