by Jon E. Lewis
When he returned to the reservation, Satanta was summoned before General William T. Sherman, out in the West on a tour of inspection. Before Sherman, Satanta gave a defiant account of the raid. At this, Sherman gave a sharp command and soldiers, previously hidden, appeared at the windows behind him with their rifles levelled. Satanta pulled a carbine from beneath his blanket and pointed it at Sherman’s heart. For a few, brief moments it looked as though Satanta and the chiefs with him would kill Sherman in a suicidal shooting match. The General’s nerve held, however, and the chiefs put up their guns. Satanta, Satank and Big Tree were arrested and sent to Texas to be tried for murder.
During the journey to Texas Satank, manacled hand and foot, began singing his death song: “O sun you remain forever, but we Ko-eet-senko must die, / O earth you remain forever, but we Ko-eet-senko must die.” He made a grab for a rifle, but was shot before he could fire it. Satanta and Big Tree were tried and sentenced to death by the court in Jacksboro, Texas, in July 1871 but on the advice of Indian agents and the trial judge, who feared an Indian uprising if the chiefs were hanged, the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment.
But the Kiowas wanted Satanta, their great chief, free. When their entreaties failed, they began raiding. They captured an army ordinance train, drove off 127 mules from Camp Supply, and raided the home of a Texas family. Lone Whites on trails and in settlements were murdered.
Once again, the Kiowa were at war.
Invasion of the Staked Plains
The tribulations of the Kiowa alarmed and agitated the Quahadi Comanche. Chief Quanah resolved ever more strongly to resist the White man. He soon had the chance to show his resolution.
Determined to halt Quahadi raiding in Texas, the Army assigned Colonel Ranald Slidell Mackenzie to conquer the band and other holdouts operating from the Staked Plains. Unapproachable and merciless, Mackenzie was considered by Ulysses S. Grant to be the most “promising young officer in the Army”. Like other Civil War heroes, how-ever, he had much to learn about Indian fighting.
In September 1871, Mackenzie assembled 600 troopers for an invasion of the Staked Plains. But Quanah and Bull Bear did not oblige Mackenzie with the frontal fight he wanted. Instead, they harried his columns and made reckless lightning thrusts, before wheeling away and vanishing. Often the war parties were led by Quanah himself. He made an impressive, unforgettable sight in battle. A cavalry officer who fought Quanah wrote in his memoirs:
A large and powerfully built chief led the bunch on a coal black racing pony. His heels nervously working in the animal’s side, with a six-shooter poised in the air, he seemed the incarnation of savage brutal joy. His face was smeared with black war paint, which gave his features a satanic look. A large cruel mouth added to his ferocious appearance. Bells jingled as he rode at headlong speed, followed by the leading warriors, all eager to outstrip him in the race.
Shortly after midnight on 10 October 1871 Quanah led a charge through Mackenzie’s encampment, flapping buffalo skins and ringing bells to panic the cavalry’s horses. The Quahadi ran off 70 mounts, including Mackenzie’s own prized animal. When Mackenzie sent a detachment of troopers after the Comanche, the Indians unceremoniously beat them off.
The relentless Mackenzie kept after the Quahadi. But in mid-October blizzards caused him to end the mission. On the way home, Mackenzie chased two Comanche who were trailing the column – and got an arrow in the hip.
But the redoubtable Mackenzie was back in the field by March 1872, hunting the Comanche. He campaigned throughout the summer, and in September his scouts came across a camp of the Kotsoteka Comanche on McClellan Creek. Mackenzie and 231 troopers attacked, killing 23 warriors and taking 124 women and children captive.
Mackenzie’s victory at the creek was a crippling blow to the Kotsoteka. Most of the band trickled to the reservation. Even the Quahadi lost their morale, and raiding almost ceased. A strange quiet descended on the west Texas frontier.
It held for almost two years, but in 1874 the South Plains War set the Panhandle afire.
Having stripped Kansas of buffalo, White hunters began to drift south in March 1874 and set up a base near the deserted trading post of Adobe Walls (where Carson had engaged the Comanche a decade before) on the South Canadian River. The presence of these buffalo hunters enraged the Indians, for it seemed the end of their world. The White hunters had to be fought.
