The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  “On one occasion the Redmen declared war on the paleface; Quanah alone opposed the war and they held another council and because of the Paleface blood in his veins they declared him a traitor to the Redmen, and condemned him to be put to death. He told them, ‘the Palefaces have many braves; we have only a few braves; our braves will all be killed by the many Paleface braves …’”

  Faced with Quanah’s courage, his enemies back down and peace triumphs: “In this one act, he no doubt averted war and preserved many lives of both tribes, as well as much suffering and distress.”

  In this fable, the author of the Battle of Adobe Walls becomes the apostle of peace.

  AFTER QUANAH’S DEATH, the white and Comanche Parkers generally kept their distance from each other. The big event that brought them together was the 1936 centennial marking both Texas independence and the raid on Parker’s Fort. The state funded a replica of the fort built on the original site on the outskirts of Groesbeck, and the town sponsored memorial festivities at which representatives of both sides of the family gathered to reenact both the raid and Cynthia Ann’s subsequent recapture twenty-four years later. “Cynthia Ann Parker Is Rescued from the Indians” proclaimed the full-page ad in the Groesbeck Journal’s Pioneer Edition of May 15, 1936. “Come See Texas History in the Making … A Gigantic, Stupendous Spectacle! You’ll Regret It All Your Life If You Miss It!”

  The ad promised a cast of four hundred “depicting the strange life of Cynthia Ann Parker, famous Texas History Character.” Admission was twenty-five or fifty cents, with the added attraction of Jack Bothwell’s Famous Centennial Rodeo, featuring Miss Ruth Wood, “internationally known Cow Girl, riding the wildest of broncos.”

  It was a curiously American celebration—after all, this was a vast and disparate family welded together by a traumatic moment when one side had pillaged, murdered, and raped the other. It was also a quintessential commercial opportunity: the local Texaco station, Dr. Cox’s Hospital, the R. E. Cox Dry Goods Company, and Palestine Pig Salt were among dozens of businesses that took out ads in the Journal welcoming visitors to town. Cayton’s Drug Store advertised “Cynthia Ann Ice Cream manufactured and sold exclusively at our fountain” in six varieties. It also offered a Cynthia Ann Frozen Malt and a Cynthia Ann Lime Cooler.

  There was no mention of Quanah. Instead, the focus was on the brave pioneers who had made their stand against Indian barbarism. The Journal reprinted in full “The Fall of Parker’s Fort,” DeShields’s imaginative and hyperbolic account excerpted from his Border Wars of Texas, first published in 1912 and dedicated to “the Sons and Daughters of Those Noble Pioneer Fathers and Mothers who … battled so bravely for supremacy and … made possible all the glorious blessings that have followed.”

  AFTER THE CENTENNIAL, the Parkers left Groesbeck and returned to their respective corners of Texas and Oklahoma. But in the early 1950s a primary school teacher in nearby Mexia, Texas, named Elsie Hamill had one of the young Parkers in her class. He told her the amazing tale of Cynthia Ann and Quanah. Hamill, who was fascinated, eventually wrote to Wanada Parker Page, another of Quanah’s daughters, to check the facts.

  Elsie’s original letter no longer exists, but Wanada’s pencil-written reply is in a file in the Baylor University library in Waco. It’s easy to sense from her answers just how naïve Elsie’s questions were—and how by 1952 the perceptual gap between whites and Indians could often be far larger than the cultural one:

  Dear Mrs. Hamill,

  First I will begin by telling you that the Comanche Indians and most all Oklahoma Indians live and have practically the same customs of their white friends. Many of them have modern homes, drive good automobiles, and most of the young Indians are well-educated.

  We do have a few “very few” of the older Indians who still clings to some of the old customs & beliefs, but they are passing away at a rapid pace and within a very short time we will not have a Comanche Indian who cannot understand and talk the English language.

  According to my father he was about 12 years old when he last saw his mother.

  I cannot tell you what was the cause of Cynthia Ann baby girls death.

  I do not know but we have heard many times that Cynthia Ann died of a broken heart longing to be back with the Indians again.

