The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  Quanah, by all accounts, took delight in his children’s accomplishments, especially the literacy and education of his daughters. Several of the girls served as his personal secretary over the years, writing his letters and keeping track of the books. There are no stories of him beating or otherwise abusing his children, and many tales of his care and concern. When his son White got into trouble at the Chilocco Indian school in northern Oklahoma and was confined to the guardhouse, Quanah wrote to the superintendent, S. M. Cowan: “I cannot, Mr. Cowan, ask you to turn him loose even if it could be done that way, but I do want you to wire me if he is ill during his confinement.” He added, “I want you to make a good boy out of him if you can …”

  Still, there were times when Quanah’s public mask slipped, giving a glimpse of the man hiding behind it. For several months he met clandestinely with a young Comanche woman named Tonarcy—she quickly earned the nickname Too-Nicey—who had been married off as a young girl along with her sister to Cruz Portillo, an older Comanche. Tonarcy pleaded with Quanah to allow her to come live with him at the Star House, but he warned her that her husband would kill her if she did. This was no idle threat: when Cruz had suspected another man of paying too much attention to one of his wives, he arranged to have the man killed, according to Comanche lore.

  One night after a quarrel with her husband, Tonarcy knocked on the window of Quanah’s bedroom on the first floor of the Star House. He did not let her in but sent her down the road to the home of his sharecropper, David Granthum. The following day, Quanah headed off in his buggy without telling anyone. He picked up Tonarcy and rode to a nearby ranch of white friends, then crossed the Red River to the small Texas town of Vernon and rode on to Mexico. At first his wives and friends feared he had been murdered. But when Tonarcy’s husband reported her missing as well, the truth became obvious.

  The incident inflamed Quanah’s enemies among the Comanches. “Now it’s time to kill that white man,” one of them said, referring to Quanah’s mixed blood. “He’s caused enough trouble, and now it’s getting worse.”

  The Mexico trip became a key moment in the Quanah Parker legend. Some storytellers say it was on this trip that he first became acquainted with peyote and its healing powers and brought this strong medicine back to his people. Others contend that Quanah and Tonarcy found a haven at the Mexican ranch of his uncle John Parker, Cynthia Ann’s younger brother, who had purportedly settled there with his wife after failing to find a home in either Texan or Comanche society. Neither of these tales is even remotely documented.

  What is clear is that after several weeks, agents for the United States and Mexican governments tracked down Quanah and convinced him to return home. When he and Tonarcy came back, his wives were furious. Weckeah packed her clothes and children and stormed out, never to return. The other wives, angry but wary, forced him to cede to them a large proportion of his horses, cattle, and other possessions. He also had to pay Tonarcy’s aggrieved husband a team of horses, a buggy, and one hundred dollars cash. Tonarcy moved into the Star House, married Quanah in September 1894, and became his “show wife,” the one he took on trips to Washington and other cities. Tonarcy was unable to have children, and so a few years later Quanah added yet another wife, Topay (“Something Fell”), with whom he had three more children.

  The press was fascinated by the beauty and multiplicity of Quanah’s wives. It fit the white notion of the Indian as a sexually voracious animal with no sense of moral decency—the same psychosexual theme underpinning the captivity narrative. A correspondent for the Daily Oklahoman retold the tale of the elopement with Tonarcy and described in loving detail her appearance and the apparent wealth of her husband as if they were American nobility: “The seventh Mrs. Parker is one of the finest Indian women in America and Chief Parker is proud of her … He never allows her to go out of his sight … She wears a blue velvet waist with what is known as a bat wing cape and moccasins that are very rich. The costume which she wore the last time she was here cost, it is said, over $1,500, the beads and other ornaments being very costly.”

  THE PEYOTE PLANT is a small, spineless cactus found mostly in northern Mexico and South Texas. It contains a powerful hallucinogen whose effects can be relaxing and euphoric. Accounts of the original Spanish explorers to the region describe native peyote rituals of frenzied dancing with knives and hooks. From its earliest days in Mexico, leaders of the Catholic Church saw peyote worship as an idolatrous evil that needed to be eradicated. They never quite succeeded.

