The variation in these numbers likely reflects the difficulty of exact counting in a chaotic military operation, the passage of time between the event and the writing of various accounts, and the question of how to categorize horses that were captured versus horses that fled with families versus horses that were later recovered.

The Texas Historical Commission marker, as the official state historical record, gives 1,400 captured and 1,000 destroyed.

The TSHA account references “1,424 horses and mules” — a figure that suggests someone counted carefully at some point and got a slightly different total.

What is consistent across the sources is the scale: somewhere between 1,100 and 1,400 horses were taken from the canyon, and roughly 1,000 were subsequently shot.

To understand why this was decisive, you have to understand what horses actually meant on the Southern Plains in 1874.