And the The Lost Valley Fight on July 12th, 1874 was the last significant action between Native American warriors and the Texas Rangers.

That day, about 50 warriors, mostly Kiowa, attacked 35 Rangers in an area called Lost Valley, 18 miles west of the town of

Jacksonville and the Army outpost of Fort Richardson. The Rangers had been on a routine tour with the man who commanded the

battalion, Major John B Jones. As battalion commander, Jones did not directly

command any of the six ranger companies, but instead spent his time traveling

up and down the frontier checking on his men.

He always traveled with an fatality during the day-long standoff with the war party, but that fatality had been brutal.

The warriors had captured, tortured, and killed Dave Bailey, and they had done it as a gruesome

display for the other Rangers.

The rest of the Rangers had escaped the standoff after dark and straggled to a ranch several

miles away.

A month later, the U.S. Army began its final major coordinated campaign on the

southern plains. It would result in a series of battles, mostly in August and September 1874 that would be called the Red River War.

By October, it was clear how the story would end.

But the young Comanche Chief Kwan Parker, would still hold out for a year before he finally

capitulated.

By the summer of 1875, the Kiowa and Comanche would submit to life on a reservation in the southwest corner of Indian Territory, the modern day state of Oklahoma.

In the late fall of 1874, while the fighting between the U.S. Army and the warriors wound down, Major

Jones completed three tours of his Ranger companies on the frontier.

Now that there were fewer raids to worry about, the Rangers increasingly turned their attention

to a problem that had been on the rise for more than a decade. Cattle rustling.

During the Civil War, the Comanche had been the most prominent cattle rustlers in Texas.

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