Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

by S. C. Gwynne

  In October 1759, Parrilla’s force found itself about eighty miles northwest of present Fort Worth, near the Red River, which marked the northern boundary of Texas. There, near the present town of Ringgold, he encountered yet another prodigious assemblage of Indians. Though the typically paranoid Spanish had suspected French collusion in the attack on the San Saba Mission, there is no evidence to support it. But this fearsome group, consisting of an ad hoc alliance of several thousand Comanches, Wichitas, Osages, Red River Caddoans, and other tribes, and dug into breastworks in the enemy’s path, almost certainly had some assistance from French intrigue. That the Comanches were the dominant power in this part of the world did not mean they did not make alliances of convenience, especially where Apaches and Spanish were concerned. They were at war with the Osages, but happy to ride with them against Parrilla.

  What happened next might have been one of the greatest slaughters in the history of the American West, except for the fact that Parrilla’s forces almost immediately turned tail and ran. Though his Spanish regulars had charged on his command, the rest of the army proved utterly feckless. Most of it melted away. Retreat turned into panic, and panic turned into headlong flight. For some reason—perhaps because they were so pleased to capture all of the provision wagons of a large Spanish army—the Indians did not pursue Parrilla’s terrified, fleeing army. Because of this, his forces suffered few casualties, an inconvenient fact that he was hard-pressed to explain to his skeptical superiors back in San Antonio and later in Mexico City.

  It was a stunning defeat, the worst inflicted on the Spanish in the New World. The Spanish had thrown everything they had at the Comanches and their allies and had been humiliated. No expeditions would ever again be sent against the Comanches in Texas; no missions were ever again established in hostile country. More important, both the Indians and Spanish of the day were interested in what happened in the same way. In the fog of war, it was a clear consensus. The fight at Spanish Fort was evidence of a major swing in the balance of power, one that heralded the beginning of a long period of violence against both Texas and northern Mexico. Within a few years Comanche power in Texas would become almost absolute. Though Spain maintained some of its missions and presidio for another sixty years, they were powerless to do anything except defend themselves. Parrilla himself was sent to Mexico to face court-martial. He lied. He said he had faced six thousand Indians under the command of French officers flying French flags. The court found no evidence of Frenchmen under arms or in positions of command. Parrilla was disgraced.

  New Spain’s leaders were not always incompetent in their handling of the Comanche problem. There were several governors and several generals who showed themselves to be shrewd and resourceful leaders, and Spain produced at least one governor of real genius who managed to do what two centuries of such governors and scores of later politicians, Indian agents, and American armies could not: make a genuine peace with the Comanches. His name was Don Juan Bautista de Anza. He was governor of the province of New Mexico from 1777 to 1787, and he was perhaps the most brilliant of all the men who ever faced the problem of hostile Indians. If the postrevolution Texans or the post–Mexican War federal Indian authorities had studied Anza, the history of the opening of the American West might have been quite different, indeed.

  Anza, a hardened Indian fighter who had met with success on the California and Sonora frontiers, inherited the same intractable Indian problem every other governor had faced. The Comanches were ascendant, the Apaches were skulking in the hinterlands but were still lethal, and the Navajos and Utes were restive in the west. All were troublesome but the most notorious Indian of all in those years was a Comanche chief known as Cuerno Verde (“Green Horn”), leader of the Kotsoteka band, whose father had been killed in battle with Spaniards and whose vengeance was legendary.30 He was, as Anza wrote to the commander-general of the interior provinces of New Spain, “a scourge of the kingdom, who had exterminated many pueblos, killing hundreds and making as many prisoners whom he afterwards sacrificed in cold blood.”31 As soon as Anza became governor, he proposed a bold and previously unthinkable strategy to defeat the Comanches: Attack them in their own country at the same moment when they were coming to attack New Mexicans. The Spanish had always thought defensively, or at least in terms of punitive expeditions. Anza aimed aggressively for the root cause of the problem.

