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Quanah Parker: Last Chief of the Comanches
Peter Gorman
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Chief Quanah Parker.
Click image to enlarge.
In October 1867, representatives of the U.S. government met with the great chiefs of the Southern Plains tribes at Medicine Lodge Creek, in Kansas, to propose a peaceful resolution to the hostilities that had raged since white settlers had begun moving west of the Mississippi thirty years earlier. The government proposed that the Indians move to newly created reservations and cease all warlike activity against both the settlers and the United States Army. In exchange, the Indians would be provided with food, clothing, housing vocational training, and benign supervision. The talks were often bitter, but the Indians, decimated by disease and decades of warfare, had little choice but to accept the offer. After three weeks of negotiations, nearly all of the chiefs of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and the Comanche tribes agreed to the terms of the treaty.
Among those noticeably absent from Medicine Lodge was Chief Quanah--later known as Quanah Parker--the young, half-white leader of the fierce Quohada clan of the Comanches. Asked why he wouldn't attend the peace council, Quanah told a reporter from the East: "You tell the white chiefs that the Quohadas are warriors and we will surrender when the bluecoats come and make us surrender."
The refusal of Chief Quanah to give up the nomadic life of the Comanches and move his clan to the reservation was seen as dangerously divisive to the cause of the peace on the Southern Plains, and spurred nearly nine years of futile attempts by the U.S. government to capture or kill him. During those years, he became legendary for his daring raids on settlements throughout Oklahoma and East Texas, often riding into armed camps either alone or well ahead of his clan.
Quanah Parker was a proud warrior, a young medicine man, and the last chief of the Comanches. But he was also pragmatic, and when finally the buffalo had all been slaughtered and his people were faced with starvation, he voluntarily surrendered himself and his clan to the Army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in May 1875. From that time until his death in 1911, he worked as hard for his people in the white man's world as he had as a Plains fighter. He refused to fall prey to the depredations of reservation life that befell so many of his contemporaries, learning instead to flourish in the new world. Over the years, he became a cattleman, a railroad investor, and one of the influential men of his time. Among his friends he counted Indian chiefs, cattle barons, statesmen, and presidents. But he never stopped being proud to be a Comanche.
His influence continues today: During those years of acclimation to reservation life, his personal power grew, both as a leader and as a medicine man. He traveled widely, performing medicine ceremonies on whites as well as Indians. His medicine was peyote, introduced to him while he was in Mexico in the late 1870s. It was his use of peyote, combined with his widespread influence, which lead to the eventual formation of what is now known as the Native American Church.
***
Around me, the rocks were close as I made my way through the crevices and up the hills, away from the camping sites and restrooms that dotted the floor of Palo Duro Canyon. Overhead, the sun glared; the sky was a deep blue, washed with an occasional patch of cloud. The spring afternoon was warm, but there was a bite in the wind. The night would grow bitterly cold.
I'd come to the canyon to do a private meditation on Quanah Parker. In my bag, I carried some gifts from Buster Parker, his grandson. Buster was a seventy-year-old Comanche I'd met just two days earlier, when I arrived in Cache, Oklahoma, seeking information on Chief Quanah. Through luck or fate, I'd asked someone at a local restaurant whether any of Quanah Parker's relatives still lived in the area and was told about Buster. We'd met and talked. Buster was one of only three living grandchildren, and the only one who had participated in Native American Church ceremonies. Among the things he'd given me was it-say, a local medicine used to keep rattlesnakes at bay, and some cedar to toss into my fire as the night progressed.
I reached a small plateau perhaps three hundred feet above the canyon floor and caught my breath beside a clump of wind-bent bushes. A bobcat suddenly stepped out from behind some rocks and stared at me, then turned and bolted. I turned as well, and continued climbing for another half-hour, until the sounds of the campers were well below me.
In front of me stretched Palo Duro, an immense crevice nearly thirty miles long cut into the Texas panhandle by the headwaters of the Red River. Its walls were a brass-colored clay and nearly sheer; trees and brush dotted the hills, which rose like a miniature mountain range down the canyon's center. Huge stones carved by a hundred thousand years of wind cast eerie shadows in the afternoon light. It was Buster who'd suggested I come here, and, though the drive from Cache has been a long one, I was glad he had.
"If I was going to do a little meditation on my grandfather I might go to Palo Duro," he'd said over coffee. "That was the winter camp of the Quohada. What a life that must have been, with all the buffalo that used to live in that canyon." It had also been, he said, the place where Quanah had often gone after his raids, his trail dust simply falling off the face of the Earth, leaving his pursuers baffled.