  In their longstanding raiding and trading forays into northern Mexico, Comanches and Kiowas were exposed to peyote and its spiritual and medicinal powers. But it seems to have gained traction among these tribes only after they were consigned to the reservation. A new generation of prophets and holy men emerged who blended Christian theology with traditional Native American music and rituals. John Wilson, a Caddo-Delaware, recounted a vision in which Christ took Wilson down the road he had walked after the crucifixion from his tomb to the moon on his way to heaven. Those who traveled the Peyote Road, preached Wilson, would themselves follow Christ to heaven.

  Peyote worship was a direct result of white man’s demands and innovations. The reservation system threw Comanches and Kiowas together with Mescalero and Lipan Apaches who had practiced peyote worship and brought the rituals to the reservation. Quanah first learned these rituals from two Apaches who ran all-night meetings in a big teepee with a fire pit in the middle. And it was a technological breakthrough, the railroad, that facilitated the introduction of peyote worship by enabling Indians to travel efficiently to Mexico and bring back dried peyote buttons. The loss of their old way of life and their difficulties in adjusting to reservation life created a spiritual void for many Indians. Some turned to Christianity for answers. But others found peyotism more in keeping with their spiritual identity. It was, above all, uniquely theirs, not another forced import from the white world.

  Quanah helped introduce peyote to his tribe, protected it from those seeking to ban it, and preached about its healing powers even while maintaining friendships with white Christian missionaries and officials who opposed it. Even when it came to myths and legends, Quanah was willing to split the difference, blending Christian ritual with Indian traditions. “The white man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus,” said Quanah, “but the Indian goes into his teepee and talks to Jesus.”

  In 1888, Special Agent E. E. White posted a written order prohibiting the use of peyote. White anticipated resistance, but Quanah paid him a visit claiming to carry a message from the other chiefs and headmen expressing their understanding that White “had taken the step solely for their own good and that they had almost entirely quit using [peyote].” White was not immovable, and Quanah quickly learned how to move him. Two months later White reported that he had reached an agreement with Quanah “to permit Indians to use peyote one night at each full moon for the next three to four months” until the supply ran out. Apparently it never did.

  James Mooney, an Indiana newspaper reporter who became an ethnologist for the Smithsonian Institution, attended several all-night peyote rituals in the early 1890s. He was allowed to participate, he wrote, “so that on my return I could tell the government and the white men that it was all good and not bad, and that it was the religion of the Indians in which they believed, and which was as dear to them as ours to us.”

  Still, to many whites, peyote was just another way for Indians to get high. J. J. Methvin, a Methodist missionary who befriended Quanah, approached a teepee near the agency one evening and found two of Quanah’s wives stretched out on the grass. When he asked what was going on, one of them motioned for him to enter the tent. He took a seat among a circle of worshippers who had their eyes shut tight and were beating tomtoms, rattling gourds, and chanting wildly. “Quanah opened his eyes and discovered me; he smiled his recognition and welcome.”

  Quanah explained that peyote helped Indians be inspired by the Great Father, just as whites we
re inspired from the Bible. “All the same God, both ways good,” he told Methvin. But the preacher was not buying this line. “This is not the Indian’s old religion and indeed cannot properly be called a religion at all,” Methvin wrote. “It is a drug habit under the guise of religion.”

  When the Oklahoma territorial legislature proposed banning peyote, Quanah led a delegation of chiefs in opposition. He told the lawmakers that peyote use was healthy and helped some Indians quit drinking. “My Indians use what they call pectus; some call it mescal. All my Indian people use that for medicine … It is no poison and we want to keep that medicine. I use that and I use the white doctor’s medicine, and my people use it too … My ways in time will wear out, and in time this medicine will wear out too.

  “… I do not think this Legislature should interfere with a man’s religion,” he concluded. The lawmakers agreed: the bill failed.

