Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

by S.C. Gwynne

What happened next—seventy-five Penateka Comanches on fifteen Rangers, arrows and lances against repeating pistols—sounds like pure bloody pandemonium. Several Rangers were badly wounded. Their pistols, meanwhile, were dropping Indians from the saddle at an alarming rate. This stage of the fight lasted fifteen minutes. Then the Indians broke and fled. It became a running fight, and went for more than an hour on over two miles of rough terrain. Urged on by their heroic chief, the Indians kept rallying, regrouping, and attacking, only to be overwhelmed by the Rangers’ fire-spitting Colt revolvers. Forty Indians were now dead or wounded. One Ranger was dead and four were wounded. Still, the fight went on, as the Indian leader rallied his men again and again. Then, as though to illustrate the five-shooter’s main weakness, Hays’s men ran out of ammunition. More precisely, they had run out of preloaded cylinders, which could not be reloaded in the field, and no one had anything but five-shooters. They were now at the mercy of the thirty-five remaining Indians. Or at least they would be when the Indians figured out their ammunition had run out. Hays then coolly called out to see if anyone had any bullets left. One man, Robert Gillespie, rode forward and said he did. “Dismount and shoot the chief,” ordered Hays. This Gillespie did: At a range of “thirty steps” he dropped the chief from his saddle. The remaining Indians “in wild affright at the loss of their leader . . . scattered ...