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

  By the time Mackenzie arrived at Fort Concho (in present San Angelo), President Grant’s peace policy had been in effect for two years. The idea had been to replace graft, corruption, and indifference in the Indian service with a stern but loving kindness. By putting Quakers in place of the old self-serving agents of the Indian office, Indian trust would be regained. Annuities would be paid on time. Promises would be kept. The Indians would honor the Great Father by coming into their reservations, laying down their weapons, and taking up peaceful new lives as farmers, as specified by the Medicine Lodge treaty. This was devoutly to be wished, especially since nothing like it had ever actually happened. When the Quaker agent Lawrie Tatum arrived at the Comanche and Kiowa agency in 1869, some two-thirds of all Comanches were not on the reservation. They accounted for most of the continuing attacks on settlements in Texas and Mexico.

  Almost from the start, the plan was a disaster, less a coherent policy than an invitation to open war. Its most basic problem was that the peace policy rewarded aggression and punished good conduct. The Indians realized that their most violent wars always ended with some sort of treaty, which was always accompanied by many splendid gifts and tokens of friendship and trust. They were thus convinced that the easiest way to get money and goods was, in Tatum’s words, “to go on the warpath awhile, kill a few white people, steal a good many horses and mules, and then make a treaty, and they would get a large amount of presents and a liberal supply of goods for that fall.”13 The treaties also typically allowed them to retain any horses and mules they had stolen. When they behaved well and limited their raiding, on the other hand, they got nothing. They were acutely aware of this. In addition, the taibos appeared to punish those who were cooperating. In 1868 and 1869 a number of Comanches did come in to the reservation, notably from the Yamparika and Nokoni bands. But because their west Texas brethren kept raiding, all annuities in 1869 were forfeited to pay depredation claims, thus penalizing the “good” Indians, which of course made no sense to any of them.

  Worse still, by prohibiting the use of troops in the reservation areas, the government had created what amounted to a sanctuary for Comanche raiding parties. This was probably the most pernicious effect of the peace policy. It meant there was nothing preventing the Indians from coming and going as they pleased, or from using their two-million-acre reserve as a base camp for attacks on the Texas settlements. They could evade cavalry pursuit, and even keep their stolen stock, simply by crossing the Red River. The upshot was that Tatum himself, the pacifist Quaker, became convinced that force would have to be used to get the Comanches to stay on the reservation.

  It was into this illogical and decidedly unpeaceful world of the far Comanche frontier that Mackenzie came in 1871. The border was still rolling backward, unmaking decades of progress. Counties west of Fort Worth and on down to Waco and the hill country continued to empty out. The peace policy was, perforce, about to change, and Ranald Slidell Mackenzie would be the instrument of that change. Following the Salt Creek Massacre (where General Sherman had narrowly escaped) and the trial of the Kiowa chiefs who had led it, Mackenzie wrote a letter to Sherman, advocating a large-scale campaign. “The Kiowas and Comanches are entirely beyond any control and have been for a long time. . . .” he wrote. “Mr. Tatum understands the matter. . . . He is anxious that the Kiowas and Comanches now out of control be brought under. This can only be accomplished by the Army. . . . It is not very important who we deal with first, the staked plains people, or those of the reserve.”14 Sherman agreed. Not only to a campaign but to new freedom for the army to pursue hostile Indians north of the border. Nothing had changed officially, but this was the beginning of the end of the peace policy.

  And so in the fall of that year Mackenzie, not quite knowing what he was doing yet, and with an indifferent regiment he had not yet had time to remake, marched six hundred men and twenty-five Tonkawa scouts up into Blanco Canyon and made his humbling mistakes and then had sixty-six of his horses, including his own gray pacer, deftly removed from him by Quanah and his midnight raiders. That encounter is worth noting because such Indian behavior was probably without precedent on the plains. Indians habitually avoided soldiers; almost all their battles with army regulars were defensive, including those against Fetterman in Wyoming and Custer on the Washita. Large concentrations of soldiers with long supply trains were a signal to simply disappear, which was usually easy enough. It was the reason so many U.S. troops spent so much time marching and riding about, looking for and not finding Indians. Not finding Indians had been the principal activity of the U.S. cavalry for years in the West. Mackenzie’s force was enormous by plains standards: It was the largest that had ever been sent to pursue Indians.

