DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm passing it straight along to you. November 25, 1864. Right here.
That date sits on the land like a stone that doesn't move. Colonel Christopher Carson — Kit Carson, the man himself, born 1809 — rode out with a few companies of United States troops. Not a whole army, mind you.
A few companies. And they came to a place called Adobe Walls. Now the troops had something going for them: the protection of the Adobe Walls themselves.
That cover mattered, because on the other side of this fight was a band of hostile Kiowa and Comanche warriors. This was no skirmish between equal strangers passing in the dark. This was a battle, and the marker calls it exactly that — the Battle of Adobe Walls.
When the smoke cleared, more than sixty warriors had been killed. But here's the thing the marker wants you to sit with, the detail that gives this whole story its weight. Kit Carson had lived a life that could fill a hundred campfires.
Frontiersman, scout, soldier — the kind of man whose name traveled faster than he did. And on that November day in 1864, under the shadow of Adobe Walls, he fought his last fight. He died in 1868.
But this — right here — was where the fighting stopped for him. Some men's last chapters are quiet. Kit Carson's wasn't.
What the marker says
Was fought here November 25, 1864, when Colonel Christopher (Kit) Carson (1809-1868) with a few companies of United States troops under the protection of the Adobe Walls attacked a band of hostile Kiowa and Comanche Indians and killed over 60 braves. This was "Kit" Carson's last fight. Erected by the State of Texas 1936