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

  Having narrowly escaped assassination, Williams now discovered, to his astonishment, that the Indian village contained the blue-eyed, light-haired Cynthia Ann Parker, the last unaccounted-for victim of the infamous massacre at Parker’s Fort, the little blond girl who never returned. It is unclear exactly how he learned of this, because she certainly did not tell him, and because being rescued from her grim and horrible fate was entirely the white man’s idea and not hers. She was nineteen. Colonel Williams had met her before, having been acquainted with the Parker family in their early days in Texas. Such was her notoriety, even then, that Williams immediately dispatched a runner with the news back to the governor’s office in Austin.

  Then Williams set about trying to purchase her from the Indians. Buying and selling captives was normal enough commerce in those days. It had been a source of profit to the Comanches since the earliest days of their ascendancy on horseback. They had done a brisk trade in Apache and Mexican captives, often using the elaborately tattooed Wichitas of north-central Texas as brokers. The captives often ended up, transshipped like bales of cotton, in Louisiana markets. Nowadays the business seemed to be centered in various Red River depots, where mercenary traders and other louche types from the outer borderlands with few scruples ran a sort of human arbitrage business, ransoming captives from the Indians then reselling them to their families at a profit. It was a highly speculative business, and involved a good deal of lying and misrepresentation. There were captives whose “saviors” turned out to be the worst sort of swindlers.

  But, as Williams soon discovered, this case was different. The Indians simply would not negotiate. In one account, he offered “12 mules and 2 mule loads of merchandise” for her, a princely sum for a single hostage. That was refused by the Indians who, according to a newspaper story, “say they will die rather than give her up.”21 Another had him offering “a large amount of goods and $400 to $500 in cash.”22 Still, the Indians refused. There were several reported versions of Cynthia Ann’s behavior. In one, she ran off and hid to avoid Williams and the others. In another, she “wept incessantly,” presumably at the thought of being returned. In a third version, Colonel Williams was granted permission to speak to her. She approached him, then sat down under a tree and stared in front of her, refusing to speak or even to indicate whether she understood him. In James T. DeShields’s nineteenth-century telling, almost certainly embellished for the tender sensibilities of his readers: “the anxiety of her mind was betrayed by the perceptible quiver of her lips, showing that she was not insensible to the common feelings of humanity.”23

  A letter written four months later from commissioners Pierce Butler and M. G. Lewis to the commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington cleared up the mystery. They suggested that the problem was not with Pah-hah-yuco or with the other headmen, who were more than willing to sell her for the right price. It was rather that “The young woman is claimed by one of the Comanches as his wife. From the influence of her alleged husband, or from her own inclination, she is unwilling to leave the people with whom she associates.”24 This was love, apparently, as difficult as that was for the white world to swallow. Either way, she wasn’t going anywhere, for any amount of money. On the mercenary frontier, this was in itself shocking news.

  At some point Cynthia Ann and Peta Nocona began living with the Penatekas, though the exact date will never be known. The Comanches responsible for the Parker’s Fort raid were allegedly Nokonis. But the evidence for this is sketchy at best, as was the taibos’ general understanding of Indian bands. They may well have been Penatekas. Or even Tennawish, a lesser band that camped, hunted, and raided with the Penatekas. Or even a combination of bands. One report had Cynthia Ann with the Yamaparikas from the distant north, which was almost certainly not true. But the band distinction is important. Based on the available evidence, the band Cynthia Ann was associated with throughout most of the 1840s were Penatekas: Pah-hah-yuco’s southern Comanches.

  That was bad luck. However she landed with them, it meant that she was thrown into the middle of a social and cultural disaster of epic proportions. To use a later historical parallel, it would have been like being adopted into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1932. There was not much future in it. She thus became the helpless victim of huge, colliding historical forces utterly beyond her control. What happened to the Penatekas in the 1840s destroyed them as a coherent social organization. They did not go down quickly and they did not go down without a fight—in their death throes they were in some ways more lethal than ever, particularly in their Mexican raids—but they never recovered. Much of what was left of them, starving and demoralized, limped on to a tiny reservation in 1855, despised even by other Comanches.

  Only ten years before, such a thing would have been unimaginable. At the moment of the raid on Parker’s Fort, the moment when a weeping Lucy Parker placed her terrified daughter on the rear flank of a Comanche mustang, the Comanches, and the Penatekas in particular, had been at the peak of their historical power and influence. They had defeated the Europeans, cowed the Mexicans, and had so thoroughly mastered the far southern plains that they were no longer threatened by other tribes. They had enough enemies to keep them entertained and supplied with a surfeit of horseflesh. But none to really worry about. Their source of food and sustenance, the buffalo, roamed the plains in record numbers and still ranged into every corner of Comancheria. The tribe’s low birth rates virtually guaranteed that their nomadic life following buffalo herds was infinitely sustainable. Their world was thus suspended in what seemed to be a perfect equilibrium, a balance of earth and wind and sun and sky that would endure forever. An empire under the bright summer moon. For those who witnessed the change at a very intimate and personal level, including Cynthia Ann and her husband, the speed with which that ideal world was dismantled must have seemed scarcely believable. She herself, the daughter of pioneers who were hammering violently at the age-old Comanche barrier that had defeated all other comers, now adopted into a culture that was beginning to die, was the emblem of the change.

  Somehow she and her husband, Peta Nocona, survived the cataclysm. As nomads, they moved constantly. One imagines her on one of these migrations, on horseback, moving slowly across the open grassy plain with hundreds of others, warriors in the vanguard, toward a wide, hazy horizon that would have looked to white men like unalloyed emptiness. There were the long trains of heavily packed mules and horses and the ubiquitous Comanche dogs. There were horses dragging travois that carried the huge tent poles and piled buffalo hides and scored the earth as they went along—perfectly parallel lines drawn on the prairie, merging and vanishing into the pale-blue Texas sky. All trailed by the enormous horse remuda, the source of their wealth. It must have been something to behold. Cynthia Ann lived a hard life. Women did all of the brutally hard work, including most of the work that went into moving camp. They did it from dawn till dark, led brief difficult lives, and did not complain about it; they did everything except hunt and fight.

  Her camp locations show just how far she roamed. Pah-hah-yuco’s camps were found in 1843 north of the Red River and south of modern-day Lawton, Oklahoma, on Cache Creek (the encampment was on a creek bank on the open prairie and stretched for half a mile).25 In 1844 he was camped on the Salt Plains of present-day north-central Oklahoma, on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River,26 well north of the Washita, where Williams found him in 1846. In 1847 his band was spotted a hundred miles north of Austin, in rolling, lightly timbered prairie, camped in a village of one hundred fifty lodges,27 and again that same year in a village in the limestone hills and mesas west of Austin. She was identified as being with the Tennawish band in 1847, who often camped with the Penateka (with whom Pah-hah-yuco was often associated), and for all practical purposes after 1845 may have been the same band. Those camps were in far west Texas on the headwaters of the Red River. Some accounts had her wearing “calico borne from the sacking of Linnville” and fleeing “with the discomfited Comanches up the Guadalupe and C
olorado,”28 suggesting she had been with Buffalo Hump on his raid. But these things cannot be proved.

  Such migrations are in keeping with what we know of the Penateka. In the wake of the Council House Fight, they had moved their camps north, away from the extreme hostilities of the Lamar regime. In the middle of the decade, after changes in the political climate, they began to drift back southward to their usual ranges. Cynthia Ann went with them. She moved in a three-hundred-mile radius. Wherever she was, it was her bad luck to be with the Comanches whose villages and hunting grounds were first in line to be jostled by the impatient and grimly determined onrush of white civilization.