  And yet it was directly into the camp of this large assemblage of firepower—the men all were equipped with Colt revolvers and repeating Spencer carbines and several hundred rounds each—that Quanah rode on the night of October 10. He and his men had not simply run off horses on a far perimeter. They had crashed directly into the sleeping area, nearly running over Mackenzie’s tent, all the while screaming and shooting and ringing cowbells.15 Was it the sheer reckless bravery of youth that had led him to do it? Was it desperation? An instinctive defensive response to the presence of so many bluecoats so far out on the buffalo plains, like a man blocking a punch? In later interviews, Quanah said that his plan had been to put the soldiers afoot.16 If he had succeeded, the result might well have been a disaster of epic proportions for the whites.

  They had avoided that disaster by moving quickly in the darkness, amid the panicked horses and the lethal swinging pickets, to recapture most of their mounts. But there were now sixty-six dismounted cavalrymen on the high remote plains of west Texas. And there was not much you could do with such men under those circumstances except order them to march east, back to the supply camp. Humiliated by the repeated blunders his command had made, the man they called Three-Finger Jack and his Fourth Cavalry sorted through the tangled mass of horses, lariats, and picket pins, and set out at dawn on the morning of October 11 to find the Comanches who had attacked them. Mackenzie had no idea then that he had stumbled into not just a Quahadi village, but the main body of the Quahadi band, several hundred lodges’ worth. Though the principal chiefs of the Quahadis were thought to be Bull Bear and Wild Horse, the village was under the much younger Quanah’s command. The remarkable tactics employed during this extended engagement were his and his alone.17 Meanwhile Mackenzie, snapping the stumps of his fingers irritably—it had already become a defining personal habit—was also completely unaware that he was about to embark upon a rollicking forty-mile chase along a razor edge of the Llano Estacado, the likes of which no western troops had ever experienced.

  The day began with yet another blunder by the white soldiers, this one far more serious. Just as the first light began to streak the eastern sky, two detachments of troops searching in the valley for the lost herd came upon a dozen Comanches leading as many horses. Thrilled with their good luck, the men under Captain E. M. Heyl spurred forward, gaining rapidly on the Indians, until they were just within pistol range. The Indians abandoned the animals and appeared to make a run for it, crossing a ravine and climbing onto the higher ground just beyond it, where a butte rose toward the top of the canyon walls. The soldiers, who also numbered a dozen and were now three miles from their camp, followed. As they ascended toward the butte, they could see in the clear light of morning that the Indians they were following had turned on them. And now a much larger force had emerged on the high ground. Heyl had been suckered by the same trick that had fooled Fetterman and Elliot. Suddenly the prairie was “fairly swarming with Indians, all mounted and galloping toward us with whoops and blood curdling yells that, for the moment, seemed to take the breath completely away from our bodies,” wrote Carter. “It was like an electric shock. All seemed to realize the deadly peril of the situation.”18 Above them, from the battlements of the canyon walls, came the eerie high-pitched ululation of the Comanch
e women, looking down at their men and cheering them on.19

  Again, it was the twenty-three-year-old Quanah riding in front, resplendent in black war paint and bear-claw necklace and armed with a brace of six-shooters. Carter found him terrifying to look at, and, considering Quanah’s height and massive upper-body muscles, there is no reason to doubt him. Having sprung the trap, Quanah ordered his warriors to flank and surround the twelve men. The besieged troopers, realizing what was about to happen to them, dismounted and backed slowly toward the ravine, firing as they retreated. Suddenly the seven men with Heyl turned and ran, abandoning their comrades to the Indians. The Indians whooped and came on. The five remaining soldiers, one of whom had been shot in the hand, continued their retreat. As they reached the lip of the ravine, they unlocked their magazines and delivered several volleys, driving the Indians back long enough for them to mount their horses. But as they turned and started toward the ravine, the horse carrying Private Seander Gregg faltered.

