What awaited them at Fort Sill and Fort Reno was not punishment in the immediate sense — there was no mass imprisonment, no mass trial.

But the leaders identified as most responsible for resistance were selected out and sent to Fort Marion in Florida, which separated them permanently from their communities and their families.

Approximately seventy-two men were sent to Fort Marion, where some died and others eventually returned, changed by years of incarceration in an alien environment.

For the families who had come in, life at the agencies was the life of the reservation: constrained, poor, dependent on government rations that were frequently inadequate, organized around the expectation that the people would become farmers and ranchers and Christians and would abandon the practices and beliefs that had organized their lives.

The transition was neither complete nor uncomplicated.