Free The Searchers by Glenn Frankel Page A

gazed longingly across the sandy wastes that marked the course of the Arkansas,” wrote Dixon. “The oftener we looked the more eager we were to tempt fate.” Even the danger of encountering Indians “added spice to the temptation.”
    The Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867 prohibited whites from hunting for buffalo south of the Arkansas. Still, after hunters had eliminated most of the great herds north of the river, they began moving south. Even the hunters themselves were under the impression that the army would try to stop them. Only it didn’t. When a group of buffalo men sought his advice, Colonel Dodge offered a cryptic reply. “Boys, if I were a buffalo hunter, I would hunt buffalo where buffalo are,” he told them.
    A hunter-merchant named J. Wright Mooar got the hint. In March 1874 he helped organize a train of one hundred wagons loaded with hunters, merchants, and camp followers, including himself and Dixon, and headed southwest from Dodge City. They crossed the Arkansas River into Indian Territory and kept going. They stopped eventually at the confluence of two creeks two miles north of the Canadian River, a gently sloping meadow with fresh drinking water and enough tall trees to provide timber. The site was just a mile from the adobe rubble of an older trading post that had been the scene of a bloody confrontation in 1864 between Colonel Kit Carson’s New Mexico volunteers and Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache warriors. Carson’s small force was lucky to have escaped with their lives. The old trading post was called Adobe Walls.
    The new Adobe Walls became the central staging ground for the new generation of white hunters. The newcomers started constructing a complex of sod buildings, including a store, mess hall, and stable, along with an eight-foot-high picket corral to contain livestock. A competinggroup arrived about a month later and built another store, corral, and outhouse nearby. And someone added a saloon and blacksmith shop to the complex.
    By mid-June teamsters were hauling a thousand hides into the trading post every day. Visitors recalled seeing vast piles near the site. “The first idea I had was that there was a small settlement out there in the wilderness …,” recalled Seth Hathaway. “[But] on getting closer, what I first took for houses turned out to be piles of buffalo hides stacked up and ready to be hauled to the railroad.”
    Billy Dixon and the others were now operating in the heart of the hunting grounds claimed by Quanah and the Quahadis. The hunters knew they were pushing their luck by setting up camp inside Comanche territory, but the rewards were too tempting to resist. Instead of two skinners a day, Dixon was now using three, and paying them up to twenty-five cents per skin. He and his men would set up a dugout with a big open fireplace near plenty of water and wood. He would kill thirty-five or forty bulls within a few hours. “No mercy was shown the buffalo when I got back to camp from Adobe Walls,” he would recall. “I killed as many as my three men could handle, working them as hard as they were willing to work. This was deadly business, without sentiment; it was dollars against tenderheartedness, and dollars won.”
    Dixon headed back to Adobe Walls to hire more skinners. The Canadian River was flooded and hard to cross. Along the way he got the news that two hunters had been killed by Kiowas fifteen miles downriver. The Indians had mutilated the two men—broken open the victims’ skulls, spilled out their brains and filled the cavities with grass, and cut out their hearts along with their ears, noses, fingers, and toes.
    Around the same time, two other hunters, an Englishman and a German, were killed a few miles away.
    â€œEvery man of us was dead set against abandoning the buffalo range,” Dixon would recall. “The herds were now at hand. And we were in a fair way to make big money.” The