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

  A twelve-year-old Comanche boy was not entirely helpless in the wild. He would have been far more competent than a frontier white boy. He would have been, as all Comanche boys were, a superb rider. He would have known how to hunt small game. He would have known how to make fire. He would have known something about gathering edible roots and berries. But by the timetables of Comanche culture, Quanah would not, at that point in his life, have been allowed to participate in battle, and would probably not even have been allowed on a buffalo or deer hunt. He would never have been permitted to stray very far from camp. He would absolutely never have been left alone in the immensity of the southern plains, without food or weapons, and with no sense of where his people were.

  What happened next has been unnoticed or uncredited by the main chroniclers of Comanche history, largely because Quanah himself later forcefully denied that he was even at the Battle of Pease River or that his father had been killed there. Both assertions were untrue, and had to do with Quanah’s interest in cleansing what would have been a terrible stain on Peta Nocona’s record: The Comanches saw Pease River as a fiasco and a disgrace, and it had happened entirely on his watch. Quanah and Peanuts were at the camp because their mother said they were. She was frantic because of it. We also know that two, and only two, riders survived the fight and managed to get away.2 We know this because Charles Goodnight and ten scouts under his command tracked them from the confluence of the Pease River and Mule Creek to a large canyon near the foot of the Llano Estacado, somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred miles to the west. He never saw their faces, only the tracks of their horses.

  Goodnight and his men found a large Indian camp, the ultimate destination of all that buffalo meat and other provisions the soldiers had found on Mule Creek. The scouts were able to get quite close to it. As Goodnight described it:

  The Indians had not seen us approaching, and it is a mystery to me yet why they had not kept a better lookout . . . as the spies [the Indian riders] had reached the camp to report the battle. There were approximately a thousand Indians in this camp. . . . We scoured back up the canyon to where I found a sharp curve. Here we could be seen only in front of this curve. I threw the men into it to wait until dark, fearing we would be discovered and knowing we would have no show to live if we were.3

  According to Goodnight, Quanah later gave him this version of what happened in the camp:

  When the two Indian guides, who had escaped from the party killed by Ross, had reached the main body of Indians, they reported that there were ten thousand of us. . . . As soon as the main body of Indians could get ready they moved back north where Quanah stated they wintered from the Washita to the Wichita Mountains. They suffered much from provisions, for they were entirely north of the buffalo.4

  Quanah knew all of this unusual detail because he was the one who arrived at the camp to tell them the terrible news and to inform them, with the naïve exaggeration of a twelve-year-old, that there were ten thousand soldiers.5 Only a child could have failed to distinguish a tiny, irregular force of Rangers and bluecoats from a full army division.

  But consider what the boy had accomplished. Abandoned in the December wilderness without food, and pursued by a band of men aroused by the blood sport of the Pease River killings and fully motivated to catch him, he had managed, with his little brother in tow, to follow the tracks of his fellow band members, who had left two or three days before, across a wide swath of the broken, undulating West Texas prairie. He had presumably done at least part of this at night, to stay ahead of Goodnight, who was in those days one of the few white men with the ability to track riders through wilderness. Had the boy made any errors, or not succeeded in finding the village, Goodnight would certainly have caught him. Goodnight reported that the two riders had caused a large commotion when they arrived in the Comanche village. Of course they had. Not only because they carried the terrible news of the battle, and thus of the loss of the band’s food for the winter. But also because Quanah and his little brother had done something absolutely extraordinary, nearly unbelievable, even by Comanche standards.

  When Quanah was born in 1848, in a tipi near the Wichita Mountains in what is now southwestern Oklahoma, white men were still a world away. The Penatekas were being progressively destroyed along the line of settlement in central Texas, but no white men would yet dare to cross the Red River in pursuit of Comanches. The horrible disease-bearing scourge of the Forty-niners had not yet swept through on the Santa Fe and other trails. The buffalo still roamed the plains in their millions.

  And in this world, still insulated from the ravages that would come, the Comanches did what they had always done. They procreated, hunted, and, most important, made war on other Indian tribes. A few weeks after Cynthia Ann gave birth to Quanah, warriors in her band—the Nokonis, or Wanderers—left to fight a Navajo war party. Comanche-Navajo enmity went back a long way, back to the days when the People had swept down from the Wind River country to challenge the Apaches in New Mexico. These same Navajos, discovering that the village was now vulnerable, attacked. This was an old Indian tactic. But instead of massacring the village and its inhabitants as they had expected to do, the sixteen attackers ran into fierce resistance from the men who had remained behind. The Navajos fled, taking two hundred Comanche horses with them. They were soon tracked down. Three of them were killed, and the horses were recovered. When the victorious Comanches returned, there were four days of joyous singing and dancing, while the scalps of the three dead Navajos were paraded about on a pole.6 This was Indian life on the plains; it went on all the time, more or less invisible to white men. Had things gone a bit differently, the baby Quanah might have been skewered on a Navajo lance. That of course would have spawned a revenge raid, which would have invited a counterraid, and the stakes of blood vengeance would have gone up all across the plains. Instead, one of the first things Quanah saw was a victory dance.

