The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  When he dug up Cynthia Ann’s remains, Birdsong was surprised to find a small skeleton in the grave lying beside her. He surmised that this was Prairie Flower. Although he had no legal authority to do so, Birdsong decided to put the bones in the same casket with Cynthia Ann “with the little girl’s remains placed as if she were in the arms of her mother.”

  “I felt that this meant so much to Quanah Parker that I was doing a most humane act, a sort of an unwritten law,” Birdsong recalled in an interview with a Fort Sill archivist forty-nine years later. He worked surreptitiously. “I knew if I’d try to obtain permission from Texas authorities I would be arrested for going as far as I did without permission, and I’d never get the remains out of the State.”

  Birdsong spirited the remains to Oklahoma, where they were placed in a coffin that was displayed at the Post Oak Mission near the Star House. A photograph taken inside the Post Oak Mission hall shows a somber Quanah Parker staring down at a small white coffin strewn with flowers and propped between two chairs. Quanah, dressed in a formal dark suit, stands stiffly, hands by his side.

  “Are you sure this is my little white mother?” Quanah asked his son-in-law.

  Birdsong said he was sure.

  “I look for her long time,” Quanah told him. “Now I’m done.”

  At the funeral Quanah spoke twice about Cynthia Ann, once in Comanche and once in English. His mother, Quanah said, “love Indians so much she no want to go back folks. All same people anyway, God say.”

  Then he explained himself by evoking Cynthia Ann. “I love my mother. I like white folks. Got great heart. I want my people to follow after white way, get educate, know work, make living. When people die today, tomorrow, ten years, I want them be ready like my mother. Then we all lie together again.

  “That’s why when government give money for monument and new grave, I have this funeral and ask whites to help. Me glad so many Indians and white people come. That’s all.”

  After a ceremony, the casket was lifted by four pallbearers to the grave site. Quanah solemnly followed. He lingered at the site for a long time. He “stood in tears and deep agony over the lowered casket,” wrote his daughter Neda.

  Man and myth had finally come together.

  OVER THE DECADES, Quanah’s partnership with ranchers such as Charles Goodnight and Burk Burnett never faded. Burnett felt especially protective and paternalistic toward his Comanche friend. Each November he invited Quanah to bring his warriors to the Matador Ranch in East Texas for hunting. But he warned the chief to be careful when traveling into the state, because “as you know there is considerable prejudice among the white people of that country against your Indians hunting out there.”

  Burnett helped arrange for what turned out to be Quanah’s last foray into Texas. When the construction of the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific Railway was complete, the company held a “Quanah Route Day” celebration at the Texas State Fair in Dallas in October 1910. Although no one could say for certain, Quanah by this time was probably around sixty-five years old, and he had suffered for several years from rheumatism, a painful inflammation of the joints. Still, he dressed in full Comanche war regalia for the event and entered the fairgrounds on horseback, followed by his extended family and a collection of aging former warriors.

  Quanah spoke to the crowd. Sul Ross had died twelve years earlier, and Quanah was no longer quite so reticent about discussing his past life as a warrior. He stated explicitly that the old story that Sul Ross had killed his father was pure fiction. “The Texas history says General Ross killed my father. The old Indian told me no so. He no kill my father … After that—two year, three year maybe—my father sick. I see him die. I want to get that in Texas history straight up.”

  For the first time, he also publicly described his killing of Trooper Gregg at Blanco Canyon in 1871. “I tell my men stand up behind hill, holler, shoot, and run. I run to one side and use this knife. I came up right side and killed man sergeant and scalp. You see how bad man I at that time?”

  But his message now was one of peace and reconciliation. And he emphasized that despite their bloodstained past and all the wrongs that had been done, Comanches and Texans shared a common identity and a common national enterprise. “You look at me,” he told them. “I put on this war bonnet. This is my war trinket. Ladies and gentlemen, I used to be a bad man. Now I am a citizen of the United States. I pay taxes the same as you people do. We are the same people now. We used to give you some trouble, but we are the same people now.”

  He never stopped searching for his mother’s long-lost legacy of land in Texas. No doubt this quest was partly because the land had monetary value. But there was more to it than that. A piece of Texas land from his mother would have objectified his connection to her and to the state he and his fellow Comanches had fought against for so long. It would have resolved the conflict in a meaningful material way. And for a man who had been orphaned by history, it could have provided the home he never had. His father had been a loner and a wanderer by choice, his mother by force of violent circumstances. Quanah, too, was a man apart—never a white man but never quite a full Comanche, either. Viewed from this angle, his life was a quest to find for himself, his family, and his people a place to call home. Quanah was a searcher.

  In a letter to Goodnight dated January 7, 1911, Quanah again asked his rancher friend’s help in taking up the matter, He also promised to visit Goodnight’s ranch in the near future. “I am going to bring some old Indians to your place and see your buffalo and make these old Indians glad.”

  He never made it.

  FOR SEVERAL WEEKS Quanah had been feeling sick to his stomach as well as aching in his joints, and Laura Parker Birdsong, his devoted eldest daughter, believed the rheumatism had spread to his heart. Still, he insisted on making a train trip to participate in a peyote ceremony with Cheyenne friends. He must have stayed up all night for the ritual before boarding a train home. On the way back he had trouble breathing and his temperature spiked. By the time Emmet Cox met the train at nearby Indiahoma, Quanah was unconscious.

  A doctor at the station revived him with a heart stimulant, and Cox rushed him to the Star House in his car. Tonarcy and Topay were waiting for him there. They laid him down on the couch. He got up unaided while Knox Beal helped remove his outer garments.

  The two wives seemed to understand the end was near. They had Beal and the white doctor leave the room, then summoned a medicine man named Quasei. “Father in heaven, this is our brother coming,” he prayed. Placing an arm around Quanah, Quasei flapped his hands and imitated the call of the Great Eagle. He thrust an eagle bone down Quanah’s throat to open it, and Tonarcy squirted water into his mouth. “He coughed, gasped, moved his lips feebly, and died, just twenty minutes after his arrival,” reported the Lawton Daily News.

  They laid out his body in full Indian costume. His wives cut the buttons from their moccasins, burned their quilts, and threw away their new clothing while his body lay in state in a casket in his bedroom.

  He was buried next to his mother’s grave, just as he had planned. There were perhaps 1,200 people at the ceremony, evenly divided between Indians and whites—far too many for the small sanctuary of the Post Oak Mission church. “Every automobile that could be rented in Lawton” was at the site, reported the Cache Register. The mourners sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and the Indian women wailed.

  Quanah Parker’s funeral in Cache, Oklahoma, February 24, 1911.

  Laura fainted and had to be carried outside. “It just seemed as if my heart was cut from my body to give him up,” she said later. Tonarcy, the “show wife” whom he always took with him on his trips to Washington, rode in an automobile, while other wives and family members squatted in the bed of a horse-drawn farm wagon.

  It was a day of powerful contrasts and strange juxtapositions, the reflection of a man who had straddled two worlds, two cultures, and two centuries. Motorcars puffed and puttered alongside cow ponies and horse-drawn wagons. White men in s
tiff black suits mingled with Indian women with papooses on their backs. At a restaurant in Cache an Indian couple ate dinner before the ceremony, the man dressed in a neatly pressed black serge suit with white shirt and collar, the woman in blankets and buckskins. Before they ate, the woman offered a Christian prayer for Quanah’s soul.

  His red granite headstone, quarried from the sacred Wichita Mountains, read: “Resting Here Until Day Breaks and Shadows Fall and Darkness Disappears Is Quanah Parker Last Chief of the Comanches.”

  The man was dead. But the legend of the last Comanche warrior and his beloved white mother was just beginning.

  11.