Finding out about Quanah Parker was the purpose of the trip to Oklahoma, so I asked for directions and left Cache the next morning, driving nearly three hundred miles across the staked-plains territory, farmland, and cattle range. Cold and brown before the onset of spring, the ground lay unbroken as far as the horizon until, without warning, it gave way to Palo Duro.
Now, standing on the top of one of those small mountains that ran down the center of the canyon, I tried to imagine what it must have been like when the rising smoke came from the teepees instead of campers, and the musky smell of thousands of buffalo filled the air. What it must have been to be a bluecoat or a Texas Ranger riding out against the Comanches and watching them disappear in the distance, wondering if it were true that they could turn into eagles and fly away. Picturing what it must have been like for Chief Quanah on the day when Colonel MacKenzie, the man whose task it was to bring Quanah in, finally discovered this canyon and came riding in with a full complement of soldiers to attack the Kiowa and Comanche staying there.
I picked a place for a fire beside a tall boulder, protected on two other sides by brush, then cleared the area. I marked off a circle large enough for both the fire and my things, then began to chew the it-say as Buster had said. "Chew these sticks and spit the black tar they make all around your circle. No rattlesnake will come anywhere near this." The circle marked with the medicine, I began to walk among the rocks. Overhead a hawk sailed gracefully on the wind.
***
Quanah was born during the late 1840s, the son of Peta Nocona, chief of the Quohada Comanches, and Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman who had been taken captive, along with her brother John, by the Comanches during a raid on Fort Parker, Texas, in 1836. At the time, she was nine years old.
Raised as a Comanche, Cynthia Ann married Chief Nocona when she was eighteen and bore him three children: two sons, Quanah and Pecos; and a daughter, Toosannah, or Prairie Flower. If she ever missed her white life, there is no record of it. By all accounts, she was fully accepted as a Comanche and thought of herself as one as well.
But in 1860, nearly twenty-five years after her capture, while she and the rest of the Comanche women, along with their children and a small group of Mexican slaves, were on the Pease River in Texas gathering berries for the winter, they were discovered by a group of Texas Rangers and Indian bounty hunters. Most of the women and children and all of the slaves were massacred. But Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower were spared and brought to Fort Parker, where Cynthia Ann's uncle, Col. Issac Parker, welcomed them both with open arms.
Neither Cynthia Ann nor Prairie Flower were happy with their new home. Prairie Flower, an Indian from birth, never adjusted to white civilization and died four years after her capture. Following her death, Cynthia Ann, broken in spirit, refused to eat and slowly starved herself to death.
"Now when they recaptured his mother, my grandfather became like a raging fire," said Buster. "Man, he hated white people and he went about in Texas, killing, burning farms, destroying things. He wanted to find out what happened to his mother, where they took her, and why."
***
Night began to fall. Across the canyon, broad strokes of gold and red burned upon the sheer wall. The sky was lit with a hundred shades of violet. I made my way back to the circle I'd drawn and began to prepare things. The circle's opening faced due east, ready to welcome the morning sun.
The night was growing cold. The wind tore through the canyon and rushed around me. I put on a poncho I'd brought and took out a bone whistle and blew it to the four directions: To the west, where it's said the Thunderbird holds back the waters so that the world won't flood; to the north, where people are said to come from; to the east, the source of light and life; and to the south, the direction of the Good Red Road, the road we're said to travel on when we die.
I put the whistle aside and took out the cedar Buster had given me. I sprinkled some on the fire. It crackled and filled the air with its sweet scent.
***
When I'd arrived in Cache two days earlier, I'd stopped at a small Indian trading post and restaurant. It was there that I'd asked about Quanah's family and learned about Buster. While I waited for him to arrive, I'd walked into the trading post gift shop, a large room filled with western clothes, Native American jewelry, painted steer skulls, and such. A pretty young woman was tending the counter.
"Excuse me," I started. "I've heard that Quanah Parker's house is located somewhere here in Cache. Any idea where it might be?"
"Sure do," she smiled. "We have it right out back. Well, not right out back, it's down the road a bit. And it's not really we who have it, it's my uncle, Herb Woesner. He'll be along any minute if you want to wait."
Within a few minutes, a thin man in his early fifties came into the store. The young woman pointed me out to him and he introduced himself. He was soft-spoken with a good smile.
"What can I do for you?" he asked.
I told him what I wanted and he offered to show me the house. As he drove me down a private road, he explained that he'd bought it from one of Quanah's granddaughters in 1958, to include it in an Old West Fairground he had been putting together at that time. He'd built the trading post and restaurant, bought some carnival rides and acquired some of the oldest buildings in Oklahoma, including the first schoolhouse and church built by settlers, and an old shack that had once belonged to Frank James. The fairground had never really gotten off the ground, however, and Woesner now only showed the buildings to people who expressed interest.
