Free The Searchers by Glenn Frankel Page B

hunters decided to go out together. “I felt uneasy all the time. Something seemed to be wrong. There was Indian in the air.”
    THE IDEA OF ATTACKING Adobe Walls started with Quanah, or so he would later claim. His original plan was to avenge the death of a childhood friend who had been killed by Tonkawa Indians, the allies of the Texans. The killing “make my heart hot and I want to make it even,” hesaid, so he recruited warriors for a raid in the time-honored method, going from camp to camp offering his pipe. Those who smoked with him signaled their agreement to go to battle. Quanah visited the Nokoni band at the head of Cache Creek and the Quahadis near Elk Creek, then the Kiowas and Cheyennes on the Washita River. “I work one month,” Quanah would recall.
    He had an unusual partner for his effort. A young Comanche shaman named Isatai was making his bid to become a messiah by claiming that he could make medicine that would render warriors immune from bullets. Isatai—whose name in Comanche meant “Wolf Droppings”—insisted he possessed miraculous healing powers and could even raise the dead. He accurately predicted the harsh spring and summer drought of 1874. He told followers he had ascended to heaven to visit the Great Spirit “high above that occupied by the white man’s Great Spiritual Power” and was empowered to wage war on the whites. He claimed to be able to spit out nearly a wagonload of cartridges at a time—unlimited ammunition for the fighters. To the Comanches, decimated by smallpox and cholera epidemics and running out of options, Isatai’s message was impossible to resist.
    He and Quanah succeeded in organizing a sun dance for all the Comanche bands. They gathered sometime in May along the Red River near the mouth of Sweetwater Creek. They even built a mock fort and tore it down in a practice battle. The older chiefs agreed to send their young men on the attack, and they wanted the first target to be Adobe Walls.
    As Quanah later recalled, the chiefs told him, “You pretty good fighter, Quanah, but you not know everything. We think you take pipe first against white buffalo hunters—you kill white men [and] make your heart feel good. After that you come back, take all young men and go to Texas warpath.”
    It was Isatai who turned the plan into a grand scheme to eliminate whites altogether and save the remaining buffalo herds, and who came up with medicine he claimed would protect them from the white man’s bullets. “God tell me we going to kill lots white men,” Isatai told them, according to Quanah’s account. “Bullets not penetrate shirts—we kill them just like old woman.”
    More than two hundred warriors—the number is still in dispute among historians—rode west for several days, then stopped in the late afternoon, made medicine, painted their faces, donned war bonnets, and crossed the Canadian River. They approached the trading post onfoot; some slept for a few hours while others stayed awake talking and smoking. Then, just as daylight began to creep through the eastern sky, they mounted their horses.
    THE NIGHT OF JUNE 26 was sultry and dry, part of the prolonged drought that gripped the southern plains that summer. Inside Adobe Walls twenty-eight men and one woman—Mrs. William Olds, who had come from Dodge City with her husband to operate a dining room in the rear of the trading store—bedded down after midnight following some spirited carousing. All of the doors and windows were left wide open in the hope of catching a breeze. Billy Dixon slept on the ground outside to be near his wagon and horses. At around 2:00 a.m. pressure from the heavy sod covering the roof of Hanrahan’s saloon cracked the cottonwood ridgepole in its center, producing a loud, sharp report like a gunshot. Hanrahan ordered everyone out of the building for fear it would collapse.
    Dixon helped shore up the