By mid-afternoon the Indians retreated. An angry swarm of Cheyennes grabbed Isatai by the throat and demanded he be killed, but the Comanches argued he had been disgraced enough by his failure. Isatai’s messiah days were over.
Over the years Isatai offered several explanations for his failure to ward off bullets. He said that on their way to Adobe Walls the warriors had killed a skunk, whose spirit had somehow neutralized the power of his medicine. He told someone else that he had concocted the medicine to sabotage the guns at Fort Dodge and had not considered that it would not work at Adobe Walls. In truth, he had sold his own myth so powerfully to his fellow warriors that he himself had come to believe it.
Three whites were killed and thirteen warriors were found dead at the site, although the Indians may have carried off the bodies of another dozen. A fourth white man, Mrs. Olds’s hapless husband, William, died when he slipped on a ladder with a loaded gun cradled in his arm and blew off his own head. When a relief column finally arrived, the troops found thirteen severed Indian heads staring blindly from the posts of the corral gate.
THE ATTACK ON ADOBE WALLS was the moment the army had been waiting for. Secretary of War W. W. Belknap took the reins off Sherman, instructing him to punish all hostile Indians, including those living on reservations. Sherman, in turn, ordered Sheridan “to act with vindictive earnestness and to make every Kiowa and Comanche knuckle down.”
Sheridan dispatched five columns totaling three thousand troops who entered the Panhandle from five different directions in a pincer movement to squeeze the warriors. A series of fourteen skirmishes and small battles ensued, known collectively as the Red River War. There were few casualties, but each violent encounter reduced the Indians’ supply of food, horses, and shelter.
Ranald Mackenzie’s column of 640 men entered the canyon country of the eastern Panhandle in mid-September. A group of newspaper reporters demanded permission to accompany him, but Bad Hand was not interested in publicity. Sherman had called for a full-scale assault. “The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next,” he declared. But Mackenzie believed that the most effective way to defeat the Comanches was not to attempt to mow them down but to destroy their means of survival.
Mackenzie’s men beat off an attack by 250 warriors after dark on September 26, at the head of Tule Canyon. Aware that he and his men were being watched, Mackenzie set off after the warriors, who were moving away from Palo Duro canyon. But when darkness fell, he changed direction, pushing his men all night thirty miles south toward the spot where Cita Blanca and Palo Duro canyons meet. At daybreak the troopers stormed the Quahadi winter stronghold on the canyon floor. Most of the Comanches escaped—the soldiers killed only three warriors—but they left behind teepees, food, blankets, saddles, and 1,424 horses and ponies. Mackenzie ordered the animals slaughtered. It was a crushing blow to the Comanches. When it rained the next night, the Indians were forced to sleep “in puddles of mud and water like swine,” Mackenzie wrote.
For the next two months, Mackenzie trailed the Comanches in relentless pursuit of his crippled foe. Through increasing sleet and rain, Mackenzie and his men doggedly stalked Quanah and the Quahadis, who were slowed by hundreds of cold, hungry, and exhausted women and children. “It is important to give the Indians as little rest as possible,” Mackenzie wrote his superiors on October 29. The Comanches eventually retreated into the Staked Plains. Mackenzie followed until sheer exhaustion and lack of food forced him and his men to quit around Christmastime. But unlike the soldiers, the Indians had no safe haven to retreat to.
FACED WITH A WINTER without shelter and with little food, other Comanche and Kiowa bands were calling it quits. Satanta and Big Tree surrendered on October 4, 1874, to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas H. Neill of the Sixth Cavalry, bringing in 145 Kiowa warriors and their families. “I came in here to give myself up and do as the white chief wishes,” proclaimed Satanta. Predictably blaming the Comanches for Adobe Walls, he claimed, “I have done no fighting against the whites, have killed no white men, and committed no depredations since I left Fort Sill.”
Mackenzie returned to Fort Sill in March 1875. One month later, 3 Comanche leaders, 35 braves, and 140 women and children surrendered themselves at the fort with some 700 horses. But the Quahadis were still on the loose.
