DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it — my job is just to carry the words down the road. Out here in Dickens County, there's a marker that doesn't let you look away. It stands in memory of Private Gregg, William Max, W.
H. Kilpatrick, and other soldiers — men who met death in this region while serving under General R. S.
MacKenzie, Fourth U.S. Cavalry, during the campaigns of 1871 to 1872 and again 1874 to 1875. Now the marker doesn't soften what those men were riding into.
It lays it plain. No hope of honor if victorious. No dream of mercy if they fell.
And the certainty — the certainty — of death by torture if taken alive. That's the country they rode out into. That's what waited for them on these plains.
Those are the words carved into stone for Private Gregg, for William Max, for W. H. Kilpatrick — names the marker holds up so the wind out here doesn't take them entirely.
This marker was placed in 1936, a time when the people doing the placing wrote without apology about a Comanche they called savage and a mission they called clearing the plains for white men. That language is part of the record too. It tells you something about 1936 just as surely as it tells you something about the 1870s — and out here on the Texas road, it's worth sitting with both truths at once.
The plains remember all of it. The marker just holds the names.
What the marker says
In Memory Of Private Gregg, William Max, W. H. Kilpatrick and other soldiers who met death in this region while serving under General R. S. MacKenzie, Fourth U.S. Cavalry, 1871-1872 and 1874-1875. with no hope of honor if victorious, no dream of mercy if they fell, and the certainty of death by torture if taken alive, they fought the savage Comanche and cleared the plains for the white men.