Another cause of the war was the governor of Texas. In 1873 the Kiowa chiefs Satanta and Big Tree were released from prison. This was offset by the demand of the governor of Texas that five Comanche braves on the reservation be surrendered to him as punishment for a raid which had occurred on Texas.
The Comanche refused to give up five men to an unknown fate. Instead, they moved out on the plains. So did the Cheyenne, Arapaho and some of the Kiowa.
In the spring of 1874, Quanah called a great council of all the Indians holding out on the south plains. They met near the mouth of Elk Creek and debated, and held a medicine dance. Isa-tai (Rear End of a Wolf), a young Quahadi medicine man, prophesied that an all-out attack would drive the White man away. “The buffalo shall come back everywhere,” said Isa-tai, “so that there shall be feasting and plenty in the lodges. The Great Spirit has taught me strong medicine which will turn away the White man’s bullets.”
Quanah probably thought Isa-tai a fraud, but saw how desperately the others wanted to believe his predictions. He even allowed Isa-tai to organize a sun dance, not a ceremony the Comanche observed. After the celebration, the Indians agreed to launch a combined attack on the buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls. From there they would move north, raiding all the camps in Panhandle country.
Before dawn on 27 June 1874, 700 warriors moved through the darkness and took up positions in the timber at the edge of Adobe Walls Creek. Before them were the three adobe buildings of the camp, and 30 sleeping hunters.
The hunters would have been slain in their sleep but for the luck of a ridge pole which happened to snap just before daylight. The noise awoke the hunter Billy Dixon, who chanced to go outside. In the grey dawn he saw hundreds of warriors moving towards the camp and shouted the alarm.
The hunters, now alert, took up positions in the buildings, and staved off repeated assaults with their new long-range Sharps rifles, fitted with telescopic sights. A warrior was knocked off his horse by one of the hunters – who included the soon-to-be-famous lawman Bat Masterson – at a distance of nearly a mile. As Red Cloud had found in the Wagon Box Fight on the Bozeman Trail, numbers or even unlimited courage were no match for innovations in gun technology. Although Quanah led the warriors to the very doors of the stockade, so that they could beat upon them with their rifle butts, the Indians could not break in. After three days of siege, Quanah called the warriors off. He was injured in the shoulder, and many of the best braves were dead. Isa-tai’s magic had failed to work.
The buffalo hunters had lost only three men, one of them killed by Quanah. When the Indians withdrew, the buffalo hunters decapitated the bodies of the warriors left behind and stuck their heads on the poles of the stockade.
For weeks following Adobe Walls, the Indians raided the southern plains from Texas to Colorado. To subdue them, the Army sent out columns from Fort Griffin, Fort Sill and Camp Supply. They adopted a scorched-earth policy to deny the warriors essential supplies, burning their camps and supplies, and killing their pony herds. In September 1874, at the vast chasm of Palo Duro – previously unknown to White men – Mackenzie routed a mixed camp of Comanche, Cheyenne and Kiowa, ransacking the village and slaughtering 1,000 ponies. Above all, the Army gave the Indians no rest, and pursued them all fall, all winter. Leading the pursuits were the 30 men who formed the Army’s elite scout unit, the Seminole Negro Indians, descendants of slaves who had escaped to the Florida swamps. At first in small bands, and then in large numbers the Indians began to come in.
The last were the Quahadis. Not until April 1875 did the first Quahadi, half starved, arrive at the reservation. Quan
ah and 400 followers continued to hold out until they received a message from Mackenzie, which informed them that if they surrendered they would be treated honourably. If they held out any longer, he would exterminate them. To the astonishment of the messenger, Quanah personally guaranteed to lead in the last of the Comanche.
On 2 June 1875 Quanah arrived at Fort Sill with his band, and over 1,500 horses in tow. The days of the free Native American on the southern plains were over – for ever.
Quanah Parker Lives in Peace
For 30 years Quanah had fought the White man. Now he took up their road. He was fortunate to escape imprisonment, which was the fate of some Comanche and Kiowa chiefs (among them Satanta, re-arrested on a fake charge; unable to endure prison, he committed suicide in 1876 by slashing his wrists and leaping from a window). After a period of model behaviour, Quanah was allowed to visit relatives of his mother, who made him welcome. He stayed with them, learnt some English and studied farm tasks.
