Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

by S. C. Gwynne

  The events of the year 1908, when he turned sixty, suggested the distance civilization had traveled since his birth on the prairie. That year Teddy Roosevelt sent his magnificent White Fleet of steel gunships around the world, and Henry Ford introduced the mass-production automobile known as the Model T. That year Quanah himself appeared in the first two-reel western movie ever made: The Bank Robbery, filmed near his home in Cache, Oklahoma. He had a bit part. There is something more than a bit surreal, more than one hundred years later, about watching Quanah himself emerge from a stagecoach, pigtails falling down over his shoulders, or ride toward the camera. At this distance, there is simply no reconciling it with the idea of free and wild Comanches on the Llano Estacado.

  Quanah also had a curious and noteworthy friendship with Teddy Roosevelt. In March 1905 he rode in an open car in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in buckskins and warbonnet, accompanied by Geronimo, two Sioux chiefs, and a Blackfeet chief. (One of the people who witnessed that event was Robert G. Carter, the officer who had been ambushed by Quanah at Blanco Canyon and who still hated Quanah bitterly and did not understand why someone who had killed so many whites could march in such a parade.)8 The two men met at a party Roosevelt hosted for the chiefs. A month later, Roosevelt traveled west on a special train to participate in a much-publicized “wolf hunt” on lands belonging to the Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas in southwestern Oklahoma. His principal hosts were leading cattlemen Burk Burnett and Daniel Waggoner, and the Comanche chief Quanah Parker. This wasn’t just fun and recreation: The 400,000-acre Big Pasture where the hunt took place was one of the most hotly contested pieces of land in the West. By virtue of the revised Jerome Agreement, the Indians held title to it and leased it to the likes of Burnett and Waggoner. But a large group of land-hungry whites, supported by Texas congressman James H. Stephens, wanted the government to buy the land and open it for development.

  When Roosevelt’s train arrived at Frederick, Oklahoma, he was met by a crowd of three thousand and then escorted by a mounted honor guard, which included Quanah, to a speaker’s stand in the middle of town. (Quanah said later that he had been afraid someone might try to shoot the president—McKinley had been assassinated four years earlier—and thus had worn a six-shooter for the occasion. The idea is unimaginable today.)9 Roosevelt made a few brief remarks, then invited Quanah, whom he called “a good citizen,” to come up on the stand with him. The two men shook hands, to rousing applause, and then Quanah gave a short speech. There is no record of what he said, but he later told his friend R. B. Thomas that “I got more cheers than Teddy.”10 Roosevelt clearly liked and admired him. “There was Quanah Parker the Comanche chief,” he wrote in his description of the wolf hunt (which had bagged seventeen wolves and coyotes) in his book Outdoor Pastimes of the American Hunter, “in his youth a bitter foe of the whites, now painfully teaching his people to travel the white man’s stony road.”11

  After the wolf hunt, Roosevelt traveled north to visit Quanah at Star House, a truly momentous occasion in tiny Cache, Oklahoma, for which all conceivable pomp and circumstance were brought to bear. Quanah made a point of serving wine (which he never drank) in large goblets, specifically because at the White House Roosevelt had served the Indians wine in small goblets.12 In his typical fashion, Quanah used the occasion to lobby Roosevelt on Indian issues. The main one was the disposition of the 400,000 acres; Quanah wanted the Indians to retain it. (He eventually lost the battle: Two years later the land was divvied up and sold off, with Comanche children born after 1900 receiving 160-acre parcels; proceeds went into an Indian trust.) Quanah also complained of territorial officers trying to collect taxes from Indians, and of the Indians’ terrible unemployment problem. Evidence that Roosevelt listened came in a letter he wrote a few days later to the commissioner of Indian affairs. “My sympathies have been much excited and I have been aroused by what I have seen here, and I am concerned at the condition of these Indians and seeming hopelessness of their future.”13 The wolf hunt and his visit to Quanah are often cited as reasons Roosevelt became determined to create the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, which today is just north of Quanah’s old home.

  Quanah remained an active leader, even into his old age. Unhappy with the Indian schools, and finding that his children were unwelcome in the white ones, he put on his broad-brimmed Stetson and wool suit and went lobbying for a new school district. He donated the land, promised that his tribesmen would pay taxes, and got it done. In June 1908 he became head of the school board in the district he had started.14 He became one of the leading religious figures in the Comanche tribe and the driving force behind the establishment of the peyote religion among the Plains Indians. Peyote is a small, spineless cactus whose ingestion produces visual and auditory hallucinations. It had been used by Comanches as early as the mid-nineteenth century, and the Indians of south Texas had used it as early as 1716. Quanah revived its use and refined it into a meaningful religious ritual that Indians embraced during the grim early days on the reservation. He would preside over all-night rituals, many of which were concerned with the healing of specific people. From his Comanches it spread to Kiowas, Wichitas, Pawnees, and Shawnees before the turn of the century. Between 1900 and 1907 it was adopted by the Poncas, Kickapoos, and Kansas, and subsequently spread throughout the plains and into the Great Basin and deserts of the Southwest. Wrote Wallace and Hoebel: “It was probably the most important cultural contribution of Comanches to the lives of other American Indians.”15 Quanah, who came under fire from time to time for his involvement in these rituals, once defended his religion by saying: “The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.” The practice eventually evolved into the entity that became known as the Native American Church.

  In spite of his success, and his eventual triumph over his rivals, Quanah’s life was never easy. He had to fight to keep prosecutors away from his peyote cult. As he got older he had marital troubles; several of his wives ended up leaving him, perhaps because of his growing financial problems. And he struggled constantly with political rivals in the tribe, including the old medicine quack Isa-tai, who never gave up in his quest to become the principal chief of the Comanches, and the Kiowa Lone Wolf, with whom he once had a fistfight over a boundary dispute.16 Charges made by Lone Wolf’s Kiowa faction, aligned with Isa-tai, in fact, led to a federal investigation of the agency in 1903. The federal agent who investigated, one Francis E. Leupp, not only concluded that Quanah and the agent had done nothing wrong, he had this to say about Quanah:

  If ever nature stamped a man with the seal of headship she did it in his case. Quanah might have been a leader and a governor in any circle where fate might have cast him—it is in his blood. His acceptability to all but an inconsiderable minority of his people is plain to any observer, and even those who are restive under his rule recognize its supremacy. He has his followers under wonderful control, but, on the other hand, looks out for them like a father.17

  The contrast could not be greater with his more famous neighbor, Geronimo, who had been relocated to Fort Sill from Alabama in 1894. Unlike Quanah, he attracted no crowds and few visitors. Though he was a genius at self-advertising, and made a lot of money selling his signatures, bows and arrows, and such (he reportedly died with $10,000 in his bank account), he was not well liked in Indian country. Hugh Scott, an officer at Fort Sill and a great friend to Indians, described him as “an unlovely character, a cross-grained, mean, selfish old curmudgeon.” He drank and liked to gamble, and died from injuries he received by falling off his horse while drunk.18 The two men’s legacies stand very much in contrast even in death. Geronimo is buried in the Apache Cemetery in Fort Sill, whose address happens to be 437 Quanah Road.