  You can almost hear the walls of ignorance and prejudice crumbling as Wanada writes her amused and commonsense answers to Elsie’s questions. Elsie clearly isn’t certain whom she is dealing with; she asks in her letter whether Wanada might feel anxious about meeting with white people. “I’m not afraid of white people,” Wanada responds. “After all, I’ve been married to one for forty years.”

  Wanada’s letter is a ringing antidote to the myths of prejudice and ignorance concerning Native Americans. “Yes Indians are very affectionate to their children,” she tells Elsie, putting to rest the old saw that Indians were anything but.

  Elsie proved to be ready and willing to learn. She and her husband drove up to Cache that summer, visited Wanada, and stayed at her home. The two women put together a two-day family reunion for Indians and whites at the replica of Old Fort Parker in July 1953.

  Since then, the two families have sent representatives to attend each other’s annual family events. Someone on the Texan side commissioned a silver bowl with the Texas and Oklahoma state flags and the legend “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” inscribed over a peace pipe. The bowl has been passed back and forth each year from one side to the other.

  EVEN THE BODIES of Cynthia Ann, Quanah, and Prairie Flower, buried side by side in the modest cemetery at the Post Oak Mission near the Star House, were not allowed to rest in peace. A few years after the first reunion, the army decided it needed the land to build a firing range for its new atomic cannon and it seized a seven-square-mile strip on the west side of Fort Sill, a patch that included the Star House, the Post Oak Mission, several ranches, and the Craterville amusement park. It proposed jacking up the houses and relocating them to nearby Cache, and digging up and reburying the graves as well. The Parker family and the Comanche community in general were torn. Many had fought in World War Two, and they felt a deep sense of pride and respect for the military. At the same time, they revered the burial places of their tribal elders. General Thomas E. de Shazo, commander of Fort Sill, enlisted Gillett Griswold, director of the fort’s history museum, and Anne Powell, a civilian employee of the information office, to campaign among the Comanches for the reburial.

  Neda Birdsong, one of Quanah’s surviving daughters, was the closest thing to a family leader. Educated at the Carlisle Indian School, she had composed the epitaph on Quanah’s granite gravestone, and she was deeply disturbed at the prospect of digging up her father’s and his mother’s remains. “If we were in a war … and I were asked to give my father’s house, I would walk out of this door without one word,” she told an interviewer at the time. “But in a time of peace it seems to me they could take a little more thought and make some better plans.”

  The army eventually came up with a plan. Anne Powell made the first approach, offering to rebury Cynthia Ann and Quanah at Fort Sill’s main cemetery. After several visits, Mrs. Birdsong agreed to meet with de Shazo. She came along with a half-dozen family members to his office and inspected the proposed site. They agreed to the reinterment with full military honors, which took place in a public ceremony in August 1957.

  New monuments of Wichita red granite were erected. The Parkers were given pride of place, in front of the graves for Santanta and other celebrated warriors in a spot now known as the Chiefs’ Knoll. It is the only military cemetery in the United States where whites and Indians are buried side by side.

  But the new grave site was not yet complete. In 1965, Prairie Flower’s remains purportedly were disinterred and reburied at Fort Sill alongside those of her mother and her older brother. Nothing about the event was straightforward. Quanah’s son-in-law Aubrey Birdsong, now eighty-seven, insisted he had dug up Prairie Flower’s remains in Cynthia Ann’s gr
ave site in 1910 when he had found her bones and those of a small child in the Fosterville Cemetery, and other accounts from that era supported his claim. But the disinterment permit from the Texas State Department of Health claimed Prairie Flower had died on or about December 15, 1863, of “influenza-pneumonia” and had been buried in the Asbury Cemetery near Edom in Van Zandt County, Texas. Where the date came from no one could say, and when the Rangers went to dig up and remove the remains, they found only a few strands of hair and sand, which they dropped into a cloth sack and carried off to Oklahoma.

  The gravestones of Wichita red granite for Quanah Parker, Cynthia Ann, and Prairie Flower on the Chief’s Knoll at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. It is reputedly the only U.S. military cemetery where whites and Indians are buried side by side.

