This distinction matters because it shapes what the destruction of those resources actually meant.

If the camps had been chance campsites — places where people stopped briefly as they moved across the Plains — the burning of whatever happened to be there would have been less consequential.

People moving across the Plains carried essential items with them; temporary camps might have relatively little of value.

But the Palo Duro camps were winter camps — permanent camps chosen for the season, designed to shelter large populations through the cold months, and stocked with the food and materials needed for that purpose.

The families had been in the canyon since early summer, and the summer and early fall had been devoted to the intensive food preparation — buffalo hunting, meat drying, hide processing — that winter survival required.