The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon was decisive because it was not primarily a killing event.

It was a destruction event, aimed with precision at the material foundations of an entire way of life.

The canyon today is beautiful.

The red walls still catch the morning light.

The Prairie Dog Town Fork still runs cold through the canyon bottom.

The juniper trees for which the canyon is named still grow on the slopes.

The people who camped here in the summer of 1874, who fled across the canyon floor on September 28, who watched their lodges burn from a distance, who spent the following winter on the Staked Plains without adequate shelter or food — their descendants are the enrolled members of the Comanche Nation, the Kiowa Tribe, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.

They did not disappear.