THE LORD IS UNMOVABLE
Psalm 125 : 1 Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved but abides forever. 2 As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the LORD surrounds his people from this time on and forevermore.
Once upon a time, in the year of 1874 the United States Army launched a military campaign, dubbed The Red River War, to displace the Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes from the Southern Plains, and to relocate the tribes by military force to the reservations established in the so-called Indian Territory.
The Native warriors were led by the legendary Comanche chief Quannah Parker and the famous Kiowa chief, Lone Wolf the Elder.
There were no great battle casualties by the thousands on either side, because the US army rather used the scorched land tactics. From 1867, the U.S. Army, all across the Great Plains, including the Southern Plains, began hunting buffalo on an industrial level, to diminish the food source of the indigenous nations living in the plains.
Also from 1870 commercial hunters began systematically targeting the buffalo herds, as the buffalo hides became highly valuable due to a new tanning invention. Once numbering in the tens of millions, the whole buffalo animal kingdom were exterminated by 1878.
For the indigenous nations, this was an irreversible disaster, as their main food resource and their whole lifestyle had been based on buffalo hunting, as the buffalo was used for food, clothing, fuel, weapon and construction materials. Without abundant buffalo herds, the Southern Plains Nations lost their self-reliance.
By the winter of 1873–1874, the crisis hit hard. However, murdering all the buffaloes was only a part of the army’s strategy. They had to burn the villages, the lodges and the homes of the resisting nations, and the army had to shoot their horses, as well and pivotally.
It happened on September 28, 1874 in the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, that colonel Mackenzie led his cavalry to attack the Kiowa Chief Lone Wolf’s settlement and routed it.
Although the tribe was able to escape, but they had to leave behind all of their possessions and horses, climbing up both sides of the canyon.
The invading cavalry men pulled down the lodges, chopped up the lodge poles, and burned all of the tribal belongings in huge bonfires. The loss of the Palo Duro camp meant the loss of the tribal safe haven and all of their winter supplies. Colonel Mackenzie was able to capture around 2000 ponies, which he murdered to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Kiowas.
Although the casualties were very light in the engagement since it had been a full run of the native settlement, but without sufficient mounts or supplies the tribes could not hold out over the winter and many returned to the reservation by November 1874.
Even Lone Wolf's Kiowas did return in February 1875. The battle of the Palo Duro Canyon was a final major engagement and was one of the last battles of the Texas-Indian Wars, which offically ended in June 1875, when Chief Quanah Parker with his Quahadi Comanches entered Fort Sill and surrendered.
The last frontier in Texas and the Southern Plains is still called the Llano Estecado. It is a huge area of a grassy flatland on the frontier between Western Texas and New Mexico.
A first lieutenant of the cavalry, Robert Carter, described it in 1871, while he was a part of the pursuing party of Quanah Parker, as he wrote, that it "… appeared to be a vast, almost illimitable expanse of prairie. As far as the eye could reach, not a bush or a tree, a twig or stone, not an object of any kind or a living thing, was in sight. It stretched out before us, one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared to the ocean in its vastness.”
The Llano Estecado was not exactly a desert, but an arid grassland. In its western part, closer to Roswell and the famous Area 51, in New Mexico, the yearly precipitation is only around 350 millimeter, and even that usually evaporates in the heat.
General Randolph Marcy called it “the Great Sahara of North America, a vast-illimitable expanse of desert prairie, … trackless as the ocean—a land where no man … permanently abides ... a treeless, desolate waste of uninhabitable solitude.”
Llano Estecado got its name from the early Spanish colonists, as this huge flatland was hardly traversable, especially the crossing of it was extremely difficult. If somebody had lost his way, there was no water, no wells, no brooks, no river, no rain. Thus, the Spanish put palisade road signs, stakes as guides there.
Karly May, a German bestseller writer from the late 19th century, regarding the Llano Estecado, where word, estecado, means stakes, had a story about robbers who removed the Spanish road signs and reimplemented them to lead into wrong directions, into the arms of the robbers. So we can imagine that the validity of the road sign was a matter of life or death.
In our modern times when whole national populations are losing their valid road signs and losing their moral ground day by day, as the whole western civilization is falling into sinkholes, it is pivotal that we must have irremovable road signs, when we must know not only where we came from, not only our destination, but also how to get there.
Jesus was asked for guidance by a rich young man, how to get to Heaven. At the end he had to conclude that “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into God’s Kingdom.”
Because, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
But other than that, he was adamant, that the guidelines are very clear. Jesus told the young man, If you want to enter Heaven, keep the commandments.” “Which ones?” he inquired. Jesus replied, “You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.”
These are the guidelines, the road signs which shall not ever be removed or replaced with something else. These road signs are eternal, the points of the Covenant with the Creator God are unchangeable. Imagine, what if God kept changing the rules, what kind of life will it be? God do not change the moral rules, and God do not change the Laws of Nature, either. Imagine the opposite! God, himself never changes, as it is written by the Apostle James, that “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”
And it is written by Paul, that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” Just as Psalm 125 says “ Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved but abides forever.” May it be so, AMEN