  QUANAH SELDOM GAVE INTERVIEWS: early on he seemed to grasp the danger of speaking freely to white people. But in 1901 he sat down with an anonymous correspondent from the Oklahoman newspaper. The reporter was clearly fixated on the number of Quanah’s wives. He noted that each wife had her own bedroom and sewing machine, and that they took turns attending Quanah in the master bedroom. The reporter could not conceal his surprise to learn that a former Comanche nomad kept carpets on the floors, as well as bureaus, chiffoniers, lamps, and other articles of furniture.

  The article reported that Quanah had many enemies among Comanches who spread rumors about him. “Some of the old people among the Comanches do not like me,” he acknowledged to the man from the Oklahoman. “They call me a white man. They are like all old people … They want to do now what they did fifty years ago. That’s no good anymore.”

  Quanah dressed in traditional garb that day: a white eagle feather in his hair, his scalp painted yellow and parted in the middle, his long hair braided and wrapped in rich beaver skin on both sides of his head. He wore a colorful blanket around his waist, a standing linen collar, and a heavy silk tie fastened to the collar with a sunburst amethyst pin. But when the reporter asked to take his photo, Quanah asked if he could first change into modern clothes.

  As the generation that had experienced the Comanche wars began to die off and the wars themselves became enshrined in myth, Quanah became a familiar figure at state fairs, rodeos, and parades, where he and his former warriors would stage “raids” and entertain the same whites whose parents they had once terrorized. A new Texas town near the Oklahoma border, just a few miles north of the site of the Pease River massacre, was named for him, as was the local railroad line. Quanah gave his namesake town his blessing: “May the Great Spirit smile on your town; may the rains fall in season; and under the warmth of the sunshine after the rain may the earth yield bountifully; may peace and contentment be with you and your children forever.”

  He returned to Quanah, Texas, a few years later to attend Fourth of July celebrations, along with 225 braves, women, and children; they rode in the parade and he gave a speech. “I am not a bad man and have not done many of the things told about me,” he told the crowd. “My mother raised me like your mothers raised their children, but my father taught me to be brave and learn to fight to become chief of my people. But we want to fight no more.”

  Even old enemies became allies. Sul Ross, the former Texas Ranger captain who had helped recapture Cynthia Ann at the Pease River, became a benefactor. Ross was elected governor of Texas in 1886 and re-elected two years later in part because of his reputation as the legendary Indian fighter who had rescued Cynthia Ann Parker. When Ross saw the advertisement for a photo of Cynthia Ann that Quanah had placed in the Fort Worth Gazette, he sent Quanah a copy of the daguerreotype of her nursing Prairie Flower that she had reluctantly posed for at A. F. Corning’s studio in Fort Worth in 1861. Quanah framed the picture, struck it on an easel, placed it in his parlor, and posed for photos sitting next to it.

  By this time a new generation of Texas historians had rediscovered the Parker saga. John Henry Brown had first met Cynthia Ann in Austin in 1861 when her uncle Isaac brought her to the secessionist legislative session seeking an annuity for her and Prairie Flower, and his wife had helped dress her and escorted her to the gallery during the session. Brown, a former Texas Ranger, state legislator, newspaper publisher, and collector of pioneer tales, later wrote a brief history of the Parker family after being asked to introduce Isaac at a political gathering in Dallas in 1874. And he later recounted the tale of Parker’s Fort in his 762-page magnum opus, Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas, originally published in 1880. Brown, who by then was mayor of Dallas, wrote that Ross had killed a warrior named Mohee, “chief of the band,” at the Pease River.

  Quanah Parker in his bedroom with the photograph of his mother, Cynthia Ann, and sister, Prairie Flower, a photo sent to him by Texas governor Sul Ross.

  Next came James T. DeShields, a twenty-three-year-old book salesman and amateur historian who contacted and collected material from Brown, Ross, Ross’s newspaper friend Victor M. Rose, Quanah, and Quanah’s cousin Ben Parker, and put together the first detailed account of the massacre, the fate of Cynthia Ann, and the emergence of her surviving child. Cynthia Ann Parker: The Story of Her Capture, first published in 1886, became the definitive version of her life. DeShields put the declaration “Truth is Stranger than Fiction” on the title page and dedicated the book to Ross.

