But the people who kept horses through everything that followed — the people who maintained the relationship between nimíipuu and horse, between Comanche and horse, between Kiowa and horse, through all the years of pressure and loss — are the proof that destroying the material conditions of a culture is not the same as destroying the culture.

Palo Duro Canyon stands in its geology as it always has: red walls, canyon floor, the Prairie Dog Town Fork running north.

The battle happened there.

The horses were taken there.

The camps were burned there.

The people are still here.

That is what the marker records and what the canyon holds: the memory of a battle that mattered not because of how many people died, but because of what was destroyed and what survived.

The cavalry captured 1,400 horses.

About 1,000 were later destroyed.

The people drifted back to their reservations.

And then they kept going.

They are still going.