  The Legend (Oklahoma and Texas, 1911–52)

  Quanah’s surviving relatives sat down in May, three months after his death, and divided his assets. He had seventeen lawful heirs, including Tonarcy, his only legally recognized wife. The Star House and the property around it were appraised at $2,540. He had additional assets of $500.52 and debts of $347.12. Topay got the house, while she and Tonarcy split the land allotment. The possessions were divided among sixteen children.

  The “richest Indian in America,” as he was often called, turned out to be worth less than three thousand dollars. It was just one fantasy among many that had shaped and defined Quanah’s image to white Americans.

  The money may have been scarce, but the praise poured out in buckets. The Christian Herald extolled “the Indian Who Made Good,” in an article dripping with fantasy and condescension:

  It was Quanah’s pride that he had been obedient to every order of the government since coming under their charge. The white settlers near him respected and esteemed him, while his sovereignty over the Comanches was absolute. He was to them as a father; his home was the spot towards which each Comanche set his face when he needed advice; they knew him as honest and just in all his dealings, therefore his word was their law.

  Now that he has gone, it must be admitted that one at least of the too often despised race “made good,” and deserves the tardy recommendation, “well done.”

  The Herald’s encomium was unusual in one respect: it made no reference to Quanah’s half-white parentage. Virtually every other tribute took pains to point out that what made this ordinary redskin such an extraordinary man was the blood and civilizing touch of his white mother. The state of Oklahoma dedicated a monument at his burial site, and James C. Nance, speaker of the state house of representatives, hailed Quanah as “a beacon of light to a wandering people. It was the loving touch of the white woman’s hand that developed the character of Quanah Parker.”

  With few solid facts to go on, the saga of Cynthia Ann and Quanah evolved according to the needs and sensibilities of each succeeding generation. Olive King Dixon, a prominent Panhandle schoolteacher and newspaper reporter—and widow of the late buffalo hunter Billy Dixon of Adobe Walls fame—helped spread the legend with an article titled “Fearless and Effective Foe, He Spared Women and Children Always.” Far from being an outcast among the Comanches because he was an orphan with white blood, her Quanah was a full-fledged war chief who struck fear into the hearts of Texans even while playing the role of the ultimate Noble Savage. “He was never known to break a promise and if he said he would do a thing he did it,” she wrote. “He claimed he never allowed any woman or children to be killed in his battles. As the red blood in his veins dominated in his youth, so the white strain began to show itself more strongly as the years passed.”

  A caption of a photo of the Star House published with the article reported that Quanah “is said to have possessed the cunning of a white man and the brutality of a savage.”

  This little passage goes to the heart of Quanah’s appeal to whites. They were able to claim him as one of theirs. The brain was a white man’s brain, even if the body was all red. They took pride in his achievements and admired the clever way he managed to circumnavigate the white world after his surrender.

  Inevitably he and his mother became easy subjects for melodrama. There were operas, choral symphonies, one-act plays, novels, and eventually a comic book called White Chief of the Comanches. Its cover depicts a massive Indian with bulging muscles swinging down from a tree to rescue a helpless blonde white woman in a canoe heading toward a waterfall.

  The opera, Cynthia Parker by Julia Smith, first performed in 1939, is no less fanciful. The saga gets a full-bodied fictional treatment, as if the true story weren’t tragic enough. The first two acts are relatively straightforward. But Act III opens to the hoot of an owl and the cry of a wolf, signaling that Quanah and his men have come to rescue Cynthia Ann and his sister from their white captors. In the ensuing skirmish, Cynthia Ann is accidentally struck by an arrow from one of her putative rescuers. She dies in the arms of Quanah and Prairie Flower, after which the Indians carry her body back to Oklahoma.

  The world premiere was held at North Texas State Teachers’ College in Denton. Quanah’s son White Parker attended, as did Topay, Quanah’s surviving wife, who was dressed in full Indian costume. James DeShields, the most ubiquitous purveyor of the Parker legend, nearing eighty but still mobile, was also on hand. The opera’s tale, after all, was not much more fanciful than his own published work.

