Early Life
Dixon was born in Ohio County, West Virginia on September 25, 1850. Of European and Native American ancestry he was orphaned at age 12 and lived with an uncle in Missouri for a year before setting out on his own. He worked in woodcutters' camps along the Missouri River until he started working at age 14 as an oxen driver and a mule skinner for a government contractor in Leavenworth, Kansas.
He was a skilled marksman and occasionally scouted for Eastern excursionists brought by the railroads. In 1869, he joined a venture in hunting and trapping on the Saline River northwest of Fort Hays in Kansas.
He scouted Texas as far south as the Salt Fork of the Red River when the buffalo hunters moved into the Texas Panhandle in 1874. He and his group hunted along the Canadian River and its tributaries.
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