To understand the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, you have to understand the world the Southern Plains peoples were defending in 1874, because that world was not simply a place — it was a functioning ecological, economic, and cultural system that had been under sustained attack for decades.

The Comanche people, at the height of their power in the early and middle nineteenth century, were the dominant military force on the Southern Plains.

They had been acquiring horses since the late seventeenth century, when the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico disrupted Spanish colonial horse-keeping and horses dispersed into the Plains.

The Comanche built an economy and a military system around horses that transformed not just their own society but the entire political order of the region.

By the 1830s and 1840s, the Comanche — particularly the bands known collectively as the Comanche Nation, or Numunuu in their own language — controlled an enormous territory stretching from the Arkansas River in the north to the Rio Grande in the south, from eastern New Mexico through most of Texas.