WILLIAM AND HANNA OLDS
Very little is known about William and Hannah Olds. They operated a boardinghouse in Dodge City, before coming to Adobe Walls. They came as employees of the Charles Rath and Company store. William in poor health, was likely from Missouri. He worked as a clerk and Hannah as a cook. While she fed the company’s employees, Rath and Company also competed with the Meyers and Leonard store selling meals to the buffalo hunters and travelers coming and going from the trading post. A room in the northern part of the newly constructed sod store served as a restaurant, the kitchen holding Mrs. Olds’ stove and all necessary crock-ware and utensils for feed large amounts of people. A small room in the south corner, partitioned by curtains, served as a bedroom for the Olds. Mrs. Olds was the only woman who had come to the trading post as a paid employee and was a very close friend of Mrs. Rath.
All accounts of her mention that the men treated her with the utmost respect, always referring to her as “Mrs. Olds”. Some of the men even captured a young mustang colt that had become separated from its mother and had mingled with the stock belonging to the hunters. Too young to feed on grass, Hannah was raising the colt on bread and sugar. Named “Inez”, it had become the pet of the post, Hannah even sewing it a blanket out of flour sacks. Dixon had recalled of picking up an Indians war lance, after the Battle, as a trophy. Mrs. Olds asked for it and Billy gave it to her.
There was great concern for her during the Battle. Dixon’s accounts refer to her “as brave as the bravest… this pioneer woman was cool and composed and lent a helping hand in every emergency”. many report she spent the day reloading and handing guns to her husband.
In the days following the battle, the men stayed busy repairing and fortifying the builds, worried about a second attack. The had added lookout enclosures to the roofs of some of the buildings, accessible by ladders from inside the. Dixon explains a very sad turn of events:
” On the fifth day William Olds was stationed in the lookout on Rath’s store to watch for Indians while the other men were at work. The lookout on the other buildings shouted that “Indians were coming”, and all of us ran for our guns and for shelter inside the buildings. Just as I entered Rath’s store, I saw Olds coming down the ladder with his gun in his hand. A moment later his gun went off accidentally, tearing off the top of Old’s head. At the same instant Mrs. Olds rushed from an adjoining room-in time to see the body of her husband roll from the ladder and crumple at her feet, a torrent of blood gushing from the terrible wound. Olds died instantly. Gladly would I have faced all the Indians from the Cimarron to Red River, rather than have witnessed this terrible scene. It seem to me that it would have been better for any other man there to have been taken than the husband of the only woman among us. Her grief was intense and pitiable. A rough lot of men, such as we were, did not know how to comfort a woman in such distress. We did the best we could, and if we did it awkwardly, it should not be set down against us. Had we been called upon to fight for her, we would not have asked about the odds, but would have sailed in, both tooth and toe-nail. When we tried to speak to her we just choked up and stood still. We buried Olds that same evening, about sixty feet from the spot where he was killed, just southeast of Rath’s store.”
The Indians, twenty five or thirty of them, passed to the north of the fort, and may have not had intentions of attack. No other Indians were seen after this incident.
To add to the hunters tired dispositions and pity for Mrs. Olds, a major “disagreement” between the hunters occurred in Hanrahans saloon. Sometime after the battle, Bat Masterson had borrowed William Olds buffalo gun from Hannah. It was a better rifle than Bat was using, and everyone agreed it would be of better use in Bat’s hands. On the evening before their departure back to Dodge City, Mrs. Olds had sent word to Fred Leonard, asking him to recover the gun for her. Bat sent back word that he would keep it until the morning and return it at that time. This wasn’t agreeable with Mrs. Olds, so she sent a man named Brown to the Saloon to retrieve the rifle. Billy Dixon was in the Saloon that night, and reported the heated exchange this way:
“Brown made a few mistakes in his language in discussing the matter with Hanrahan the latter having said several times that he would be personally responsible for the gun and would guarantee that it was returned to Mrs.Olds. Brown crowded matters until Hanrahan grabbed him by the neck, shook him as a bulldog would a rabbit, and then threw Brown out of the saloon, saying ‘get out of my building you ———-! Hanrahan drew his gun and had Brown covered, ready to pull the trigger, which I believe he would have done, if several of us had not disarmed him, and then reasoned with him not to go any further, because if shooting began there was no telling what might happen, as both men had friends. Next morning Bat returned the gun to Mrs. Olds.
Not surprisingly, Frank Brown remembered the incident quite differently. According to him, he and Fred Leonard walked to the saloon, and asked Bat for the rifle. Bat simply replied “I have charge of this gun, you go on and attend your own business and I’ll attend to mine”. Brown interrupted Bat by asking “by what right do you claim this gun?” At that point the patrons at the bar turned on Brown and Leonard, striking Leonard and forcing him from the building. They then proceeded to giving Brown a thorough whipping in the corner of the Saloon and pushing him through a window. Brown returned through the same window, brandishing a pair of revolvers. Halfway back into the window, he encountered a buffalo gun pointed at his head, and was pushed back outside. For a couple of hours a standoff occurred, the Hanrahan-Masterson crew inside the Saloon and the Brown-Leonard party outside, shooting “every time anyone of Batt’s crowd stuck his head out.” In the end of Browns version of this story, the men inside finally “showed a white flag on the end of a gun barrel and surrendered Mrs. Olds rifle. “
Regardless of the version of the story , Billy Dixon’s words about the disagreement tell of a hard truth of the old west:
” The row spread ill feeling among a number of the men, and though blood that had been spilt in fighting for each other was scarcely dry on the ground, yet some were now ready to begin fighting each other. This was the way of the west in those times- every tub had to stand on its own bottom every minute of the day. It was the code that every able bodied man had to live by.”
The next morning must have made for an awkward setting, for Brown and two of his men joined with Hanrahan, Masterson and Dixon for the return trip to Dodge City.
Hannah Olds belongings were loaded into the Company’s wagon and she also returned to Dodge City with the group. No other historical records of Hannah Olds have been located, and the rest of her life is unknown.
