The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  For Roosevelt, violence was a purifying act, both cleansing and mythical. He had no time for those “foolish sentimentalists” who sought to protect and preserve Indian culture.

  Above all, he believed that character was destiny and that strong men made their own history. He loved natural men who could ride, shoot, hunt, and thrive in the wilderness. Thus a special man such as Quanah Parker—an Indian, yet with his mother’s Anglo-Saxon blood coursing through his veins—appealed to Roosevelt’s celebration of “a race of heroes.”

  Quanah first came to Roosevelt’s attention through Francis E. Leeup, a New York journalist and Indian rights lobbyist who became part of Roosevelt’s inner circle. The president dispatched Leeup to the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache agency in Anadarko in 1903 to investigate allegations of corruption against the Indian agent James Randlett, one of Quanah’s closest allies. Leeup uncovered a nest of jealousy, double-dealing, theft, and vicious in-fighting among white merchants, land speculators, squaw men, and chiefs, but he exonerated the agent. As for Quanah, Leeup wrote approvingly that the Comanche chief was “always conscious that he is Indian, but never forgetful that the white civilization is supreme, and that the Indian’s wisest course is to adapt himself to it as fast as he can.”

  Leeup had observed politicians in Washington over the years and believed he knew leadership when he saw it. “If ever Nature stamped a man with the seal of headship she did it in his case,” he wrote. “Quanah would have been a leader and a governor in any circle where fate might have cast him. It is in his blood … Even those who are restive under his rule recognize its supremacy.”

  Quanah’s national fame was cemented at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, where he participated in a celebration of the American West. It was followed by an invitation to Roosevelt’s March 4, 1905, inauguration, along with Geronimo, Buckskin Charlie of the Utes, Hollow Horn Bear of the Rosebud Sioux, American Horse of the Brule Sioux, and Little Plume of the Blackfeet. In what the historian Douglas Brinkley called “Roosevelt’s own Buffalo Bill production,” pioneers, cowboys, Rough Riders, the cowboy star Tom Mix, and the Indian chiefs all gathered to parade in a light snow.

  The authorities ordered Quanah to appear “fully equipped with Indian clothing as gorgeous as possible in its make-up and complete in its representation of old Indian dress,” wrote Captain W. A. Mercer, superintendent at the Carlisle Indian School, to Randlett. Quanah was to epitomize “the progressive Indian, one who is in accord with the efforts of the Government to better the condition of the race.”

  Not everyone approved of Quanah’s place of honor. Retired Army captain Robert G. Carter, who had served in the Fourth Cavalry under Mackenzie during the Red River War, was incensed that Roosevelt had invited Quanah and the other “good Indians … most of whom had dipped their hands in many a white settler’s blood.” Carter was equally angered that Texas towns had been named after Quanah and his father, Nocona. Had any towns been named for one of the cavalrymen, Carter wondered, “who risked their lives and sacrificed their health and future happiness here on earth in more than one effort to drive out that same Quahada Comanche band and open up that wild and desolate region to settlement?” But Carter’s was a minority view. Having been thoroughly vanquished and defanged, Native Americans were now fair subjects for popular admiration.

  One month after the inauguration, Roosevelt decided to take up an invitation to go wolf hunting in southwestern Oklahoma, and he made the territory one of the stops on a five-week tour of the West. When he arrived at the train station in Frederick on April 8, Roosevelt invited Quanah to join him on the speaker’s stand. “Give the red man the same chance as the white,” the president told the small crowd. “The country is founded on a doctrine of giving each man a fair show to see what there is in him.”

  Quanah showed up with twelve of his men and wore his six-shooter strapped to his waist—“afraid somebody might try to kill President,” he explained.

  Burk Burnett and his son Tom—two of Quanah’s white benefactors—were the president’s main hosts, along with Guy Waggoner, Burnett’s business partner. They brought with them Jack “Catch ’Em Alive” Abernathy, a Texas-born wolf hunter. They took the president and his party south to Big Pasture, setting up camp at Deep Red Creek, which empties into the Red River, under the shade of elms and pecan trees. They were serenaded by cardinals and mockingbirds—“the most individual and delightful of all birds in voice and manner,” declared Roosevelt.