  On August 15, 1779, the new governor gathered an army of six hundred men, including 259 Indians, and set off in search of Cuerno Verde. To avoid detection, he took a different and more mountainous route than the one used by all previous Spanish expeditions,32 crossing the front range of the Rockies near South Park. He went ultimately north and east, onto the elevated plains in present-day eastern Colorado, where he found the Indian camp. Though most of its warriors and the chief were absent, Anza attacked anyway; the Indians fled. It took the Spanish nine miles to ride them down, and another three miles to subdue them. They killed eighteen—presumably old men, boys, and women—and took thirty women and thirty-four children prisoner. They got all five hundred horses. From the prisoners, Anza learned that Cuerno Verde was off raiding in New Mexico but was returning soon for a grand feast and celebration.

  Anza waited for him, surprised him on the trail in Colorado near a place that is still known as Greenhorn Peak, and in a piece of brilliant battlefield strategy, engineered one of the great Spanish victories in North America. He had ventured into the heart of Comancheria, to the very homeland of the Comanche, where countless others had perished, and where they had never been beaten in a major fight, and he had triumphed. Anza wrote later that he believed he owed his victory in part to Cuerno Verde’s arrogance. After Cuerno Verde attacked the six-hundred-strong Spanish battle line with his bodyguard of fifty warriors, Anza theorized that “his death was caused by his own intrepidity and the contempt he wished to show our people, being vaunted by the many successes that they have always obtained over us because of the irregularities with which they have always warred. . . . From this should be deduced the arrogance, presumption and pride which characterized this barbarian, and which he manifested until the last moment in various ways, disdaining even to load his own musket. . . .”33 Only a handful of warriors escaped capture or death. The Spanish suffered only one casualty. Anza and his lancers launched other attacks into Comancheria, and though none was nearly as effective as the one against Cuerno Verde, he soon had their full attention.

  What Anza did next was equally unconventional. Other governors, flush with such success, would likely have tried to destroy the rest of the Comanches, in spite of the fact that there were more than twenty thousand of them on the plains34 (or, according to Anza’s own inflated estimate, thirty thousand). But Anza was not trying to beat the Comanches, just scare them enough so that a diplomatic accommodation could be made. Considering what had happened in New Mexico and what was even now happening in Texas, he had what sounded like a wildly implausible goal: He wanted to make friends and allies of them.

  This he did. He gathered Comanche chiefs for peace talks, insisting that he speak with all of the bands that touched the western perimeter of the plains, and eventually insisting on appointing a single chief to speak for all the bands, something that had never happened before. Anza treated the Comanches as equals, did not threaten their hunting grounds, and refused to try to declare sovereignty over them. He offered them trade. They liked and respected him. In one of the more remarkable diplomatic pirouettes ever seen on the border, Anza then managed to concoct an overweening solution to all his problems. He somehow managed not only to get the Comanches to sign a peace treaty, but also to bind them with their enemies the Utes in an alliance with Spain against their bitterest foes, the Apaches. Then, for the coup de grâce, he took this combined force of Spanish, Ute, and Comanche and used it to force the Navajo into the compact.

  Odder still, Anza’s treaty worked. In the entire history of the American West, few treaties between whites and Indians have ever held up more than a
few years. Most were invalid the day they were signed. History is full of hundreds of Indian treaties concocted by governments who could not enforce them. This is the rare exception. It was only with the province of New Mexico, and it probably saved New Mexico from the long terror of Comanche raiding that was even then being unleashed on Texas and northern Mexico. The truce with the Utes was broken soon enough, but the treaty with New Mexico actually held up. It did so in part because it was in the Comanches’ own best interests. New Mexico was a mother lode of trade, a place where they could sell their horses and captives. The Anza peace gave rise to a new, and quite special form of mercantile relationship between the western Comanches and New Mexico. Instead of terror there was simply trade, conducted by an entirely new breed, hard-bitten mestizo middlemen who went by the name of Comancheros.

