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

  THE RESERVATION WAS a shattering experience. It was bad enough that the Comanches, having bent to the white man’s will, had to line up meekly to receive his beneficence. Like small, helpless children they were now unable to feed or clothe themselves. But as usual—to layer nightmare upon nightmare—much of this desperately needed welfare never came. The system was both cruel and humiliating: The taibos had taken away everything that had defined Comanche existence and offered nothing but crude squalor in its place. From the moment the People arrived, there was only a great yawning void of hunger and desperation and dependency. There was no way out and no way back.1

  The white man’s charity came in two forms: food rations and annuities. The latter consisted of $30,000 worth of goods each year for the combined Comanche and Kiowa tribes. Divided by three thousand residents, that meant $10 per person. The goods included axes, frying pans, thimbles, tin plates, butcher knives, and basic clothing. A lot of it was shoddy, if not completely worthless. The Comanches usually sold it cheap to white men. The beef ration of 1.5 pounds per person per day, on which the Indians mainly survived, turned out to be a bureaucratic and logistical disaster. The beef was issued on the hoof, and the government’s assumption was that an animal would produce edible food in the amount of 50 percent of its weight. This was a fine notion in a wet, fertile season when there was plenty of grass. But in winter many of the range-fed cattle lost so much weight that many had value only as hides. Since the reservation’s game was nearly hunted out, and the buffalo rarely came into range, and the nonbeef components of the ration (flour, coffee, sugar, salt) were less than half of what a soldier got—when they came at all—many families went hungry. The weekly issue did at least provide a diversion, if a pathetic one. The ration cows would be released from their pens, and then the Comanche warriors, whooping and yelling, would run them down and kill them with bows, arrows, and pistols.2

  Strange, then, that this despondent, crippled, post-cataclysmic world became the staging ground for the remarkable career of Quanah Parker, as he would insist on being called, the man who became the most successful and influential Native American of the late nineteenth century and the first and only man ever to hold the title Principal Chief of the Comanches. His rise was doubly strange since he had been the hardest of the hard cases, the last holdout of the last band of the fanatical Quahadis, the only band of any tribe in North America that had never signed a treaty with the white man. At the time of his surrender he was twenty-seven years old. He was known as a fierce and charismatic warrior, a true killer, probably the toughest of his generation of Comanches, which was saying something. He had killed many Indians and white people in his short life, a statistic that will remain forever unknown because in the reservation years he quite intelligently refused to address the subject. He had led his own band in the wilderness after his elopement with Weckeah and was famous for having done so; along with Isa-tai he was the most prominent and the fastest rising of the young war chiefs. His surrender to Mackenzie in June 1875 ended such traditional career prospects forever.

  But it also marked the beginning of something. His attitude toward his captivity had completely changed by the time he arrived at Fort Sill.3 He would take the white man’s road. He would leave the glories of the free life on the plains behind and he would not look back. Just as important, he would strive to lead his often recalcitrant, retrogressive tribe down that road. That meant the white man’s farming and ranching, white man’s schools for the children, white man’s commerce and politics and language. The void that loomed before the pitiable remnant of the Comanches was for Quanah Parker a grand opportunity. He would remake himself as a prosperous, tax-paying citizen of the United States of America who dressed in wool suits and Stetson hats and attended school board meetings. And he would try to haul the rest of the Comanche nation along with him. In the dreary, hopeless winter of 1875–76, the notion of bourgeois citizen-Comanches was just short of ridiculous; no one would have wanted it anyway. But Quanah saw the future clearly. On the high and wild plains he had been a fighter of jaw-dropping aggressiveness; now he would move just as resolutely from the life of a late Stone Age barbarian into the mainstream of industrial American culture.

  Quanah arrived on the harsh shores of the American nation like many other immigrants: in abject poverty. When he reached Fort Sill he had two wives, a daughter, a degree of standing in the tribe, and little more. He was a ration-drawer like everyone else, living in a tipi near the agency, waiting patiently in long lines for food. Whatever wealth he had possessed in the way of horseflesh was gone. Killing or dispersing Comanche horse herds was an integral part of the whites’ economic and military destruction of the Comanche tribe. In both white and Comanche terms, he was destitute.

  Quanah was, moreover, only one of a number of chiefs with a claim on band or tribal leadership. There were older leaders like Horseback (Nokoni), Milky Way (Penateka), Shaking Hand (Kotsoteka), Wild Horse (Quahadi), and most especially Hears the Sunrise (Yamparika), all of whom wielded more influence than he did. But he was undeterred. From his first days on the reservation he plotted to advance himself and was not shy about it. Perhaps he had discovered something about his true nature in the days when he and Isa-tai had recruited Indians from five tribes to attack the buffalo hunters, a feat unprecedented in plains history, and one that caused him to be deferred to even by such great chiefs as the Kiowas’ Lone Wolf. Up until that disastrous first morning at Adobe Walls, when Isa-tai’s magic failed and the buffalo guns roared, they had been stunningly successful.

  Quanah understood that the way to power was through the white man and his power to designate and appoint leaders, as it was for the native populations in nineteenth-century British colonies in Malaysia, India, and elsewhere. Thus he cultivated both the Indian agent, the Quaker J. M. Haworth, and the army commander, who from April 1, 1875, until 1877 was the irascible and brutally competent Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. Mackenzie had been surprised to learn of his parentage, and had taken some trouble, starting with his May 19 letter, to find out what had happened to his mother and sister. In one of their early meetings, Mackenzie told Quanah what he had learned, thus shattering Quanah’s immemorial dreams of a reunion with his beloved mother.