As he had once led his people in war, he began to lead them in peace. He made a big business out of the grazing rights the Comanche owned, leasing pasturage to Texas stockmen like Charles Goodnight and Burk Burnett. Burnett built Quanah Parker – as Quanah now called himself, in deference to his White blood – a large ranch house near Cache, Oklahoma, which became known as the “Comanche White House”. Wearing a business suit, Quanah Parker lobbied governments, argued legal cases and invested in the railroads. He served as a judge, and in 1902 was elected deputy sheriff of Lawton, Oklahoma. Six years later, he was elected president of the local school district, which he had helped to create.
To do his duty by the Comanche, Quanah Parker was prepared to take up White ways. Yet he seldom compromised his Comanche cultural and spiritual heritage; he was a principal proponent of the ceremonial use of peyote, a spineless cactus which produces “buttons” containing a hallucinogenic drug. Over time the peyote rite became the focus for the Indian religion known as the Native American Church.
Quanah Parker died of pneumonia on 22 February 1911. In keeping with Comanche tradition, a medicine man flapped his hands over the body of Quanah like an eagle flaps its wings – and so the chief’s spirit was called to the afterworld.
Quanah Parker was buried next to his mother. Inside the White man’s coffin, he was dressed in the full regalia of a Quahadi chief.
Little Big Horn
War Clouds Over the Black Hills
When the final war between the Sioux and the Whites came, it began in the Black Hills of Dakota, to the Sioux a special, hallowed place. Although they had only arrived in the land themselves a century before, the Sioux had come to regard the Black Hills as the most sacred place on earth.
Under the terms of the Treaty of 1868, which the victorious Red Cloud had secured from the government, the Black Hills were promised to the Sioux for “as long as the grass shall grow.” They would also hold forever the Powder River Buffalo range.
The ink of the treaty was hardly dry before small clouds of war began to hover over the Black Hills and the other lands held by the Sioux. White homesteaders were outraged that good land had been given to the Indians. Twenty Sioux chiefs, including Red Cloud, travelled east to Washington DC to put their case to President Grant. The talks petered out without conclusion, but what Red Cloud saw of the White man’s power in the East persuaded him that a military struggle against the US was fruitless. Red Cloud, on his return home, hung up his war lance for ever, and reluctantly agreed to move to an agency south of the Black Hills. Many went with him and gave up the old way of life.
The decision of Red Cloud split the Sioux, for many also refused to leave the Powder River. Increasingly, the holdout Sioux began to look for guidance to a Huncpapa medicine man called Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake), who was as stubborn as his name suggested. In boyhood Sitting Bull had been nicknamed “Slow”, for his wilful deliberation, and this aspect about him had never changed. Almost as influential as Sitting Bull was the Oglala warrior Crazy Horse. Although many found Crazy Horse strange – he believed that he lived in the world of dreams, and he always went into battle naked save for a loincloth – he was a fearless and inspired warrior. Such was his utter suspicion of and contempt for the White man that he refused to have his photograph taken by their cameras.
As each year passed, more and more little clouds of war began to accumulate over the northern plains. The slaughter of the American buffalo was continuing apace, and threatening the last big herd, located in Montana–Wyoming. Settlers were edging onto Sioux lands. And then a second transcontinental railroad, the Northern Pacific, began to reach out into the Far West, with surveying parties entering the Yellowstone River region – Teton Sioux land – in 1873. In the summer of that year, bands of Sioux under Crazy Horse skirmished with the cavalry assigned to protect the surveyors. The White horse soldiers were from the 7th Cavalry and were led by George Armstrong Custer. After his victory at the Washita, Custer had thrown himself into the role of frontier Indian fighter, and dressed in buckskin, complete with tassels. Custer relished fighting Indians, but was also attracted to them, to their heroic glory and their freedom. He had even taken an Indian mistress, Mo-nah-se-ta, daughter of the Cheyenne leader Little Rock.
