The Red River War ended on June 2, 1875, when the Quahadi band of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ, the Comanche, surrendered at Fort Sill under Quanah Parker. The war and the hide hunters, whom the Army did not keep off tribal lands, had brought the virtual extinction of the southern buffalo herd. Two years later the Llano Estacado was not quiet. Some Nʉmʉnʉʉ had left the reservation in the winter of 1876-77 and were raiding hunting parties and taking stock. The hunters wanted their horses back, and the Army wanted the people back at Fort Sill.
Dry camps
In July 1877 Capt. Nicholas Nolan rode out of Fort Concho, headquarters of the Tenth Cavalry, with about sixty Black troopers of Company A, who served under white officers. Mid-month, on Bull Creek, they met some two dozen hunters led by James Harvey, and together they made a base at Double Lakes. It was a drought year. Water holes were dry, and at Double Lakes the men had to dig for water. On July 18 Quanah Parker, by then living on the reservation, rode into the camp and told them the people they wanted were at Mustang Springs. Historians have asked whether he was steering the column away while he went to persuade the band to give up. It did return to the reservation.
Eighty-six hours
On July 26 Nolan, Lt. C. S. Cooper, forty enlisted men and twenty-two hunters set off from the lakes. By the next day the trails had scattered. Nolan's men found no Nʉmʉnʉʉ and fired no shot. On July 28 Nolan turned back, and the hunters struck southwest and found water at the site of Lubbock. The soldiers had none. They drank their own urine mixed with sugar and the blood of a killed horse, and the survivors reached Double Lakes on July 30, eighty-six hours after their last water. Four men died: Privates John H. Bonds, Isaac Derwin, John Isaacs and John T. Gordon, who had all enlisted in the previous year. The command also lost about twenty-five horses and four mules.
The court-martial
Before Nolan was back, the story had gone ahead of him. First Sgt. William Umbles, demoted on July 25, had left the column on the night of July 27 with a few men, saying they were looking for water. On August 3 he reached Fort Concho and reported Company A lost. Eastern newspapers called it a massacre, and the affair became known as the Staked Plains Horror. Nolan reached the fort on August 14. Umbles and three others were tried for desertion, found guilty, dishonorably discharged and sent to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth. Nolan's own report went without official commendation, though the press praised him.
The four privates have their names on the Texas Historical Commission marker in Morton Memorial Cemetery, the Buffalo Soldier Tragedy of 1877. The hunters found their water where Lubbock now stands. In Yellow House Draw, Lubbock Lake Landmark is a place to see why: its springs ran until the early 1930s, and the trails there are free to walk.