Bad Hand at Dead Horse by Dustin Rice with the help of Lance Tahmahkera

When the village bedded down for the night on September 29, 1874, the native tribes in Thook-Hoonko-Vee, or Deep Creek, had no idea that they had lived their last day as the reigning rulers of the southern plains. Their camp, extending two miles along the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River in Palo Duro Canyon, had been spotted by Tonkawa scouts. Never again would the biggest town in Texas dwell in the deep fortress. Never again would anyone seek its walls for protection. Never again would The People pass winter in freedom, by the fire, in peace.

Their enemy was known as Bad Hand. Colonel Ranald Mackenzie lost two fingers in 1864 at Jerusalem Park Road during the siege of Petersburg. That, and another half dozen wounds, kept him in constant pain, and thus a constant sour mood. He had a reputation for strict discipline, but he led his men from the front. He had their respect, and he had permission to use whatever tactics necessary to get the Comanche, Kiowa, Kiowa Apache, and Cheyenne in the canyon onto Agency land, to confinement on the reservation.

The plan was cold and calculated. Behind the village, slot canyons whose sheer walls dead ended into sharp wedges served as perfect corrals for almost 2,000 horses. When Mackenzie’s men attacked, however, there was nowhere to go and no way to get them out. Women and children scrambled up the cliff faces, taking only the clothes on their backs. The men followed them up, carrying only their rifles. As they reached the rim of the canyon, 800-1,000 feet above, the warriors rained bullets upon the soldiers who took cover and looked to Mackenzie. “I got you in, I’ll get you out!!” he told his men as they were pinned down. 

As it turned out, he didn’t have to. On foot and without unified leadership, the Indigenous tribes fled into open country. The soldiers seized their entire winter food supply, source of shelter, and means of transport--and it cost the soldiers one man. The tribes combined to lose three, but Mackenzie knew it was just a matter of time until they transitioned to the reservation. He had done what no one in the history of North America had yet managed: he separated the southern Plains Indian culture from the horse. 

The hides and tent poles of the teepees were broken, slashed, and burned. The possessions inside were looted by the Tonkawa scouts and their wives, who had come along. Their chief, Johnson, received upwards of 50 horses from the herd and his scouts split 300 more. The remaining horses were marched from Palo Duro Canyon to Tule Canyon, 20 miles south, where they were executed one by one with a bullet to the head.

One can only imagine the tension that filled that canyon as the long process of killing almost 1,500 horses began. The relationship between a cavalry soldier and his horse was a special one. To task a cavalryman with killing healthy horses, be them Indian ponies or not, must have been heart-wrenching. 

The thousands of pounds of rotting horse flesh in Tule Canyon turned stomachs for hundreds of miles on the wind. The sun-bleached bones were later piled up and it reached over 50 feet and spread for hundreds of yards. Eventually they were carted off and ground into fertilizer, but that place became known as Dead Horse. The herd is said to haunt Tule Canyon to this day, stampeding at night, the thundering of their hooves like a storm without rain. 

Call it karma, call it bad luck, but within a few short years Mackenzie took a fall from a wagon in Oklahoma where he’d recently been engaged to be married. His behavior soon grew erratic and hostile. His hopes for marriage were soon gone along with his bride. He was in and out of insane asylums for at least 10 years. He died at the age of 48 in New York at the home of his sister, a shadow of the proud officer he once was.

In the course of researching this place, I found hundreds of accounts of the heroism of the victors and how the Army had cleared out the Native nuisance. I found very few accounts that reflected the Indigenous side. Then we had the fortune of meeting with Lance Tahmahkera, great-great grandson of Quanah Parker, the last Comanche war chief. He told us a story of that tragic day that was passed down to him by his grandmother. She said that the army followed them--close enough that the Comanche could sometimes make out individuals on horseback--but the soldiers were not chasing them to engage them in a fight. They pushed them to walk as fast as they could. To wear them down. The fear the soldiers put into those that fled that day has been passed down for generations.

We made our way to Tule Canyon knowing we couldn’t get to Dead Horse. It is on private land and we had no access. I don’t know what we would have found if we got to see it anyway. What we did find when we got there made our hearts sink. At the end of the canyon, across the highway from the entrance, is a reservoir built in the early 1970’s, Lake McKenzie. The man who engineered the destruction of the Comanche empire has a lake named after him. The water that fills the lake runs directly past the spot where the horse kill took place. There are multiple historic monuments and markers there and none mention the slaughter. The lake also covered and destroyed seventy-seven historically valuable archeological sites with evidence of native culture going back over 10,000 years.