  Quanah’s childhood is divided by his father’s death and his mother’s capture into two strikingly different periods. For his first twelve years, he was the son of a powerful war chief, a man with much influence and many horses, a talented hunter. We do not know many of its details, but in Comanche terms he led a privileged life. The family was apparently happy, and Quanah later claimed many fond memories of his mother and father. So fearful was Peta Nocona that his white wife would be taken from him that when Comancheros or other traders passed through his camp he often blackened her face with ashes and made her hide away.7 (This partly explains the dearth of Cynthia Ann sightings over the years.)

  Quanah grew up the way most Comanche boys did. By the time he was four he would have been riding an old packhorse. By five he managed a pony of his own. By six he was riding young colts bareback, and soon after that he was enlisted to help herd ponies. Like all Comanche boys, he would have become expert at roping and catching horses. From this point onward he spent an enormous amount of time in the saddle; his horse quickly became, as it was for all of the People, men and women, an extension of his physical being.

  As he learned to ride, the Comanche boy was initiated into the secrets of weaponry, usually by his grandfather or another elderly male. At six he was given a bow and blunt arrows and taught to shoot. He soon began hunting with real arrows, going out with other boys and shooting birds. In the Comanche culture boys were allowed extraordinary freedom. They did no menial labor of any kind. They did not fetch water or wood. They did not have to help pack or unpack during the band’s frequent moves. Instead they roved about in gangs, wrestling, swimming, racing their horses. They would often follow birds and insects, shooting hummingbirds with special headless arrows that had split foreshafts. They shot grasshoppers and ate the legs for lunch. Sometimes they tied two grasshoppers together with a short thread and then watched them try to jump. They would make bets. The first one that fell on its back was the loser. They occasionally played with girls. One co-ed game called Grizzly Bear consisted of a “bear” inside a circle who tried to capture children
outside the circle who were protected by a “mother.” The children would run into the circle trying to steal some of the bear’s “sugar.” At night they listened to their elders tell terrifying stories of Piamempits, the Big Cannibal Owl, a mythological creature who dwelt in a cave in the Wichita Mountains and came out by night to eat naughty children.8

  Quanah would have gone about naked until he was nine years old, except when the weather was severely cold. After that he wore a breechclout, leggings, and moccasins. The leggings often had fringe work, a trademark of the Comanches. In winter he wore a heavy robe made from a buffalo that had been killed in the late fall, when the creature had grown a dark brown winter fur that was up to twenty inches thick.9 Plainsmen and soldiers claimed that one such robe offered more warmth than four heavy, army-issue woolen blankets.

  As a boy approached puberty, life quickly became more serious. These were the high lonesome plains, after all, and his tribe lived a hard and brutal nomadic life where nothing was guaranteed. Skill in hunting was the only real guarantee of survival, and thus he was expected to perfect his skills in archery. The Comanches were known as exceptional archers, both from horseback and on foot. From fifty yards a warrior could reliably hit an object the size of a doorknob four out of five times. From ten to fifteen yards he could shoot a twenty- to thirty-inch arrow with such force that it would drive entirely through the carcass of a two-thousand-pound buffalo if it did not hit bone. A Comanche boy had to learn to make fire: In those years it was done by hand-twirling a firedrill on a soft stick that was surrounded with a gunpowder-laden rag. (In the old days, Spanish moss tinder or birds’ nests were used.) He had to learn basic wilderness skills like telling whether an observed animal was heading toward or away from water. (One example was a bird called the Dirt Dauber. If his mouth was empty, the observer knew he was going straight to water.)10

  With puberty, too, came the rituals that would transform them, in the eyes of the tribe, from boys to men. One of these was the vision quest, a version of which existed in most North American Indian tribes. For Comanches it began with a swim in a river or stream, a form of purification. The young man then ventured out to a lonely place where he would see no one, clad only in breechclout and moccasins. With him he carried a buffalo robe, a bone pipe, tobacco, and fire-making materials. On the way to his secluded spot he stopped four times, each time smoking and praying. At night he smoked and prayed for power. He looked for signs in the animals and rocks and trees around him. He fasted. (Unlike some of the northern plains tribes, there was no self-torture involved.) Usually this lasted four days and nights, but the idea was for the young brave to remain in place until he received a vision. We do not know exactly what the result of Quanah’s vision quest was. Later he told of dreaming of a bear. His medicine as an adult was bear medicine, which meant that the bear was the source of his power, his puha. Comanche adolescents also sought spirit power in the ritual of the Eagle Dance, in which the warrior-dancers proceeded to a nearby camp to “capture” a girl, usually an actual captive. After they returned, there was singing and drumming and the young men danced, imitating the cry of eagles. The idea was that they were young eagles attempting to leave the nest.11

  After the Battle of Pease River, Quanah’s life underwent a profound and unpleasant change. The comfort and status of being a chief’s son vanished immediately. He was an orphan in a culture that did not easily accommodate orphans. At first he was cared for by his father’s Indian wife. But she died within the year, leaving him and his brother with no near relatives to care for them. “We were often treated very cruelly,” he said later, “as orphans only of Indians are treated.” Then Peanuts died, too (of unknown causes). Quanah was left alone. “It then seemed to me that I was left friendless,” he recalled. “I often had to beg for my food and clothes, and could scarcely get anyone to make or mend my clothes. I at last learned that I was more cruelly treated than the other orphans on account of my white blood.”12

