"Adobe Walls was scarcely more than a lone island in the vast sea of the Great Plains, a solitary refuge uncharted and practically unknown.

[1]: 145 and 153  In June 1874 (ten years after the first battle) a group of enterprising businessmen had set up two stores near the ruins of the old trading post in an effort to rekindle the town of Adobe Walls.

The complex quickly grew to include a store and corral (Leonard & Meyers), a sod saloon owned by James Hanrahan, a blacksmith shop (Tom O'Keefe) and a sod store used to purchase buffalo hides (Rath & Wright, operated by Langton),[1]: 176 and 178  all of which served the population of 200-300 buffalo hunters in the area.

[1]: 186  "The story of the Indian depredations had spread to all the hunting camps, and a large crowd had gathered in from the surrounding country" at the "Walls".

[1]: 192–193 The remaining free-ranging Southern Plains bands (Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa and Arapaho) perceived the post and the buffalo hunting as a major threat to their existence.

The party encountered a band of Cheyenne on June 26 at Sharp's Creek, 75 miles southwest of Dodge City, who ran off all of their cattle.

The reason for his action was that he knew about the attack in advance but did not tell anyone, afraid that men would leave the camp, hurting his business.

Thus, most of the inhabitants were already wide awake and up at dawn when a combined force of Comanche, Cheyenne and Kiowa warriors swept across the plains, intent on erasing the populace of Adobe Walls.

Hundreds of warriors, the flower of the fighting men of the southwestern Plains tribes, mounted upon their finest horses, armed with guns and lances, and carrying heavy shields of thick buffalo hide, were coming like the wind.

[1]: 207 The hunters suffered four fatalities, three on the first day: the two Shadler brothers asleep in a wagon[1]: 208  were killed in the initial onslaught, and Billy Tyler was shot through the lungs as he entered the doorway of a building while retreating from the stockade.

[1]: 230  George Bellfield's outfit made it to the Walls, as did Jim and Bob Cator, while Henry Lease volunteered to ride to Dodge City while two hunters visited the surrounding camps to warn them that "the Indians were on the war path".

At the behest of one of the hunters, Dixon, renowned as a crack shot, took aim with a rifle that he had borrowed from Hanrahan and cleanly dropped a warrior from atop his horse.

[1]: 244 and 247 By August a troop of cavalry made it to Adobe Walls, under Lt. Frank D. Baldwin, with Masterson and Dixon as scouts, where a dozen men were still holed up.

In September, just three months after Adobe Walls, an army dispatch detail consisting of Dixon, scout Amos Chapman, and four troopers from the 6th Cavalry were surrounded and besieged by a large combined band of Kiowas and Comanches.

An extremely cold rainstorm that night discouraged the Indians, and they broke off the fight; every man in the detail was wounded and one trooper killed.

This fight is historically significant because it led to the Red River War of 1874–75, resulting in the final relocation of the Southern Plains Indians to reservations in what is now Oklahoma.