  Twenty-two

  RESTING HERE UNTIL DAY BREAKS

  QUANAH NEVER FORGOT his mother. He kept the photograph Sul Ross gave him—the one taken in 1862 at A. F. Corning’s studio in Fort Worth, with Prairie Flower nursing at her
breast—on the wall above his bed. She had been taken from him when he was only twelve; in a matter of minutes she had disappeared forever into the white man’s world. He later learned that she had been unhappy and that she had repeatedly tried to escape to find him. Like her son, she had adapted brilliantly to an alien culture, but she could not do it twice. In 1908 he placed ads in Texas newspapers seeking help in finding her grave. He got a response from a man named J. R. O’Quinn, his first cousin and the son of Cynthia Ann’s younger sister Orlena, who told him he knew where to find it. It was Quanah’s first contact with his Texas family. Later he heard from another cousin, who invited him to a family function in Athens, Texas, southeast of Dallas. (He would eventually be embraced and celebrated by his Texas family.) Having found his mother, he now lobbied for money to move her grave from Texas to Oklahoma. Persistent and persuasive as always, he convinced his congressman to sponsor a bill authorizing $1,000 to relocate Cynthia Ann’s bones. The bill became law in March 1909. He traveled to Texas, met some of his white family, and found the cemetery where she lay. On December 10, 1910, she was reinterred at the Post Oak Mission in Cache. At a ceremony over her grave, Quanah gave a simple speech in his fractured English. “Forty years ago my mother died,” he said. “She captured by Comanches, nine years old. Love Indian and wild life so well, no want to go back to white folks. All same people anyway, God say. I love my mother.”

  He himself had less than three months to live. He had been busy in the fall of 1910 as usual, traveling to Dallas in October for a celebration known as Quanah Route Day at the Texas State Fair. Its purpose was to promote the Quanah, Acme and Pacific Railroad, which ran through the town of Quanah, Texas, just south of the old reservation. Quanah, who rarely turned down a chance to appear in public, drew an overflow crowd. According to a Dallas Morning News story from October 25, 1910, “The SRO sign was hung out yesterday afternoon at the convention hall. . . . Every seat was taken and standing room was at a premium. Chief Quanah Parker of the Comanches was, of course, the principal attraction.” He was there with his twelve-year-old son, Gussie. Both were dressed in warbonnets, buckskins, and moccasins. He spoke in a voice that was “clear and resonant and distinct to those even in the rear of the hall although his words were occasionally broken and difficult to understand.”1 “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I used to be a bad man. Now I am a citizen of the United States. I pay taxes same as you people do. We are the same people now.” He spoke of his mother, of stealing Mackenzie’s horses at Blanco Canyon. He told the audience about his trips to Washington to “work for my Indians,” and about meeting Roosevelt. He was funny and engaging, telling stories he had told many times before. He of course did not mention his career as a raider and killer of white people. In the best American fashion, he had carefully removed the less savory parts from his past. He took the time to deny, once and for all, that his father, Peta Nokona, had died in the battle of Pease River. He was lying, but he had a clear, and forgivable, purpose: He was trying to save his father’s reputation. Then he concluded with an odd remark. “Just one more minute, here is one more say. My ways call for money every time they send me to the fair. Two men came to me about a year ago to go to New York City. ‘I give you $5,000 for tour six months, to take your family over there.’ I say ‘No, you put me in little pen. I no monkey.’ That is all, gentlemen.” Then, as the paper noted, “as the throng crowded forward . . . he took each person by the hand and pressed it and frequently his face was wreathed in smiles.”2 His last comments were, perhaps, a way of saying that he, unlike, say, Geronimo, had limits on how far he would exploit his fame and his heritage. Dignity, he was saying, had its limits. Why he was moved to point that out will remain forever a mystery. As far as we know, they were his last public words.

  In February 1911, Quanah was returning by train from a visit to some of his Cheyenne friends, reportedly to seek a cure at a peyote meeting. He knew he was sick. Traveling with his number one wife, the childless To-nar-cy, he rode the train with his head bowed and lips trembling. When he arrived home in Cache, he was taken to his house by his white son-in-law Emmet Cox. He died there on February 23 of rheumatism-induced heart failure.

  Word of his death moved like electricity through Oklahoma and Texas, in both white and Indian communities. By morning hundreds had gathered at Quanah’s house, with its double porch and bright red roof marked with large white stars. By noon the crowd had swelled to two thousand. Mourners came on horseback and muleback and in farm wagons and buggies and automobiles. There were whites wearing Sunday clothes and Indians in buckskins and blankets. They moved in a long, slow procession to the church, where only a small fraction of them could fit. Those outside sang and prayed. Eventually they all filed past the casket where Quanah lay adorned in his favorite buckskin, his trademark plaited hair falling over his shoulders. At the gravesite, mourners sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and then the casket, draped with brilliantly colored blankets, was lowered into the grave beside Cynthia Ann’s.