  The Penatekas had borne the brunt of the Mirabeau Lamar years (1838–1841). They had been defeated at the Council House, at Plum Creek, and on the upper Colorado River. Two of those had been massacres. They had won military engagements, too, to be sure—including the San Saba and Bird’s Creek fights—and they had won plenty more against militia and ranging companies that were never recorded. But they must have had the sense that they had lost more than they had won, especially to a foe that seemed to have limitless resources, human and financial, at its disposal. Between 1836 and 1840 alone, the Penateka were thought to have lost a quarter of all their fighting men.29

  With such small numbers, it would normally take years to recover from such setbacks. But the Penatekas were already out of time. What was killing them steadily and surely was not the warlike policies of Lamar, as harsh as they were. Or even the catastrophic disappearance of game from their eastern ranges. The agent of destruction was the same one that had destroyed the majority of the population of almost every Indian tribe in the Americas, starting with the Aztecs: white man’s disease. This was not the first time that horse tribes had been hit by disease. Prior to 1820 it is thought that some thirty epidemics of varying scales moved through the Plains Indians: measles, malaria, whooping cough, and influenza, taking an unknown toll on their numbers.30 But the Penatekas were hit harder than any other band or tribe on the plains. Their Mexican raiding had brought back smallpox in 1816 along with another horrifying and easily transmitted disease they had never seen before: syphilis. In 1839 smallpox had swept through them again, this time brought by Kiowas from the Mandan Indians on the Missouri River. Thousands had died.

  They had no defense against this terrifying, invisible magic. While the Comanches’ abilities to treat simple medical conditions could be fairly sophisticated—they treated toothaches successfully with heated tree fungus, filled cavities by stuffing dried mushrooms in the hole; they made laxatives by boiling the cambium layer of the willow tree; they used mechanical tourniquets and even primitive surgery on gunshot wounds31—the best they could muster against these marauding spirits were prayers and incantations, magical markings on the body, and purification rites. One example of the latter was the presumed cure for smallpox: The sufferer took a sweat bath and then immersed himself in a cold stream, a treatment that often proved fatal.

  Then, in 1849, came the most devastating blow of all: cholera. The disease had first appeared on earth in India’s Ganges River delta in the early nineteenth century. It broke out in Europe in 1830, crossed the ocean to America in 1832, and spread rapidly from there. It came west on the wagon trains with thousands of Forty-niners who were traveling to the gold fields of California. They traveled by old trails like the Santa Fe, but they cut new trails, too, including a route along the Canadian River, which passed through Oklahoma and Texas, and thus through the very heart of Comanche country. In 1849 alone three thousand pioneers traveled that route. They were a dirty, scurvy lot themselves, with hygiene scarcely better than the Indians, gold-crazed hilljacks from the poorer parts of the East and trans-Appalachia. They carried death with them (they had smallpox, too), and spread it in hundreds of Indian villages.

  Cholera was not subtle; it killed fast and explosively. Its incubation period was from two hours to five days, which meant that, from the moment of infection, it could and often did kill a healthy adult in a matter of hours. The disease is marked by severe diarrhea and vomiting, followed by leg cramps, extreme dehydration, raging thirst, kidney failure, and death.32 It was a horrible way to die, and a horrible thing to watch. The disease was transmitted by the ingestion of fecal matter, either directly or in contaminated water or food. Imagine a village of five hundred primitive people with poor or nonexistent sanitary habits in which several hundred of them have violent, uncontrollable diarrhea. The water sources would soon be infected, and then everything else would be infected, too, creating a sort of microbial nightmare. Unable to understand what was causing it, the People had no chance. Because the Nermernuh viewed illness superstitiously, the sick were often left to die alone, layering one kind of horror on another. Grief-stricken families left their dying mothers or fathers or children to flee to the “safety” of another village, only to infect them, too. The disease ripped through the rest of the plains as well. Half of the entire Kiowa tribe perished; five decades later Kiowas remembered it as the most terrible experience in tribal memory.33 Half of the southern Cheyennes died—an estimated two thousand had perished, a number that included entire bands. There was evidence of disease-driven suicide among Kiowas and Arapahoes.34

