In the long run William “Billy” Dixon cared far much less about being a legend or hero than he did concerning the vibrancy of life he had skilled on the Nice Plains. Dying had flirted with the famed frontier scout and buffalo hunter on multiple event, but it surely was in these harrowing moments he had felt most alive.
A reflective Dixon recalled a kind of life-defining episodes in his autobiography, dictated shortly earlier than his demise and printed in 1914. His thoughts drifted to his days as a younger buffalo hunter at Adobe Partitions, a distant outpost of hunters, skinners and tradesmen within the Texas Panhandle. There, within the predawn hours of June 27, 1874, Dixon caught a glimpse of a giant physique of shadowy objects close to a timberline past the settlement’s grazing horses. They had been transferring towards the outpost. Dixon strained his eyes however couldn’t outline something within the murky mild. Immediately, the advancing physique “unfold out like a fan” and unleashed a collective, thunderous conflict whoop that “appeared to shake the very air of the early morning.”
Lots of of mounted Comanche, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne warriors then burst into view, charging furiously in full regalia. The fearless Comanche Chief Quanah Parker led the pack. Dixon described the scene with vivid, romantic prose—splashes of vibrant pink, vermillion and ochre on the soldiers and their horses…scalps dangling from bridles…fluttering plumes of magnificent warbonnets…and the bronzed, half-naked our bodies of the riders, glittering with silver and brass ornaments as they emerged from the fires of the rising solar. “There was by no means a extra splendidly barbaric sight,” Dixon confessed. “In after years I used to be glad that I had seen it.”
Dixon had witnessed one of many final nice thrusts by the Plains tribes in protection of their lifestyle—an historical, nomadic existence tethered to the as soon as mighty herds of buffalo. By the point of the 1874 Second Battle of Adobe Partitions, nonetheless, the herds had been vanishing at an alarming price. Dixon, just like the buffalo, miraculously survived. He emerged from battle that day because the “hero of Adobe Partitions,” having dropped a warrior from his horse with a legendary rifle shot of greater than 1,500 yards. Within the ensuing many years Dixon turned more and more cognizant of the distinctive historical past he had skilled on the Nice Plains. Above all he got here to understand the magnitude these occasions had had on the event of the American West.
“I worry that the conquest of savagery within the Southwest was due extra usually to like of journey than to any want that cities ought to come up within the desert, or that the highways of civilization ought to take the place of the paths of the Indian and the buffalo,” Dixon stated. “In truth, many people believed and hoped that the wilderness would stay without end. Life there was to our liking. Its freedom, its risks, its tax upon our power and braveness, gave zest to residing.”
Reminiscences of that life flooded Dixon’s thoughts. Fortuitously, Billy’s biggest champion—his spouse, Olive—satisfied him to protect his remembrances for future generations in an as-told-to autobiography. Beginning in earnest within the fall of 1912, she faithfully recorded Billy’s operating narrative on notebooks scattered all through their homestead in Cimarron County, Okla. She even saved a pocket book within the corral in case her taciturn husband turned reflective concerning the previous, ever conscious of his reluctance to fuss over his adventures. Sadly, Billy by no means learn the ultimate manuscript. He caught pneumonia throughout a winter storm and died shortly afterward at dwelling on March 9, 1913, at age 62. Fellow members of his Masonic lodge buried Billy within the nearest cemetery on Texas soil, within the Panhandle city of Texline.
“Little did we suspect that Dying—the enemy from whom he had escaped so many instances within the outdated days—was at hand,” Olive wrote within the preface to his autobiography, “and that the arrow was set to the bow.”
Having inherited her husband’s hefty mantle, Olive faithfully labored over the subsequent 43 years—till her personal demise—to protect and promote his legacy. Her love and unwavering dedication to Billy, a person 22 years her senior, is persistently evident in her non-public letters, printed articles, lectures and memorial initiatives. Within the quick aftermath of his demise she devoted her efforts to publishing his life story. First, Olive enlisted the companies of Frederick S. Barde, the “dean of Oklahoma journalism,” to compile Billy’s remembrances into an orderly manuscript initially entitled Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon. She then borrowed $500 at 12 % curiosity to pay for the printing—a mighty sacrifice for a widow of seven youngsters. Twelve years would cross earlier than Olive lastly paid off her banknote, however any hardships proved worthwhile the place her husband’s legend was involved.
Historians and old-timers alike declared the e book an prompt frontier basic. College of Oklahoma historical past professor Joseph B. Thoburn, who turned one in every of Olive’s closest mates and confidants, seen the timing of her work on the e book as “nearly Providential.” In a single letter to Olive he declared, “Posterity will all the time owe you a debt of gratitude in your persistence in persuading your husband to inform his life story for publication. A lot beneficial historic materials of this class had been misplaced within the West as a result of the story of a person’s life was permitted to die with him.”