  Carter gives us an interesting and rare snapshot of frontier battle in the close-quarters fight that followed. Seeing Gregg’s problem, Quanah spun and rode quickly toward him, zigzagging his horse and turning Gregg and his stumbling mount into a shield. Quanah’s command of his horse was such that Carter and the others could not shoot at him without hitting Gregg. As Quanah closed for the kill, Gregg tried to use his carbine but in his panic failed to pull the lever hard enough, jamming the cartridge. Carter shouted at him to use his six-shooter, but it was too late. Quanah was upon him. He shot Gregg in the head from feet or inches away. It would have been customary for Quanah to scalp the fallen Gregg. But instead he whirled and with the rest of his men galloped away and up the canyon wall. Amazed, Carter turned and saw why. The Tonkawa scouts had crested the ridge; behind them rose the prodigious dust from Mackenzie’s main column.

  Carter’s cool head had saved his men from almost certain death. For his actions in Blanco Canyon that morning he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was undoubtedly a very brave man. But he had something else going for him, too, that would bear importantly on the final outcome of the Indian wars: Spencer rifles. Prior to the Civil War the only repeating weapons in military use in America were the six-shot revolvers that Samuel Colt had introduced in the 1840s. But the war had seen the advent of the repeating rifle, most of which were Spencer carbines. For their time, they were technological wonders. They fired .52-caliber bullets from a seven-round magazine, which could be reloaded in one-tenth the time it took to reload a Colt-style revolver and gave the rifles a sustainable rate of fire of twenty rounds per minute. They were accurate up to five hundred yards.

  The Comanches had nothing at the time of the Blanco Canyon fight to match it.20 Their main weapons, revolvers and bows, were effective only at short range, generally less than sixty yards. The single-shot muskets they carried, meanwhile, were accurate at longer ranges but were so cumbersome to load—two shots a minute from horseback would have been considered good—that they were mainly used only to fire an opening volley. (Carter noted that most of their muskets were muzzle-loading.)21 The mismatch was extraordinary. Colonel Richard Dodge observed this huge gap in firepower between whites and Indians. He believed that a horse Indian armed with repeating rifle, “an arm suited to his mode of fighting” was “the finest natural soldier in the world.”22 But Indians carrying repeaters would not appear in numbers until the last days of the plains wars. And even at Little Bighorn, five years later, most of the shots the Indians fired came from bows.

  Now that Mackenzie’s column had nearly caught up to Quanah’s advance guard, the chase began in earnest. Mackenzie outnumbered him and with his superior weaponry enjoyed an enormous tactical advantage, something the Indians, who scrupulously avoided pitched battles against well-equipped bluecoats, were well aware of. They were also defending their village, which included their women and children. And so they ran.

  One might think that an entire human settlement consisting of several hundred lodges, with large numbers of women and children and old men, many tons of equipment and provisions and supplies, along with a remuda of three thousand horses and mules, an unspecified number of cattle, and dogs, would be an easy enough quarry. The Comanche village could not hide on the open plains. Nor could it possibly move as fast as a well-mounted and determined force of nearly six hundred men. These things seem obvious enough. This was one of the few times in recorded history where a large number of troops pursued an entire village in open country, and its outcome might have seemed a foregone conclusion. Instead, Quanah gave Colonel Mackenzie an object lesson in one of the most important components of plains warfare down the centuries: escape.

  Aware now that they were hunting the whole camp as well as the warriors, Mackenzie’s men moved northwest along the Clear Fork of the Brazos, cutting a gentle arc just to the east of the present city of Lubbock. The river ran through a canyon that was sometimes narrow and sometimes opened out into broad valleys broken by ravines and rolling sand hills, and bordered by high, often impassable bluffs. The men saw small herds of buffalo here and there, and at places where the creek widened into lovely, clear pools, enormous flocks of ducks and curlews. This was unmapped terrain, pristine and untouched by white civilization. Every so often they would pass abandoned grass and brush huts, known as wickiups, that were used by the Indian herders.

