It had been a most unfortunate affair. The Kickapoos crossed the Mexican border in the Eagle Pass area and settled down about forty miles inland. Always irked by memories of the unprovoked Dove Creek fight, they thereafter heartily joined future raids into Texas. They were no longer “friendly Indians.”
It was this matter of raids into Texas in the upper Rio Grande country that attracted General Sherman’s attention in March of 1873, when he ordered Colonel Mackenzie and his 4th Cavalry to Fort Concho. From Concho they moved to Fort Clark, only about thirty miles from the Mexican border. At Fort Clark a conference of high ranking officials was held, including apparently the Secretary of War, General Phil Sheridan, Mackenzie and others. No orders were issued but after the conference was over, the “brass” reviewed the 4th Cavalry. The “ten-year” men in the regiment knew that something big was brewing.
Dark and early, on the morning of May 17, 1873, Colonel Mackenzie led 400 men of his 4th Cavalry and twenty or thirty Seminole scouts under Lt. John L. Bullis, on a drive across the Rio Grande into Mexico.
After four days and night of continuous riding and fighting, the small expeditionary force, carrying their supplies in their pockets and with no time taken out for sleeping, recrossed the river and were back on friendly Texas soil. They had covered some 160 miles and had burned three Kickapoo and Lipan villages, killed a considerable number of braves, captured forty women and children, plus the chief of the Lipans, and had driven the remainder of the tribes into the Santa Rosa Mountains.
Washington and Mexico City both hit the ceiling over this invasion of a friendly nation. Mackenzie could show no written orders for the action. Had he failed, he would have been court-martialed, and he knew that beforehand. But President Grant stood by his officer, and the incident soon blew over. In fact a year or two later most of the remaining Kickapoos were persuaded to accept Uncle Sam’s hospitality. They went from Mexico to Fort Sill, by way of Fort Concho, and were given a cozy place on a reservation in the Indian Territory.[9]
By this time it is apparent that our Colonel Mackenzie was the fair-haired boy of President Grant and Generals Sherman and Sheridan. During the Civil War, Grant had regarded him as his ablest young officer. Now if things got out of line, you would simply “dress on Bobs.”
Truly, things were about to get out of line again. Some foolish policy of appeasement was still rampant in Washington, so Satanta and Big Tree were released from the penitentiary. This combined with other factors, such as the restlessness of the Indians on the reservations, and the slaughter of the buffalo, united the efforts of the Comanche tribe. Along with the Kiowas, now aided by the Cheyennes, they started trouble all over again. Once more the raids, during the spring of 1874, hit the Texas frontier, and as usual the soldiers while sleeping, had their horses stolen. Buffalo hunters in their lonely camps on the Panhandle plains were murdered and scalped.
Just east of the old Adobe Walls ruins, on the north side of the Canadian River in what is now northeastern Hutchinson County, twenty-eight men and one woman fortified themselves in three new adobe buildings that had just been completed as a trading post in anticipation of the northern migration of the great buffalo herds.
They were awakened before daylight on the morning of June 27, 1874, by a sharp cracking noise. The newly cut cottonwood ridge pole that supported the roof on one of the three buildings had settled, and the sod-covered roof threatened to collapse at any moment. Fifteen men worked until daylight propping up the roof. That accident saved the lives of all at the Walls, for just as daylight came, being awake and outside, they saw to the eastward, an estimated 700 mounted Indians riding hard for the settlement. The attacking force was less than half a mile away when it deployed in a great converging arc.
Billy Dixon, the buffalo hunter and frontier scout described the charge in a dramatic manner: