The Kiowa and the Southern Plains: Horse Trade, Sun Dance, and the Long Road to Reservation

Buffalo hunts. Battles. Long lines of families moving camp. These were the pictures young Kiowa men drew in the ledger books they were handed at Fort Marion, an old Spanish fort on the sea at St. Augustine, Florida, where the Army shipped seventy-two prisoners from the southern plains in 1875, at the end of the Red River War.

The world in those drawings had been a long time in the making. The Kiowa remember a beginning far to the north, in the Yellowstone country, when the people still walked everywhere and measured distance in sleeps. The drift south came next, and the horse, the alliance with the Comanche, the bands and raids and the summer Sun Dance, smallpox and the Texas frontier, and in 1867 the treaty council at Medicine Lodge, where Satanta told the commissioners he loved the land and the buffalo and would not part with them.

After Fort Marion came the reservation, the years when Washington set out to end the Sun Dance for good, the Kiowa Six, young painters of the 1920s who carried their people's images into galleries on both sides of the Atlantic, and the modern Kiowa Nation, governed today from Carnegie, Oklahoma. The prisoners in that Florida fort drew so the old life would not be lost. On paper, at least, it never was.