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 archaeology 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.
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. They battled the soldiers only long enough to allow their families to escape the Panhandle. We find the fact behind the theory. 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.