  Six

  BLOOD AND SMOKE

  MIRABEAU BUONAPARTE LAMAR was a poet. His best-known works—they were apparently popular in certain literary corners of nineteenth-century America—were “Thou Idol of My Soul” and “An Evening on the Banks of the Chatahoochee.” He was also an expert fencer, a superb horseman, an amateur historian, and an oil painter of some accomplishment and sensibility. When he was elected president of the sovereign nation known as the Republic of Texas in 1838, his critics derided him for making a better poet than president.

  That may or may not have been true. But the one thing everyone could agree on, in that violent and unsettled year, was that he was, even by frontier standards, a dangerous, mean, and uncompromising son of a bitch. There is a famous photograph of him from sometime in the 1840s in which he looks less like a poet than a button man for the mob. His arms are crossed defiantly and defensively, enhancing the wrinkles in an already deeply creased broadcloth suit. His hair, swept back from his forehead, looks like it needs washing and combing. His thin lips are curled ever so slightly back into something that looks like the beginning of a snarl. It is unclear just how the poet and painter came to be housed in the body of a truculent Indian-annihilator and would-be empire builder.1

  He owed his elevation to the presidency both to his heroism at the battle of San Jacinto—his rescue of two fellow soldiers was so breathtakingly brave that it drew a salute from enemy lines—and to the utter failure of his predecessor, the brilliant alcoholic statesman Sam Houston, to solve the Indian “problem.” In the years since San Jacinto and the raid at Parker’s Fort, white men had been pouring into Texas by the thousands, crashing headlong into the eastern boundary lands of Comancheria, and as a result the frontier had exploded in violence, most of it at the hand of the Comanches. Houston had taken a conciliatory approach. He refused to implement congressional troop authorizations. He refused to authorize frontier forts. He had spent time with Indians, both as an agent and as the ambassador for the Cherokee nation in Washington. He liked them and believed he understood them. He often sided with them, and he invariably defended their right to territory. When a Comanche chief asked him to set a boundary on white settlement, he answered in frustration: “If I could build a wall from the Red River to the Rio Grande, so high that no Indian could scale it, the white people would go crazy trying to devise a means to get beyond it.”2 He had held peace talks with Comanches, without result.

  Meanwhile the settlers rushed in like a moon tide from the East, bearing their ingenious instruments that “stole the land,” and spurred on by the Texas Congress’s opening of all Indian lands to white settlement (over Houston’s veto). As homesteads crept up the valleys of the Colorado, Guadalupe, and Brazos rivers, Comanche attacks escalated. In just the first two years of Houston’s administration more than one hundred captives were carried off. Most, like little nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, were simply, heartbreakingly gone. There was no appeal to the government, no redress, just wrenching, empty grief for hundreds of families who could not know the fate of their loved ones in the high, windy plains of Comancheria. After the raid at Parker’s Fort, Cynthia Ann’s uncle—and Rachel’s father—James had pleaded on two occasions with Sam Houston to finance a rescue expedition to retrieve the five hostages.3 Houston had turned him down flat. There was violent death everywhere along the bleeding edge of this westernmost frontier—a great deal more than historians ever recorded—and Houston could not afford to throw his scant resources at the rescue of one set of captives, however touching their story.

  By late 1838 the new republic had reached a boiling point. And just at that moment, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was elected president. The hard-edged Lamar was the perfect counterpoint to the measured, diplomatic Houston, whom he despised as much as he hated the new city on a bayou in east Texas that bore his name. One of Lamar’s first acts was to move the capital from the swamps of east Texas one hundred fifty miles west to a new town named Austin at the very foot of the Balcones Escarpment—in other words, right up against the edge of Comanche country.4 The move westward was in keeping with the views of this pro-slavery fire-eater who wanted nothing to do with union with the United States. His dream was to push the borders of his young republic all the way to the golden shores of the Pacific Ocean. Austin would be at the confluence of key western trade routes, a sort of Constantinople of the primitive West, the seat of a sprawling empire called Texas that would vie for continental supremacy with the agglomeration of eastern states known as the United States of America. Though the majority of Texans had expected that they would be annexed almost instantly by the United States after their victory at San Jacinto, Lamar had plenty of fellow dreamers. One of them was James Parker, who proposed to the Congress that he lead four thousand men gloriously to capture Santa Fe and New Mexico, and that each of the men be given three hundred sixty acres as a reward. Congress declined to approve the plan.5

