In 1875, at the end of the Red River War, seventy-two Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, and Arapaho men were chained into railcars and shipped to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida — imprisoned without trial as hostages for their nations' good behavior. Their jailer's assimilation experiment (the prisoners' famous ledger art notwithstanding) became the model for the Carlisle boarding-school system: the prison as the laboratory of "killing the Indian to save the man."

A decade later the Chiricahua Apache — including the scouts who had served the Army — were deported wholesale to Florida when Geronimo surrendered in 1886. Geronimo and his people remained prisoners of war for twenty-seven years, dying in the damp casemates of Fort Pickens and Mount Vernon Barracks and finally at Fort Sill, where Geronimo died still a POW in 1909; the survivors were released only in 1913.