Military service did not erase discrimination, but it gave many Native veterans experience, confidence, and an expectation that they deserved respect at home after serving abroad.

That pattern appeared in Native communities across the United States after both world wars.

Veterans returned from military service unwilling to accept the same limits that had governed life before they left.

Hayes Pond was not organized as a veterans’ action, and reducing it to military experience would be misleading.

But the presence of veterans helps explain why the Klan’s assumptions about passivity were so badly wrong.

The crowd included men familiar with weapons, discipline, and collective action.

The Klan brought theater to a community that included people who had experienced actual war.

The contrast became almost symbolic in the photographs afterward.

The robe was costume.

The confidence of the men holding it was not.