Ghosts Of War

More than 250 years of history are hidden at battlefields across the state, waiting to be discovered. I made it my mission to visit the places—both famous and forgotten—where blood was shed and lives were lost in the creation of Texas. And with apologies to my old teachers, I learned more than I ever did in the classroom.

by Gary Cartwright

April 2009

(Page 5 of 5)

The last land battle of the civil war was fought on a spit of land at the southernmost tip of Texas, near where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico. The date was May 1865, more than a month after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Myth has it that the two armies didn’t know the war was over, but that’s not true. Neither side was ready to stop fighting.

The site of the Battle of Palmito Ranch is twelve miles east of Brownsville, on Texas Highway 4. A historical marker describes a fight in which the old Texas Ranger and Indian fighter John “Rip” Ford routed an exhausted Union force. One of the oldest ranches in the area, Palmito was originally part of the Espiritu Santo Spanish land grant. The federal government owns most of the site, but a few tracts are privately owned, like the one that has been in Antonio Zavaleta’s family for 150 years. “This land looks almost exactly as it did in 1865,” said Zavaleta, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville. “If the combatants came back today, they’d have no trouble recognizing it.”

The Confederates had learned of Lee’s surrender two weeks earlier, from a copy of the New Orleans Times. Several hundred rebels had already headed home, but those who stayed remained devoted to the cause. Union troops, meanwhile, had received an erroneous report that the Confederates were preparing to evacuate Brownsville. Acting on this bad intelligence, the Union commander, Colonel Theodore H. Barrett, had ordered a detachment to march toward the city. That’s when they ran into a Confederate buzz saw.

Ambitious but inept, Barrett had advanced without cavalry or sufficient artillery; Ford had both. His men hid in a grove of small trees as they formed their battle lines, then took the Union troops by surprise. Barrett ordered his men to fall back, or, as Ford described it in his memoirs, “seemed to have lost his presence of mind.” Demoralized Union soldiers bolted, and Ford’s men chased them for seven miles, at which point Ford decided to “let well enough alone and retire.”

Historians disagree on the number of deaths, but Fehrenbach called it a staggering victory for the Confederates, while “Union dead lay all over the battlefield and strung over the seven miles to the sea.”

The Second Battle of Adobe Walls

Location: Adobe Walls
Date: June 27—29, 1874
Casualties: Approximately 74 killed and wounded

Miss Bayless didn’t talk much about the Indian wars. But I’d heard about Adobe Walls, the old trading post for buffalo hunters, from my granny. She was part Comanche and a great admirer of the tribe’s last war chief, Quanah Parker. Unfortunately, the Second Battle of Adobe Walls signaled the beginning of the end for his people.

Before searching out the site, which is just north of the Canadian River, in the Panhandle, I stopped in Borger to talk to Ed Benz, the director of the Hutchinson County Historical Museum. “There were at least eighteen battles and skirmishes in the area, including an earlier Battle of Adobe Walls, in 1864,” Benz told me.

Like so many battlegrounds in Texas, the site is located on private property, in this case on the Turkey Track Ranch, which is owned by the Whittenburgs, a prominent Panhandle family. But just one mile to the north, the family has donated a two-acre site, where the Second Battle of Adobe Walls took place. This was the spot I was looking for.

Benz had warned me that there is nothing left of the outpost, but the museum contains models of how it looked in 1874: The Myers and Leonard store, where 50,000 buffalo hides were stacked; the mess halls and stables; and Hanrahan’s Saloon, where most of the 28 buffalo hunters held out during the battle.

Benz treated me to a routine he had worked up for the museum’s annual tour of Adobe Walls, which will be held on June 13. He had internalized the voices of some of the most famous buffalo hunters—the crack shot Billy Dixon, an agile buffalo skinner called Frenchy, and an eighteen-year-old gunfighter named Bat Masterson.

For the Comanche, life on the South Plains revolved around the buffalo, 50 million of which roamed the area. But that began to change in 1874, when a caravan of hunters, skinners, and traders from Dodge City established Adobe Walls.

