Comanche Chief Quanah Parker, A Leader in Two Worlds

 

              Few frontier stories have touched the imagination of men more poignantly and more profoundly that that of Quanah, the last great chief of the Comanches. He symbolized that tragic transition of once proud and savagely passionate people from a life of uninhibited freedom on horseback to a pedestrian alien existence as cooped-up wards of the federal government. With lofty courage he suffered loss of freedom without loss of character and accepted the dispossessions of his land and way of life with monumental dignity. He was chief until the last, who, only in death, could suffer indignity.

              The Comanche’s-those “superb savage horsemen”, to quote their great historian, Dr. R.N. Richardson-were an offshoot of the Shoshoean family whose superiority was suggested by their name Nimma, meaning “the people”. Possessed of the mighty vital force that reckons events and shapes history, they “left their country between the Yellowstone and Platte rivers in the late sixteen hundreds moved into the South Plains”.

              With healthy individualism, they split into many bands, and went their own ways under their own leaders to meet at times in council, somewhat suggestive of our federal principle, to discuss their problems or lay their strategy as dictated by common blood, interests and ideals.

              Out of the Rockies above the headwaters of the Arkansas came the band to occupy their northern range, the Yamparikas or the Root-eaters. In the wide, grassy land between there and the Southern Plains rode the sturdy Kotsotekas or Buffalo-eaters. Farther south, erratically from the wooded streams of central Texas westward, at times to the bee caves of the Devil’s River were the Penatekas or Honey-eaters. In the breaks and upon the Staked Plains in between were such bands as the Nokoni- the Wanderers, and in warfare and resistance the most stubborn of them all- those who subsisted on the fleetest and best wild meat known to Western man- the Antelope eaters or the Kwahadis.

              Quanah was a Kwahadi. His father, Nokoni, was a chieftain of the Wanderers. His mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, was a white captive of the Indians. Quanah, a word meaning fragrance or perfume and evidently bestowed from the fact that he was born upon the prairie among the wild flowers, grew up with the Antelope-eaters. He rode, fought, thought and looked like an Indian. No facial feature, physical attribute or psychological trait betrayed his origin. Half-white, he was all Indian.

              Quanah’s mother was one of five captives taken when the Comanches ravaged Parker’s Fort, May 19, 1836, on the Navasota River, in deep central Texas. The dispersal of these captives was swift and complete. Within a few months one was ransomed by President Sam Houston from the Delaware Indians. In 1838, Indian traders recovered another far north of Santa Fe, the sad Rachel Plummer. Her son and Cynthia’s brother, John Parker, were traded out of the hands of Indians hundreds of miles to the east in 1842, at Fort Gibson, near present Muskogee, Oklahoma. But Cynthia Ann’s uncle, John Parker, wore out the tragic years in dangers and fruitless search for his blue-eyed niece.

              But youth is pliant and the human species adaptable and little Cynthia Ann- about nine years old at the time of her capture- matured into an Indian. Nokoni took her for one of his wives. She had two sons of rabbit hunting age and was wildly riding with a babe beneath her buffalo robe when recaptured by Sul Ross’ Texas Rangers, in a fight on Pease River late in December, 1860-twenty-four years after the fall of Parker’s Fort. Her boys escaped.

              At that time, Quanah was possibly nine years old. His actual age still seems uncertain, though his tombstone bears the date of 1852. He grew up on those open lands of infinite distance and ever-present danger, the Staked Plains of Texas. In their hunting and their raids the Comanches ranged from beyond the Arkansas to far below the Rio Grande.

              For years it was the verdict of history, firmly believed by Governor Ross himself, that he had killed Nokoni in hand-to-hand combat on the Pease. Charles Goodnight, ranger scout at the same fight, and pioneer plainsman, finally set the record straight. It was a case of mistaken identity, for Nokoni died years later while on a wild plum hunt along the Canadian.

              Cynthia Ann was taken back to her people in the woods, among the settlements of Texas. Everything there was unnatural; everything disquieting and strange. She held her baby close and furtively, as a wild animal in a cage, stared into space- beyond the civilized walls that held her captive to an open land of wide expanse and brilliant light; to where her lean-loined sons in buckskin breechclouts were riding with abandon; to where her somber men still rode in the light of the moon to kill and scalp the hated Tejanos.

              Prairie Flower, her little baby, soon passed away, and Cynthia Ann sank with grief and loneliness and died in 1864, apparently with a broken heart- an expatriate among people of her own blood. Her tragic story is part of the Texas tradition.

              Quanah grew into a leading warrior with the Antelope-eaters as the Indian struggles of the Southern Plains moved into their final stages. In the late sixties and early seventies the destruction of the great buffalo herds, chief source of the red men’s shelter and larder, was underway by the hide hunters. Step by step the broad free grasslands of the Indians were being taken from them in war and negotiated from them in peace. For the wise old men in the Comanche tepees the end was in sight.