  But the main architects of the Cynthia Ann–Quanah legend have been the Parkers themselves, both the Comanche and Texan sides of the family. Quanah had tried and failed to bring them together during his lifetime, but after his death they began to coalesce.

  In the 1890s, Araminta McClellan, the Reverend Daniel Parker’s great-great-granddaughter, met and married a young man named Joseph Taulman in Hubbard City in East Texas, just thirty-five miles from the site of Parker’s Fort. As a young man, Joe Taulman worked as a printer, saddle and harness maker, and cowboy. In 1893 he opened a photography studio in Hubbard City and remained in that business until 1919. He moved his family to Fort Worth in 1920, and he worked as a linotype operator for the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram from 1925 until his death in 1946. But Joe and Araminta’s true passion was collecting and recording family histories, and the vast, extended Parker family with its close ties to the founding and history of the state of Texas became their full-time passion.

  In the early days before cars and telephones, they did it the old-fashioned way, with letters and telegrams. They constructed a family tree, collecting as many documents as possible, including the Articles of Faith of the Pilgrim Predestinarian Regular Baptist Church—signed at Lamotte, Illinois, in 1833 by Daniel Parker, his family, and other congregants—and Benjamin Parker’s original family Bible, discovered amid the wreckage of Parker’s Fort after the massacre. Other documents relate to the establishment of the church in Texas, where it was the first organized Baptist church. The Taulmans also collected property deeds from North Carolina, Illinois, and Tennessee, where the Parkers lived before coming to Texas, as well as original land grants from the Republic and the state of Texas, and a Mexican land grant to Daniel Parker. The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin has nearly forty feet of files, 2,800 photographs, and 600 negatives that Joe and Araminta collected over their lifetimes.

  The Taulmans had little recorded information to work with. Joe carried on a regular correspondence with fellow amateur historians such as DeShields. Unlike Susan Parker St. John, there’s no record that the Taulmans ever ventured up to Cache to meet their famous Comanche cousin, although they encouraged Susan to do so. Later Joe pleaded with Mrs. Aubrey C. Birdsong, one of Quanah’s daughters, to help him piece together the true story. “So many wrong statements have been printed in the newspapers in the past, and are still being printed, in regard to Cynthia Ann and her family that I think it is time that an authentic history was prepared and published,” he told her.

  It’s clear from her reply that the Comanche side of the family was still hoping to locate the elusive league of land that Texas legislators had promised Cynthia Ann in 1861. “I wonder if you are fortunate enough to have record or negative record of any kind of the ‘land grant’ given Cynthia
Ann Parker by the state of Texas,” she wrote Joe. “After her death, who were next of kin?”

  Araminta had her own aspirations. She wrote a manuscript titled Twice a Captive, a short account of Cynthia Ann’s life that she sent in 1935 to Adeline M. Alvord, a Hollywood agent. Alvord was encouraging at first, saying the studios were feverishly buying up good historical material. But nothing ever developed. A year later Alvord returned the manuscript. “The market for historical scenarios has been very inactive and shows little disposition to pick up,” she told Araminta.

  Still, even though they never published their own account, the Taulmans managed to put together factual material that was often far more reliable than the feverish myth-spinning of James DeShields and his fellow historians. In 1925, Araminta tracked down and interviewed the women who had sat with Cynthia Ann in 1861 at the photographic studio in Fort Worth where her famous portrait was taken. The Taulmans also collected the various handwritten notes of Susan St. John, the cousin who interviewed Cynthia Ann’s white relatives after her death and first established that both she and Prairie Flower had lived well beyond 1864, the date recorded in DeShields’s unreliable saga. Susan had hoped to write her own book for the extended Parker family, but she never finished it; she died in a fire in a nursing home in Los Angeles in 1925.

  Despite the best efforts of the Taulmans and Susan Parker St. John, other members of the Parker family were as prone as James DeShields to historical fantasy. When three of James Parker’s descendants reprinted Rachel Plummer’s narrative in 1926, they added a remarkable account in the foreword of Quanah’s bravery that manages to invoke the familiar trope of his white blood: