Adobe Wall

Did rotten walls and the collapse of a roof alert the hunters at Adobe Wall?

In the spring of 1874 James Hanrahan and Charles Rath were among several workers and businessmen who followed the hunters to Adobe Walls. On the morning of the attack on the scattering of adobe structures, spread out some thirty yards!” yelled Jim Hanrahan, An old government wagon master and experienced frontiersman.

On the morning of the attack on the scattering of adobe structures, Hanrahan’s adobe building, eighty feet long, twenty-five feet wide and with walls of some two feet thick.

That Texas June morning a rotten cottonwood logs upheld the universe for the Kansas hunters; if the sound cottonwood beam had been set as a ridge-pole in the west end of Hanrahan’s place over the bar, not a man would have escaped alive from Adobe Wall. A story was told crack of a breaking timber aroused everybody in Hanrahan’s during the night; the dirt roof threatened to fall, and the situation demanded their arduous and extended attention. By considerable labor the men propped up the falling beam, and Hanrahan sent two men to shovel dirt from the roof to lighten the weight. The first rays of the morning sun were beginning to kindle the prairie, and Billy Dixon was astir at his wagon a few yards away. The young fellows lined up at the bar to take a drink, after their work, and as they were all going hunting that day, they decided to remain up and make an early start. Two men, Watson and Ogg went outside for the horses, and lariated them some five hundred yards to the northeast.

The hunters outside fired one volley and retreated within when the Indians were within hundred yards.“Save your fire for thirty yards!”  yelled Jim Hanrahan, old government wagon master and experienced frontiersman. Inside Hanrahan’s adobe were ten men, seven armed with Buffalo fifty-caliber guns, some of them the best marksman on the plains. At thirty yards the effect of such of volley from such men was terrific – the formation of the aborigines was split in twain, as if cut by a butchers cleaver.