What they saw was the winter.

The lodges, the food, the horses — these were not abstractions.

They were the specific material conditions on which survival through the coming months depended.

Every family who watched the smoke from the canyon floor understood exactly what was burning, and exactly what it meant for the months ahead.

The psychological impact of this — of watching everything that had been prepared through the summer go up in smoke — is not something that the military record captures.

It is something that the oral histories and the cultural memories of the nations whose ancestors were at Palo Duro Canyon carry in ways that historical markers cannot.