The First Battle of Adobe Walls was the largest Indian battle in the Civil War. Fifteen miles east, at the 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, the famous scout and mountain man. Although Carson made a brilliant defense, called the greatest fight of his career, the Indians won. Some of the same Indians later lost in the 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls, though they outnumbered 700 to 29 the buffalo hunters whose victory helped open the Panhandle to settlement.