"Quanah's house was called the Star House, because Quanah had had five large stars painted on the roof," Herb explained. "Some people said he'd done it to signify that he always wanted to live beneath the stars even after he moved from a teepee to a frame house. Others said it was because he wanted visiting dignitaries to understand that he thought of himself as a Comanche general with as much right to stars and the white military leaders had.
"I bought it from Mrs. Ella Cox Lutz. She'd lived in it with her mother, Mrs. Birdsong, who was Quanah's daughter, until 1956, when the U.S. Army decided to expand the Fort Sill Artillery Range and bought up a lot of the old Comanche land, including Quanah's. Of course, the Army Corps of Engineers had been nice enough to move the house for her instead of demolishing it, and it sat right across the street from the trading post from the spring of 1957 until Easter, 1958. Then, when Mrs. Birdsong died, I bought it and moved it here."
As he finished, we pulled into the fairgrounds area, drove past the rusting carnival rides, and stopped at the gate of a tall fence that ran around the Old West buildings. Woesner unlocked the gate and we walked in. It was obvious that Quanah Parker's house had been the intended star attraction. It was a large, two-storied white building with wide balconies wrapped around two sides on both floors. It looked just like the old photographs I'd seen, except that the stars had worn off the roof and it now overlooked a scrub plain instead of the beautiful Wichita Mountains. Teepee poles leaned against a tree to the right of the house and the rain-weathered remains of a peyote altar and ceremonial fire were visible directly in front of the house. I asked Herb about them.
"They sometimes have ceremonies down here. I think the last one was back in November," he said.
He unlocked the doors to the house--a recent addition--and walked me through, pointing out which rooms had been used by which of Quanah's several wives. Through most of the time he'd lived in the house, Quanah had had five wives, though in all he'd had eight.
There were large, framed photographs of each wife hanging in the rooms where they'd lived. They were beautiful women, strong and independent. Three of them lived on the main floor, two upstairs with his twenty-three children. I later asked Buster whether there had been jealousies among the wives. "Not at all," he said. "My mother used to tell me that all the Comanche women wanted to marry him."
In Quanah's own room, there were two photographs: one of his mother Cynthia Ann, breast-feeding Prairie Flower; the other of Quanah standing next to Burke Burnett, a cattle baron, a friend, and the man who built the Star House for him. It had been Quanah's commission for leasing out some unused Comanche grazing land to the cattlemen, something many people have pointed to as a sellout to the whites. In fact, the land was leased for a quarter-million dollars annually, and the money was used to buy cattle and build two-room homes for all of the Comanche families on the Fort Sill reservation. "That's not a sellout," says Buster, "that's vision."
Rumors of Quanah Parker as a sellout to the whites persist in some quarters even today, probably because he appeared to get such preferential treatment from them. While the one-wife law of the white settlers was imposed on other Indians, Quanah was permitted several. Too, while other Indian leaders were allowed to travel only infrequently, Quanah was permitted to go when and where he pleased. He traveled extensively to Mexico, Colorado, and even Washington, D.C., on three occasions. There is a famous photograph of Teddy Roosevelt standing with Quanah, which was taken when Roosevelt came to Oklahoma and asked Quanah to go hunting with him, an invitation Quanah tactfully turned down.
But the special treatment he received, as well as the personal wealth he accrued, appears to have come from the respect he commanded and from his business acumen rather than from catering to the white authorities. He simply learned to beat the whites at their own game. According to Woesner, Quanah "understood the whites and even made good friends with some of them. But he never trusted them. Mostly he was a politician."
Certainly, in the early years of reservation life, his distrust was apparent: He saw that in the new world order Indians would have to go to school, but he was adamantly opposed to sending Comanche children to missionary schools, opting instead to build the first Indian school in the Oklahoma territory. He even told his people to accept the white missionaries' religion if that was what satisfied them, but he himself never stopped practicing his own spiritual beliefs.
***
I threw more cedar onto the fire, and it danced in the wind. I sat huddled against the cold night air. Overhead, stars were falling.
I stood to stretch and stepped out of the circle. Away from the protection of the brush, the wind buffeted me. It cut through my layers of clothing and burned me. Night sounds rushed past and around me. I opened my arms and thought I might take off into the night sky. This was what the Comanches had felt. This was the wind that had moved among their buffalo and carved these canyon walls. It was a fierce wind, and I reveled in it. I danced in circles as it thundered around me. Bits of brush whipped by my face; pebbles and clay and uprooted shrubs tumbled by my legs and arms. It was exhilarating.