  In spite of this hardship, Quanah became a full warrior when he was fifteen years old.13 He was a large, long-limbed boy, much taller and stronger than the average Comanche. As an adult he was a strapping six-footer, nearly a head taller than many of his peers. In later photos the sheer mass of his biceps and forearms is apparent. If he was treated cruelly for a time, that treatment must surely have stopped as he grew into young manhood. Quanah was no one to tangle with. He was also strikingly handsome: fully dark-skinned Comanche but with a classical, straight northern European nose, high cheekbones, and piercing light gray eyes that were as luminous and transparent as his mother’s. He somehow looked completely Indian without looking Asiatic, and could have served as a model of how white people thought a noble savage ought to look, not the least because he looked a bit like them. He was a superb archer and an accomplished hunter. As a youth, and as a warrior, he became known for his “careless, daredevil sort of courage, quite in contrast with the stealthy, deadly character of Indian warfare.”14 He was also, as he would prove conclusively later in his life, extremely intelligent.

  He was by nature aggressive, forthright, and fearless, and these qualities were on display at a young age. When he was only seven years old, Quanah, who had been given a small piece of meat one night at dinner, challenged an adult guest who had gotten a larger piece, explaining that the situation was unfair. The astonished guest gave the young boy the meat, which he could not finish. His mother, Cynthia Ann, later punished him by cramming the rest of the meat down his throat.15 There was never anything subtle about Quanah, either in war or in peace. The other thing that distinguished him, in the years after the Pease River fight, was his smoldering hatred of white men. “He wished to avenge the wrong,” his son Baldwin Parker wrote later. “He understood, too, that white people were responsible for his father’s death.”16

  His first raid was a foray with thirty warriors from a camp in southwestern Kansas. The raiding party rode south, through Oklahoma, all the way to San Antonio. The goal appears to have been horses as opposed to revenge. They indulged themselves in what, for the Comanches, was routine mischief. They stole thirty-eight horses and killed and scalped two unfortunate white men who happened to cross their path. As was often the case after raids, they were pursued by white horsemen. They rode hard for three days and outdistanced them, returning home triumphantly with their large herd and two scalps. A war dance was held in their honor.

  Quanah’s second raid was more interesting. This time he rode out with sixty warriors from their camp in what is now western Oklahoma. They swept west and south, into New Mexico, ending up on the Penasco River in the eastern part of the territory. At one point they spotted a company of U.S. Army cavalry headed in the other direction. Instead of leaving them alone, which most Comanches would have done without a second thought, the war chief decided it would be a good idea to steal the cavalry’s sixty mules. So they did. The cavalry soon followed and caught up with the Indians, who could move the balky mules only so fast. Quanah was dispatched with two other braves to drive the mules into the mountains while the rest of the party took up defensive positions in a rocky pass. A two-hour shooting fight ensued, with no casualties on either side. Night fell and the soldiers retired to their camp while the Indians, as usual, beat a fast pace toward home. They traveled all night, then all day, then all night, finally stopping and sleeping in a circle around their mules. They were so exhausted that when they awoke they found that many of their precious mules had wandered half a mile from camp. When they returned with the captured herd, another glorious war dance was held in their honor.17

  In 1868, at age twenty, Quanah took part in an extended expedition into Mexico with nine warriors under the command of the Kiowa chief Tohausan, famous from the battle of Adobe Walls in 1864, where his combined forces of Comanches and Kiowas had come remarkably close to defeating a U.S. Army force commanded by the legendary Kit Carson. The Mexican raid was a classic Comanche (and Kiowa) enterprise, one of the ways young, ambitious men traditionally made their n
ames and fortunes. In 1852, Captain Randolph Marcy described the phenomenon that took warriors away for as long as two years:

  Six or nine young men set out upon one of these adventures, and the only outfit they require is a horse, with their war equipments, consisting of bows and arrows, lance and shield, with occasionally a gun. Thus prepared they set out on a journey of 1,000 miles or more, through a perfectly wild and desolate country, dependent for assistance wholly upon such game as they may chance to find. They make their way to the northern provinces of Mexico.18

  But times had changed. It was now much harder to go blithely adventuring about the American southwest in search of loot and glory. Comanche power was still strong, and still dominant west of the 98th meridian and east of the Rockies and the Grand Cordillera. But it was no longer unchallenged. A line of forts had been thrown up along the San Antonio–El Paso trail whose purpose was both to protect wagon trains but also to disrupt traditional Comanche raiding patterns into Mexico. Fort Stockton, for example, was built near the site of the plentiful icy waters of Comanche Springs, one of the largest springs in Texas and for a hundred years the main way station for raiders traveling to Mexico. In a bone-dry country, the water hole was an important landmark. Now it was useless to Quanah and his fellow braves; they would never drink its clear, chill waters again.