Families who had escaped the canyon were now mobile only to the extent that the horses remaining with them — those not captured or shot — permitted.

Some horses had escaped with the families; others had scattered across the canyon bottom during the fighting.

But the approximately 1,400 horses that the army had captured represented the majority of the horse wealth concentrated in the Palo Duro camps, and the roughly 1,000 that were shot were gone.

The medium-term consequence was strategic.

The off-reservation peoples could not sustain the mobile, flexible resistance that had characterized their response to Army pressure throughout the 1860s and early 1870s.

The raids, the evasions, the ability to strike and disengage, the freedom to range across hundreds of miles of the Plains in pursuit of buffalo or in response to Army movements — all of this became progressively less possible as the horse herds diminished and the pressure from five Army columns continued.