Were there really two Battles at Adobe Walls, Texas, and what role if any did famous "mountain man" Kit Carson have in the first, less publicized, of these battles? The summer of 1864 will long be remembered by plains people as a season when the Comanche, the Kiowa, the Arapahoe, the Cheyenne, and the Plain Apache held high carnival on our western plains making numerous attacks on white settlements. In the month of October, 1864, General James H. Carleton, then commanding the Department of New Mexico, believing that the Comanches and Kiowas might be found, on the south side of the Canadian river, in winter quarters, issued a general order, directing an expedition against these Indians. The command included Colonel Christopher Carson commander of the First New Mexico Cavalry. On November 10, 1864, Carson started from Fort Bascom with 260 cavalry, 75 infantry and 72 Ute and Jicarilla Apache scouts that he had recruited from Lucien Maxwell's ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico. Approximately two hours after daybreak on November 25, Carson's cavalry found and attacked a Kiowa village of 176 lodges. The Chief, Dohäsan, and his people fled, passing the alarm to allied Comanche villages nearby; Guipago led the warriors. Marching forward to Adobe Walls, four miles from the Kiowa village, Carson dug in there. In 1878 eyewitness and participant in the Adobe Walls battle Captain George H. Pettis (born 1834) published a 20 page narrative of the battle titled "Kit Carson's Fight With the Comanche and Kiowa Indians."

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