Just wondering. The canoe, which is seen in the sequence where Janet Margolin takes him to the Indian village to recuperate from his knife wounds, seems it would be out of place in a plains Indian village.
shareI wondered this, too. You could look it up
shareDid Kiowas stay in the same place long enough for Max/Nevada to be healed of his wounds - weeks or days?
Could Kiowas live off the reservation without government rations for weeks or months? Not after the southern buffalo herd vanished in the 1870s, being gone by 1876, soon after the final defeat of the Kiowas, Comanches, and Cheyenne in the Buffalo or Red River War of 1874 to 1875. Maybe that Kiowa camp was on the Kiowa reservation in Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma) and they did periodically get rations.
But the Kiowa reservation should have been hundreds of miles from Abilene (Abilene, Kansas or Abilene, Texas), and dragging the badly wounded Max all the way to the reservation, instead of to the next town, for medical treatment could kill him.
If that Kiowa band was camped for a long time near Abilene (Abilene, Kansas or Abilene, Texas) how did the Kiowas support themselves if it was after the buffalo were gone? If they hunted cattle in place of buffalo the ranchers wouldn't stand for it. Maybe some of the Kiowas worked as cowboys on the ranches.
But the general idea of a band of Kiowas being off the reservation and camped near Abilene (Abilene, Kansas or Abilene, Texas) for a while and the local white people being unconcerned about it instead of calling on the army to take them back to the reservation seems a little dubious to me.