Artifacts Cast New Light on Texas Indian Wars

Capt. Wyllys Lyman watched blood trickle between his fingers as he choked on dusty air. Gathering ammunition and courage, he loaded his pistol and peered around the circled wagons.

Arrows whizzed past his head, confirming his fear: Lyman and his men were surrounded by Comanches. Were the Indians too smart to waste ammunition on men already dead?

The Comanches understood how easily the merciless Texas plains could conquer the soldiers. If trapped, Lyman’s men would surely die in terrain so tough that one soldier described it as “not only . . . a bad place to die, it wasn’t even a good place to be buried.”

Horse flies and thorn bushes tore at Lyman’s resolve. After a few days, he and his men resorted to drinking the water out of tomato cans. When all seemed lost, the soldiers charged their enemies--and lived.

But not because they defeated the Indians. The Comanches had disappeared without a trace.

Over the last several months, archeologist Patricia Mercado Allinger and her team have pieced together that scenario--and more battles in the last war to drive Indians from the Texas Panhandle than any researchers in the last 50 years.

“You have to play detective,” Allinger says, sweeping her metal detector from side to side. “You can use the artifacts and their location to determine the framework of a particular battle.”

Allinger, who works for the Texas Historical Commission, reconstructed Lyman’s experience by meshing others’ written accounts and her findings: the recovered remains of wagons, bloody arrowheads, tomato cans and bullet casings. A soldier who heard about the battle from Lyman documented the soldiers’ suffering in the heat.

About two years ago, Allinger began collecting artifacts and documenting the Red River Indian War against the Comanches, Cheyenne and Arapahos. The war began in 1874 after an Indian raid on a U.S. trading post left three men dead. It lasted about a year.

Because the state cannot afford a full staff of professionals, Allinger assembled a team that included a small-town museum curator, a couple of archeology students looking for adventure and field experience, and a historian who had never before wielded a metal detector.

Five days a week, they jump over ditches and dodge cactus in the Caprock Canyons. Moments after one of them chops off a rattlesnake’s head with a shovel, another locates a treasure trove of artifacts--buttons, arrowheads, gun cartridges. Cheers erupt as the team grabs flags, shovels and a map to mark a site of combat.

Every site bolsters Allinger’s belief that historians mistakenly accepted soldiers’ accounts that the Indians were the aggressors and that the United States merely wanted to push the Indians onto Oklahoma reservation territory.

With guesswork about the site of the Lyman ambush, Allinger suspects that the Indians knew they were outmatched: sophisticated weaponry vs. rudimentary guns and bows and arrows. They battled the soldiers only long enough to allow their families to escape the Panhandle.

“We find the fact behind the theory. When those facts don’t match the theory, it’s time for a new theory,” Allinger says.

After the Indian raid, military units gathered from Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas in February 1874. Almost two dozen battles, including Lyman’s, took place in the canyons in the following months.

Allinger’s work has revealed that much of the combat involved running battles, with one of the forces in constant retreat.

“The Indians knew the canyons like the backs of their hands, while the soldiers had only the vaguest idea of where they were,” Allinger says. “The Indians retreated into rough areas in many of the battles.”

But the soldiers apparently had high-powered weapons: the Perrot Rifle, which historians call the “grenade launcher of the late 1800s”--and at least two Gatling guns, history’s first rapid-fire, bunker-style weapon.

“We’ve found things we just never expected,” says Rolla Shaller, assistant curator of archeology at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon. “It’s kind of silly to think that the Indians could have seen the Gatling gun and still felt like they had a chance to win.”

The Indians did have firearms, Allinger says, but limited ammunition. “Could you imagine, fighting against soldiers with a Gatling gun when all you have is a bow with arrows?”

Allinger also found evidence of huge camps of Indian women and children--documented by toys, sewing materials, cooking utensils. They apparently moved in groups a few miles from skirmishes led by Col. Nelson Miles.

The Indians surrendered in June 1875, ending the war.

“If it was a victory for Miles, it was a hollow victory,” Allinger says. “The entire number of women and children escaped northward. Miles and his troops never did catch up to them.”

Thomas Hester, a professor of archeology at the University of Texas, says Allinger’s challenges to conventional wisdom have drawn attention.

“As an archeologist, you dream about the chance to uncover unknown facts that change or reshape the way an event is looked upon,” Hester says. “Allinger is definitely doing that.”

That doesn’t surprise Susan Kurranah, one of the last living relatives of Comanche Chief Quanah Parker.

“Among the Indians, the story has always been told in a way that showed there wasn’t any intention of fighting a war,” she says. “If this means that the history books are going to finally get it right, then I’m happy.”