But those numbers tell only part of what happened on September 28.

Here is what the same marker records: Mackenzie’s force captured 1,400 horses.

He later destroyed about 1,000 of them.

He also ordered the camp and all its supplies burned.

Everything — the winter food supplies the families had spent months accumulating, the lodges that would shelter them through the cold season, the equipment, the weapons stocks, the dried meat and the processed hides and the tools of daily life — went up in flames.

Then the horses were driven approximately twenty miles from the canyon and shot.

The low body count on the battlefield was real.

The strategic devastation was also real.

This is the story of how a battle with relatively few recorded deaths became one of the decisive actions in the war that ended off-reservation life on the Southern Plains — and why the horses mattered more than any other single factor in that outcome.

Palo Duro Canyon And Why It Mattered

Palo Duro Canyon is one of the more dramatic geological features in Texas, which is not a state generally known for dramatic geological features.

The canyon sits in the Texas Panhandle, cut into the Staked Plains — the Llano Estacado — by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.

It runs for roughly 120 miles through Randall and Armstrong counties, and at its deepest point it drops approximately 800 feet below the surrounding plain.

The widest sections extend a mile or more across.