Who Was Comanche Bill?

I learned about him in the book A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird.

This line caught my attention: 

His life has since been mainly devoted to a search for this child, and to killing Indians wherever he can find them.

She described Comanche Bill as "picturesque" - long hair, blue eyes, "dressed in a hunter's buckskin suit ornamented with beads", "a rifle laid across his saddle and a pair of pistols in the holsters", "a knife in his belt, and a carbine slung behind him". 

She met him in a trail going to Denver. They crossed together the South Park of Colorado - this place in my other blog - and the Continental Divide (probably through the old Breckenridge Pass, now known as Boreas Pass). 

After separating, a lady from a cabin told Isabella: 

"I am sure you found Comanche Bill a real gentleman."

The British writer then knew that she rode ten miles with: 

...one of the most notorious desperadoes of the Rocky Mountains, and the greatest Indian exterminator on the frontier—a man whose father and family fell in a massacre at Spirit Lake by the hands of Indians, who carried away his sister, then a child of eleven. His life has since been mainly devoted to a search for this child, and to killing Indians wherever he can find them.

That's all about Comanche Bill in this book.

I tried to find who the real guy was, but the info is scarce. The closest match was the frontier celebrity George W. Porter because he called himself Comanche Bill and gave interviews to some newspapers - a lot of self-promotion. 

Could it be that Isabella Bird did meet George W. Porter on that trail? 

I found a short interview published in the Sacramento Daily Union on August 30, 1871. The title was "An Indian Killer Interviewed". The piece matches parts of the tale from Isabella Bird. 

This is the description of Porter-Comanche Bill in the report: 

He is about 28 years of age, of slender build, sandy complexioned, with a profusion of hair that he wears long on the neck. His dress is a pair of buckskin pants, ornamented from the outer seams with a row of steel buttons, a coarse shirt, an old coat and a broad-brimmed hat. His eye is piercing keen,

Porter is quoted on the event of the massacre of his family: 

I was in the Minnesota massacre, near New Ulm, the 18th of August of that year. All my folks were killed except me and my little sister three years old, whom they took prisoner.

There are discrepancies between the two narratives: The age of the sister (eleven and three) and the place of the massacre of his family.

Porter refers probably to the massacre in Milford in 1862 - it's near New Ulm -, even if no surname Porter appears on the monument to the victims. Isabella Bird mentions in her book the Spirit Lake Massacre which happened in Iowa in 1857.

More curious yet: A year before Isabella Bird travelled to Colorado - in 1872 - a dime novel was published titled Comanche Bill, or Black Wolf's Scalp! written by Edward Sylvester Ellis. He was a prolific dime-novel writer at the time - many of his novels are free in Project Gutenberg. 

My guess is that the tale of Comanche Bill is one of the many myths of the old frontier loosely based in real events.

Extra Note: 

Another unlikely match based in the last name of George W. Porter leads to the Porter Family Massacre of 1863. 

A band of Comanches or Comanches and Kiowas attacked the Porter family homestead near the Red River - close to the present-day border of Oklahoma and Arkansas. The patriarch - Pendleton Porter -, his wife, a daughter, and a daughter in law were murdered by the Indians.  

Their son William Porter was wounded but survived with two small children of some George Porter who was Pendleton's son. 

Here we got the surname "Porter" and the name "George", but no sister taken captive by the Indians.