             They spurned the treaty council of Medicine Lodge in 1867 and more and more sought refuge in that dreaded desert on the rim of Texas. There antelope were plentiful, but fugitive water in widely scattered seeps and holes could be found only by the few who knew- by the wildest Indians of the Staked Plains. Out there Quanah Parker, in mounting fury, was riding in the lead of the Quahadi.

            An early description of Chief Quanah at this time was given by Capt. Robert Carter of the 4^th Calvary:

            “A large and powerfully built chief led the bunch, on a coal-black racing pony, leaning forward upon his mane, six-shooter poised in the air, face smeared with black war paint. A full-length headdress or war bonnet of eagle’s feathers, spreading out as he rode and descending from his forehead, over head and back, to his pony’s tail, almost swept the ground. Large brass hoops were in his ears; he was naked to the waist, wearing simple leggings, moccasins and a breach-clout. A necklace of bear’s claws hung around his neck. His scalp lock was carefully braided in with otter fur, and tied with bright red flannel. His horse’s bridle was profusely ornamented with bits of silver, and red flannel was also braided in his mane and tail. Bells jingled as he rode at headlong speed, followed by the leading warriors. It was Quanah, the principal war chief of the wild Quahadi.”

 

              Pressed on three sides by the buffalo hunters, the Texas Rangers and the cowmen, he was making the stand of the valiant. There in this vast open world, devoid of shelter except illimitable distance, his elusive warriors stubbornly fought and fled, with women, children and camp equipage to disperse, to gather, to feint and fight again. Their struggle against the best the army could send went on for years.  Other chieftains quit and straggled into the reservations. But through ruthless war, near starvation and bitter privation, Quanah, beaten back at times as before Adobe Walls, was never routed and never captured.

              Yet Quanah too was wise. He read the signs written by horses’ hoofs upon the land. He saw the meaning of the steady march of men and herds that, despite the bloodshed, never faltered among the frontiers of Texas. And there, just beyond this advancing line, a special deputation traveling under a flag of truce from Fort Sill, in Indian Territory, found him in the spring of 1875, with 100 warriors, 300 women and children and old men, and 1400 horses, he rode into the army post at Fort Sill. There he laid down his bull-hide shield and his arms, and accepted the bitter dictates of fate that moderate men characterized as destiny.

              Without cavil and without doubt, he was the acknowledged leader of “the people” of the Great Plains, the chief of the Comanches. He folded his buffalo-hide tepees and built a spacious home, upon the roof of which he painted great white stars, one for each of his surviving wives. He turned to ranching; he became of friend of President Theodore Roosevelt; he negotiated with the government; he still defended the interests of “the people” as the cordon of settlement and authority closed around him.

              He adjudicated disputes among the Indians, arrested wrong-doers, delivered them to the white man’s justice, and rose in stature in peace as his shield had shone terribly bright in war.

              He even adopted the white man’s clothing, but at times he found their ways difficult to fathom. When he and Yellow Bear stopped at the old Pickwick Hotel, in Fort Worth, to spend the night, they simply locked their door and blew out the gas light. By morning Yellow Bear was happily riding the celestial hunting grounds, and Quanah was pulled back only with difficulty.

Having turned his people by honorable treaty to the ways of peace, he put a stop to their enlistment by the army at Fort Sill. He pointed out that white missionaries were now teaching them that it is wrong to go to war. Therefore, he reasoned, it was inconsistent for the whites to recruit them into an outfit “whose sole business was fighting.”

As for himself, he held to the ritual and beliefs of his people, and is credited with introducing the Mexican Peyote into the Indian rites. His integrity was unassailable, his patience monumental and his wit unanswerable. In Washington once, tradition tells, Indian office officials were pressing him with the view that a multitude of wives was bad, and that he must forsake the ways of polygamy in keeping with the white man’s laws. A high official pressed the point.

“When you get back home, Quanah, pick out the wife you like best and tell the rest of them that they must get out.”

Quanah listened, silent and inscrutable! But authority backed by the voice of virtue, is loud and insistent, and the official reiterated his demand.

“Just pick out your favorite wife, and tell the others they’ve got to move.”

“You tell ‘em,” Quanah replied.

In his late years he moved the remains of his mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, from Texas, and reentered them in the Indian country. A Texas county had been named for her family, a village for his father, and a substantial Texas town for him.

At his own request he was buried beside his mother, a proper place, remarked his old friend, Charles Goodnight, since he “at one time, had six wives and… could not easily be buried by the side of them all”.

In keeping with Comanche custom, a spear-shaped cedar, pointing the way to heaven, was planted at the head of his grave. Upon his red granite headstone, from the Wichita Mountains nearby, is this moving inscription: 

Resting here until day breaks, and Shadow fall, and darkness disappears, is QUANAH PARKER, Last Chief of the Comanches.