It was a cool morning on September 28, 1874, as the sun cast its first shadows over the canyon floor.  The past few days had seen the first hint of autumn’s refreshing relief from the harsh summer heat of the Southern Plains.  The heart-shaped leaves of the cottonwoods clustered along the banks of the Red River had just begun to show splatches of yellow along their outer edges.  The early signs of seasonal change lent a sense of urgency and apprehension to those living in the protected canyon as they desperately gathered what meager provisions they could to survive another harsh winter on the Great Plains.

While the women prepared to collect firewood and food, mostly acorns and edible roots, the men readied their weapons for the unlikely event that a few remnant buffalo might wander into sight.  Still unseen so early in the morning were several hundred blue-coated Cavalrymen, who had gathered on the canyon rim with grim intent.  These soldiers were looking down nearly 800 vertical feet at the teepees and thatch lean-tos of the last band of Comanche who still dared to resist the spiritual and geographic confinement that unknown men in far away Washington wished to impose on them.  Today, that resistance would come to an end.

Unable to find a suitable trail to the canyon floor, the soldiers quietly maneuvered their mounts directly down the dangerously steep canyon walls toward the unsuspecting men, women, and children below.  One of the chiefs, Red Warbonnet, had gotten up earlier than the others, and his sudden appearance before the descending bluecoats meant he would be the first to die that day.  With the early autumn silence shattered by gunfire, the cavalrymen quickened their pace and rushed with drawn guns into the canyon toward the surprised Indians.

The battle did not last long.  It was probably over by noon, although a few hidden Comanche snipers took occasional potshots at soldiers until nightfall.  Casualties were few.  Only one of Col. Ranald Mackenzie’s bluecoats was killed.  Only a few more Comanche and their Kiowa allies met a similar fate.  The significance of the battle was not its death toll.  By 1874, there were so few Comanche and Kiowa left on the open range that a high death toll was hardly even possible.  But as the terrified Indians fled the storming cavalrymen, they left behind what winter provisions they had already gathered.  Even more ominous, they also left behind 1,400 horses, the one asset that was indispensible for the Comanche way of life.  A few of the horses were kept by the soldiers.  Most were slaughtered on the spot, so they could never fall back into the hands of the Comanche and Kiowa.  Without their mounts or winter provisions, the tribes could not survive the coming winter.  They could either starve or freeze, or surrender to the hated White Man.  They chose the latter option.

The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon was the last battle of the Red River War, the war which brought an end to the nearly 200 year old “empire” of the Comanche.  In the late seventeenth century, these fierce horsemen had migrated from the Central Rockies into the Plains and forced less warlike and sedentary tribes away from the great southern buffalo herds.  They pushed the Apache and Ute into the deserts and mountains of the southwest, and the Pawnee and Osage to less favorable hunting grounds to the north and east.  Other tribes were absorbed, fought to extinction, or reduced to fearful vassalage.  The resulting Comancheria had prevented encroachment from Spanish settlers pushing up from Mexico, and waged a 50 year long war against Anglo-American settlers from the east.

I am fascinated by endings.  I have written about a few of the more consequential endings of history, like the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476, or the fall of Constantinople a millennium later.  Fin de siecle Europe, that peculiar period of 30 years or so before Gavrilo Princip fired his fatal gunshots in Sarajevo, is one of my favorite periods of world history.  It was a time when much of Humanity was blind to the immensity of the events and discoveries that were happening all around, bringing an end to the old world order that had been created after the fall of Napoleon.

The ending that took place on this date in 1874 was nowhere near as consequential as those mentioned above.  Nevertheless,  it is similar to them in the sense that the event itself was rather anti-climactic, really just the final episode of a much longer story whose conclusion was by then certain.  With the end of the Civil War, America's military might was redirected from the bloody battlefields of the East, to places where the Comanche, Lakota, and other great tribes of the Plains still resisted Anglo encroachment.  As powerful as those tribes were, they could not defeat the large population and advanced technology of those who wished to remove them.

Despite its present day obscurity, the Comancheria's impact on the development of Texas and the Southwest was immense.  It was one of the reasons far-off authorities in Mexico City opened the province they called Tejas to Anglo-American settlers, a decision that would result in the deaths of thousands of men and women over the next 50 years.  The small battle that took place that September morning in Palo Duro Canyon simply marked the final coda for a long epoch that encompassed episodes of conquest and wild euphoria, treachery and bloody vengeance, and finally bitter defeat.

There is a story that used to be told by Anglo settlers on the Southern Plains about an old rancher who lived near the mouth of Palo Duro Canyon.*  Its veracity may be questionable, but its sentiment is clearly not.  The rancher was among the very first white men to move into the canyon after the Comanche had been removed.  In fact, when he was a young man he had been a ranger, and had participated in several skirmishes against the same Indians whose land he now possessed.  Not long after establishing his ranch, he rounded up a small group of buffalo that had wandered nearby. These were among the very last of their kind, and he had worked hard to build a small herd and protect the animals from extinction. 

One day the old rancher heard a knock on his front door, and found a scraggly group of Comanche gathered in his yard.  All held bows and arrows of the old style that had once been common among their tribe.  A few were young, but most were old men.  The rancher recognized a few of the older ones.  He had even fought some of them years before, but that was water under the bridge.  Indian and rancher alike now regarded the other with guarded respect, bordering on friendship.  A few of the older men asked the rancher for a buffalo bull.  The rancher refused.

“They used to belong to us,” argued an old Comanche.

“Ha, they belonged to whoever could kill them,” answered the rancher.  “If it weren’t for me, they’d all be gone.”

The conversation continued in this vein for several more minutes before the rancher turned away and went inside, still refusing to relinquish one of his bulls.  But the Indians did not leave.  They made camp in front of the old man’s house, where they slept under the stars during the night, and told stories and sang Indian song during the day.  Curious cowhands began ignoring their chores out on the range to watch this strange gathering of Comanche men.  After several days, the angry old rancher finally relented, and with a loud noise he told the Indians to take the goddamn bull and get the hell off of his property.

What happened next shocked him, but it shouldn’t have.  He expected the Indians to lasso the bull and try to drag him all the way back to the Oklahoma reservation.  Instead, they spooked the bull and forced him into a run.  Then the small group mounted their horses, and with euphoric shouts and cries they chased the panicked bull and shot him with arrows until he collapsed.  One of the older men charged the fallen bull with drawn lance, and thrust it into its neck.  Then, all of the Comanche men gathered around and silently watched the bleeding bull gasp its last breath.  They stood there a long time without saying a word.  Eventually, they climbed back on their mounts and sadly rode away, leaving the dead bull where it lay. 

The old rancher had witnessed the scene from his front yard.  Watching silently as the little band of Comanche disappeared beyond the mesas to the east, he recalled the old times, and vaguely understood what he had just seen.  Once the Indians had ridden out of sight, a few of the cowhands approached, wondering what to do with the dead bull.  The rancher sat on his porch and waved them away.  He suddenly felt much older than he did when he had woken up that morning.  As the sun fell low above the distant canyon walls, the old man poured himself a glass of whisky, hoping to wash away the bitter sadness that had overcome him the moment he realized he would never see those once proud Comanche warriors again.

*The story of the old rancher and the Comanche men is based on an anecdote from the John Graves narrative Goodbye to a River.