The Life of "Billy" Dixon is a compelling narrative of the "wild, free life" on the Great Plains frontier. We ride with Billy Dixon to a high point on the plains and look out over a nearly solid mass of buffalo that stretches in every direction as far as the eye can see. We stand with Billy Dixon at Adobe Walls, in the unsettled Texas Panhandle, as hundreds of Comanche, Kowa and Cheyenne warriors on horseback charge out of the pre-dawn darkness toward a few dozen buffalo hunters.
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William "Billy" Dixon scouted the Texas Panhandle for the Army, hunted buffalo for the train companies, defended the Adobe Walls settlement against Indian attack with his legendary buffalo rifle, and was one of eight civilians in the history of the U.S. to receive the Medal of Honor. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
In the spring of 1874 a handful of men and one women set out for the Texas Panhandle to seek their fortunes in the great buffalo hunt. Moving south to follow the herds, they intended to establish a trading post to serve the hunter, or "hide men." At a place called Adobe Walls they dug blocks from the sod and built their center of operations After operating for only a few months, the post was attacked one sultry June morning by angry members of several Plains Indian tribes, whose physical and cultural survival depending on the great bison herd that were rapidly shrinking before the white men's guns. Initially defeated, that attacking Indians retreated. But the defenders also retreated leaving the deserted post to be burned by Indians intent on erasing all traces of the white man's presence. Nonetheless, tracing did remain, and in the ashes and dirt were buried minute details of the hide men's lives and the battle that so suddenly changed them. A little more than a century later white men again dug into the sod at Adobe Walls. The nineteenth-century men dug for profits, but the modern hunters sere looking for the natural time capsule inadvertently left by those earlier adventurers. The authors of this book, a historian and an archeologists, have dug into the sod and into far-flung archives to sift reality form the long-romanticized story of Adobe Walls, its residents, and the Indians who so fiercely resented their presence. The full story of Adobe Walls now tells us much about the life and work of the hide men, about the dying of the Plains Indian culture, and about the march of white commerce across the frontier.
Precocious, spirited, bored, and outspoken, sixteen year old Elucia (Lucy) Grey Alexis Howard, is both out-of-place in and a prisoner of her wealthy life amongst the highest of New York’s social elite and her father’s ambitious pursuit of greater prosperity. Sent out west in 1877 to Lincoln County, New Mexico, to marry her pre-contracted fiancé, John H. Tunstall, Lucy is inconsolable at the prospect of a loveless marriage when she meets and falls in love with pistoleer, Billy Bonney, a young, vivacious firebrand hired by John to work his land and provide protection from the dangers posed by John’s nefarious competitor, J. J. Dolan and the entire Santa Fe Ring. When John pays the ultimate price and is murdered, refusing to succumb to the opposition and intimidation of his rivals, Lucy’s own life is then in jeopardy. As a result of John’s death, Billy and the other men working in John’s employment are deputized to combat the tyranny of Dolan and the Ring. Fearing for Lucy, the newly deputized Lincoln County Regulators take her into their protective guard and into the hellfire of what becomes known as the Lincoln County War, the catalyst that inspires Lucy to wage her own personal war for freedom from her oppressive life and a desperate attempt to stay close to the man she loves, the boy about to become known to history as the incendiary notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid. Includes Readers Guide.
Billy Crawford is a blond, eighteen-year-old surfer from Southern California, working in Fiji as a surfing instructor. But when he gets fired for leading his students into some dangerous surf, his endless summer seems to be over, and he decides that it's time to get a real job. He comes across a tuna clipper called Lucky Dragon whose crew is short a boatman, and the first mate offers him a job. What Billy doesn't know is that the clipper finds tuna by following dolphins. When Lucky Dragon sets its net for the first time, Billy witnesses a harrowing sight???dolphins being killed by the Dragon's money-hungry pirates. When he attempts to save a dolphin who is caught in the tuna net, the Dragon's captain tosses Billy and his belongings???including his surfboard???into the ocean and leaves.
Bob Ross writes with an authenticity as poetic and unforgiving as the Nebraska Sandhills themselves. The nine connected stories Billy Above the Roofs paint an indelible portrait of the life and times of one Billy Dixon in an era on the Great Plains not entirely bygone. From the first line of the prologue, "After Billy Dixon's hilltop suicide," which takes place as "the sun's flat chin still rested on the horizon," to the end of this remarkable book, we follow the protagonist to his death in the company of lovers and the inhabitants of Turtle Lodge, Nebraska, on a bluff overlooking the endless lands of the past.
The New York Times bestselling author of Silver City brings history to life as Cash McLendon takes refuge in Dodge City and falls in with some of the most famous men in the American West... After barely escaping nemesis Killer Boots in the tiny Arizona Territory town of Glorious, Cash McLendon is in desperate need of a safe haven somewhere on the frontier. Fleeing to Dodge City, he meets an intrepid band of buffalo hunters determined to head south to forbidden Indian Territory in the Texas panhandle. In the company of such colorful Western legends as Bat Masterson and Billy Dixon, Cash helps establish a hunting camp known as Adobe Walls. When a massive migration of buffalo arrives, and newly hopeful that he may yet patch things up with Gabrielle Tirrito back in Arizona, Cash thinks his luck has finally changed. But no good can come of entering the prohibited lands they’ve crossed into. Little do Cash and his fellows know that their camp is targeted by a new coalition of the finest warriors among the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa. Led by fierce Comanche war chief Quanah and eerie tribal mystic Isatai, an enormous force of 2,000 is about to descend on the camp and will mark one of the fiercest, bloodiest battles in frontier history. Cash McLendon is in another fight for his life, and this time, running is not an option...
The buffalo brought them west: frontiersmen like Billy Dixon, who made his living with a long-barreled rifle, and businessmen like George Eddy, who balanced the books for a frontier trading company.