Thoburn spoke fact. If not for Olive’s perseverance, massive swaths of Billy’s outstanding life story would by no means have been recorded. The autobiography alone offered Dixon’s firsthand accounts and context for 2 of the American West’s most thrilling episodes—the June 27, 1874, Second Battle of Adobe Partitions, and the Sept. 12, 1874, Buffalo Wallow Struggle.
Buffalo Wallow
At Buffalo Wallow—a sideshow of the Sept. 9–14, 1874, Battle of the Higher Washita River—Dixon, fellow civilian scout Amos Chapman and 4 enlisted males of the sixth U.S. Cavalry defended a patch of bare floor towards a big band of Comanche and Kiowa warriors. For his or her actions Dixon and the others obtained the Medal of Honor. Billy’s blunt however gripping narration of the battle to Olive offered the backstory behind the medals.
Dixon described how he and his companions had been carrying dispatches from McClellan Creek, within the Panhandle, to Camp Provide in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), some 150 miles to the northwest. They’d been despatched by Colonel Nelson A. Miles, then commanding the fifth U.S. Infantry and the sixth Cavalry, whose rations had been operating dangerously low amid the Purple River Warfare, the continued marketing campaign to subdue the southern Plains tribes. At dawn on September 12, their second day trip, the small social gathering crested a knoll inside plain sight of the Comanches and Kiowas. The soldiers shortly encircled the lads.
“We had been in a entice,” Dixon recalled. “We knew that one of the best factor to do was to make a stand and struggle for our lives.” As the lads dismounted, Personal George W. Smith gathered the reins of their horses, solely to be shot a second later. He fell face down. At that the horses bolted. A fierce, close-quarters firefight ensued, as Dixon, Chapman, Sergeant Zachariah T. Woodhall and Privates Peter Roth (or Rath) and John Harrington fended off an estimated 125 warriors.
Scanning the open plains for any shelter, Dixon noticed a melancholy some yards distant the place buffalo had pawed and wallowed. As the lads sprinted for it below hearth, one shot dropped Chapman, who fell with a moan. Roth, Woodhall, Harrington and Dixon saved operating until they reached the wallow, then desperately stabbed and clawed on the earth with their knives and fingers to throw up a crude earthwork round its perimeter. “We had been keenly conscious that the one factor to do was to promote our lives as dearly as potential,” Dixon stated. “We fired intentionally, taking good intention, and had been choosing off an Indian at nearly each spherical.”
Chapman and Smith—the latter presumed lifeless—remained the place they’d fallen. One of many males cried out for Chapman to make a splash for the wallow, however the scout replied {that a} bullet had shattered his left knee. Dixon refused to depart Chapman stranded. Regardless of intense volleys by the enemy, he lastly reached his fellow scout, hoisted Chapman on his again and bore the bigger man to the security of the wallow. Chapman later advised a dramatically completely different model of who saved whom that day, a declare the reserved Dixon by no means contested publicly whereas alive, a lot to Olive’s dismay.
Round 3 p.m. merciful destiny intervened, as sheets of chilly rain offered the defenders with welcome water and pelted their assailants, prompting the Comanches and Kiowas to retreat for heat and canopy out of rifle vary. By daybreak the subsequent day the soldiers had vanished. The break got here too late for Smith, who’d been mortally wounded with a punctured lung. In the dead of night of evening Dixon and Roth had manhandled the non-public again to the wallow, the place he died with out criticism. A long time later Billy spoke of the cool braveness displayed by each man that day and mournfully advised his spouse that Personal Smith nonetheless lay buried out on the windswept plains.
Tireless Work
The information that Smith’s grave, in addition to the battle web site, remained unmarked overwhelmed Olive with a way of accountability to honor the reminiscence of Billy and his contemporaries. With that singular mission in thoughts she leapt from one mission to the subsequent. She wrote to magazines and newspapers, usually to appropriate particulars in printed articles about Billy’s life. In 1922 she turned a constitution member of the Panhandle-Plains Historic Society and two years later spearheaded the society’s efforts to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Battle of Adobe Partitions.
On June 27, 1924, greater than 3,000 celebrants descended on the distant Adobe Partitions battlefield, by then a part of the Turkey Monitor Ranch in Hutchinson County, Texas. They arrived in vehicles, wagons and on horseback, all to pay homage to the reminiscence of a heroic and profitable final stand by 28 males and one lady (Hannah Olds, the spouse of prepare dinner William Olds) towards “the flower and perfection” of the Plains tribal warriors.
