t's Fort, as another
trading-post, to deal with the Red River Comanches. William Bent had
sent one of his clerks, named by the Cheyennes Wrinkled Neck, to build
it.

After it had been abandoned, in 1864 General Kit Carson had attacked
the winter villages of three thousand Comanche, Kiowa, Apache and
Arapaho warriors and their families, here. He was just able to get his
four hundred men safely away.

The second Adobe Walls had been built only a year or two ago. It was
down-river from the old Adobe Walls, and formed a small settlement
where the buffalo-hunters came in, from their outside camps, to store
their hides and get supplies, and so forth. There were Hanrahan's
saloon, and Rath's general store, and several sheds and shacks, mainly
of adobe or dried clay, and a large horse and mule corral, of adobe and
palisades, with a plank gate. Such was Adobe Walls of 1874, squatted
amidst the dun bunch-grass landscape broken only by the shallow South
Canadian and a rounded hill or two.

The Rath store was the principal building. It was forty feet long, and
contained two rooms--the store room, and a room where persons might
sleep. It looked not unlike a fort; the thick walls had bastions at
the corners, the deep window casings were embrasured or sloped outward,
so that guns might be aimed at an angle, from within.

In the night of June 24 twenty-eight men and one woman were at Adobe
Walls. Excepting Mrs. Rath, and her husband, and Saloon-keeper
Hanrahan, and two or three Mexican clerks and roustabouts, they mainly
were buffalo-hunters. Billy Dixon, government scout, was in with his
wagon and outfit; he expected to start for his camp, twenty-five miles
south, in the morning. The Shadley brothers and their freighter outfit
were here. And likewise some twenty others.

It was not to be expected that Indians would attack Adobe Walls itself;
they were more likely to raid the camps: but the general store seemed
to be a great prize--the Comanches and Kiowas and Apaches and Arapahos
and Cheyennes counted upon plunder of clothes and flour and ammunition,
and I-sa-tai's medicine had told him to try Adobe Walls first.

The night was warm. Scout Dixon slept out-doors, in his wagon; the
Shadley brothers slept in their wagon; several men slept upon
buffalo-robes, on the ground; others were in the Rath store and in the
saloon.

Shortly after midnight the men in the saloon were awakened by the
cracking of the roof ridge-pole