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

  Tohausan’s expedition sounds remarkably inglorious. The days of the great and productive Mexican raiding were fast coming to a close. Comanches would never again be allowed to indulge themselves in the bloody, summer-long raids that emptied out whole districts in northern Mexico and left behind burning ruins over whole states, raids that produced hundreds or thousands of captured horses that then moved in long lines northward through Texas along the Comanche Trace. Quanah’s war party was out for months. Twice they went two days without water. They nearly starved in Chihuahua. They found Mexican settlements bristling with hostility and only a few horses to steal. Quanah and a friend lost their mules on the long trek back across northern Mexico and Texas. They arrived back at their village on foot. By his own account, the journey was a complete disaster. There were no victory dances to celebrate his return. If he hadn’t been so young and carefree and enthusiastic about his life, he might have noticed that time was running out for the Comanches. But this would not be in his thoughts until much later.

  In 1868 he took part in some of the Comanche raids into the Texas hill country, raids that history records as extremely, vengefully violent. One was the infamous raid at the Legion Valley settlement, near present-day Llano, where seven captives were killed, including a baby and a three-year-old, and where Minnie Caudle was kidnapped.19 There is no proof that he took part in what the white people regarded as unthinkable atrocities, but this sort of raiding was in fact what young Comanche men were doing in the waning days of the plains empire, and Quanah himself was known to burn for revenge against the people who killed his father and stole his mother and sister. Their actions amounted to what we would today consider to be political terrorism. There was still status in horse-thieving, to be sure. But all Comanches knew that the one sure way to roll back the frontier was to torture, rape, and kill all of its white residents. Thus, as time went by the raids took on a more purely political character, and with good reason. There was plenty of evidence that such a strategy worked.

  Quanah became a war chief at a very young age. He did it in the traditional way, by demonstrating in battle that he was braver, smarter, fiercer, and cooler under fire than his peers. His transformation took place in two different fights. Both happened in the late 1860s, and both have been claimed as the vehicles of his elevation. In one, the raid originated in a camp in the Llano Estacado. The leader was a chief named Bear’s Ear. Quanah himself had grown up mostly with the Nokoni band. But councils before this expedition were held by Hears the Sunrise, who was a chief of the Yamparikas (the Yap Eaters), whose domain was traditionally above the Canadian River. Also present was Milky Way, a Penateka chief who had chosen not to go to the reservation with most of the rest of his band, and who was married to a Yamparika.20 Such commingling suggests a blurring of band loyalty, and indeed this was happening. From 1868 to 1872, Quanah spent most of his time with the Quahadis, a band that seems to have coalesced out of the Kotsotekas in the 1850s,21 perhaps out of a desire to remain aloof and pure on the high plains. He also camped a good deal with the Kotsotekas. And his raiding parties were very likely mixed. With the onslaught of whites and the reduction of the hunting ranges, the old geographic separation of bands was disappearing.

  Bear’s Ear’s expedition roared east from the high flat plains, across the palisaded rock headlands and down onto the rolling, broken, and river-crossed plains, and eventually collided with the line of settlement, which had continued to roll eastward like a receding wave: It was farther east than it had been when Peta Nocona raided it in 1860. The raiders struck hard at the ranches and farms in the area of Gainesville (fifty miles north of Fort Worth). They probably killed people though this is not recorded. They managed to steal a large herd of horses, and headed home. They got as far as the Red River when they were intercepted by a force of soldiers that had been dispatched from Fort Richardson (near Jacksboro) to find them.

  A bloody fight followed, during which Bear’s Ear was killed. As we have seen, the death of the chief, and thus the failure of his medicine, usually turned the tide of battle in favor of the white men. Dispirited and leaderless, the Indians often picked up the chief’s body and fled. Not this time. In the absence of Bear’s Ear, Quanah took over. “Spread out,” he yelled to his warriors. “Turn the horses north to the river.” This was a departure from Bear’s Ear’s original plan. With Quanah urging them on, the Comanches wheeled the herd about and raced over rough ground toward the river. As Quanah retreated with the others, he was pursued by a bluecoat, who fired at him. Instead of spurring his horse harder to get away, Quanah rounded on his adversary and confronted the soldier head-on. He then charged and, like a medieval jousters, the two warriors thundered toward each other, weapons out. The soldier fired his revolver. His bullet grazed Quanah’s thigh. Quanah’s arrow, meanwhile, found its mark in the man’s shoulder. He dropped his weapon, turned his horse, and fled. But Quanah was now exposed to the fire of other soldiers. He dropped down behind his horse in the old Comanche way, and, with bullets singing all around him, raced after his own war party. Somehow they managed to swim with their stolen stock across the river to safety. The white soldiers did not pursue them. That night around the campfire the Comanche war party chose Quanah as their leader.22