Mackenzie began preparing for a new spring offensive to hunt them down, but first he wanted to see if he could coax them into surrender. He sent out an emissary: Jacob J. Sturm, the same man who had brought home young Bianca Babb from her Comanche abductors a decade earlier. Sturm was a self-styled “pioneer physician,” Army scout, and interpreter who had married a local Caddo woman. Accompanied by three reservation Comanches, he set out from Fort Sill on April 23. According to Sturm’s journal, it took them a week to travel roughly 250 miles through territory where white men had once feared to tread. Now the land seemed empty of people and wildlife.
Sturm’s party eventually encountered a friendly Quahadi band, led by Black Beard, a chief with fifteen to twenty lodges. Black Beard was happy to see Sturm, fed him a dinner of buffalo meat, shared a pipe, and then got down to business, saying he and his followers were tired of war and ready to come to Fort Sill. The main Quahadi camp, he told Sturm, was “two sleeps” away. To cement his friendship and sincerity, Black Beard bestowed upon Sturm any mule of his choice.
It took several more days for Sturm’s little party to ascend the timbered bushland and emerge onto the eastern edge of the empty, windswept Staked Plains—“a barren waste unfit for habitation of civilized men,” according to Sturm. There they finally caught up to the main Quahadi camp, under the leadership of the much-maligned Isatai. Sturm and his men introduced themselves as messengers of peace and shared their supplies of tobacco, coffee, and sugar with the Comanches.
The Indians told Sturm they were no longer seeking to fight anyone and were doing their best to keep out of the way of those whites who still wanted to fight them. Isatai said he was inclined to take his people to Fort Sill, but could not make a final decision until the return of thirty men who were out on a buffalo hunt. He and Sturm met again the next day, and this time he brought along a tall young warrior named Quanah, whom Sturm described as “a young man of much influence with his people.” The young warrior expressed his support for surrendering. Isatai “then told his people they must all prepare to come in to Fort Sill and as his authority seems to be absolute they all agreed to start tomorrow,” wrote Sturm.
They broke camp the next day and started northeast to Fort Sill, leaving a message for the hunters to catch up to them on a piece of buffalo skin stuck on a pole.
It was, Sturm writes, an extraordinary sight: hundreds of warriors, women, and children, trekking through the High Plains in a great snaking line that strung out for miles. They were traveling from their hunting grounds and a harsh, unsustainable freedom to a form of captivity and an unknown future. There was nothing joyous or exciting about the journey; they were making it because they had no choice. They were in no hurry: they killed a handful of buffalo along the way, stripped the corpses of their meat, and waited two days while meat and hides dried in the sun.
At one point near sundown, Sturm spotted a single rider moving through the plains like a sailboat on an open, placid sea, “coming out of this vastness of the great plain, without any path to keep him from getting lost nor road to guide him, but coming up to our camp on a beeline.” It was an Apache who said that more than forty lodges of his tribesmen—perhaps three hundred people—were also prepared to surrender. “I told him I was not instructed to bring in Apaches but was sure that General Mackenzie would be much pleased if they would all come in.”
The next night the Comanches staged a medicine dance—“the last … they ever expect to have [on] these broad Plains.” They were gripped by fear, hope, and resignation. “They say they will abandon their roving life and try to learn to live as white people do,” wrote Sturm.
The next day the caravan climbed a
rocky bluff and ascended onto “the great high plain wonderful and grand in its vastness.” It was clear to Sturm that Isatai, not Quanah, was in charge. “When he says move, we move, and when he says stop, we stop, and if I ask any one when we will start they refer me to him always.”
With the main body of Quahadis winding slowly through the plains, Sturm sent an advance party of three Comanches on ahead. They arrived at Fort Sill on May 13. With Horace Jones interpreting, the men told the colonel that the Quahadis would keep their word and surrender as promised. The main body was moving slowly because their horses were weak and there were women, children, and old people among them. But it would arrive in a few weeks.
