Um.... some degree of twaddle in pop Texas history.
The FIRST battle of Adobe Walls was in the winter of 1862 (??) when Kit Carson went against the Kiowa and Comanche camps in the area with US Cavalry. Coulda been another Little Big Horn disaster but Carson knew his business and extricated his men before they could be wiped out by far superior numbers.
The real significance of this fight was that the Indian camps were surrounded by large herds of cattle. The Kiowa and Comanches got into cattle rustling and herding in a big way beginning about 1860 in response to the decline of the Buffalo herds subsequent to a catastrophic drought in the 1850’s and the continued spread of feral cattle, which carried diseases lethal to Buffalo.
Ten years later, by the Red River War, most Comanches were ranching in Oklahoma, to the tune of trading 30,000 head of cattle to the US Army in New Mexico in 1873, one year before that skirmish at Adobe Walls.
By the summer of 1874 those Comanches still out were the radical fringe, including many young men looking to gain war honors in ways that herding cattle didn’t provide.
Out of desperation this forlorn minority of Comanche and Kiowa Traditionalists actually held a Northern Plains style Sun Dance, a thing foreign to their cultures.
Pumped up with spiritual derring-do, and Isa-Tai’s bullet proof promise, they debated what to do next. Quanah Parker wanted to go nail the coffin on their dreaded, feared and almost extinct enemies the Tonkawas, who even then were still chowing down on Comanches while leading Ranald MacKenzie down on them.
Parker was overruled, and it was decided to go sweep the Plains of Whites instead. Stop #1 was Adobe Walls, but there weren’t anything like 700 Indian warriors in that whole Traditionalist faction.
We all know how the second battle of Adobe Walls turned out, a skirmish really. What is generally not mentioned is that Indian casualties were also light and the many survivors went on to wreak havoc across the Plains that summer.
MacKenzie, guided by the Tonks, captured the women and children of those still out, bringing an end to hostilities. It was a gentle and highly respected German horticulturalist, JJ “ Doc” Sturm who had been in contact with the Comanche since the Brazos Reserve days twenty years earlier, who was sent out by MacKenzie to lead the wary and distrustful hostiles in. A White guy they trusted implicitly.
Quanah was able to slip so quickly and easily into ranching because most Comanches had already been doing that for years. Isa-Tai became a rival politician in tribal elections.
...and that’s how the story ends we’re told, a few grey Federales say, we coulda had them any day, we only let them slip away, out of kindness I suppose....