  No one knows how many thousands of Comanches died in the cholera epidemic of 1849. Some of the northern bands, including the Kotsoteka, were devastated by it as well. It is believed that half of the still-surviving Penateka died. That would mean that the band’s members dropped from eight thousand to two thousand in less than thirty years, though no hard estimate is possible. Most of the important camp headmen died in 1849. What started as gradual disintegration now looked like dissolution. Pah-hah-yuco managed to live through it, though he soon withdrew to far northern ranges. The band chose Buffalo Hump to succeed him, but the title lacked any meaning, since from now on the band had no common leader.35 What was left of them found that the buffalo no longer came south to their ranges, and that much of the other game had disappeared, too. They had signed a few treaties, meanwhile, which of course did nothing to protect them. The agreements drew lines that the Indians could not cross, even to hunt, while white men sent surveying parties scurrying westward across those same imaginary lines into Indian lands. By the early 1850s many of the Penatekas were starving. In the words of one of their chiefs, Ketumseh,

  Over this vast country, where for centuries our ancestors roamed in undisputed possession, free and happy, what have we left? The game, our main dependence, is killed and driven off, and we are forced into the most sterile and barren portions of it to starve. We see nothing but extermination left before us, and we await the result with stolid indifference. Give us a country we can call our own, where we may bury our people in quiet.36

  We can see this all now: the complete narrative of the Honey Eaters, the roots of their power, their long migrations south, their wars with Apaches and Mexicans, their rise to dominance on the southern plains, the curse of their proximity to the settlements, and what the cholera did to them. We can see their degradation, their decay, their suffering, the arc of their fall. But that is all hindsight.

  No one on the frontier or in Houston or in Washington understood any of this at the time. There was little doubt that the Texans had won the fights at Council House and Plum Creek and the Colorado. But no one knew exactly what that meant or what portion of the Comanche tribe had been involved. A fierce and independent group numbering in the thousands with a remuda of fifteen thousand horses and camping in Palo Duro Canyon—the Quahadis—was beyond anything they knew or could guess at. Nor did the Texans have any idea how many Comanches died from cholera, or from the smallpox in 1839. They were invisible catastrophes; they would not be fully understood for decades. Comancheria still loomed before them, as dark, impenetrable, and lethal as ever. The last thing on anyone’s mind was mounting a large force of soldiers to ride far into the Northwest and try to conquer it. The taibos knew that much, anyway.

  In this shadowy world of half knowledge an
d vague assessments, it was also impossible to see the principal side effect of Lamar’s war policy. Though he had driven the southern Comanches north of the Red River and thus produced a temporary peace, he had not changed the nature of the Comanches. The culture was based on war: Young men still had to fight and kill and return with horses. Instead of riding for the Texas frontier, which was now seen as a dangerous place, the Penateka looped to the west, down the old Comanche Trace, which opened into the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Chihuahua. There was little effective government here, the legacy of the long, slow decline of Spanish Imperial power and Mexico’s lack of will to hunt down marauding Indians in its northern provinces. Its eighty-thousand-man army stayed in the south, and was mainly used against the Mexican people. The only real threat were the armed vaqueros. The result was a sort of raider’s paradise.

  And now Buffalo Hump and Santa Anna and other Penateka chiefs cut a wide arc of bloody terror through the eastern provinces of Mexico. They left a long trail of bloated and charred corpses and burned-out villages. They tortured hundreds or thousands to death, no one would ever know how many. They took captive children by the dozen and cattle and horses, and in the summer months people reported seeing this remarkable procession heading back north along the Trace, through current Fort Stockton, a long dusty line of cattle and horses and captives, the spoils of a season’s raiding. Comanche raiders killed thousands more people south of the Rio Grande than they ever killed in Texas; much of this was done by Penatekas, and much of it was done in what history now sees as their dying days.