The destruction of the cultural and human foundations of the Southern Plains peoples was not achieved at the canyon — it was attempted through the reservation system, the boarding school system, the allotment policy, and the broader project of cultural assimilation that characterized federal Indian policy through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It was not achieved.

The people carried what they carried out of the canyon — the intangible things that bullets and fire could not destroy — and they built from those things the communities that exist today: the Comanche Nation, the Kiowa Tribe, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, and the other nations whose histories include September 28, 1874.

The 1,000 horses were shot.

The lodges and the food were burned.