Believing Billy Dixon

Some years ago I read an article in a magazine which covered a topic I'd already been aware of and interested in for a long, long time. It was about the Battle of Adobe Walls, more properly called The Second Battle of Adobe Walls. It was called "I Believe You, Billy Dixon!"

The location was a couple of buildings, one of which had been a store, the other a bar. The style of their construction is evident in the name of the battle. Actually, the First Battle of Adobe Walls should be considered a bigger deal Historically, because more people participated on both the native and white sides. The famous Colonel Christopher "Kit" Carson was in command of about 500 men who were attacked by a much larger force than they had been led to believe they were about to face. One article on Google actually states that the U.S. Army was outnumbered 10-1 there for two days. The Army called it a victory for them, based on the large number of dead and wounded among the Cheyenne. But the Cheyenne can be expected to see things differently, and so do some modern Historians. The Army may have done most of the killing, but it was also the Army that was forced to retreat and leave the ground in possession of its enemies. Kit and his men were running out of loads.

This was 1864, with a lot of the Civil War left to be fought. The Union had assigned so many troops to fighting the Confederacy that some southwest tribes had begun to believe they could repossess the Texas/New Mexico area. There had been some isolated fights and some pretty one-sided killings. Thus, the army had to detail Kit Carson and his 500 to reassert the power and authority of the government in "Washington City" and to reassure white settlers that they had not been forgotten by a government strapped with the daunting task of defeating the likes of Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, and James Longstreet, all of whom lived through the war.

Carson lost very few people in this battle. His men were wielding the same rifles as their comrades back east, but he had also brought two mountain howitzers with him. The colonel showed real mastery of the placement and use of these little cannon. But, as in the case of the Battle of Bunker's (or Breed's) Hill, they couldn't keep up their superior rate of killing when the ammunition began to run low. They tried to retreat. The Cheyenne cleverly tried to burn the grass to keep them pinned down between themselves and the river. Carson thought quickly, sent men to create backfires, and thus preserved a way of retreat.

Remember those numbers! 5,000 vs 500. Only ten years later, 28 people, one of them a woman, were attacked by the Cheyenne while they were encamped in the same place as Kit Carson's force had been. The Cheyenne were understandably upset with the federal government policy of hiring riflemen and skinners to kill off the great herds of buffalo on which the natives subsisted. And the 28 people scampering for the shelter of the walls were in just that business. The 28 were under attack by a much smaller force than that which attacked Carson. In the ten intervening years, many of the native warriors had died or been killed. Only 200-300 made the attack. OK, actually some authors say it was 500. The point here is that the 28 people behind the adobe walls won!

Some of them were using the military quick-reloading Springfield Trapdoor rifles. Those whose job was actually shooting the buffalo were an unfortunate group for the Cheyenne to have tangled with that day. They were armed with the long-range death machines of the day: the Sharps falling block rifle, the Remington rolling block rifle, etc.

The part that everybody remembers is the fact that one of the hunters, Billy Dixon, borrowed a .50 caliber Sharps from a friend and knocked a Cheyenne fellow from his horse from an amazing distance. During my life I've heard it quoted as "a little over a mile," "right at a mile," "not quite a mile," and "1,528 yards." I found one article which tried to poo-poo the whole thing by saying that the shot was "only" 1,028 yards. This same writer says that most of the fighting was up close and that the whites were employing the new cartridge revolvers which Colt and Smith & Wesson had only recently begun to market. This author bothered me a little. He sounded like he had an axe to grind. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find him to be a far left wing, anti-hunting, self-loathing-because-of-his-ancestry revisionist Historian. He seemed to be saying all through the piece that everyone else who'd ever written about the Second Battle had gotten it all wrong and he alone could be counted upon for the true facts and figures. He showed no hesitancy or self-doubt. That always makes me suspicious of "authorities," except Church authorities who get their information from truly perfect sources.

The author of this scornfully doubting article further irritated me by questioning the possibility of anyone armed with a nineteenth century cartridge rifle loaded with a lead bullet and plain old black powder to make such a shot. But I have some experience with arms of that type. I have seen them do some pretty good shooting, although I don't hang around with the Earps and some other young, sharp-eyed guys who could sit in one spot ("a stand") and shoot 300 buffalo without moving. I haven't seen the best. But Billy Dixon and some of his companions were among the best the country had to offer back then.

