Kiowa National Grassland: Comanche and Kiowa Country and the Land They Left By Force

The Kiowa National Grassland sits in the northeastern corner of New Mexico, a country of rolling short-grass plains and cedar-dotted mesas that does not look, at first, like anything in particular. It looks like high plains. What it is, is country the Kiowa and Comanche roamed and hunted, which the Army then closed to them by force within a decade of the Medicine Lodge Treaty of eighteen sixty-seven.

The Red River War of eighteen seventy-four was the Army's campaign to end the resistance of the Southern Plains nations, primarily the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, to confinement on the reservations established by the Medicine Lodge Treaty. The war was decided not by a single battle but by a systematic strategy: Colonel Ranald Mackenzie and other Army commanders pursued the nations through the canyon country and onto the high plains through the winter of eighteen seventy-four and eighteen seventy-five, destroying their camps, killing their horses, burning their food stores. By the spring of eighteen seventy-five, the resistance was broken. The Kiowa and Comanche were confined to the Fort Sill reservation in Indian Territory. The land here, the land the Kiowa National Grassland now occupies, was opened to cattle ranching and eventually to homesteaders.

The homesteaders failed, as they failed across the southern plains, and the Bankhead-Jones Act of nineteen thirty-seven funded the federal purchase of their failed claims. The grassland designation followed.

The Canadian River runs through the eastern portion of the grassland. Mills Canyon, a deep cut in the plains rim, is one of the few places where the grassland's terrain breaks into something dramatic. The rest of it is the flat, open, endlessly wide country that the Kiowa and Comanche rode through for generations before the Army made that impossible.