After the warriors finished, one of them—an unusually tall and powerful-looking man with striking gray eyes—took Jones aside for a lengthy discussion, after which the interpreter turned to Mackenzie and conveyed a highly unusual request. Jones told him the warrior’s name was Quanah and he wanted the colonel’s help in locating his white mother and his sister. As a child he had been called Tseeta or Citra, and these were the names by which his mother might recognize him. Her white name, Jones added, was Cynthia Ann Parker. Jones, who had met Cynthia Ann after her recapture fifteen years earlier and had also spoken with her Comanche husband, Peta Nocona, knew her story well and filled in the details for the colonel.
Mackenzie respected the Quahadis. He admired the fact that, unlike his other Indian foes, they had never played the double game of camping at the reservation for food and shelter during the winter months and then returning to raiding in the spring and summer. He wanted to help them. “I think better of this band than of any other on the reservation as they have been steadily out and now come in at a most unusual time,” he wrote. “I shall let them down as easily as I can.”
Mackenzie listened carefully to Quanah’s request. He said he would try to help.
8.
The Go-between (Fort Sill, 1875–1886)
In End of the Trail (1915), James Earle Fraser’s doleful statue of a Native American rider and horse, the heads of both are bowed in defeat. This was the tragic and romantic portrait of the Noble but Doomed Savage at the beginning of the twentieth century, vanquished and displaced by the modern world, the tip of his war lance turned downward in submission. But its message was misleading: Indians did not vanish, their story was not over, and their trail did not end when they lost their struggle against white domination. Their struggle to survive continued, only in many ways it was harder and more complex than the one they had waged in battle.
The long, thin caravan of Quahadi men, women, and children—the last significant group of hostile Comanches on the High Plains—finally trickled into the Signal Station, six miles west of Fort Sill, on June 2, 1875. The official count was 427 people and 1,500 horses. The old people, women, and children proceeded to an appointed campground, while the men quietly laid down their arms and trudged under military escort to their place of confinement at the fort, a roofless icehouse with a stone floor, 150 by 40 feet, already crammed with 130 Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne prisoners. At meal times soldiers would throw chunks of raw meat over the high walls. “They fed us like we were lions,” said Gotebo, a Kiowa warrior. Quanah was spared this indignity and allowed to camp with his wives and children west of the fort, along the banks of Cache Creek.
Many of the Quahadis who rode into Fort Sill to surrender in the summer of 1875 likely believed they could ride out again and resume their nomadic warrior life whenever they chose to, as they had in the past. Quanah, by contrast, seemed to understand from the beginning that his life had been irrevocably altered, and he began to adjust accordingly.
For one thing, the Comanche population had been decimated by war, epidemic, starvation, and the grim realities of fugitive life on the unyielding plains. When the nineteenth century began, there had been between twenty thousand and thirty thousand Comanches. But James M. Haworth, head of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache agency at the fort, registered only 1,475 in 1877, along with 1,120 Kiowas and 344 Apaches. A few hundred more were huddled in remote corners of the Staked Plains or in the foothills of the Rockies. The assembly-line extermination of the buffalo over the past decade meant that the Comanches had lost not only most of their own community but also their sole traditional means of replenishing it.
Open resistance was futile. Quanah knew well the fate of Satank, Satanta, Big Tree, and the other chiefs who had been hunted down, imprisoned, or condemned to a never-ending life on the run. Quanah was a proud man but a practical one. He harbored no taste for martyrdom.
He decided to recast his own narrative. Not that he thought of it in exactly those terms, but Quanah was a storyteller. His old story was about a proud, independent warrior, beholden to no one, who had held out as long as he could. Now he had a different tale to tell—about a man who was half-white and half-Comanche, and who longed to bring those two worlds together, explaining each to the other and linking the two, just as they were linked in his own bloodstream. The Man of Peace. The White Comanche. The Noble Savage. It was, always, a work in progress. But almost from the moment his captivity began, it is clear that this was the role he had decided to play.