Andy Johnson of Dodge Metropolis, Kan.—one in every of two residing defenders—attended the celebration with a pistol mounted to his waistband. He later regaled the gang with a stirring account of the battle as airplanes circled overhead. Naturally, Johnson’s story of Dixon’s legendary lengthy shot obtained prime therapy, although the declare later drew skepticism in some quarters. Olive additionally made transient remarks, crediting others for the historic event. The gang cheered lustily when a 10-foot-tall monument of the best Oklahoma pink granite was unveiled. Inscribed on it are the names of every Adobe Partitions defender.
The profitable occasion solely fueled Olive’s dedication to her trigger. She had already begun lobbying the society to mark the positioning of the Buffalo Wallow Struggle whereas concurrently trying to find a writer to reprint Billy’s e book. Regardless of the e book’s crucial acclaim a decade earlier, Olive’s hunt for a writer proved sluggish and unnerving. In a Dec. 27, 1925, letter to Thoburn, she went as far as to declare that if she couldn’t safe a writer quickly, she could be compelled to “promote my land in Cimarron County.”
Two years handed earlier than Olive celebrated these two signature achievements—the discharge of a revised version of Billy’s autobiography, by Dallas-based P.L. Turner Co., and the position of a monument on the Buffalo Wallow battleground, 22 miles south of Canadian, Texas. She even efficiently lobbied the U.S. Warfare Division to offer a grave marker for Personal George Smith.
Nonetheless, Olive couldn’t relaxation. Two years later she made the intensely private choice to have her husband’s stays reinterred to Adobe Partitions. On June 27, 1929—55 years to the day after the storied battle with allied warriors led by Quanah Parker—a police escort led a funeral procession three hours from Texline to the battleground. Reverent spectators lined the route, eradicating their hats because the caravan handed. A headline within the Amarillo Every day Information proclaimed, Col. Billy Dixon Will get Final Want: Buried at Website of Adobe Partitions. By no means thoughts that Dixon had no army rank; he didn’t want one to be remembered.
Immortalized in Print
The mannequin of a loyal widow, Olive ensured her husband’s identify would echo via time. She did so tirelessly, lovingly and with humility. Recognizing her immense contributions to the historical past of the Texas Panhandle, creator John McCarty sought her permission to put in writing a biography about her life with Billy, and his imaginative and prescient culminated within the 1955 publication of Adobe Partitions Bride: The Story of Billy and Olive Dixon. Initially, Olive had balked on the thought. “All through the time when interviews and analysis had been bringing out the story of her life,” McCarty wrote, “Mrs. Dixon steadily maintained that there was nothing distinctive about her or her experiences; she even protested that there could be little interest in a narrative of her life, as she had finished nothing out of the unusual. All her disclosures had been slanted towards one recurring theme: ‘My husband was an important man.’ However she took no credit score for Dixon’s achievements.”
Olive died in Amarillo a yr later, on March 17, 1956—43 years and eight days after her beloved Billy left this earth. Dying stole her swiftly. That night she had joined daughter Edna and son-in-law Walter Irwin for dinner at a well-liked barbecue restaurant. On the drive dwelling Olive quietly slumped over on her daughter’s shoulder. She by no means regained consciousness.
As a baby rising up in Virginia, Olive had dreamed of a time when she may “mingle with individuals who had been actually doing issues in an uncommon manner.” Tales of the expansive cattle ranches on the Nice Plains fueled her creativeness, till in 1893, at age 20, she boldly joined brother Archie King in Texas for the journey of a lifetime. He labored as a cowhand for a Hutchinson County unfold, residing with spouse and little one in a crude log-and-sod construction dug out of a financial institution on Johns Creek some 20 miles from the ranch headquarters. She additionally visited brother Albert, who wrangled for a neighboring unfold.
Olive immediately fell in love with the West, and shortly after with one in every of its icons. Her childhood dream was realized. She’d sought journey, embraced the pioneer spirit after which married the love of her life. Olive, like her husband, had lived a life price remembering.
Ron J. Jackson Jr. is an award-winning creator from Rocky, Okla., and an everyday contributor to Wild West. For additional studying he recommends the autobiography Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon, in addition to Adobe Partitions: The Historical past and Archeology of the 1874 Buying and selling Put up, by T. Lindsay Baker and Billy R. Harrison; Adobe Partitions Bride: The Story of Billy and Olive King Dixon, by John L. McCarty; and Billy and Olive Dixon: The Plainsman and His Woman, by Invoice O’Neal.