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.