From the day he arrived at Fort Sill, Quanah chose to make himself useful to the men who were now in charge of his fate, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie and Indian agent Haworth. Twice that summer Quanah volunteered to round up Comanche stragglers and deliver them to the fort; each time Mackenzie sent along a document of authorization to give Quanah a modicum of protection from trigger-happy whites inclined to kill any Comanche they encountered.
Texas was a dangerous place for any Indian to venture into. A Texas congressman attached a rider to an appropriation bill that year forbidding Indian hunting parties from entering the state even when escorted by troops. Perhaps he was thinking of their safety. Five Indians who crossed into Jack County in northeastern Texas in April 1875 were surrounded by white settlers, gunned down, and beheaded. “I understand the heads are now preserved in alcohol in Jacksboro,” wrote Haworth in his annual report to Washington.
On his first run as an agent of the United States government, Quanah brought back a party of twenty-one Comanches whom he located on the Pecos River. This was “excellent conduct in a dangerous expedition,” Mackenzie reported to his superiors. The returned fugitives were stripped of their weapons and horses and dispatched to the icehouse. But Quanah insisted that they not be shipped off to a military prison. This earned him the gratitude of the former fugitives. Already he was learning how to serve as a bridge between the two sides, white and Indian.
It was not long before Mackenzie sent out Quanah again, this time to find and bring back a small band of Quahadis still lurking in the familiar, well-worn creases of the Texas Panhandle. Quanah left on July 12 with three men, three women, and several pack mules loaded with supplies. He carried a white flag and a stern letter from Mackenzie warning anyone they encountered not to interfere with him or his mission.
One of the renegades was Herman Lehmann, a teenage white captive turned Comanche warrior. He and his fellow warriors, determined to live by the old ways, scoured the desolate plateau for the last remnants of wild game while avoiding the soldiers and Texas Rangers who were in turn hunting for them. But their main enemies were the buffalo hunters who were engaged in eliminating the last of the herds. Everywhere they rode, the Quahadis came across stinking mounds of rotting carcasses. “The plains were literally alive with buffalo hunters,” Lehmann would recall.
Some of the warriors had fought in the debacle at Adobe Walls and did not yearn for another. For the most part they shied away from the hunters, who were armed with long-range Sharps rifles. But early in 1877 the nomads joined forces with warriors under Black Horse, a Quahadi chief who had obtained permission from Haworth for a hunting expedition in the Panhandle. When Black Horse and his increasingly frustrated followers could not find any buffalo to kill, they decided to hunt the hunters instead. One morning in early February they came across a lone bu
ffalo man named Marshall Sewell, who was working the Salt Fork of the Brazos River. They watched unseen from a distance as Sewell brought down beast after beast in mechanical fashion with his rifle. When he finally ran out of bullets, they moved in. One of the Indians shot him in the thigh. Sewell frantically hobbled back toward his camp but Lehmann and the others cut him off and finished him.
The Comanches pillaged the camp, taking weapons, tools, and food, defacing the hides with their knives and setting them on fire. They scalped Sewell’s corpse, cut a gash in each temple and stuck a sharp stick through his stomach, then set fire to his wagon. No white hunter could miss the message.
Seeking revenge, about four dozen buffalo men set out in early March to hunt down the Comanches. They found the Indians camped in Yellow House Canyon, a few miles east of present-day Lubbock. The gun battle lasted all day—one hunter and three Indians were killed—until the badly outnumbered hunters were forced to withdraw. The skirmish constituted the last organized battle between whites and Indians in the state of Texas. A few weeks later a cavalry troop from Fort Griffin quietly rounded up most of the Quahadi stragglers and escorted them back to Fort Sill. Lehmann and a ragtag handful eluded capture and continued to roam the Staked Plains until Quanah tracked them down that summer along the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico.
To these hardened, defiant, but exhausted stragglers, Quanah did not try to preach peace, love, or reconciliation, just practical arithmetic. They were, he told them, outnumbered. He “told us that it was useless for us to fight longer,” Lehmann would recall, “for the white people would kill all of us if we kept on fighting … He said the white men had us completely surrounded; that they would come in on us from every side, and we had better give up.”
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