The Red River War: Tule Canyon, September 1874
Texas
By the summer of eighteen seventy-four the federal government had broken the terms of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, which it had signed with Kiowa, Comanche, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations just seven years earlier. Buffalo hunters backed by government permissiveness had crossed into protected territory and were systematically destroying the southern bison herd, the economic and spiritual center of Comanche life. In June of eighteen seventy-four, warriors left their reservations. The Red River War had begun.
The army mounted a five-column campaign, converging on the Panhandle from every direction. Colonel Ranald Mackenzie commanded the column out of Fort Concho. On September twenty-eighth, eighteen seventy-four, Mackenzie's troops discovered a large encampment of Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne people sheltered in the depths of Palo Duro Canyon. The battle that followed lasted several hours. Casualty figures vary by source, most accounts record only three or four Native warriors killed and no soldiers lost in the canyon itself. The physical destruction was the point.
After the soldiers drove the people from the canyon, they burned the lodges, the robes, the food stores, and the winter supplies. Then came what has come to be recognized as the decisive act of the campaign. Mackenzie ordered the capture of somewhere between twelve hundred and two thousand horses belonging to the Comanche and allied bands. He drove them to Tule Canyon, a broad, shallow drainage south of the main canyon, and had them shot. The horses died over the course of a day, September twenty-ninth, eighteen seventy-four. No horses meant no mobility across the plains. No mobility meant no hunting. No hunting meant no food for winter.
Within months, band after band came in to the reservation at Fort Sill in present-day Oklahoma. The battle killed almost no one, but the slaughter at Tule Canyon destroyed the Comanche way of life on the southern plains. It ended nearly two centuries of Comanche sovereignty over the Llano Estacado.
The Panhandle's ranching economy was built on land vacated in the following year.
