Mackenzie’s column, and the other four columns of the Red River War campaign, continued operations through the fall and into the winter of 1874-1875.

Wherever they found camps, they burned them.

Wherever they found food stores, they destroyed them.

Wherever they found horses, they captured or killed them.

The strategy was working exactly as Sheridan and the other architects of the campaign had intended.

The off-reservation peoples of the Southern Plains were not being defeated militarily in the traditional sense — there was no decisive battle, no surrender ceremony, no single moment when resistance ended.

They were being ground down, methodically and deliberately, through the destruction of the material foundations of their way of life.