This brings me to today's experience with friend and fellow shooting enthusiast, Aric Armell. He owns and uses a laser range finder. He had measured all this out before. We trudged up a hill among cedars, a place we've fired into many times before, and set up the gong. We've never measured it, but we both figure it to be about 14" wide and about 21" tall. It is steel swinging on an axis of steel. Aric's hand loads of today were loaded with .30 caliber bullets of 200 grains of weight. They are much sleeker and move much faster than anything available to Billy Dixon and company. But I saw it happen. I watched it through a spotting scope as I sat on a folding chair. The scope was solidly rested on my tripod which sat firmly with all three feet in the snow, 76 yards short of a mile. It was a truly amazing distance just in the thinking. But when I saw it my jaw dropped. I couldn't see our target at all and the hill on which it sat looked like it had to be on a different reservation in some other county!

He would fire a shot and, if I'd been able to see the impact, I'd tell him how far off it was. Something like "Two feet low, about four feet to the right." This went on for some time. It was colder than the proverbial witch's mammary gland out there, and the barrel kept heating up despite the temperature. We'd let it cool for maybe five minutes and go at it again. Finally I believed I'd heard the sound of a hit, although my gaze through the scope showed no marks on the face of the gong, and it wasn't swinging back and forth as usual when it's hit with a 200 grain bullet.

At long last, Aric nailed the lower left corner of it! We cheered. I stood up to get pictures of the shooter as he prepared to fire his last load. Now, I had seen the gong swing on the first sure hit. I sat back down to watch through the scope again. Again I saw the gong swing back and forth rather gently.

Now, when we'd arrived we saw maybe a thousand large white birds bedded down in an old spud field. They were a little over two hundred yards away, so I couldn't identify them. I guessed that they were probably snow geese. But just before Aric started shooting, I tilted the spotting scope forward and down a little. Swans! Hundreds and hundreds of swans. I knew what was about to happen. Sure enough, as Aric's first shot broke the sound barrier about 40 or 50 feet over their heads, the entire flock decided to get up and leave. I got a few shots of them and a couple of shots of mated pairs flying together in a direction of their own choosing. Even with the lowly 4 megapixels of our five year old camera, those two shots came out rather well, I thought. I hope you enjoy the pictures of the shooting and of the swans.

The Christmas Truce of 1914 - and Its Prologue

One of the most famous contests of WW I was a Rugby match played by British and German boys who had, only hours previously, been shooting at each other with Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifles and 1898 Mauser rifles. I have known of this event for years, but I've never found out what the score was by the end of the game. I don't think anybody cared.

The war had been going since 1 August and had already shown just how nasty it was going to turn out to be. Jeff Cooper, an Historian, a US Marine officer, and a teacher of gun fighting skills, once referred to World War One (1914-1918) as "a considerable bloodletting." Considerable, indeed. It made all previous wars (that Historians knew about) seem pretty puny by comparison. By the end of the four year period 9,000,000 men had been killed. "Only" 115,000 of these kids were Americans. I don't know whether those figures included the Americans who had joined the armies and air forces of France and Britain years before America officially got around to declaring war. The truly incredible losses at that time were suffered by the Russians, the Germans, the British, the Austrians and the French, with Belgians and Italians also tossing tens of thousands of their boys into the equation.

One French soldier said that he saw an unheard-of sight on the day of Christmas Eve. "A perfect Boche" (an insulting French word for the Germans with whom the French had crossed swords before) simply climbed out of his trench and stood there, a perfect target. Then a couple of French kids did the same thing. Then boys on both sides began jumping out of their trenches. On the allied side, most of those who took this risk were Brits. Officers and non-coms had no control over their enlisted men. Hundreds of them simply walked into each others' arms and began communicating the best they could. Language barriers don't seem to slow down people of good will, I've noticed. The kids on both sides began to offer cigarettes, candy, and strange little collectibles to each other.

Then came the Rugby game. As with most examples of this game, the gloves were off and no quarter was shown by either side. However, the good will continued into Christmas Day. Still, said a man named Bairnsfather who was wounded the next year and became a successful cartoonist with his "Old Bill" character for the rest of his life, no one on either side lost for even a moment his determination to keep fighting when the time came and see the thing through to a successful conclusion for his side.

Finally, with regret, both sides shook hands or even embraced each other. Everyone shambled back to his trench and took up the same position in the freezing mud which he'd been occupying for months. Shortly before the shooting started again, the German boys held up a big sign written in English. "Sorry, friends."

One might wonder where the kids (and I militantly keep calling them that, because so many of them weren't out of their teens yet) of both sides got the idea to pull off a wonderful, insane stunt like this. I suspect they'd been listening to their fathers and grandfathers talk about an event just like it which had occurred 43 years to the day earlier.

