Capt. N.M. Gillentine led a patrol detachment of twenty men from Maj. Geroge B.Erath's headquarters of the 2nd Frontier Regiment of Texas State Troops in Erath County to a location northwest of what is now the town of Albany in Shackelford County. The patrol came across a fresh Indian trail made by what the men thought was a small raiding party of Comanches. Capt. Gillentine immediately sent a rider back to Stephenville to inform the Maj. Erath of the movement of a band of hostile Comanches across the west Texas frontier and requested additional troops. After sending the dipatch rider to Maj. Erath, Capt. Gillentine and his men continued to examine the Indian trial and found it was 1/2 mile wide with hundreds of recently abandoned Indian shelters at approximately twenty mile intervals.

Maj. Erath was in Austin when the rider arrived at his headquarters in Stephenville,Texas. Not knowing they were peaceful Kickapoo Indians from a Kansas reservation and unaware of the emense size of the Indian migration, Capt. S.S. Totten took the message for Maj. Erath and immediately raised two companies of about 200 Texas State Troops. Capt.Totten's 200 Texas militia troops, Capt. Gillentine's 20 man patrol and Capt. Henry S. Fossett's 160 man company of Confederate troops from Camp Colorado arrived at different times at Dove Creek on the Tankersley Ranch and were not coordinated into a single fighting unit. Capt.Fossett's men killed two Kickapoos boys who were hunting game and one boy escaped with the help of Brooks Lee. The boy alerted over 1,500 heavily armed Kickapoo Indians in their camp on the Tankersley Ranch. The individual units of Cofederate troops and State Troops fought in skirmishes along Dove Creek over a period of five days. The Kickapoo warriors were armed with Springfield rifles instead of bows and arrows and the Texans finally retreated through a blinding snow storm on January 8,1865.

The descendants of the same band of Kickapoo Indians at the Battle of Dove Creek live in Mexico today.