P.O. Box 1460
Fritch, TX 79036
(806) 857-3151

For thousands of years, people came to the red bluffs above the Canadian River. They came for flint so vital to their existence. Prehistoric people needed good raw material for tools and weapons and Alibates Flint was some of the finest. Demand for the highquality, rainbow-hued flint is reflected in the distribution of Alibates Flint through the Great Plains. Paleo-indians first discovered the colorful flint and used it for spear points. Nomadic groups of Paleo-indians roamed the Plains from 10,000 to 6000 B.C. hunting large game animals such as a mammoth, camel, bison, and horses. Points and tools of Alibates Flint found with the skeletal remains of these extinct animals represent several Paleo-indian types. Perhaps these people sought the variegated flint as much for its beauty as its utilitarian properties. Painstaking care went into many of their weapon tips; much more care than was necessary to produce a functional point.

The extinction of some of the large game animals signaled the beginning of the Archaic Period, a time when people hunted animal species existing today and gathered wild plant foods as a supplement. Hunting and gathering in this area from about 6000 B.C. to A.D. 1, they continued to use the colorful flint, and many of their chipping workshops are located on the hilltops overlooking the Canadian River. The use of Alibates Flint continued throughout the Woodland Period, A.D. 1 to 1000, as this tradition spread from the east, up the Arkansas and Canadian Rivers, bringing such ideas as farming and pottery making into this region. The Plains Village tradition, which followed, was a blend of Mississippian influences from the east with indigenous Woodland traditions.

During the period A.D. 1000 to 1500, a sedentary agricultural group (Antelope Creek Focus) built stone and adobe villages here and in other parts of the Texas Panhandle. They too made tools of the rainbow-hued flint and traded it for Pacific Coast seashell, Minnesota pipestone, painted pottery from the Southwest Pueblos, and other items. Ideas were exchanged as well, and the villagers began to build multiroomed houses, an idea adopted from the Puebloan Indians of New Mexico.

After 1450, Apache Indians began to replace sedentary farmers in the Texas Panhandle. In the Historic Period, beginning with Coronado's trek into Kansas to Quivira in 1541 several tribes of nomadic Indians dominated the area until the U.S. Army opened the door to settlers in 1874. One of these pioneers, a man named Allie Bates, worked near the flint quarries on a cottonwood- shaded creek, later named for him.

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