  DeShields promised his readers a “narrative of plain, unvarnished facts,” but he could not resist fanciful details and commentary. He claimed the Indian attack on Fort Parker involved five hundred warriors who, despite their vast numbers, used treachery against the worthy pioneers, making “such pleas with all the servile sycophancy of a slave, like the Italian who embraces his victim ere plunging the poniard into his heart.”

  The young self-styled historian also used his imagination to portray Cynthia Ann’s “budding charms” as the white captive of dark-skinned savages.

  “Doubtless the heart of more than one warrior was pierced by the Ulyssean darts from her laughing eyes, or charmed by the silvery ripple of her joyous laughter,” he wrote. No doubt she had fallen in love with Peta Nocona, “performing for her imperious lord all the slavish offices which savageism and Indian custom assigns as the duty of a wife. She bore him children and we are assured loved him with a species of fierce passion and wifely devotion.”

  DeShields even claimed that Cynthia Ann rode alongside Peta Nocona and five hundred Comanches who sought to rescue the warriors trapped by Rip Ford’s raiders in Indian Territory in 1858. “Doubtless,” DeShields quotes Victor Rose, “Cynthia Ann rode from this ill-starred field with her infant daughter pressed to her bosom and her sons … at her side.”

  By now a politician aspiring for the governor’s mansion, Ross assured DeShields that “my early life was one of constant danger from [Indian] forays.” He changed the identity of the warrior he killed at the Pease River from the little-known Mohee to “the chief of the party, Peta Nocona, a noted warrior of great repute.”

  “It was a short but desperate conflict,” wrote DeShields of Ross’s clash with the Comanche chief. “Victory trembled in the balance … The two chiefs engaged in a personal encounter, which must result in the death of one or the other. Peta Nocona fell, and his last sigh was taken up in mournful wailings on the wings of defeat.”

  Victor Rose, who served as Ross’s campaign strategist and biographer, undoubtedly had a hand in the rewrite. DeShields helped the campaign by transforming a brief, tawdry massacre into a heroic triumph: “the great Comanche confederacy was forever broken.” He also stated as fact I. D. Parker’s claim that Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower, “her little barbarian,” had died in 1864.

  Despite its many inaccuracies, DeShields’s account became enshrined in one of the most enduring of the Indian war histories, Indian Depredations in Texas, published in 1889. John Wesley Wilbarger’s 691-page book is an exhaustive compendium of Indian attacks on pioneers and their families, most of the
m drawn from firsthand accounts and previously published stories. He reprinted DeShields’s version of events without fact-checking a single sentence. The book helped establish DeShields’s work as the accepted official account of the Cynthia Ann saga, handed down through the generations and incorporated into the state of Texas’s public school history curriculum.

  Brown, DeShields, and Wilbarger all depicted Comanches as savage killers shorn of all humanity—“these wild Ishmaelites of the prairie,” in DeShields’s words. Wilbarger was especially scornful of “maudlin, sentimental writers” who failed to recognize the brutality of the Indians. Such writers, he surmised, “never had their fathers, mothers, brothers, or sisters butchered by them in cold blood; never had their little sons and daughters carried away by them into captivity, to be brought up as savages … and certainly they never themselves had their own limbs beaten, bruised, burnt, and tortured with fiendish ingenuity by ‘ye gentle savages,’ nor their scalps ruthlessly torn from their bleeding heads.”

  His own view of the Indian, said Wilbarger, was: “We are glad he is gone, and that there are no Indians now in Texas except ‘good ones,’ who are as dead as Julius Caesar.”

  At the same time, each author praised Quanah, and their books contributed to his growing celebrity as the Noble Savage. Brown’s book includes a photo of Quanah and describes him as “a popular and trustworthy chief of the Comanches … a fine looking and dignified son of the plains.”

  Each of these male authors created and buffed the macho frontier legend using whatever facts fit their vision and discarding those that were less convenient. But occasionally someone came along who gathered a more modest, fact-based account.