Battle of Palo Duro Canyon was a Indian Wars and Frontier Conflicts engagement fought in Texas, 1874.
During the Red River War, a decisive win for the United States came about at what history remembers as the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. On September 28, 1874, a force made up of several U.S. Army companies, led by Ranald S. Mackenzie, struck a sizable camp of Plains Indians situated in Palo Duro Canyon, within the Texas Panhandle.
During the Red River War, a decisive win for the United States came about at what history remembers as the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. On September 28, 1874, a force made up of several U.S. Army companies, led by Ranald S. Mackenzie, struck a sizable camp of Plains Indians situated in Palo Duro Canyon, within the Texas Panhandle.
On the morning of September 28, a pair of Tonkawa scouts riding with Mackenzie came upon a "fresh trail," and the column pushed onward. By daybreak they arrived at a "wide and yawning chasm," from which the lodges of the encampment below became visible. The cavalrymen dismounted there, guiding their mounts one after another down a winding, narrow trail.
The first blow fell on the Kiowa camp of Chief Lone Wolf, which Mackenzie's men overran and scattered. Lone Wolf and Chief Poor Buffalo, along with their people, escaped up both walls of the canyon, though they left behind horses and belongings in the chaos. From heights ranging between 800 and 1000 feet, Indian warriors opened fire down onto the soldiers below, and the intensity of the shooting led one man to ask how they would ever get out. Mackenzie's reply was blunt: he had brought them in, and he would bring them out. While a portion of the command clambered back up the steep cliffs they had earlier descended, others set about destroying the camp, tearing down lodges, splitting the poles into pieces, and heaping the Indians' possessions onto massive fires. Close to 2000 horses were seized, and by four in the afternoon the remaining soldiers had herded them out of the canyon. The following morning, September 29, Mackenzie's men rejoined their supply camp back in Tule Canyon.
With the fall of the Palo Duro camp, the Indians lost both their protected refuge and everything they had stored away for winter. While a number of horses managed to escape with them out onto the plains, Mackenzie's men seized between 1,500 and 2,000 ponies, and rather than risk these animals returning to Indian hands, he had them killed. Because the fight had turned into such a thorough rout, few men died or were wounded on either side. Still, lacking enough horses and provisions to survive the coming months, most of the tribes drifted back to the Fort Sill reservation by November of 1874, though Lone Wolf's Kiowas held out until February 1875. This engagement stood as the last significant clash of the Red River War, ranking among the final battles fought in the Texas-Indian Wars. Afterward, Col. R. S. Mackenzie put forward the names of seven 4th U.S. Cavalry soldiers, along with Adam Payne of the Black Seminole Scouts, for the Medal of Honor.
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