  When his family sorted through his estate, they found there was not much there. He had a few hundred dollars in the bank. His wife To-nar-cy, who was recognized as his widow under Oklahoma law, took the rights to one-third of his land allotment. Wife To-pay, who had two children, aged two and eleven, got the house. His eldest son, White Parker, got the cherished, and now famous, photograph of Cynthia Ann that had hung over Quanah’s bed. Otherwise, there were a couple of horses and mules, a coach, a hack, and buggy. He did not have much else. He owed $350, a debt that was covered by the sale of his mules. That was all that remained of the last chief of the Comanches. Except for his house he had what amounted to a nomad’s possessions, a sort of symmetry that some Comanches might have appreciated. Four months after his death, the secretary of the interior ordered the Indian superintendent to eliminate the office of chief and instead to create a committee formed of members of the tribes.3 In later years there were “chairmen” but no paraibos.

  The Lords of the South Plains, meanwhile, were fast fading into America. That was what aboriginal cultures did if they did not vanish altogether. It would be inaccurate to say that the Comanches adapted well, or that Quanah was a model that the tribe as a whole was prepared or equipped to follow. The first generations of Comanches in captivity never really understood the concept of wealth, of private property. The central truth of their lives was the past, the dimming memory of the wild, ecstatic freedom of the plains, of the days when Comanche warriors in black buffalo headdresses rode unchallenged from Kansas to northern Mexico, of a world without property or boundaries. What Quanah had that the rest of his tribe in the later years did not was that most American of human traits: boundless optimism. Quanah never looked back, an astonishing feat of will for someone who had lived in such untrammeled freedom on the open plains, and who had endured such a shattering transformation. In hard times he looked resolutely forward toward something better. That sentiment appears, obliquely, on his gravestone, which reads:

  Resting here until day breaks

  And shadows fall

  And darkness disappears

  Is Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches.

  His school-educated daughter probably wrote it, based loosely on a verse in the Song of Solomon, a book of the Old Testament that settlers, among them his forefathers, carried with them into the lethal West, where Stone Age pagans on horseback once ruled the immemorial land. Quanah would have been pleased.

  NOTES

  One A NEW KIND OF WAR

  1. Robert G. Carter, On the Border with Mackenzie, p. 159.

  2. Captain George Pettis, Kit Carson’s Fight with the Comanche and Kiowa Indians,

  pp. 7ff.

  3. Cited in C. C. Rister, ed., “Documents Relating to General W. T. Sherman’s Southern Plains Indian Policy 1871–75,” Pandhandle Plains Historical Review 9, 1936.

  4. T. R. Fehrenbach, Comanches, p. 494.

  5. F. E., Green, ed., “Ranald Mackenzie’s Official Correspondence Relating to
Texas, 1873–1879,” p. 7; this incident is also known as the Wagon Train Massacre, per Fehrenbach, p. 506 (and occasionally as the Warren Wagon Train Massacre).

  6. Carter, pp. 81–82.

  7. Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, The Comanches, pp. 50–55.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Cited in Herbert Eugene Bolton, Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains.

  10. Thomas W. Kavanaugh, The Comanches, p. 3.

  11. Rupert Richardson, The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement, p. 156.

  12. Carter, p. 149.

  13. Ibid., p. 160.

  14. Ibid., p. 161.

  15. Ibid., p. 176.

  Two A LETHAL PARADISE

  1. Quanah Parker interview with Charles Goodnight, undated manuscript, Goodnight Papers, Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas.

  2. Marshall DeBruhl, Sam Houston: Sword of San Jacinto, p. 305.

  3. Deed of indenture, November 1, 1835, signed by Juan Basquis for sale of half a league of land to Silas Parker; document in Taulman Archive, Center for American History, University of Texas.