In 1875 Colonel Ranald Mackenzie -- a White US Army officer stationed in southwestern Indian Territory--conducted an experiment on Comanches and Kiowas living at Fort Sill. Relatively little is known about the experiment's inner workings, but a report created by Mackenzies's successor, Lieutenant Colonel John P. Hatch, preserved the premise and results. Mackenzie's experiment evolved from a conflict known as the Red River War. Between the summer of 1874 and the spring of 1875, the US Army crushed Indigenous resistance to American expansion on the southern Great Plains. In the aftermath of the war, high-ranking US Army officials furiously debated how to consolidate American power in the region. At Fort Sill, the army conducted several experiments with the goal of transforming Indigenous cultures, thereby eliminating the most significant obstacles to American imperialism.

Truden, John. “Notes and Documents: A US Army Officer’s Report on a Forgotten Experiment at Fort Sill.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 101, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 210-219.

John Truden is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Center for the Futures of Native Peoples at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Oklahoma Historical Society's Website. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/contents#v101

Citation