“Dodge City was an end-of-the-track town,” Benz said, slipping into the character of Billy Dixon. “Colonel Dodge, who founded Dodge City, told us, ‘Boys, go where the buffalo are, down in the Texas Panhandle.’ Well, he was right. There were buffalo as far as you could see—an ocean of them. We came for the money and the adventure. We wanted to see Indians, wanted to have a fight. We knew that if we built a fort, they would show up. And they did, on June 27, 1874.”

Finding the site of Adobe Walls was trickier than I had thought. I drove north out of Borger on Texas Highway 207. Twelve miles past the town of Stinnett, I nearly missed a small green “Adobe Walls” sign on the east side of the highway. Turning right, I drove as far as I could, then headed south where the blacktop became a gravel road. I finally found a sign identifying Turkey Track Ranch, but the public road ended at a locked gate. I was puzzled for a minute or two, until I realized I had found it—Adobe Walls. Not exactly what I’d imagined.

The Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, in Canyon, maintains the site and has had the sense to leave the grass on either side of the road in its natural state, but it was so tall that at first I didn’t see the two markers or the three grave sites. The main monument, erected in the twenties, celebrates the heroism of “28 brave frontiersmen” who repulsed seven hundred warriors. Nearby, on what would have been the location of Rath and Company Store, is Dixon’s grave marker. Only in 1941 did it occur to folks to erect a second monument, for the Indians who “died for that which makes life worth living.” Across the road are the graves of the Shadler brothers, buffalo hunters who were sleeping under their wagon when the Indians attacked. The Comanche killed them on the spot, then scalped their dog.

With a sharp wind stinging my eyes, I walked to where I thought Hanrahan’s Saloon once stood, trying to imagine that morning. Quanah Parker, the son of Chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, was the Comanche war chief, but he was influenced by his spiritual adviser and medicine man, Isa-tai, a name that translates as “coyote droppings.” Isa-tai had convinced his tribe that his magical powers would cause the bullets of the white men to pass harmlessly through the warriors’ bodies. The tribe was desperate: They could see that their time as lords of the plains was nearing an end.

Isa-tai’s strategy was to attack while the hunters slept, and it might have worked except for an unforeseen incident: A lodge pole that supported the roof of the saloon cracked with what sounded like a rifle shot. The hunters were in the process of repairing the roof when the Indians made their move. In his biography Dixon spoke admiringly of “the splendidly barbaric sight . . . [of] hundreds of warriors, the flower of the fighting men of the southwestern Plains tribes, mounted upon their finest horses . . . coming like the wind.”

Taking cover behind the sod walls, Dixon and the other marksmen used their heavy long-barreled rifles to mow down the flower of Indian manhood. In the early fighting, more than a dozen warriors were shot dead, putting to shame Isa-tai’s proclamation. By the third day, the Indians were thoroughly demoralized. That’s when Dixon showed his own brand of magic. Parker and some of his chiefs had ridden to the top of a mesa to assess the situation. Though the Indians were nearly a mile from the saloon—the exact distance was 1,538 yards—Dixon rested his Sharps .50-caliber rifle across some feed sacks, took aim, squeezed off a shot, and watched in amazement as a warrior fell from his horse. Parker knew it was over for his tribe. Less than a year later, he would be the last Comanche chief to surrender.

Walking back to my car, I looked again at the mesa where Dixon had fired his amazing shot. I stood there for maybe half an hour, breathing history in the raw, tasting the fresh winter air, feeling small but alive. That’s what this journey had awakened in me, a sense of renewal, of a living past that has always been there, just a step away, amused at our innocence. I had never really appreciated the scope and diversity of who we are and where we came from, our uniqueness, what Hardin had called the exceptionalism that is the core of the Texas character. I had dwelled on the violence, the bloodshed, and the treachery, and there is much there to dwell on, but I had overlooked the magnificent blend of the people, their strength of purpose, the staggering odds that they all found their way here and played their roles with such fidelity and patience. It was almost as though their lives had been scripted. But that was crazy. Who would write such a script? And who would buy it? Those were the eternal questions for history, and history had no time for them.

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