In the fall of 1877, many of the Comanches became dissatisfied with their life on the military reservation at Fort Sill and fled to their old home on the Staked Plains. Chas. Goodnight was running his cattle in the lower end of Palo Duro, and the Comanches were soon killing beef. When he heard of it, he mounted his horse and rode down to where they were and made a private peace treaty with them, agreeing to give them two beeves a day as long as they remained, if they would not raid his herd. His proposal was accepted, and the compact was kept until the soldiers arrived and compelled the Comanches to return to their reservation.
I met Quanah at that time, having gone out with the troops. As we were riding along one day, he began talking about the fight at the Walls. When I told him that I was one of the men that had fought against him, he leaned over on his horse and shook my hand. We became good friends.
A number of different stories have been related about Quanah's mishaps in the fight. A man who knew him well in later years said that Quanah told him that early in the fight on the first day his horse was shot and killed at a distance of between 400 and 500 yards from the buildings. The horse fell suddenly, pitching Quanah headlong to the ground his gun falling from his grasp and bounding away. When Quanah saw that his horse was dead, he took shelter behind an old buffalo carcass over which wood-rats had piled weeds and grass, making a heap about waist high. Then something happened that Quanah was never able to explain. He was struck a terrific blow between his shoulder blade and his neck. He was badly stunned but managed to gain his feet and ran and hid himself in a plum thicket. At first he thought somebody had hit him with a heavy stone, but as only his own men could have done this, he abandoned this notion and concluded that he had been hit by a spent or deflected bullet. His right shoulder was useless most of the day, and he could raise his gun with difficulty. He left the battleground by riding behind another Indian.
Had it not been for the cracking of the cottonwood ridge pole in Hanrahan's saloon, the Indians would have come upon us unawares and all of us would have been killed, yet we never could find a single thing wrong with the log. Every hunter that came in after the fight, as well as every man at the Walls, examined that cottonwood ridge log over and over to find the break, but it could not be found. The two men who were sleeping in the building declared that the noise sounded like the report of a rifle.
The fight at Adobe Walls broke up buffalo-hunting in that section just as the Indians had planned. This was the last buffalo-hunting I ever did as a business. Hanrahan owned a big outfit and lost everything.
We were now so strong in numbers and so many days had passed without the coming of relief from Dodge that we organized a party of about twenty-five men to go up there and find out why help was not coming. Jim Hanrahan, the oldest man among us, was placed in command. It had now been about a week since the fight.
A serious row was barely averted the night before we pulled out for Dodge. Guns were scarce, and after the death of Olds "Bat" Masterson had borrowed the Olds gun, a better gun than the one used by Masterson who had lent his gun to another man. When it was learned that we were going to Dodge, Mrs. Olds sent for her husband's gun. "Bat" sent back word that he wanted to keep the gun until morning, promising that he would promptly return it at that time. This was not agreeable to Mrs. Olds, and she sent a man named Brown to Hanrahan's to get the gun without further talk, as she feared that she might lose the gun.
Brown made a few mistakes in his language in discussing the matter with Hanrahan, the latter having said several times that he would be personally responsible for the gun and would guarantee that it was returned to Mrs. Olds. Brown crowded matters until Hanrahan grabbed him by the neck, shook him as a bulldog would a rabbit, and then threw Brown out of the saloon, saying, "Get out of my building, you ——, ——"! Hanrahan drew his own gun and had Brown covered, ready to pull the trigger, which I believe he would have done, if several of us had not disarmed him, and then reasoned with him not to go any further, because if shooting began there was no telling what might happen, as both men had friends. Next morning "Bat" returned the gun to Mrs. Olds.
The row spread ill feeling among a number of the men, and though blood that had been spilt in fighting for each other was scarcely dry on the ground, yet some were now ready to begin fighting each other. This was the way of the west in those times—every tub had to stand on its own bottom every minute of the day. It was the code that every able-bodied man had to live by. If, however, a man should fall sick or be in bad luck or crippled, the boys stuck to him until he was able to take care of himself. The quarrel caused a little embarrassment to me, for as we rode away next morning and were passing Leonard & Myers store, the men there yelled out, "Goodbye, we don't care for any of you leaving, except Billy Dixon."
We went up Short Creek until we got out on the Plains, where we left the main-traveled freight road and bore more to the west, as we felt that the Indians might be watching this main road. We made it to the head of the Palo Duro the first day and went into camp. By making a long ride our next camp was San Francisco Creek. Here we found where buffalo-hunters had built a camp, and the body of Charley Sharp, who had been killed by the Indians. He had been dead about a week, and the body was shockingly mutilated. Sharp was a partner of Henry Lease, and had remained in camp while Lease went to Adobe Walls for supplies. Sharp bore the nickname "Dublin." Sharp's Creek in Beaver County, Oklahoma, bears his name. We buried the body where we found it.