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 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 reservations established in the so-called Indian Territory.
The Native warriors were led by the legendary Comanche chief Quanah Parker and the famous Kiowa chief, Lone Wolf the Elder.
There were no great battle casualties by the hundreds on either side, like it happened at Little Bighorn in 1876, because the U.S. Army chose instead to use scorched-earth tactics.
From 1867 onward, all across the Great Plains, including the Southern Plains, the U.S. Army began hunting buffalo on an industrial level to diminish the food source of the Indigenous nations living on the plains.
Also, from 1870, commercial hunters began systematically targeting the buffalo herds, as buffalo hides became highly valuable due to a new tanning invention. Once numbering in the tens of millions, the whole buffalo animal kingdom was exterminated by 1878.
For the Indigenous nations on the prairies, this was an irreversible disaster, as their main food resource and their entire lifestyle had been based on buffalo hunting; the buffalo was used for food, clothing, fuel, weapons, 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 US Army’s strategy. They also had to burn the villages, the lodges, and the homes of the resisting nations; and pivotally, the US Army had to shoot their horses as well.
It happened on September 28, 1874, in the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, that Colonel Mackenzie led his cavalry to attack Kiowa Chief Lone Wolf’s settlement and routed it.
Although the tribe was able to escape, they had to leave behind all of their possessions and horses, climbing up both sides of the canyon.
The invading cavalrymen 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 2,000 ponies, which he slaughtered to prevent them from falling back into the hands of the Kiowas.
Although the casualties were very light in the engagement, (albeit the loss of one single person is too many), since it had been a full retreat of the Native settlement, still 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 returned in February 1875. The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon was the final major engagement and was one of the last battles of the Texas-Indian Wars, which officially 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 Estacado. It is a huge area of 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 part of the pursuing party chasing Quanah Parker. 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 Estacado 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 millimeters, 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.”
The Llano Estacado got its name from the early Spanish colonists, as this huge flatland was hardly traversable; crossing it was extremely difficult. If someone lost their way, there was no water, no wells, no brooks, no rivers, and no rain. Thus, the Spanish put up palisade road signs—stakes—as guides.
Karl May, a German bestselling writer from the late 19th century, wrote a very fictional story regarding the Llano Estacado (where the word estacado means "staked") about robbers who removed the Spanish road signs and reset them to lead travelers in the wrong direction, straight into the arms of the bandits. So, we can imagine that the validity of a road sign was literally 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 of the Western civilization is falling into sinkholes, it is pivotal that we have irremovable road signs. We must know not only where we came from and our destination, but also how to get there.
Jesus was asked for guidance by a rich young man on 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 never 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 would it be? God does not change the moral rules, and God does not change the Laws of Nature, either. Imagine the opposite!
God never changes, as it is written by the Apostle James, “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, “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.