The skirmishes in the Yellowstone were sharp probing engagements, curtain-raisers to a bigger affair. Second Lieutenant Charles Larned described one in a letter home:
At early dawn on the 10th our efforts to cross [the Tongue River] commenced, and it was not until 4 in the afternoon that they were reluctantly relinquished, after every expedient had been resorted to in vain. The current was too swift and fierce for our heavy cavalry. We therefore went into bivouac close to the river bank to await the arrival of the main body, and slept that night as only men in such condition can sleep. We hardly anticipated the lively awakening that awaited us. Just at daylight our slumbers were broken by a sharp volley of musketry from the opposite bank, accompanied by shouts and yells that brought us all to our feet in an instant. As far up the river as we could see, clouds of dust announced the approach of our slippery foes, while the rattling volleys from the opposite woods, and the “zip,” “zip” of the balls about our ears told us that there were a few evil disposed persons close by.
For half an hour, while the balls flew high, we lay still without replying, but when the occasional quiver of a wounded horse told that the range was being acquired by them, the horses and men were moved back from the river edge to the foot of the bluffs, and there drawn up in line of battle to await developments. A detachment of sharpshooters was concealed in the woods, and soon sent back a sharp reply to the thickening compliments from the other side. Our scouts and the Indians were soon exchanging chaste complimentary remarks in choice Sioux – such as: “We’re coming over to give you h—l;” “You’ll see more Indians than you ever saw before in your life,” and “Shoot, you son of a dog” from ours. Sure enough, over they came, as good as their word, above and below us, and in twenty minutes our scouts came tumbling down the bluffs head overheels, screeching: “Heap Indian come.” Just at this moment General Custer rode up to the line, followed by a bright guidon, and made rapid disposition for the defense. Glad were we that the moment of action had arrived, and that we were to stand no longer quietly and grimly in line of battle to be shot at. One platoon of the first squadron on the left was moved rapidly up the bluffs, and thrown out in skirmish line on the summit, to hold the extreme left. The remainder of the squadron followed as quickly as it could be deployed, together with one troop of the Fourth Squadron.
On they came as before, 500 or 600 in number, screaming and yelling as usual, right onto the line before they saw it. At the same moment the regimental band, which had been stationed in a ravine just in rear, struck up “Garry Owen.” The men set up a responsive shout, and a rattling volley swept the whole line.
The fight was short and sharp just here, the Indians rolling back after the first fire and shooting from a safer distance. In twenty minutes the squadrons were mounted an
d ordered to charge. Our evil-disposed friends tarried no longer, but fled incontinently before the pursuing squadrons. We chased them eight miles and over the river, only returning when the last Indian had gotten beyond our reach.
No less than a thousand warriors had surrounded us, and we could see on the opposite bluffs the scattered remnants galloping wildly to and fro. Just at the conclusion of the fight the infantry came up, and two shells from the Rodman guns completed the discomfiture of our demoralized foes. Our loss was one killed, Private Tuttle, E Troop, Seventh Cavalry, and three wounded. Among the latter, Lieutenant [Charles] Braden, Seventh Cavalry, while gallantly holding the extreme left, the hottest portion of the line, was shot through the thigh, crushing the bone badly. Four horses were killed and eight or ten wounded, and deserve honorable mention, although noncombatants. Official estimates place the Indian loss at forty killed and wounded, and a large number of ponies.
To the disappointment of the 7th Cavalry they were suddenly withdrawn from the Yellowstone. So were the railwaymen. Overbuilding on the Northern Pacific had caused the bank backing the company to collapse. Within days the entire US financial system was in collapse. Within months a million Americans were out of work.
The year 1873 was destined to be a bad year for America; it also saw drought on the Great Plains, and swarms of locusts that devoured the crops, even the paint on houses.
A desperate nation began to seize on desperate solutions. There were rumours of gold in the Black Hills, the Sioux’s hallowed ground, the ground given to them “forever”. In July 1874, Custer, 600 soldiers and several newspapermen left Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, Dakota, on an expedition to the Black Hills. Ostensibly the purpose of the expedition was scientific and exploratory. But as everyone knew, its real mission was to determine whether there was gold in the hills; accompanying the soldiers were two prospectors.
