The sounds of fear don’t readily emanate from the written narratives of warfare. The language is limited in its ability to conjure the screams, the rapid respiration and the crunch of grass under foot when it’s time to run.
The audio track of violence and panic is even more difficult to imagine in the serenity of a place like Palo Duro Canyon. But on an early fall day a short 150 years back in time, the calm of this natural wonder was shattered in a sudden eruption of gunfire that reverberated off canyon walls and across time, altering the course of history.
On Sept. 28, 1874, the 4th U.S. Cavalry, under the command of Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie, fell upon bands of Comanche, Kiowa, southern Cheyenne and southern Arapaho encamped at the bottom of the upper Palo Duro during a brief lull in a months-long struggle known as the Red River War. Warriors held off long enough to allow their women and children to escape the trap, but were forced to abandon their positions and leave behind not only their winter provisions, but also most of their horses.
The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon was a long time coming considering the decades of strife between white settlers and indigenous people of the Plains, but the slaughter of the bison, or American buffalo, on the Southern Plains in the early 1870s hastened the climax. Reservations in Oklahoma had already been established for the Southern Plains tribes, but their people still depended on buffalo beyond reservation boundaries because government rations were meager—and often nonexistent. The appearance of white buffalo hunters at the Adobe Walls outpost in Hutchinson County in early 1874 presented a grave threat to the Southern Plains tribes, so they went on the offensive.
Michael Grauer, formerly with the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum and now curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, points out that the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty allowed the tribes to hunt buffalo in the Texas Panhandle. But Grauer asserts the federal government could not grant exclusive hunting rights to the tribes as it did not have jurisdiction over the public lands of Texas, where both the indigenous inhabitants and white buffalo hunters were free to take what they wanted across the unsettled Panhandle.
War on the Plains
Nonetheless, the native peoples believed their rights had been violated. With the scarcity of food on their minds, a confederation of tribes attacked the hunters at Adobe Walls on June 27, 1874. (Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum maintains this battle site and has a 150th Anniversary exhibition about Adobe Walls on display through May 2025.) The multiday siege essentially ended in a draw but set the stage for future confrontation, though the U.S. government did not immediately respond.
“When the Adobe Walls trading post was attacked, the U.S. Army at Fort Dodge refused to send help, calling it a civilian affair, which it was,” Grauer asserts. Soon, however, violence broke out in other locations, and President Ulysses S. Grant decided it was time for the military to compel the warring bands of Southern Plains tribes to give up and return to the reservations.
Acting on Grant’s orders, Gen. Philip Sheridan of Civil War fame deployed five columns of army soldiers to the region, three of which were under Mackenzie’s command. Throughout the sweltering summer, soldiers and Tonkawa scouts pursued the scattered bands of natives, seeking to pin them down, divest them of their war-making resources and return them to Oklahoma. Multiple skirmishes took place in August and September from the lower reaches of the Palo Duro in Armstrong and Briscoe counties all the way to the Upper Washita River in Hemphill County. But in each case, warriors and their families disappeared into the great unknown, frustrating the military campaign.
Into the Canyon
Then, early on the morning of Sept. 28, Tonkawa scouts discovered several indigenous camps spread along the floor of Palo Duro Canyon, and Mackenzie ordered his men to slip quietly down the steep cliffs, single-file, to mount an attack. As the fighting intensified, warriors and their families fled and climbed out of the canyon, leaving everything they owned behind. The soldiers began to take fire from above their positions, so the order was given to destroy the lodges and food supplies and march out of the canyon to safety on the rim. As the soldiers left, they took more than 1,400 of the tribes’ horses with them.
The next day, Mackenzie ordered more than 1,000 of the horses to be slaughtered in nearby Tule Canyon to keep them from falling back into enemy hands. With very little food and virtually no transportation, the Southern Plains tribes were no longer in a position to resist.
“Some returned to their reservation in western Indian Territory,” Grauer says. “Most, being Kwahadis, fled west into West Texas and New Mexico. They were trying to escape what they thought were attempts to annihilate them.”
Quanah Parker, the chief warrior of the Kwahadi Comanches, wasn’t present at the Palo Duro Canyon fight, and held out longer. But after several months, he, too, resigned himself to the inevitable and surrendered at Fort Sill in June 1875, thus ending all armed resistance to white settlement of the Panhandle.
Reconciling with History
The changes that took place in the ensuing years are often glamorized, but to the native people, their defeat and exile was traumatic. Dr. Tim Bowman, professor of history at West Texas A&M University, points out that the Panhandle region was a part of the tribal homeland going back at least a century.
“Imagine a foreign power coming in, defeating you and your people militarily, and then colonizing the place that you call home, including your sacred spaces. It was an awful tragedy for them, to say the least,” Bowman shares.
The wild Panhandle was abruptly tamed by Euro-American people who were very much aware of the culture they displaced, but they didn’t look back, and the contributions of native peoples to life on the Plains were mostly dismissed as irrelevant in a modern era.
But there is always a hope that history, which cannot be changed, can at least enlighten, and people of the modern era can gain something by understanding the civilization and culture that preceded them. Dr. Alex Hunt, WT’s Vincent-Haley Professor of Western Studies, Regents Professor of English and director of the Center for the Study of the American West, says the settlers that moved to the Panhandle after the Red River War may have gained land and a place in which to build a new civilization. But by erasing the past, they missed out on a richness of
cultural and ecological diversity.
“I think we are due for some form of reconciliation with our history,
and some consideration of what we might want and be able to restore to some extent,” Hunt says. “One example is the bison herd at Caprock Canyons State Park. But I see little effort to engage with the Comanches and Kiowas, the efforts of Texas Tech and Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum notwithstanding.”
Any engagement of this sort would never return the region to an open buffalo range or erase mistakes of the past. But armed with a better knowledge and appreciation of those whose ancestors first fell in love with the lavish emptiness of the Texas Panhandle, anyone claiming the home range would hopefully grow to love and protect it even more. A Panhandle sunset is beautiful in the eyes of every beholder, and in that sense, we are much the same as the vanquished tribes who once called this area home. Our shared love for the land is a great place to start.