I stopped my dancing and stepped back into the circle. I stared into the fire and thought of what it must have been like to be here when the buffalo roamed, and in the fire the buffalo appeared, short-legged and shaggy, moving easily on green plains. Behind them, downwind, Indians on horseback, hunting those that separated from the herd. The air was clear and there were trees on the horizon.
Suddenly, dust and noise; everywhere the sound, the feel, the drumming of thousands of hoofbeats, of thunderous motion. The trees were in flames and the buffalo stampeding. The fire crackled like gunshot and the buffalo began to fall, hundreds, thousands of them, falling, roaring, stumbling over one another's carcasses. Trains appeared and from their windows the buffalo sport hunters fired their Sharps repeaters and buffalo guns, leaving the animals to rot until they piled up and the air stank with the copper smell of their blood.
It had been the buffalo hunters more than anything else that had killed the Plains Indian cultures. Three or four men could take down hundreds of buffalo daily with their specialized weaponry, their partners skinning the animals and drying the skins on the Staked Plains for sale back East, the flesh left where it lay. The greed of those hunters had been fantastic: In the period from 1872-1874 alone, it is estimated that nearly four million buffalo were killed in the southern Plains.
It was that slaughter that led to the bitter battle of Adobe Walls in the Texas panhandle, the most famous of Quanah's battles. It was a battle in which both Kiowa and Cheyenne joined up with the Quohada Comanches to oust the buffalo hunters from lands where hunting was by treaty reserved for the Indians. Under the leadership of Chief Quanah, and with the blessing of the great Comanche medicine man Isatai--who predicted that his medicine would make the Indians invincible to the hunters' bullets--several hundred warriors rode out to the Adobe Walls trading post and on June 27, 1874, launched an attack. Quanah rode first, charging with another Comanche warrior to the fortified walls of the post.
"We charged pretty fast, throwing up dust high," he later said. "I got up to the adobe house with another Comanche and poked holes through the roof to shoot."
On the first charge it seemed as though Isatai's medicine might indeed protect the warriors, but on a later charge Quanah's horse was shot out from under him and he was grazed while heading for cover. The fight lasted from sunrise until past noon, when it became apparent that the Indians' bows and arrows, lances, and single-shot rifles were no match for telescoped buffalo rifles with a range of more than a mile. In the early afternoon, when the Indians withdrew, fifteen of them were dead and many more were wounded. Quanah himself had to stop the warriors from beating Isatai for the failure of his medicine, though it's said he never put his trust in a medicine man again.
Following the battle, most of the Kiowa and Cheyenne who had left their reservations to join the attack returned to them. Quanah and his Quohadas, however, turned south and rampaged through the Texas panhandle for several weeks, finally returning to their winter home at Palo Duro in late summer. There, on the canyon floor, lived one of the last of the great buffalo herds, and for the remainder of the summer, the Indians lived as they always had.
On September 26 of that year, however, Colonel MacKenzie's forces found Palo Duro and surprised the Indians living there. They moved through the canyon, storming up the creek, burning teepees, and destroying winter supplies, then drove fourteen hundred of the Indian's horses into the canyon's Tule valley and slaughtered them. Most of the Indians escaped, but few had supplies and many had no horses. Through that fall and into the winter, they turned themselves in at Fort Sill. In May of the following year, Chief Quanah and his Quohadas turned themselves in as well.
The end of the free life for Chief Quanah and his clan began with the Battle of Adobe Walls. En route to the battle, Quanah had sung a song of lament for the warriors who would not be returning with them. That song, The Battle of Adobe Walls, is still sung at peyote ceremonies, though Quanah never used peyote until several years later, while he and his clan were living on the Fort Sill reservation.
Quanah had gone into East Texas to search for his mother and sister among her white relatives--it was at that time that he began using her last name as his own--and learned that they had both died. He was unable to discover the whereabouts of their burial sites, however, either because the Parkers refused to tell him or genuinely didn't know, and he continued south, into Mexico, to see his uncle John who was living with the Indians there, to verify the deaths.
While in Mexico, Quanah either fell ill or was injured--the exact problem is unknown--and he was treated by a curandera, a medicine woman, with peyote and cured. "That experience," says Joan Denton, the adopted daughter of Buster Parker, "was so spiritual, so wonderful, that from that moment on, it became Quanah's medicine. It was enlightening."
When Quanah returned to Fort Sill, he brought with him the new medicine, and in so doing laid the foundation of what is now known as the Peyote Road of the Native American Church. His belief in both the spiritual and physical curative properties of peyote was immense, and word of his use of the little cactus began to spread, first among the Comanches and later among the other tribes at Fort Sill.