It was called The Franco-Prussian War and it took less than two full years for the Prussians (northeast industrialized Germans; Germany was a place on the map in 1870, but it was still several separate countries) to conquer and occupy much of France. This war could be called a dress rehearsal for World War One. Like General Grant's siege of Petersburg, VA (1864-1865), the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) was a long, miserable experience for two armies living in trenches and often up to their knees in mud around the clock. As with the American Civil War (1861-1865,) the Franco-Prussian shootout was in many ways a precursor of World War One.

In the five years between the American "unpleasantness" and that between French and German boys, much had changed in the way of personal weaponry. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia were shooting at each other with muzzle-loading rifles. But by 1870, cartridge rifles were being used. They were still loading those cartridges with black powder, but the action which locked the cartridges in place was a turn-bolt, very similar to what most hunters use today. except that they had no magazine and thus were not repeaters like the much faster firearms of WW I. In this war, as in the Siege of Petersburg and as in WW I, each side would occasionally run across "no-man's land" in an effort to push the enemy back a trench or two. This was an absurdly dangerous thing to try in the two nineteenth century wars, but absolutely ridiculous by 1914. All the nations were playing with new toys by then called "machine guns." Put those together with repeating rifles of small caliber and much higher velocity due to the new "smokeless" or "white powder," and you have a recipe for a whole bunch of guys having a very bad day.

Well, in the midst of the Franco-Prussian thing, Christmas came along as it has been prone to do for a long time now. During a lull in the shooting on the 24th, the German boys were amazed to see a young French guy jump up out of his trench and start singing "Cantique de Noel" which we of the English-speaking persuasion call "O Holy Night." He had no sooner finished than an inspired German boy sprang up in full sight of the French Army and sang a German Christmas Carol called "Von Himmel Hoch." That would be translated "From Heaven on High" if my two years of high school German don't let me down.

Anyway, the enlisted men could not be persuaded to do each other any harm until the Holiday (holy day) had concluded.

Of course, when the Prussians had actually conquered and occupied a big chunk of France, there was not much good will left. I think I've mentioned before in this little column how many of Guy de Maupassant's short stories take place during or after that war. He ought to know what it was like. He fought in it.

Humblest Apologies to One and All

Our camera has developed a problem in which the battery cannot be charged fully. Or maybe it's charged all the way but just hemorraging power all the time. At any rate, it only takes a few pictures before running out of steam.

I took my cell phone last night to Jenni's wedding, because it had done well on some outside shots in the past. Sadly, it can't handle the inside shots. I took nearly eighty photos and short films. I haven't watched the latter, but the still shots are nearly all blurred. Most of this was due to the shutter speed on the little camera which seems to be about a day and a half in a cell phone. A lot can happen in that amount of time. Lexi might decide to bend all the way down to inspect her cute little shoes. One of the Brown boys might feel a powerful urge to hold one leg out at an amusing angle.

Some of the babies cooperated and were recorded with relative clarity and with their cute faces intact. I'll try to include the good, the bad, and the ugly here. I won't make you look through 80 shots. Maybe I'll use 15 or 20 representative samples.

Do I Have Anything New to Show You?

These are a few photos from the past 5 or 6 months which I haven't inflicted on you yet. Of course, most of these people are very easy on the eyes. For example...

Mellissa (sic) Bosen, our niece on Thanksgiving Day. She has at last decided to stop being a full-time heart breaker and settle down - with a younger man.

A sunset across the street from us.

Molly Susanne Haeberle.

Scintillating Sidnie, our niece.

Joseph & Mary's 2009 Christmas tree.

Penny takes advantage of the slow shutter speed of the phone/camera to do a little blurring.

Merry Matthew and Marvelous Mary

Antiquated Andrew (He's in kindergarten, you know.)

Dapper Dallin considers his next move in life.

Sheryl's brother, Larry Wilde. He's a long haul trucker and we only see him once a month, if that. When he got married to a woman many years ago who turned out to be quite shady, he was assisted in getting an almost immediate divorce by no less a personage than Gen'l. Colin Powell. Larry was doing something that the general needed to have done and trusted only Larry to do.

Mrs. Fast Horse, Zannita's mom. The whole clan is descended from Crazy Horse. Mrs. Fast Horse is a judge at Fort Hall.

Now these pictures above are some I took late in the summer. The faces are well known and well beloved in our group. I might be biased just a tad, but I think I see deep-seated goodness in all six pairs of eyes. Seven, actually. Mary's a good kid, too.

