The solution was scouts: specifically, the Tonkawa scouts and Black Seminole Scouts who had the tracking skills and the terrain knowledge to find what the Army’s maps could not locate.

The Tonkawa chief Johnson, who guided Mackenzie to Palo Duro, provided the human intelligence that the Army’s own resources could not generate.

This dependence on Indigenous scouts — people with their own histories, their own motivations, and their own understandings of what they were doing — was characteristic of Army operations on the Southern Plains throughout the Indian War period.

The Army could not operate effectively in this terrain without Indigenous assistance, and the assistance it received was provided by peoples who had their own reasons for participating.

The Tonkawa had been reduced to a small, vulnerable community partly through Comanche pressure.