I recently read the reprinting of Mark Heinz’s original article dated September 20, 2022, in the September 28, 2024, issue of Cowboy State Daily which told of the 4.4-mile rifle shot by a Jackson-based rifle team that set a world record.
It brought to mind another fantastic shot performed by a young fellow in Texas 150 years ago. Here’s the story.
If there was one facet of Billy Dixon’s life he was most proud of, it was his career as a buffalo hunter, or more specifically a hide hunter.
Although he was only 23 years old, he had already won the admiration and respect of hunters many years his senior. He was known all over Texas, Kansas, and Indian Territory for his marksmanship and his ability to bring down staggering numbers of buffalo in the course of a single day.
On June 29, 1874, Dixon wasn’t thinking about buffalo. The young hunter was concerned about his safety and that of his 25 or so companions.
For the past three days, they had been holed up at a remote hunters’ camp in the Texas Panhandle called Adobe Walls, fighting off a brutal attack by Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne warriors under the leadership of Isa-tai and Quanah Parker.
Three men had already been killed in the fierce fighting which pitted the handful of hunters against nearly 700 Indians. The warriors had also shot and killed most of the hunters’ horses and cattle. Had it not been for the camp’s thick walls of sod, more casualties would likely have occurred.
For two days after the initial attack, it had been quiet in the hunters’ compound.
One man slipped away to Dodge City for help, while a burial detail interred the three dead men in a single grave. The hunters also disposed of the rotting carcasses of the cattle and horses as best they could.
The Indians still surrounded Adobe Walls at a distance, showing themselves from time to time to pester and to remind the men inside that escape was impossible.
While several of the hunters surveyed the plain around the camp, they noticed some Indians silhouetted against a slight rise about a mile away.
One of the hunters was Dixon, who had lost his prize Sharps rifle several days earlier while crossing the swollen Canadian River.
Now, he reached over and picked up James Hanrahan’s .50-caliber Sharps and fiddled for a moment with the rear sight. He aimed the rifle at a lone Indian outlined against the skyline.
The big Sharps belched flames and smoke. Neither Dixon, his friends, nor the Indian’s companions could believe their eyes. Dixon later described the incident:
“I took careful aim and pulled the trigger. We saw an Indian fall from his horse. The others dashed out of sight and behind a clump of timber. A few moments later two Indians ran quickly on foot to where the dead Indian lay, seized his body and scurried for cover. They had risked their lives, as we had frequently observed, to rescue a companion who might be not only wounded, but dead. I was admittedly a good marksman, yet this was what might be called a scratch shot.”
Dixon’s remarkable shot was too much for the Indians. They left Adobe Walls to the buffalo hunters. Once they were out of sight, a curious hunter paced off the distance of Dixon’s incredible shot and found that it was 1,538 yards—nearly seven-eighths of a mile!
Out of the dramatic battle at Adobe Walls, two legends were born. One concerned the marksmanship of Billy Dixon. Although he repeatedly acknowledged that he had been lucky, his precision shooting ability became a subject for storytellers forever after.
Dixon went on to become a distinguished scout for the 6th U.S. Cavalry under the command of Colonel Nelson Miles.
For his action at a later encounter with the Indians, he was awarded a Medal of Honor for his “skill, courage and determined fortitude, displayed in an engagement with 5 others, on the 12th of September 1874, against hostile Indians in overwhelming numbers.”
The Army later rescinded the award after learning that Dixon had been a civilian at the time of that action.
The other legend spawned by Adobe Walls was the accuracy and killing power of the Sharps rifle.
The Sharps had already been used by both Confederate and Union forces during the Civil War, but it was the hide hunters who made it so popular.
It was the weapon of choice for hundreds of buffalo hunters who scoured the Great Plains in search of ever-dwindling herds of the great beasts during the 1870s and 1880s.
To these men, the beauty of the Sharps was its ability to fire a heavy bullet several hundred yards with complete accuracy. Since the hunters usually shot their prey from a distance of at least three hundred yards to keep from spooking other members of the herd, the long-range Sharps was ideal. Its reputation continued to grow as tales of Dixon’s mile-long shot spread.
Sadly, by the 1880s, buffalo had all but disappeared from the southern Great Plains due primarily to the indiscriminate slaughter by hide hunters wielding sure-fire weapons such as the Sharps rifle.
But another factor also entered the equation. The United States government cheerfully condoned the slaughter of the once-numerous bison -- which some authorities estimated to originally number 60 million -- as a means of controlling and “civilizing” the various Plains Indian tribes who heavily depended upon the animal for their livelihoods.
In 1875, when Texas legislators were considering a bill to protect the last of the state’s buffalo herds, General Philip Sheridan appeared before the lawmakers and urged them to kill the proposal.
In Sheridan’s opinion, the men who destroyed the buffalo were heroes. They should be given “a hearty, unanimous vote of thanks,” he said, as well as a bronze medal “with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged Indian on the other.” Sheridan continued:
“These men have done in the last two years, and will do in the next year, more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last twenty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary; and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them the powder and lead, if you will; but for the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization.”
With a mentality such as the one displayed and advocated by the federal government, the fate of the buffalo was sealed. Within a few more years, the once-vast, thundering herds had reached the brink of extinction.
By 1886, when a Smithsonian Institution party scoured the Great Plains searching for enough bison to fill a panorama at the museum in Washington D.C., the expedition, led by William T. Hornaday, found barely enough specimens to fill the exhibit.
James A. Crutchfield can be reached at tncrutch@aol.com
