The 1,400 horses captured and the 1,000 subsequently destroyed represented the mobility, the hunting capacity, the military capability, the stored wealth, and the escape mechanism of an entire population.

The burning of the lodges and the food stores represented the elimination of winter shelter and the accumulated labor of a season’s food preparation.

The battle at Palo Duro Canyon was not, in the first instance, a killing event.

It was a strategic destruction operation, executed against the material foundations of off-reservation life on the Southern Plains.

The four recorded dead — and the zero cavalry casualties — are accurate numbers.

They are also incomplete as a description of what happened on September 28, 1874, and in the months that followed.