New Mexico historian Sherry Robinson doubts that the nine-day battle actually occurred. "The hatred was real but probably not the battle. The teller of this tale, decades after it allegedly occurred, was the Apache-hating Texas Governor Domingo Cabello y Robles. Lipan anthropologist Enrique Maestas dismisses the story as folklore or one of many battles between Apaches and Comanches. Anthropologist Morris Opler wrote that 'authenticated nine-day battles between tribes are not too common in American Indian annals. Yet this bit of recorded hearsay — far removed in time and space from the putative event— has been cited with all earnestness again and again.'"