"Billy" Dixon's Log Homestead on Site of Original Adobe Walls.
When we first saw Adobe Walls, there were parts of walls still standing, some being four or five feet high. The adobe bricks were in an excellent state of preservation. Many different stories have been told about this place and its origin. While I was hunting buffaloes in southern Kansas I met up with a man named Charley Powell who had been a soldier in the Third Cavalry. He told me that in 1863, when they were going from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Fort Bascom, New Mexico, the trail lay on the south of the Canadian, opposite Adobe Walls. The soldiers crossed over and looked at the ruins. Even at that time none of the buildings was standing.
Later, when I was serving as scout at Fort Elliott, Texas, I was talking with General Hatch one day, and we fell to discussing the Adobe Walls country. He told me that he passed up the Canadian in 1848 with a regiment of dragoons, going out west, and stopped to examine these ruins. He said that only the broken walls were to be seen and that there was much to indicate that the place long since had been abandoned. On this expedition he was a second lieutenant; at the time I talked with him he was Lieutenant Colonel of the Fourth United States Cavalry, and in command at Fort Elliott, an old, gray-haired man. He was shrewd and very industrious. He took pride in improving Fort Elliott, and had a mania for using adobe bricks in the erection of buildings. Employing Mexicans, who were past masters in the making of these bricks, Colonel Hatch built stables large enough to hold horses for three troops of cavalry. He put up so many adobe buildings at Fort Elliott that finally he was called "Doby" Hatch.
It is probable that old Adobe Walls was built by Major William Bent, in the first 40's or earlier, the year 1844 being possible. Major Bent's son, George Bent, now living at Colony, Okla., made this statement:
"Bent & Company built Adobe Walls, as it is called. I cannot find out when it was built. It was a trading post to trade with the Comanches, Kiowas and Prairie Apaches. Bent & Company traded for horses and mules from the Indians. They sent their traders in summer time to trade for this stock. The post was not occupied in winter, as the Company did not trade for buffalo robes, as the trading post was too far from Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River to haul the hides. These horses and mules were driven to Missouri and sold; also, to the Platte Rivers, to be sold to the emigrants. The Comanches, Kiowas and Apaches were rich in horses and mules. They stole many in old Mexico and traded off the wild ones very cheap. Bent & Company employed many Mexicans to break these wild animals, after which the latter were sold to the whites."
The noted plainsman and Indian trader, John Smith, told George Bent that together with five or six companions he made his escape from old Adobe Walls, after it had been attacked by Comanches and Kiowas.
Even though it be true that old Adobe Walls was established by Major William Bent and his associates, a tradition remains that they merely seized upon a site that had been occupied at an even earlier day by men of whom nothing is known, save that they are believed to have come from the Spanish settlements in New Mexico. There are traditions of buried treasure at Adobe Walls, and strangers have appeared there in search of it. One of these treasure-hunters was an old gray-haired man who came after the country had been settled. His story was that a pack train loaded with gold and silver bullion had been attacked at this place by Indians. In its extremity, the besieged party buried the bullion. Only one or two members of the expedition escaped massacre, among the slain being a Catholic priest.
The old man in search of the treasure was too feeble to do the physical work of digging, and tried to hire men to work for him. He was looked upon as slightly demented, and could get no assistance. He departed without finding the buried fortune. Subsequently, his story was revived, and men living in the locality made numerous excavations, but found nothing.
The day after we camped on Bent Creek, several of the boys rode northeast, to look over the country. Upon their return, they reported that there was an excellent site for a permanent camp on the next creek, about a mile and a half further on, so we pulled up the valley and began unloading our wagons on the bare ground in a broad valley where there was a pretty stream called East Adobe Walls Creek. This was to become a spot memorable to all of us.
Myers & Leonard built a picket house twenty by sixty feet in size. James Hanrahan put up a sod house, twenty-five by sixty, in which he opened a saloon. Thomas O'Keefe built a blacksmith's shop of pickets, fifteen feet square. Thus, a little town was sprouting in the wilderness—a place where we could buy something to eat and wear, something to drink, ammunition for our guns, and a place where our wagons, so necessary in expeditions like ours, could be repaired.