  “The weather was good, we were in the saddle from morning until night, and our camp was in all respects all that a camp should be,” the president exulted. “So how could we help enjoying ourselves?”

  They spent four days there, killed seventeen wolves, and ate and slept outdoors. On the third day, three of Quanah’s wives and two of his children joined them. “It was a thoroughly congenial company all through,” Roosevelt wrote. When it ended, Quanah invited Roosevelt to the Star House for dinner. While talking with Quanah that evening, Roosevelt mentioned the idea of establishing a bison refuge, populated by buffalo currently residing at the Bronx Zoo in New York, in the newly created Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, a few miles north of the Star House. Quanah was almost speechless with excitement at the prospect of seeing buffalo again near his home.

  Anna Birdsong Dean, one of Quanah’s granddaughters, recalled hearing from her mother about Roosevelt’s visit to the house. “My mother’s job was to see if everything was done properly,” Anna recalled. She checked the dining room table before the president was to arrive and chastised Quanah for filling large goblets to the brim with wine. “Grandfather replied that when he went to Washington the President served wine in small glasses and he wanted to give the President more wine than Roosevelt gave him.”

  It took more than two years for the paperwork to go through. But on October 11, 1907, seven bison bulls and eight cows were loaded onto fifteen padded compartments at Fordham Station, accompanied by three zoo officials for the two-thousand-mile journey to the Wichita refuge. Three of the bison were named for Lone Wolf, Geronimo, and Quanah.

  Dressed in full war feathers, Quanah awaited their arrival in Cache. He and his men helped load the bison into wagons for the thirteen-mile journey to the refuge. It was as if the ancient Kiowa vision had been realized: the bison again came roaring out of Mount Scott, even if only a remnant.

  BY NOW QUANAH HAD BECOME the most important and influential Native American of his generation. He was the Man to See when it came to Comanche affairs, a reliable ally and a formidable enemy. He was also the white man’s favorite Indian, in no small part because he was the son of a white woman.

  A certificate from Indian commissioner W. A. Jones recognized his power and authority even while reflecting just how fragile the entire arrangement was: “This is to certify that Quanah Parker is recognized as the chief of the Comanches, and has promised his Great Father to be always friendly towards white men, and any white man to whom he may show this Paper is requested by the Government to treaty him in a friendly manner, and to be careful to give him no cause to break his promise.”

  His relations with the long parade of white officials who ran the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Indian agency were friendly but measured. Many developed a genuine affection for Quanah and his family. James Randlett, who became his closest ally among the agents, arranged to have one of the first telephones in the Oklahoma territory installed at the Star House and helped with jobs and housing for many of Quanah’s vast brood. When one of the periodic smallpox epidemics broke out, Randlett wrote one of his subordinates: “I wish you to go over to Quanah’s to find out how he is fixed and if anything can be done for him … After you get this I want you to write me every day so long as smallpox is in Quanah’s family, and tell me how they are and if anything can be done for them.”

  Yet, while the agents sought to respect Quanah’s pride and dignity, the portrait that emerges from the agency’s files is of a man who was still a ward of the state. Every expense, no matter how tr
ivial, was scrutinized. Quanah could not spend his own private funds to buy building materials for his house or purchase a new cow without agency permission. Often the agent had to pass these requests up the chain of command to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. Nor could Quanah travel to Washington without permission from the commissioner of Indian Affairs. Once when Quanah sought fifty dollars’ reimbursement for the expenses of his wife Pohpondy for a trip to Washington, an Interior Department bureaucrat rejected the request by noting he had not seen proof that Pohpondy was Quanah’s legal spouse.

  For Quanah, there were two worlds: the Comanche world he came from and identified with, and the white world that found him fascinating and acceptable so long as he was careful and obsequious. He alone moved between these worlds, yet at the same time he knew to keep them separate, and he seldom let his guard down in either one.

  “My grandfather never trusted a white man,” Baldwin Parker Jr., a grandson, once told an interviewer. “He was smart enough to live with them. He could live in both worlds at the same time. His whiteness and red-ness worked for him instead of against him. The two had become one.”