  “To tell the truth, Captain,” wrote Stan Redding, a Ranger historian who was part of the reburial detail, to his commanding officer, “I didn’t really deliver no body, just some east Texas sand and a legend. The sand and some bits of wood that might have been part of her coffin was all that was left when we dug her up …”

  The army had no solution for the slowly rotting Star House. The Corps of Engineers offered to buy it for demolition, or to move it. Mrs. Birdsong and the family chose the latter. Engineers divided it into two sections, jacked it up onto two flatbed trucks, and deposited it on the main road. They left it there for a winter, then moved it to a vacant lot in Cache. The house caught fire twice during the next two years, and volunteer firemen rushed out to save it. But with no concrete foundation to provide stability, it seemed doomed to collapse. Then, on Easter Sunday, 1958, Mrs. Birdsong drove to the house of a local businessman named Herbert Woesner, whom she had known for many years. She did not get out of her car, just honked until he came out to greet her. “She told him, ‘Son, if this house is to be saved, it looks like it’s going to be up to you,’ “ recalled Woesner’s sister Kathy. He agreed to buy it from her in trade for the house of the high school basketball coach, who was leaving town for another job. They drew up the papers the following day. Woesner’s men jacked up the house again and moved it a half mile to a large lot in the back of his property, just a few dozen feet from Cache Creek. “It was one of the happiest moments in my life,” Herbert Woesner said at the time.

  Like the Star House and the remains of the principals themselves, the legend of Cynthia Ann and Quanah was transplanted to fresher soil and reconsecrated. She remained the tragic figure, unable to bridge the gap between two warring civilizations. But her son had managed to build a bridge between the two worlds, and his children strengthened and deepened those links.

  AROUND THE SAME TIME Elsie Hamill was making contact with Wanada Parker Page, a Western novelist and screenplay writer showed up in East Texas asking questions about the original abduction of Cynthia Ann and the events that followed.

  Alan LeMay had known about the Parkers and Cynthia Ann at least since his sojourn to the Texas Panhandle, once the heart of Comancheria, to shoot a B Western titled The Sundowners in 1950. As a new novel began to take shape in his mind, he journeyed to Elkhart, where the Parkers had built their Baptist church in the 1830s and where descendants of Cynthia Ann’s family still lived. He visited there with Ben Parker, the eighty-four-year-old patriarch of the family and keeper of the blue trunk that had held family documents for generations.

  Ben was born in 1868, which made him old enough to have met as a boy some of the survivors of the original massacre, including Abram Anglin, who was still alive and recounting the story well into the 1880s. A farmer, Ben became deputy sheriff of Anderson County and worked for a time in a sawmill, for which he showed no particular talent, as evidenced by his nickname, “Five Finger Ben,” because by the time he left its employ that was all the fingers he had left on his two hands.

  Ben had helped with the reconstruction of Parker’s Fort for the centennial of the massacre in 1936, basing his knowledge of the size and shape of the fort on what he had heard as a child. He also helped build a replica of the original Pilgrim Church, the first Protestant church established in the colony of Texas, founded by his great-uncle Daniel Parker. Each day after Ben retired, his son would come pick him up and drive him to town, where he would hold court at the lone grocery store on Parker Street. In tolerable weather, he would plant himself atop an old tin bread box in front of the store, smoking his pipe and talking to anyone who came by. Ben was a proud Parker: his relatives reckoned that 90 percent of his conversation in his later years centered around family history and lore.

  LeMay visited Ben at his modest farmhouse, where Ben sat in his rocking chair near the fireplace. There are no surviving notes of their conversation, but Ben said later he was surprised that LeMay wasn’t so much interested in Cynthia Ann but rather in the problematic and long-forgotten character who had searched for her for eight years after her abduction: her angry, vindictive, self-justifying uncle James.

  III

  Alan Lemay

  12.

