Through Time and the Valley

5. The Battle of Adobe Walls

5 The Battle of Adobe Walls In 1867 President Andrew Johnson appointed a peace commission to meet with the five major tribes of Plains Indians and to reach an accord with them. Among those he appointed were Generals Sherman and Harney, Indian Commissioner Nathaniel Taylor, and other senators and dignitaries. In October they arrived at Medicine Lodge, Kansas, to meet with a delegation of chiefs headed by Satanta, Kicking Bird, and Lone Wolf of the Kiowas; Black Kettle and White Antelope of the Cheyennes; and Little Raven of the Arapahos. Also present at this historic occasion were HenryStanley of the New York Tribune (four years later Stanley 41 42 -- Through TiIne and the Valley would journeytoAfrica to find David Livingstone), William F. Cody (also known to us as Buffalo Bill), and Billy Dixon, then a government teamster. For a whole week before the actual council began, each side worked at allaying the suspicions of the other. The soldiers kept an open house under a grove of trees, where they offered coffee, sugar, and soda crackers to the Indians, and distributed such articles as saddles, blankets, and blue overalls. The Indians responded by inviting their white brothers to a huge feast, where a hundred dogs were basted and barbecued and served by Indian butlers wearing blue overalls. But these shows of friendship and generosity merely glossed over the differences between the two worlds. The commission from Washington had come prepared to be generous with its overalls but with little else. From the government's point of view, the purpose of the Council was to induce the Indians to retire to reservations where, it was hoped, they would become thrifty farmers and solid citizens. The commission had come to Medicine Lodge to sign a treaty, and sign they did. It called for the Indians to retire to reservation lands, cease their depredations, and allow the railroads to build through their land. In return for these concessions, they were to be issued annuity goods, and all the land south of the Arkansas River was declared off limits to white hunters. Why either side bothered to sign the treaty is a mystery, since time proved neither overly scrupulous in abiding by its provisions. The treaty was worthless from the very beginning. In the first place, it is doubtful that the Indians even understood what they were signing. The official interpreter for the council, Phillip McCusker, spoke only Comanche, while the spokesmen for the Indians were Kiowas and Cheyennes. One can imagine that by the time legal English had been translated through two or three Indian dialects, the message had become somewhat garbled. In the second place, the Indians who signed the paper had no authority to enforce such The Battle of Adobe Walls -- 43 an agreement because such authority did not exist in their culture. They had no congress, no courts of law, no social or legal structures that would have given a chief the right to force his young braves to observe the treaty. And finally, a hundred years of treatymaking had left the Indians with little respect for legal agreements. Most had come to Medicine Lodge strictly for a good time and free food. For that they would have signed a dozen treaties, and a dozen treaties wouldn't have changed their behavior any more than one did. And while the whites entered into the treaty with an outward show of gravity, one doubts that they ever intended to keep the buffalo hunters north of theArkansas. The government, which considered the wild Indians a bur in the flesh of progress, realized that the economy of the Plains tribes depended on an abundant supply ofbuffalo. Extending the logic one step, they understood that when the buffalo disappeared, so would the wild Indians. The treaty was doomed to failure, and it doesn't even matter which side broke it first. In 1871 when the construction ofthe Santa Fe Railroad stopped at Granada, Colorado, hundreds of men were thrown out of work and had to find another way of making a living. Some left the country , but many turned to buffalo hunting. In the winter of 1872-73 the country was full of hunters and the buffalo fell in record numbers . The number ofbuffalo north of the Arkansas River decreased rapidly until almost none remained, and gradually the hunters began slipping across the river into the Indian hunting grounds. Among them was Billy...