  The other battle took place in the summer of 1869. Quanah, sixty-three other Indians, and “some Mexicans” left camp in Santa Fe. They rode east to cattle ranches located around present-day San Angelo. These would have been the westernmost settlements in the state of Texas in that year, located not coincidentally near the U.S. Army forts Chadbourne (est. 1852) and Concho (est. 1867). As Quanah later told it, he and some of his friends discovered a cowboy camp and a small herd of horses just a few miles from Fort Concho. The Indians hid in rocks and bushes, waited until nightfall, then stampeded the horses, capturing the best ones for themselves. The cowboys fired into the darkness, but hit no one.23 The Indians continued south, riding by night, into the Texas hill country west of San Antonio, where they killed a man who was driving a team of oxen. News of the shooting traveled quickly through the settlement. Thirty men rode in pursuit of the raiders.

  The whites soon caught them, and a battle ensued. According to Quanah, the white men had long-range rifles, probably buffalo guns. The Indians were losing the battle, and they began a retreat. Quanah, however, did not fall back with the rest. He concealed himself in the bushes beside the trail, and when two of the white men rode by he emerged and killed both of them with his lance, a bravura performance that was witnessed by the other warriors. They quickly re-formed and charged, and the Texans were forced into cover. A brief shooting fight followed, with no resolution. The Indians ran out of ammunition, and withdrew. That night, in council on the San Saba River, this war party, too, elected Quanah as their leader.

  Quanah’s conspicuous bravery on the battlefield meant that he became, at a very young age, one of a small, select group of Comanche men who would lead the tribe’s final raiding and military expeditions in the last years of their freedom. Their world was getting noticeably smaller. The following year there were less than four thousand Comanches left in the world. Of those a mere one thousand had refused to go to the reservation.24

  The most dramatic story of Quanah’s early life involves his marriage. He had many wives later in life but none of his unions was ever as dramatic as his marriage to his second wife, whose name was Weckeah. (His first wife was apparently a Mescalero Apache, about whom little is known.) The marriage probably took place in the early 1870s.25 In any case, the story begins with a familiar premise. Quanah was in love with Weckeah. They had grown up together. She was in love with him. She beaded his moccasins and bow quiver. They wanted to marry. There was just one problem: Her father, Old Bear, opposed it. This was partly because of Quanah’s white blood and partly because, as an orphan and thus a pauper, he had no standing in the tribe.26 Complicating matters was a rival suitor, one Tannap, son of Eckitoacup, who was a wealthy chief. Weckeah did not like Tannap at all.27 At the he
art of Quanah’s problem was that most important unit of Comanche wealth: horseflesh. Tannap’s father, who owned a hundred horses, offered ten of them for Weckeah’s hand in marriage. Quanah could offer only one horse.

  Still, Weckeah implored him to try to match Tannap’s offer. So Quanah went to his friends and managed to gather up ten horses. He then drove them to Old Bear’s tipi and presented them. Unfortunately, Eckitoacup had already heard of his plan and had doubled his offer.

  Undeterred, Quanah came up with a new idea. Now he told Weckeah that their only hope was to elope. This was not uncommon in Comanche culture: An impoverished suitor often had no choice but to abscond with the bride. “When a girl learned that a rich suitor whom she did not care to marry was about to propose,” wrote Wallace and Hoebel in their classic ethnographic study of the tribe, “she might elope with the man she loved. Couples occasionally eloped when the boy was poor and unable to furnish enough ponies or other articles of value to satisfy the parents of the girl. In such a case the relatives and friends of the boy might supply the necessary ponies to soothe the dishonor suffered by the wife’s parents.”28 Quanah had no such family. Which meant that by taking Weckeah he risked death, as did Weckeah. Comanche families could be quite unforgiving about such things, and it was a simple enough matter for a powerful chief like Eckitoacup to recruit an expedition to seek retribution from a young man who had so grossly violated cultural protocols.

