The policy of distant incarceration, applied to approximately seventy-two leaders identified as most responsible for resistance during the Red River War, was intended to decapitate community leadership and prevent any future organization of resistance.

Iron Shirt of the Cheyenne, who had also been at Palo Duro, was among the Cheyenne leaders who eventually brought their people in to the agencies as resistance capacity collapsed.

Poor Buffalo of the Comanche was another of the leaders whose camp was at Palo Duro.

The destruction of the camp did not mean the death of these men, but it eliminated the material base on which they could sustain leadership in an off-reservation context.

The rank and file of the off-reservation populations — the families who had spent the summer accumulating food stores in Palo Duro Canyon, who had fled the canyon on September 28 with whatever they could carry — made their decisions not as political actors in the grand sense but as parents and grandparents and spouses trying to keep people alive.