Billy and Olive Dixon: The Plainsman and His Lady by Bill O’Neal

Abstract

Reviewed by: Billy and Olive Dixon: The Plainsman and His Lady by Bill O’Neal Chuck Parsons Billy and Olive Dixon: The Plainsman and His Lady. By Bill O’Neal. (Fort Worth: Eakin Press, 2019. Pp. 259. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) The names of Billy and Olive Dixon are household words in the Texas Panhandle, just as they should be. At the Battle of Adobe Walls in 1874 Dixon made a remarkable shot with his Sharps “Big Fifty” rifle, shooting a Comanche nearly three-quarters of a mile away. Dixon later claimed it was a “scratch shot” made with a borrowed Sharps, not with his regular weapon. Certainly an element of luck played into it, but two months later Dixon and other hunters were trapped in a buffalo wallow, surrounded by Comanche, again fighting for their lives. Dixon’s actions in this latter engagement earned him the Medal of Honor. The book is written from reliable sources. Dixon himself composed his autobiography; Olive Dixon wrote many articles and other materials that provided additional information about him and his contemporaries. In addition, John L. McCarty wrote a biography of Olive entitled Adobe Walls Bride (Naylor, 1955). Much of the other material O’Neal used is housed in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, a valuable resource for any historian dealing with Texas and the American Southwest. A lesser historian would have found these materials sufficient, but O’Neal, a modern historianus herbidus (202), visited the ground where his subjects walked. He not only spent a day at Adobe Walls battleground but also visited most of the museums in the Panhandle counties, and he also created many of the illustrations in Billy and Olive Dixon. Billy Dixon himself may have felt most comfortable on the buffalo range. That he ever married is probably due to Olive King’s influence, because Billy was shy when meeting a woman. He would have remained a [End Page 473] bachelor if not for the “adventurous young schoolmarm” (1) who had left Virginia to visit her cowboy brother in the Panhandle. She fell in love with the land, and when her brother’s sod house became crowded due to her newborn nephew, she contemplated returning to Virginia. Fortunately for history she obtained a teaching position in a school south of the Canadian River. Billy Dixon lived five miles away and the two met in late 1893 through one of Olive’s friends. They were married in late 1894; he was forty-five, she was twenty-one. O’Neal’s dual biography is the first solid work on Dixon in more than fifty years. It is as much a biography of the buffalo hunter as a study of how two people lived on one of the last North American frontiers. As Billy Dixon started to suffer from his years outdoors in severe weather, the couple began to work on his autobiography. After his death in 1913, she continued the work and eventually had manuscripts all over the house. Olive Dixon collected interviews with old-timers and provided much valuable material to the fledgling museum in Canyon, today the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. Readers will appreciate not only Billy and Olive Dixon as a fine love story, but also as background for the founding and growth of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, which continues to offer assistance to historians. Chuck Parsons Luling, Texas Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association