Like so many other treaties, the Medicine Lodge pact was unworkable. The government attempted to keep faith but was hampered by bureaucracy. The Kiowa war faction, headed by Satanta and Lone Wolf, was not really interested in making it work. Despite allegations by Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, however, documented evidence shows that Satanta was elsewhere when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer attacked the Plains Indian camps along the Washita during Sheridan’s winter campaign of 1868­69. And being absent, he likewise was not responsible for the death in that fight of white captive Clara Blinn, for which Sheridan specifically blamed him. Even so, Sheridan ordered Custer to arrest Satanta and Lone Wolf, and they were kept in close confinement for several weeks. Upon release, Satanta went back to his old habit of raiding.

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Satanta finally pushed his luck too far when he participated in the Warren Wagon Trail Massacre near Fort Richardson, Texas, on May 18, 1871. Returning to the Kiowa­Comanche Agency near Fort Sill (southwestern Oklahoma), he bragged about the raid and the killings to Agent Lawrie Tatum and incriminated several other chiefs, including the aging war chief Satank and the teenage subchief Big Tree. Tatum reported the boasts to Fort Sill, where General W.T. Sherman was on inspection, having just arrived from Fort Richardson. Sherman was aware of the Warren raid, and he had narrowly missed death at the hands of the same war party, which had spotted him the day before the massacre. Sherman arrested Satanta and Satank and ordered them, together with Big Tree, to Texas for trial.

Old Satank (who is often confused with Satanta because of their similar names) jumped a guard at Fort Sill and was killed. Satanta and Big Tree were tried by a Texas jury and convicted of seven counts of murder in the Warren massacre. The jury fixed their sentences at death by hanging. At the behest of Agent Tatum, a Quaker, and Judge Charles Soward, who presided over the trial, Governor Edmund Davis commuted their sentences to life imprisonment, and on November 2, 1871, Satanta and Big Tree entered the state penitentiary at Huntsville.

Although Tatum advocated sending more hostile chiefs to prison, his superiors in the Quaker committee that administered all the southern Plains agencies immediately began lobbying for a pardon for the two chiefs. Davis, a Reconstruction governor, balked at the idea, but after 23 months of wrangling and pressure from Washington, finally agreed to parole Satanta and Big Tree against the good behavior of the Kiowa as a whole.

Much of the fighting spirit had left Satanta when he returned to his people, and, when the Kiowa debated whether to enter the Red River War of 1874, he publicly stated his position by resigning his office as a war chief and giving his symbolic medicine lance and shield to other warriors. Even so, he was present when fighting erupted. Although he may not have participated in it, he did consort with hostile chiefs, and Kiowa involvement in the war was, itself, considered a parole violation. He was arrested and returned to Huntsville.

As time passed, Satanta seemed to lose the will to live and became a sympathetic figure. Even Thomas J. Gorree, superintendent of the penitentiary, advocated his release. The government, however, was adamant that he remain confined. Finally, on October 11, 1878, he slashed his wrists. As he was taken to the second floor of the prison hospital, he jumped off the landing. The fall killed him.

Satanta’s descendants believe he was pushed off the landing, because suicide was not in his nature. Still, it would have been in character for Satanta, in his last act as a Kiowa warrior, to deprive the whites of victory by taking his own life. They had his corpse, but not his obedience. And for a warrior, that is an honorable death.

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