Comstock and Grover found the village on Sunday, August 16. Accounts of its location vary, but according to the research of John S. Gray, it lay at the head of the Solomon River, about 25 miles north and east of Monument Station. Comstock and Grover made it to the chief’s lodge safely, but midway through negotiations, runners galloped into the village with news of the Benteen fight. Comstock and Grover left in a hurry.

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What happened next will never be known for certain. The official report from Fort Wallace, written by commanding officer Captain Henry C. Bankhead and dated August 19, states: “The Indians then drove Comstock and Grover out of camp, and when about two miles away were overtaken by a party of seven, who at first appeared friendly, and after riding along with them, fired into their backs, killing William Com-stock instantly. Grover remained hid [sic] in the grass during Monday—Monday night walked to the railroad, which he struck about seven miles east of Monument, and sent on to this post….”

In a letter to his father dated August 23, 1868, post surgeon Turner mentions having Grover under his care in the hospital, shot through the lung but with good prospects of recovery. Of Comstock’s death, Turner wrote: “I know of no one whose death would have produced so wide-felt an impression. He is certainly a great loss.”

There were those who suspected Grover of killing his partner to acquire his profitable ranch. “Apparently, that was the opinion of several of the officers at Fort Wallace,” John Adams Comstock noted in A History and Genealogy of the Comstock Family in America (privately printed in 1949). “There are some points in Grover’s account that do not seem possible.” For one, he observed, Grover had recovered enough from his reportedly grave wounds to lead Colonel George Forsyth’s scouting expedition against the hostile Indians just a few weeks later. (That campaign ended in the infamous Battle of Beecher Island, in which Beecher was killed.) And, he notes, Grover did indeed acquire the valuable Rose Creek Ranch following Comstock’s death.

There are other tantalizing accounts. In 1922 Frank Yellow Bull told an interviewer his father had been in the Cheyenne camp the night Comstock and Grover arrived. The two white men argued after leaving, Yellow Bull recounted, suggesting, “Maybe white man shoot white man.” Still, it’s hard to imagine Grover would shoot himself through the lung to escape suspicion. Forsyth did not think him guilty, writing later that men “not to be depended upon” had spread such ugly rumors. Furthermore, Grover did not take immediate ownership of Rose Creek but succeeded Comstock’s employee Frank Dixon after he, too, met a violent end. At any rate, his tenure on the ranch was brief. Grover was killed in a drunken saloon brawl in 1869. His assailant was not charged, alleging that he acted in self-defense.

There is one remaining question: What became of Comstock’s body? Early rumors said the Army had recovered the corpse and reburied it in the post cemetery. Certainly the family believed this. Wrote John Adams Comstock: “General [sic] Bankhead sent out a detachment to bring the body of Comstock into the post, and he was buried there. The grave was the third one south of the northeast corner of the post cemetery.” Only it isn’t. Jayne Humphrey Pearce, president of the Fort Wallace Memorial Association, says there is no record of Comstock having been buried in the post cemetery.

Pearce, who lives in Wallace, maintains an archive of letters and manuscripts written by residents and Kansas historians who have sought Comstock’s final resting place. The documents are puzzling for a reader not intimately familiar with the terrain; some are incomplete, many composed by men who have since joined the scout in the world beyond, but they tell an interesting tale. In one document, written after 1950, longtime area resident Frank Madigan describes a conversation he had with Charles Carmack, a former Fort Wallace ambulance driver, in which Carmack says he buried Comstock’s body on the north bank of the Smoky Hill River, about 300 yards north of Hell Creek. Carmack, who must have been a very old man at the time, died before he could take Madigan to the spot, but Madigan noted several graves in the area, “one in particular that has been covered with rocks, as was described to me by Carmack.”

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