Quanah's new medicine was recognized by many as a powerful aid, but among the missionaries, who were driven to convert the "pagan" Indians to Christianity, and the military, whose aim was to divest the Indians of their tribal identity, it was seen as a dangerous weapon. Like many of the Indian dances, rituals, and ceremonies, peyote was seen as something that would bind the Indians together, and its use was forbidden by the whites. There are countless cases on record of peyote meetings that were broken up by mobs of both whites and Indians who were fearful of the pagan ceremony they imagined was taking place.
Quanah himself appears to have been left alone on this count while other Indian leaders suffered these indignities. That was partly due to his standing in both the Indian and white worlds, but it was also due to the fact that he never intended to start a religion or foster a movement. For him, peyote was a medicine and his use was apparently private. He treated both whites and Indians with it and often traveled great distances to bring it to those who needed it.
But it was precisely because he was not trying to start a cult that one formed around him. He was successful, respected, and wealthy, with advantages few other Indian leaders received. It was only natural that a people who had been stripped of their traditions would gravitate toward the beliefs of such a man.
As the use of peyote spread from tribe to tribe, the ceremony accompanying that use became formalized. The ceremony as practiced today, however, came much later than the time of Quanah Parker. The Native American Church came later, as well, first being incorporated in Oklahoma in 1918, several years after his death. And it wasn't until 1993 that the use of peyote by its Native American members was legalized. For Quanah, peyote appears to simply have been a good medicine, something to replace the medicine he'd lost faith in at Adobe Walls.
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Three of Quanah Parker's wives.
Click image to enlarge.
***
The fire began to flicker. The last of the wood had become bright coals. False dawn was breaking, and I was tired. It was too cold to sleep, and my mind was beginning to wander. I listened for a little while to try to hear the sound of the buffalo hooves again in the wind, but they were gone. Overhead, the stars, too, began to disappear. I put away my things, poured water on the embers, then blew the whistle in the four directions. I wiped away the circle and brushed the ground to try to make my presence there as unnoticeable as possible.
I walked to the top of the hill and looked around the canyon. Dawn was almost breaking. I said my thanks and good-byes, then made my way down the hills to the canyon floor and began the drive back to Cache.
***
By late afternoon, I was with Buster at the Fort Sill Military Museum, where we met with the museum director, anthropologist Towana Spivey, for a trip out to the original site of Quanah's house. We drove close to the Wichita Mountains, through a lush game reserve and onto the restricted artillery ranges. When we reached the end of the road, we got out and walked.
The ground was burned and covered with char and the grease of gunpowder accrued over more than thirty years of strafing by low-flying, training-mission planes. Shell casings and spent cartridges were everywhere. Bits of brick and mortar seemed to grow from the ravaged soil. Splintered trees fought for life among the ruins. Spivey explained that the range we were on was called the Quanah Range.
Overhead, the sky had grown dark. Storm clouds moved across the open prairie from the north. To the east were the Wichitas, ancient red stones heaped like burial mounds, rounded and worn. Buster walked nearby, pointing out landmarks on the ravaged landscape.
"Right over there," he said, pointing to a ragged cluster of tree stumps; "that was where I grew up. That was my father's house. And right there, that was Quanah's garden. Man, it was such a beautiful garden, even by the time I saw it."
A sense of melancholy came over me unexpectedly. Quanah Parker had seemed so real to me the night before, up in Palo Duro Canyon, but here, walking on what had once been his land, everything seemed off-kilter. It was probably just logistics, but it seemed awfully strange that of all the thousands and thousands of acres Fort Sill had to work with, they had decided to buy up land occupied by the Indians on which to expand their ranges. Whatever vestiges of a culture remained after a people were forced onto a reservation would almost surely be lost by a second move, off those lands. Perhaps that was what they had in mind.
"And right over there," said Buster, pointing to a small hill, "that was where Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower used to be buried."
He saw the surprised look on my face. "Oh, yes," he said. "Quanah eventually found his mother. Actually, it was his son-in-law, Aubrey Birdsong, who found them in 1910. Quanah had them brought here and washed every bone himself before they were reburied. And when he died he was buried right up on that hill alongside them."
Quanah Parker died on February 23, 1911, shortly after contracting diphtheria from a woman to whom he was ministering peyote. He was reburied in Fort Sill, along with his mother and sister on August 9, 1957. A monument was erected over his grave from the red granite of the Wichita Mountains. His inscription reads: "Resting here until daybreak shall fall and darkness disappears, is Quanah Parker, last chief of the Comanches."
Peter Gorman is a freelance writer who lives in Joshua, Texas.
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