The transition to farming — which was the federal government’s stated goal for reservation populations — required not just new skills but a fundamental reorientation of the relationship between people and land, and it was expected to happen within a generation or two in an environment where the traditional economy had been deliberately destroyed.

It did not happen as quickly or as cleanly as federal policy anticipated.

The reservation era produced not a smooth transition but a long period of poverty, cultural disruption, population decline from disease and malnutrition, and political marginalization.

The populations that had numbered in the tens of thousands on the open Plains were reduced by the end of the nineteenth century to fractions of their former numbers.

The leasing of reservation grazing lands to Texas ranchers — a practice that Quanah Parker, among others, participated in negotiating — provided some income but also embedded the nations in an economic relationship of dependence on outside capital that shaped reservation economies for generations.