The horse-based economy was gone.

The buffalo were gone.

The land was going.

The rations were inadequate.

The skills and knowledge that had produced prosperity on the open Plains — horse management, hide processing, tipi construction, buffalo hunting — were less applicable to the farming and ranching economy that reservation life was supposed to produce.

The populations declined.

Disease, poverty, and the psychological consequences of the transition from the open Plains to reservation confinement produced a demographic crisis that reduced Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne populations to small fractions of their pre-reservation numbers.

The people did not disappear.