  In spite of an empty treasury and currency that was almost worthless,6 Lamar saw no reason why he could not build his empire of the West. The first step, of course, was getting rid of the Indians. He believed that Indians should be either expunged from Texas or killed outright. This included all Indians, from the Comanches on the west to the Wacos in the middle, and the Shawnees and Delawares and Cherokees in the east. In his inaugural address he put this quite succinctly, in case anyone was not clear about where he stood. Citing the Indians’ cruelties, he called for an “exterminating war” against them that would “admit of no compromise, and have no termination except in their total extinction, or total expulsion.”7 The Congress of the Republic of Texas heartily agreed. That month they voted to create an eight-hundred-forty-man regiment of fifty companies to serve for three years; they also voted a million-dollar appropriation.

  Thus Lamar’s rallying cry: extinction or expulsion. It sounds a good deal like a public appeal for genocide, certainly among the very few in modern history. But as appalling as it might sound, in fact Lamar, a man who had experience with Creek Indians in Georgia, was just being brutally candid in a way that almost no white men had ever been on the subject of Indian rights. His was a policy of naked aggression, as usual, but without the usual lies and misrepresentation. He demanded the Indians’ complete submission to the Texans’ terms—there would be no endless renegotiation of meaningless boundaries—and stated quite clearly what would happen to them if they did not agree. “He proposed nothing and presided over nothing that was not already fully established in Anglo-American precedent and policy,” wrote historian T. R. Fehrenbach. “The people and the courts had decided that true peace between white men and red men was impossible, unless either the Indians gave up their world, or the Americans eschewed the nation they were determined to erect upon this continent.”8 Since two hundred years of duplicity and bloodshed had proved that neither of those things would ever happen, Lamar was just stating what was to him obvious.

  What he had done that no high-ranking government official in the neighboring United States of America had ever done before was to explicitly deny that Indians in Texas had rights to any territory at all. Every treaty ever signed assumed that Indians would get at least some land on thei
r terms. Indeed, in 1825 the U.S. government had created an Indian Country (modern Oklahoma) in order to guarantee that, in the words of Secretary of War James Barbour, “the future residence of these peoples will be forever undisturbed.”9 Lamar and most of the residents of their new sovereign nation opposed the very principle. In some sense, what he proposed was better than the piecemeal destruction that had been meted out to the eastern tribes. In another sense, it was an invitation to the outright slaughter of native peoples. The Texas Congress loved the new Indian policy. In 1839 two thousand revved-up, patriotic, adventure-hungry Texans signed up to fight Indians.10

  And fight them they did. The upshot of the Lamar presidency was an almost immediate war against all Indians in Texas. The summer of 1839 witnessed one of the most savage campaigns ever unleashed against Native Americans. The first target was the Cherokees, who had been pushed relentlessly westward over many decades from their homelands in the Carolinas. Many had landed in the piney woods and sandy riverbanks of east Texas, near the Louisiana border, where they had largely lived in peace with whites for almost twenty years. They were one of the five “civilized tribes,” and were indeed quickly absorbing the white man’s culture, dressing like whites, farming or running businesses, speaking English. The excuse for getting rid of them was a trumped-up charge that they were part of a Mexican-backed plot to drive the whites from Texas. It was almost certainly false, but it was all that Lamar and his secretary of war needed.

  Faced with the demand for his immediate departure from the state, Chief Bowles of the Cherokees agreed to leave if the government compensated his tribe for improvements they had made on the land. The Texans agreed in principle, but offered little, and talks soon broke down. Then, by plan, the soldiers moved in. Nine hundred of them. On July 15, 1839, they attacked a Cherokee village.11 On July 16 they cornered five hundred Cherokees in a dense thicket and swamp and proceeded to kill most of the men, including Chief Bowles. Two days later, the soldiers burned their villages, homes, and fields.