It was a situation that produced individual and family-level decisions about how to survive.

The autumn of the Southern Plains is not immediately brutal — temperatures in October can still be moderate during the day.

But the nights cool rapidly, and by November, the Panhandle experiences genuine winter.

Without lodges, surviving winter nights required either finding other shelter — in canyons, in thick brush, in any available cover — or being killed by exposure.

Without food stores, the families needed to find food.

What remained of the Southern Plains bison herds was increasingly distant and increasingly pressured by commercial hunters.