  Quanah’s celebrity continued to grow. He hosted two major powwows near his home that attracted thousands of visitors. The highlight in 1903 was a staged attack by three hundred warriors on a Frisco passenger train just arriving at the station in Cache. “Painted, brandishing their bows and arrows and shrieking their war cries, the Indians produced near-panic on the train, and passengers screamed and fainted in the coaches,” reported one newspaper account.

  His fame became a passport that allowed him to enter worlds that other Indians were not welcome in. Once in Texas, he recalled to his cousin Susan St. John, he had sat down in a train coach across from some white businessmen. He was always careful when he rode the train to dress in his finest dark wool suit from the haberdashers in Electra, Texas, but he never hid his warrior’s braids, which gave him away as a Comanche just as his pale blue eyes betrayed his white origins. The men wanted this obvious Indian evicted from the coach and some of them went to get a conductor, who proceeded to inform them that the man in question was the famous Quanah Parker. Suddenly the mood changed. The men shook his hand and engaged him in conversation. As far as they were concerned, Quanah Parker was a celebrity.

  Still, some doors remained closed. When Quanah sought to enroll one of his sons in the Cache public schools, the boy was rejected by order of the Republican-dominated school board. The board ruled the boy was not a bona fide resident of Cache, but a personal investigation by the Oklahoman’s special correspondent reported, “The real reason is because he is an Indian.”

  Quanah went to J. A. Johnson, an old friend who was superintendent of schools in Comanche County, and asked Johnson to organize a new school district in Quanah’s area. The chief donated the land, built the school, and ensured that residents paid a school tax. Quanah was elected head of the board in June 1908.

  Cache held a “great Quanah Parker celebration” that same year, with bronco busting, horse races, Indian dances, stagecoach robbery enactments, and oratory. Quanah loved the hoopla, but he insisted upon his dignity. When two businessmen approached him the following year and offered him $5,000 for six months if he agreed to appear in a Wild West show in New York, he said no. “You put me in little pen,” he told them. “I no monkey.”

  THROUGH IT ALL, Quanah maintained a burning interest in his mother and her fate. His obsession stemmed from both a sincere longing and a canny assessment of the stature and protection white blood offered at a time when the white world was seeking to destroy what was left of Comanche culture and identity. It also gave him a soothing story to tell: the fierce Indian warrior now transformed into an ambassador for peace and reconciliation because of his love for his white mother.

  His white relatives may not have been eager to welcome him to Texas, but he always welcomed them to Oklahoma. Adam Parker of Weatherford, Texas, one of Uncle Isaac’s sons, spent two weeks at the Star House in 1902 and wrote to his cousin Susan Parker St. John that Quanah was “a most interesting character … He boasts of his ancestral white blood and delights in the entertainment of Cynthiann’s [sic] relations.” He concluded: “You should visit him.”

  Two years later, she took up the suggestion. Susan was a daughter of Nathaniel Parker, one of the sons of Elder John who chose not to migrate to Texas with his father and brothers. Thus she was a first cousin of Cynthia Ann. She recalled growing up listening to her father tell stories of Cynthia Ann’s capture. “Being a little girl myself Cynthia Ann’s fate appealed most strongly of all to me,” she wrote.

  Susan had married John P. St. John, who became governor of Kansas, and she ventured periodically from her home in Olathe, Kansas, to Oklahoma and Texas interviewing survivors and gathering firsthand accounts of the life and times of Cynthia Ann and Quanah for a family memoir she planned to publish.

  She and a woman friend traveled to Lawton, where Quanah came to greet them at a local hotel. He himself drove his coach, drawn by four mules, up to the front entrance. “Quanah is a man worth looking at,” she later told an interviewer. “He is a magnificent-looking man and his bearing and manner is that of a cavalier. He was dressed in the latest style of civilization and, as he strode into the hotel, I was just proud of him.”

  Quanah stared at her as she came forward.

  “Is this the cousin?” he asked.

  “This is the cousin,” she replied.

  Then he took Susan’s hand and kissed it, she recalled, “as cousinly and gently as if he had learned the art in some finishing school for gentlemen. And, only to think of it, not so many years ago this man was a bloodthirsty, scalping wild Indian.”

  Later, he told her she looked like his mother.

  Susan Parker St. John, first cousin of Cynthia Ann, interviewed family members and other sources and visited with Quanah Parker. Her unpublished notes are one of the most reliable sources of information about Cynthia Ann’s life and death after her recapture in 1860.

  He took the two women to the Star House. The house was handsomely furnished and scrupulously clean—“just as the house of any white man of wealth and refinement,” Susan would recall.

  Susan was especially impressed with Quanah’s kindness to his wife Topay. When a fierce storm lit up the evening sky, he ushered everyone inside for their safety. “Quanah showed us how the windows bolted and doors locked, said the big gate … was locked … [N]o one could get in. [He] told us he slept in the next room and if we needed anything or was afraid to rap on his door.” He asked Susan if Topay, who had recently lost a baby, could stay with her during the storm. “He seems so thoughtful of his wives. I suppose that’s why he brought her in our room.”

  Susan in her account captured Quanah’s virtue and his vanity. “He is a fine looking man proud as a peacock and vain as a … pretty girl,” she recalled, “[who] likes to have you tell him what a great man he is.”

  QUANAH HAD LOST his mother when she was alive; now he wanted to claim her in death by having her remains removed from Texas and reburied in the homeland of the native people she had embraced as her own. He knew he would never obtain permission from the Texas legislature for such a project, so instead he asked his rancher friends Burnett and Goodnight to lobby in Washington. In 1909, Congress passed a bill authorizing the transfer and appropriating $1,000 for the purpose.

  On Department of Interior letterhead, Quanah petitioned Texas governor Thomas Mitchell Campbell for his personal protection: “Dear Sir, Congress has set aside money for me to remove the body of my mother Cynthia Ann Parker and build a monument and some time past I was hunting in Texas and they accused me [of] killing antelope and I was afraid to come for fear they might make some trouble for me because of a dislike to a friend of mine in Texas, would you protect me if I was to come to Austin and neighborhood to remove my mother’s body some time soon.”

  There is no record of a reply from Campbell. But Quanah did get an offer of help, handwri
tten in pencil, from J. R. O’Quinn, a first cousin:

  Sir:

  I see your advertisement in reguard to your Mother Cytnia An Parkers grave and its where bouts I aught to no how she was.

  She was my mothers sister that makes her my own aunt. And she was living with my father and mother when she died. You said you wanted to find her grave if you do we aught to no where it is and if you will come down I think we can site you to the place my father written to you some 8 or 10 days ago but miss address not doing the exact Post office the address to Lawton. Well I have written to a cousin that I never have seen, waiting to hear from you soon.

  Yours Respectfully,

  JR O’Quinn

  Other members of the Texas Parkers were not so accommodating. “The relatives of Cynthia Ann and the friends of the Parkers did not want to see her removed, they said they thought she had suffered enough from the Indians, and they didn’t want her taken up and buried among them,” recalled Ambrosia Miller, a cousin. “The Parkers helped make Texas and they thought they had more right to Cynthia Ann’s body than the Indians.”

  In the fall of 1910, Quanah dispatched son-in-law Aubrey C. Birdsong, who was married to his daughter Neda, to East Texas. Birdsong visited small-town cemeteries in Groesbeck, Canton, Mineola, Athens, and several other sites, but despite O’Quinn’s offer of help, he could not locate Cynthia Ann’s grave. At first he could not even find anyone who had attended her funeral. But eventually he found his way to a local judge named John Parker. The judge in turn sent him to the small town of Poynor to meet Bob and Joe Padgett.

  The Padgetts had known Cynthia Ann in the last year of her life; Bob and Joe told Birdsong they had assisted in her burial. Joe’s wife recalled dressing the body and pinning up Cynthia Ann’s hair with a bone hairpin. The brothers escorted Birdsong to an unmarked grave in the nearby Fosterville cemetery, described by one relative as “the most desolate and forsaken cemetery I have ever seen.” Birdsong located the grave on Thanksgiving Day.