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

Over the last several months, state archaeologist
Patricia Mercado Allinger and her team pieced together more battles surrounding
the last war to move the Comanches, Cheyenne and Arapahos from the Texas
Panhandle than any researchers in the last 50 years.

"It's kind of like 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's reconstruction of Lyman's near-death
experience is an amalgamation of written accounts and her own findings
- the recovered remains of wagons, bloody arrowheads, tomato cans and bullet
casings. A soldier who documented the battle after hearing about it from
Lyman highlighted the soldiers' suffering in the heat and the Indians'
sudden, inexplicable withdrawal, eventhough they had superior numbers
and position.

Allinger, who works for the Texas Historical
Commission, was charged almost two years ago with collecting artifacts
and documenting battles in what's known as the Red River Indian War. The
war, which began in 1874 after an Indian raid on a U.S. trading post left
three men dead, lasted about a year.

Because the state agency cannot afford a full
staff of professionals, Allinger assembled a team of makeshift archaeologists:
a small-town museum curator, a couple of archaeology students looking for
hard-to-find field experience and harder-to-find adventure, and a historian
who had never before wielded a metal detector.

Five days a week, the team jumps over ditches
and dodges cactus in the rough terrain of the Caprock Canyons. Moments
after one of them chops off a rattlesnake's head with a shovel, another
locates a treasure trove