The families who escaped the burning of the camp — who watched, from wherever they had fled to, the smoke of their winter supplies rising from the canyon floor — were not defeated.

They were dispossessed.

The distinction matters.

Defeated means the enemy has overcome your capacity to fight.

The Southern Plains peoples were not defeated at Palo Duro Canyon.

Their capacity to fight was still real, as subsequent events in the Red River War demonstrated — skirmishes and engagements continued through the fall and winter of 1874-1875.

What was eliminated at Palo Duro was not the capacity to fight, but the capacity to sustain the conditions of life from which fighting emerged.

The families who came to the agencies in the months after Palo Duro were coming not because they had lost the will to resist, but because the material conditions of resistance had been systematically destroyed and the prospect of another winter without shelter, food, or adequate horses was more immediately deadly than the prospect of reservation confinement.