  But Quanah had something more than simple elopement in mind. Before he and Weckeah left, he recruited what amounted to an insurance policy: a war party of twenty-one young Comanche warriors. Together they rode south for seven hours, not breaking a trot except when crossing streams.29 This was as fast as Comanches could travel, and could only have been done with a large number of mounts for each warrior. So fearful were they of what might be pursuing them that they traveled by night for two nights, split up and rejoined a number of times, then split again into units of two, coming together at Double Mountain, near the present town of Snyder in west Texas. They finally stopped on the North Concho River near the town of San Angelo and, as Quanah put it, “went to stealin’ horses.”

  They stayed there for more than a year, during which time Quanah built the camp into his own power base. Their main activity was horse stealing. “We just stole horses all over Texas,” according to Quanah. They undoubtably killed people, too. With time, some of his young and daring cohorts returned to their main camp, telling tales of riches and adventure, and Quanah’s leadership, returning to the North Concho with their sweethearts or wives, as well as other young men who wanted to ride with Quanah. At the end of the year, Quanah’s band numbered several hundred.30 They owned a large horse herd.

  Meanwhile, Weckeah’s elopement had not stopped gnawing at Eckitoacup, and he finally decided he would mount an expedition to get her back. By now everyone knew where Quanah was. Eckitoacup rode south with a war party and arrived at the renegade camp on the river. It is not clear what he expected to find, but what he and his warriors found themselves confronting was Quanah’s entire band, armed and painted and drawn up for battle. Shocked by the number of warriors, Eckitoacup became alarmed for his own safety. Instead of fighting, he decided to settle: Four leaders from each side met on neutral ground. After much smoking and haggling, a deal was made. Eckitoacup would receive nineteen horses, the pick of Quanah’s herd. In exchange Quanah would be granted the right to return to the tribe. (Quanah observed, after the deal was concluded, that he knew a ranch where he could steal nineteen comparable horses in a few hours.) The deal was sealed with a night of feasting and dancing. Because Quanah’s band had by this time become too large to be left in peace in that part of Texas, he followed Eckitoacup back home the next day, where he found that he enjoyed new status as a fully fledged war chief.31

  Fourteen

  UNCIVIL WARS

  THE YEAR QUANAH became a warrior, 1863, was the bloodiest year in American history, though most of the blood that was shed had nothing at all to do with this ambitious Comanche boy who rode free on the western plains, stealing horses and taking scalps. The agent of death and destruction was the Civil War. That year it was transformed forever from the relatively brief, self-contained, regional conflict most people believed it would be into the malevolent, drawn-out, continent-girding affair that threatened to rip the country permanently apart. Eighteen sixty-three was the year of Chancellorsville and Chickamauga, of Vicksburg and Chattanooga, the year Robert E. Lee marched seventy-five thousand rebel troops clear into Pennsylvania, into the great heartland of the north, where they fought the Union to a grisly fifty-one-thousand-casualty draw at Gettysburg.

  The Civil War had very little to do with the western frontier itself. All of its main engagements took place east of the Mississippi River and such action as there was in Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, and the Indian Territory did not involve the free horse tribes. Still, the war managed to tear that frontier apart. It did so not with armies of men and rolling caissons but with simple neglect. Preoccupied with the war, and in any case lacking the money to fight Indians, Union and Confederate governments alike had no choice but to leave the west to its own devices. That meant that, quite suddenly, most of the people who had defended the borderlands in the 1840s and 1850s, from the Rangers to the Second Cavalry to various state militias, were simply gone. The men who won victories with Ford at Antelope Hills, or Van Dorn at Wichita Village, or Ross at Pease River all departed for eastern battlefields. And with them went the knowledge and will to pursue Comanches into their homelands.

  In their place rose the state and territorial militias, a sorry lot of inferior soldiers commanded by substandard officers who were ducking the larger war. They were underequipped as well. They provided their own, often atrocious, weapons. Their lead was in short supply and some of their powder was so poor that it “would not kill a man ten steps from the muzzle.”1 They suffered from bad food, alcoholism, epidemics of measles and intestinal ills, and in any event were neither brave enough nor smart enough to win fights with Comanches or Cheyennes or Kiowas. (One regiment, embarking on an Indian pursuit, decided instead to head to another fort and play poker.)