  The highest of the bluffs, on the west side of the canyon, were part of a massive geological formation in west Texas called the “caprock,” essentially a long seam of rock that underlies the Llano Estacado and becomes an outcropping just at the point where the high plains give way to the lower, rolling plains. The formation is worth noting because it became a key part of the Indians’ evasive maneuvers. Seen from the land below, where Mackenzie’s men were, it looks like an enormous shelf, topped by rocky battlements. It rises anywhere from two hundred to a thousand feet above the lower plains. The term llano estacado is usually translated as “staked plain.” But that is not what Coronado meant when he named it. He meant “palisaded plain,” meaning a plain that begins (or ends) in a steep cliff. The caprock runs for several hundred miles.23

  The men marched steadily through the day in the “stillness and utter solitude of this lovely valley only disturbed by the tramp of our horses’ hoofs.”24 They were more than fifty miles from their supply camp, isolated on the absolute edge of the known world, in one of the most dangerous places on the plains for white men. Late in the afternoon they came upon the site of Quanah’s village. The Comanches had left in great haste, dragging their enormous load with them, leaving a broad trail up the canyon. Confident now that they were close on the heels of the slow-moving tribe, Mackenzie’s column spurred forward, following their twenty-five Tonkawa trackers.

  That confidence was short-lived. Soon the trail divided, and then it appeared to cross and recross itself in every direction until the scouts could discern no clear direction. After much parleying with Mackenzie and the other officers, the scouts concluded that Quanah and his band had actually doubled back on their pursuers, and had proceeded away back down the trail. Frustrated and chagrined that they had been outfoxed yet again by the Comanches, the Fourth had no choice but to countermarch, bivouacking for the night at the site of the abandoned village.25

  The next morning the Tonks managed to pick up the trail again, but now the broad traces left by hundreds of lodge poles and thousands of head of stock seemed to do the impossible, climbing hundreds of feet up the nearly vertical canyon wall and over the cliffs of the caprock. Somehow the village was behaving like a small group of riders. And now the soldiers toiled upward through an extremely steep ascent over rock outcroppings and ravines. At the top, they saw something that relatively few white men had ever seen: the preternaturally flat expanse of the high plains, covered only with short buffalo grass. “As far as the eye could reach,” wrote Carter, “not an object of any kind or a living thing, was in sight. It stretched out before us—one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared w
ith the ocean in its vastness.”26 The scene was terrifying even for men with experience of the plains. “This is a terrible country,” railroad worker Arthur Ferguson had written a few years earlier, “the stillness, wildness and desolation of which is awful. Not a tree to be seen. The stillness too was perfectly awful, not a sign of man to be seen, and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal.”27 The men noticed something else, too: The temperature was dropping; a norther was starting to kick up. They were at an elevation over three thousand feet, still wearing their summer uniforms. The day before they had basked in the warm sunshine of the cloistered canyon. Now the north wind bit into them, and the short, stiff grass made the task of tracking the Comanches difficult at best.

  Again, the column paused while the Tonks tried to figure out where Quanah’s village had gone. When they finally found the trail, they realized that, after following the edge of the caprock, it went back over the bluff and down into the canyon. Disgusted, and aware that they had been duped once more, the troopers made the dangerous descent, only to find the same tangled skein of wildly crisscrossing trails, some leading up the valley, some down, and some moving directly across it. The Tonks fanned out again. Now they found that the trail led once again up and over the steep bluffs, this time on the other side of the canyon. Again, the troopers went up through the rocky breaks. For all of their anger and frustration, the men were beginning to feel admiration, bordering on astonishment, at what Quanah’s Comanches were able to do. Wrote Carter:

  It was a singularly sharp trick, even for Indians, done of course to blind us and gain time in moving their families of women and children as far as possible out of our reach. Without our own Indian scouts to beat the Comanches at their own native shrewdness, we would have undoubtedly lost the trail and [in] hopelessness abandoned the task.28