Signals Catalogue

Have any of you ever gotten this one? It simply says "Signals" on the front cover. I first became aware of it during the Elena years. It's so full of clever, witty, brainy little gifts that it makes me really sad that I'm always broke these days. I thought of all of you as I read through this little booklet. The hat and matching mittens which bore the visages of owls naturally made me wish I could get them for Jocy. The sweatshirt which bore the legend "I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you" kept me chuckling for hours. I long to give it to Mother.

There was a cutting board that I loved. I guess some call them "chopping boards." It showed a simple portrait of a young Pole in nineteenth century garb, his back turned to his piano, his chin in his hand, and his face the very image of what Sherlock Holmes called "the enui." Its title was "Chopin Bored."

Another shirt made me laugh explosively. It said, "Non sequiturs are like Bicycles: They don't bathe." Somehow I could just hear Jacob's characteristic Michael Landon laugh.

Another features a simple drawing of two mushrooms. The label beneath them says "Fun Guy."

There's a marble spoon rest in this catalogue. Down the left side it proclaims: "Many people have eaten my cooking and gone on to lead normal lives." But it doesn't describe just what a normal life is. Some objects make statements: "English Major: You do the math." Others ask pithy questions: "i before e except after c..............weird?" "At what age am I old enough to know better?"

The catalogue feature lots of Edward Gorey art and quotations for those who love PBS Mysteries. A clear and obvious threat is on one shirt: "Careful or you'll end up in my novel." And, just to show that teachers can be as silly as their students, a tan shirt urges us to believe that: "The dog ate my lesson plan." I have to smile at that one. A number of times in my curtailed career our principal would proclaim that all our lesson plans had to be written out so that he could look at them early in the morning if he so chose. These absurd requirements must have been New Years resolutions as they practically never checked them. I think I recall one time when the administrator came into the room and asked to see my "lesson plan." I simply opened the lecture notes I'd already been using for maybe a dozen years, pointed to the place I intended to start that day and the place I intended to reach by the end of each hour. I was never asked again.

Speaking of Jocy (weren't we just a little while ago?), page 47 features some great owls, so perfectly made that they make ME want to become a collector. The necklace on page 48 quotes the text of Philippians 4:13 but doesn't then say "for Pete's sake!" I guess the maker doesn't read the Father Tim novels.

Two whole pages feature items to encourage the fight against what I sometimes call "Shayne's Disease." A silhouette on a white shirt shows a man and woman sitting expectantly with wine glasses. It says, "Waiting for Bordeaux." I had to explain that to a couple of people, but it was worth it. A Wagnerian woman is drawn on a shirt with her arms open as if to give freer passage to her words: "Don't make me use my opera voice." All the California Haeberles, several of the Humphries, and at least three of my kids would smile to see one that says: "E=Fb, the musical theory of relativity." There's also a door mat which welcomes you to its exact longitude and latitude.

I identify wholely with the shirt which wails "I was promised there would be no math involved." The world stood in awe of Dr. Einstein, but most quotations from him seem pretty humble: "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research."

All the Bill Mauldin cartoons which he drew while simultaneously fighting WW II and getting a Purple Heart are featured in a book named for his two characters, "Willie and Joe." Near that is a black sweatshirt which quips "A Pun at Maturity is Fully Groan." All of Bill Cosby's early comedy albums are featured here on CD! Various action figures from Monty Python and the Holy Grail can be purchased here. One is the Black Knight with detachable limbs. "Come back here; I'll bit your kneecaps off!" You can also get Monty's livestock-tossing catapult, complete with cows, geese, ducks, etc. You can buy two souvenirs of A Christmas Story. Ralphie's late forties house can be had in very fine detail. So can his father's "major award." The lamp can glow only under the shade, or the leg can get in on the act, too.

For those of us who are beginning to received jests at our expense regarding our age, some positively-thinking soul has created a shirt that says "Chronologically Gifted." I sort of like that. I've never been called "gifted" before, although I have a grandson in Rexburg and another in OKC who are called just that.

Need a little pick-me-up? You can buy a giant Serotonin molecule to hang on your wall!

Let me finish by quoting a shirt I wish I'd had many years ago, because I used to say something very like it: "If I'm talking, you should be taking notes."

The Signals catalogue can be had from 5581 Hudson Industrial Parkway, PO Box 2599, Hudson, OH, 44236-0099. Their phone number is 1-800-669-9696.