  The Author (Hollywood, 1952)

  When Alan LeMay first began writing fiction for a living in the early 1920s, the Western novel was already as entrenched in popular culture as jazz or baseball or gangster stories. James Fenimore Cooper’s enormously well-read literary novels of the American frontier had evolved—or, more accurately, deteriorated—into the orange-backed dime novels of the 1860s, launching the Western to an even higher level of popularity, with total sales reaching five million copies by 1865. The cowboys were taking over from the pioneers. Wise and resourceful backwoods heroes like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, and Cooper’s fictional equivalent, Natty Bumppo, were supplanted by gunfighters and lawmen such as Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday. And a new generation of outlaws based loosely on real-life characters—Jesse and Frank James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, and the Dalton Gang—was emerging and adding a new layer of moral ambiguity to the entire enterprise.

  Women characters were transformed as well, from Cooper’s delicate and passive objects of desire to rough-and-ready gals who could handle themselves in any situation. One recurring character was the purported Indian girl of great physical ability—she rides and shoots better than any man—who turns out to be an upper-class white girl who had been abducted as a child by Indians.

  Buffalo Bill himself took the next step, turning literature into live entertainment, bringing real cowboys, Indians, horses, cattle, and even stagecoaches and buffalo onstage for his Wild West Show.

  The cowboy was Natty Bumppo’s natural heir: a rugged man, freed from the phony gentility of East Coast society and transformed into a two-gunned, two-fisted man with his own moral code. Sometimes he himself was an outlaw or had been one in the past, and he was not always readily distinguishable from the bad guys he fought against. And fight he did: gun violence was his means of taming and purifying the wilderness. Almost every story ended with a triumphant gunfight.

  The first great cowboy novel, Owen Wister’s The Virginian, published in 1902 and dedicated to his good friend Theodore Roosevelt, sold nearly two hundred thousand copies in its first year. The Virginian is a transplanted Easterner who has become a cowhand in Wyoming: a natural man, supremely competent, suspicious of city folks and their silly, impatient, sharp-dealing ways. He is not too fond of foreigners or of Jews, two of whom he unceremoniously evicts from a flophouse late one evening to make more room for himself. The narrator, a visitor from the East, describes him in Nietzsche-like, homoerotic terms as “a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures. His broad, soft hat was pushed back; a loose-knotted, dull-scarlet handkerchief sagged from his throat; and one casual thumb was hooked in the cartridge-belt that slanted across his hips. He had plainly come many miles from somewhere across the vast horizon, as the dust upon him showed … The weather-beaten bloom of his face shone through it duskily, as the ripe peaches look upon their trees in a dry season. But no dinginess of travel or shabbiness of attire could tarnish the splendor that radiated
from his youth and strength.”

  The Virginian—we never learn his real name—is a laconic superman who slays the bad guy, wins the heart of the pretty schoolteacher, and rides off with her into the sunset.

  Popular fiction writers such as Zane Grey, Max Brand, N. M. Bower, and Ernest Haycox would follow. Americans liked stories about themselves, and they especially admired mythic ones. Whatever the particular plotline, the Western was grounded in the enduring foundational myth that the American frontier was an untouched, pure new world, and a place to test one’s mettle and faith. The land was a metaphor for the mission: taming the savage wilderness, after all, meant taming one’s own soul. It was a place to celebrate the great American values: self-reliance, individualism, and democracy. And the wilderness could be made safe for white women and children only when Indians, with their chaotic violence and barbaric rapacity, had been subdued. The classic Man Who Knows Indians—a white man raised to understand the lore, mind-set, and weaknesses of red men—led the path to civilization.

  The Western consistently outsold all other genres, including its closest competitor, the detective story—whose protagonist was, after all, just another version of the Western hero clothed in a double-breasted suit and sent forth into the urban wilderness minus the horse and saddle.

  Men wrote and published most of the books, of course, both nonfiction and novels, and they presented a vision of the American West as an exclusively male domain where women served either as victims or as objects of purity rather than desire. It would take many years for a different and more ambiguous version of the settlement of the West to emerge: a female counternarrative that emphasized family and community over the lone heroic gunman. The characters created by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather had to fight for their place alongside Wild Bill Hickok and Billy the Kid. Even Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, the great sharpshooter and gunslinger, were women of manly virtues.