The campaign’s design was explicitly about ending off-reservation resistance by destroying the material conditions for it, not about killing as many people as possible.

The families were allowed to escape the canyon rather than pursued and engaged.

The warriors on the canyon walls were firing into positions they knew were only loosely held, and the Army did not mount a full pursuit that would have engaged those warriors directly.

The Army of the 1870s operated within specific legal and cultural frameworks about what was acceptable in military operations against civilian populations.

The deliberate targeting of non-combatants — of women, children, and elderly people — was not explicitly authorized and was understood to be, at minimum, politically problematic.