  Still, Quanah had a fierce curiosity about his white family and continued to write, which meant having someone else write, letters seeking information. (Throughout the reservation years, Quanah’s apparent level of literacy varied with the educational level of whomever he got to write for him; he sounds alternately like a hillbilly, a pidgin-speaking Indian, and an English professor.) Evidence of his blossoming relationship with his new friend Mackenzie was a letter Mackenzie wrote on Quanah’s behalf to Cynthia Ann’s eighty-two-year-old uncle Isaac Parker in Fort Worth. In it, he explained to Isaac that Quanah was upset that the Parkers were apparently refusing to acknowledge him as a member of their family, and argued that Quanah “certainly should not be held responsible for the sins of a former generation of Comanches, and is a man whom it is worth trying to do something with.”4 Isaac never replied. The two men met on many other occasions. They lived for a while in close proximity to each other—Quanah in his tipi and Mackenzie in the row of houses that constituted the Fort Sill officers’ quarters. Quanah later told Charles Goodnight, after Goodnight complimented him on his manners, that it had been Mackenzie who had taken the time to teach him about white ways.5 This suggested that the two men spent significant time together. It would have been something to watch the etiquette lessons given by America’s greatest Indian fighter to the man who would turn out to be the last Comanche chief.

  In a world of sullen, dispossessed Indians, camped disconsolately in tipis in the grassy, rolling hills and stream bottoms around Fort Sill, Quanah made a point of being cheerful, helpful, and cooperative. That was his nature anyway. He was naturally gregarious, the product of an intensely communal society where consensus-building was the most valued political skill and the particular skill that he possessed in abundanc
e. A young war chief’s standing was based entirely on his ability to recruit warriors to go along with him on raids and military expeditions. Recruitment and consensus was what the Adobe Walls campaign was all about. Quanah volunteered to bring back several Comanches who had left the reservation to hunt buffalo. He also brought in a brave who was charged with murdering a soldier.6

  His approach soon paid off. When agent Haworth divided up the tribes into “beef bands” in order to streamline the rationing process, he appointed leaders of each band, and by 1878, Quanah had been named head of the third-largest band. Thus, like a ward boss in Chicago of a later day, he controlled the distribution of goods, and obviously guaranteed his own take. This was his first taste of power in the new political order, and it did not come without consequences. Some of the Comanche leaders despised him and his favored status with the taibos. They would force him to fight for whatever power he got for virtually his whole life on the reservation.

  Just as important for the new politics of captivity, Quanah agreed to go on a special mission for his new friend Mackenzie. His task: to track down and bring back a small group of renegade Comanches and their families who remained outside the reservation. In July 1877, Quanah set out to find them with two older Comanche men, three women, and several government pack mules loaded with supplies. He carried a white flag and a stern letter from Colonel Mackenzie on army letterhead detailing Quanah’s mission and promising severe consequences for anyone who interfered with it. Still, it was an extremely dangerous undertaking. The land to the west of Fort Sill was loaded with buffalo hunters and other cold-eyed men in the hide business who sought revenge on Indians in general and specifically on Comanches. A lightly armed party of six consisting mostly of old men and women would have been easy prey. That Quanah, until his surrender one of the most arrogant warriors of the plains and at the height of his physical prowess, would undertake such a bloodless diplomatic mission with women as his outriders was extraordinary. It showed just how much he had changed his thinking. Or perhaps it showed how much he wanted to impress his new bosses.

  Quanah and his party headed westward across the rolling plains, climbed the caprock, and crossed the dead-flat grasslands of the high plains under the scorching summer sun. Near the Texas–New Mexico border he encountered a unit of forty black soldiers from the Tenth Cavalry under Captain Nicholas Nolan, a white man. They were looking for the same group of runaway Comanches, who had apparently attacked some buffalo hunters. The bluecoats were anticipating considerable glory when they caught the renegades and were thus unhappy when they learned of Quanah’s commission and of Colonel Mackenzie’s plan to give the criminal Indians a free pass back to Fort Sill.7 Quanah told Nolan that he knew where the Indians were and that he was heading southeast to find them. This was a bald-faced lie, and had its intended effect. Nolan’s troops took off in hot pursuit, in the wrong direction. In their haste they also neglected to provision themselves adequately for a trip across the plains in high summer. They soon ran out of water. The men were forced to drink their own and their horses’ urine, mixing it with sugar to make it more palatable. They killed and drank the blood of two of their horses. They somehow survived.8 They never found anybody.

  Quanah had no such trouble, either with the searing heat and bone-dry land or in locating the runaway Indians. He found them camped on the Pecos River and met with the men in council over four days, laboring to convince them that they had to give up their lives on the open plains. “Quanah told us that it was useless for us to fight longer, for the white people would kill us all if we kept on fighting,” wrote Herman Lehmann, a former captive who had become a full-fledged, battle-hardened Comanche warrior and who was among the renegades. “If we went on the reservation the Great White Father at Washington would feed us, and give us homes, and we would in time become like the white man, with lots of good horses and cattle, and pretty things to wear.” This may sound disingenuous: Quanah knew as well as anyone what life on the reservation was like. But there is no reason to doubt his hope or his optimism. His entire career was based on his peculiarly sunny view of the future. He always genuinely believed things would get better, if he could only convince his people to change their old ways. Persuasive as always, and with unmatched credentials as a killer of white men, Quanah won the renegades over. Then he escorted them to their new home, a distance of two hundred fifty miles as the crow flies, across the same potentially lethal plains. Now, of course, his band was far more numerous and therefore much more visible. Quanah took no chances. He traveled by night. He abandoned three hundred horses. There were still several tense encounters with whites, but according to Lehmann, Quanah, speaking broken English, somehow managed to talk his way through.9

  On August 20, