He could not prevent the slower recovery that happened over subsequent years and decades.

The horse culture of the Southern Plains peoples was not ended by a single operation, however comprehensive.

It was transformed by the cumulative pressures of reservation confinement, allotment, and the loss of the open range.

But it persisted in modified forms — in ranching, in rodeo, in traditional horsemanship — through the reservation period and into the present.

The horses that were shot on the Texas Panhandle plains in September 1874 cannot be replaced.

The culture they sustained cannot be fully restored.