First Battle of Adobe Walls

The village Carson struck belonged to Dohäsan, Little Mountain, principal chief of the Kiowa from 1833, a people organized today as the Kiowa Tribe. The Handbook of Texas says he signed the Fort Gibson Treaty in 1837, sat for Lt. James W. Abert's watercolor on the Canadian in 1845 and was given an old army ambulance wagon in 1859, which he rode with boys on the horses. At Adobe Walls he escaped to warn other camps but lost his horse and the wagon. He signed the Little Arkansas Treaty in 1865 and died in 1866.

What the plaque says

(November 25, 1865) Largest Indian battle in Civil War. 15 miles east, at ruins of Bent's Old Fort, on the Canadian. 3,000 Comanches and Kiowas, allies of the South, met 372 Federals under Col. Kit Carson, famous scout and mountain man. Though Carson made a brilliant defense - called greatest fight of his career - the Indians won. Some of the same Indians lost in 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls, though they outnumbered 700 to 29 the buffalo hunters whose victory helped open the Panhandle to settlement. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hutchinson County Museum — 16 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 19 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 26 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.

More markers nearby

• Gulf Dial #1 Oil Well — 7.0 mi
• Plemons Cemetery — 10 mi
• Bents Creek — 10 mi
• Fifteen miles to the Site of the Battle of Adobe Walls — 10 mi