The Comanche were still capable fighters in the fall of 1874.

What ended organized off-reservation life was the systematic destruction of everything that made independent life on the Plains possible: the food, the lodges, the horses.

The Other Red River War Campaigns

Palo Duro Canyon was the most significant single action of the Red River War, but it did not occur in isolation.

The five-column campaign produced engagements across the Panhandle throughout the fall of 1874 that compounded the pressure on the off-reservation peoples.

Colonel Miles’s column fought the Battle of the Washita River in August 1874, which was followed by a series of engagements in which Miles’s force pursued Cheyenne bands across the Texas Panhandle.