  They were preoccupied with other concerns anyway, which included their own miniaturized version of the war. In 1861 the Texas militia moved into Indian Territory, occupied federal forts, and drove the Union troops north into the brand-new state of Kansas. There would be periodic small-scale fighting over the territory for the duration of the war, culminating in the Battle of Honey Springs in 1863, in which three thousand Union troops from Kansas defeated six thousand Texans and Indians. But these events took place well east of the frontier, which remained ignored and undefended.

  And this sudden neglect changed everything. Though the bizarrely passive federal policies of the 1850s had opened the way for hundreds of Indian attacks, the decade had in fact closed with a flash of willpower and resolve. Rip Ford’s 1858 expedition was a watershed event with few precedents (including what the only Spanish governor to rein in Comanche terror, the brilliant Don Juan Bautista de Anza, had done in his pursuit of Cuerno Verde onto the plains of eastern Colorado in 1779). And while Sul Ross’s victory at Pease River in 1860 may not have been quite as glorious as most histories suggest, as a measure of the taibos’ will to defend themselves it, too, was a conspicuous advance. Indeed, it would have seemed in the late 1850s, as it had seemed in the late 1830s and the late 1840s, that Comanche power was fast on the wane, that the end of their ability to raid unchallenged would soon come to an end, that their days off the reservation were sharply numbered. And yet all that was an illusion. Comanche history must be understood that way, in terms of pulses and counterpulses of power. The pulse of state and federal power in the late 1850s was awesome. Comanches were running for shelter in the fastness of the Llano Estacado. They would soon have been broken. There were not enough of them left for it to be otherwise.

  Then the Civil War came, the Texans went off to fight it, and they left their bones
in shallow graves all over the South, and the lesson was forgotten again. What is remarkable, in retrospect, is how long it took the Comanches to figure out that border defenses had lapsed, how long it took them to grasp this massive shift in the balance of power. This was partly because both the Union and Confederacy, equally enfeebled in their western zones, were quick to pursue generous new treaties with them. The resulting agreements were versions of the same tired, disingenuous, and ultimately useless promises. But they did delay the inevitable reckoning. The Confederates promised the People gifts and supplies. In exchange the Indians cheerfully agreed to settle on their reservation, learn how to farm, and stop attacking both white and red people, promises they had no intention of keeping. The treaty was signed by the Comanches who lived on the reservation, mainly Penatekas, as well as the chiefs of the wild Comanche bands, including the Nokoni, Yamparika, Kotsoteka, and a remnant of the Tennawish. The Quahadis, magnificently aloof as always, refused to sign anything. The federal government made its own treaty, too, one that simply restated the treaty of 1853, promising the same old annuities and provisions, asking for the same sort of absurd concessions.

  The first of the horrors to be unleashed by the demon of neglect had little to do with the white man. These were the Indian-on-Indian wars in the Indian Territory, the land north of the Red River and south of Kansas that would eventually become the state of Oklahoma. Most of the conquered and displaced tribes from the East, South, and Midwest had been relocated there—a process that had begun in the early nineteenth century. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which forced most tribes to give up all of their lands in the East and Midwest for a supposedly eternal plot of ground in the Indian Territory. By the 1860s the territory had become an intricate patchwork of aboriginal cultures, each with its own designated reserve. The larger reserves had been given to the Five Civilized Tribes (Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Seminole), as well as to the combined Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache tribes, the Cheyennes and Arapahos, and to the Wichitas and their affiliated tribes (Caddos, Anadarkos, Tonkawas, Tawakonis, Keechis, and Delawares). There were smaller areas for Kickapoos, Sac and Fox, Osages, Pawnees, Pottawotamies and Shawnees, Iowas, Peorias, Quapaws, Modocs, Ottawas, Wyandottes, Senecas, Poncas, and Otos and Missouris. It was, all in all, an astonishing collision of native interests and antagonisms, all jammed together by fiat of Congress on the rolling plains and timberlands north of the Red River.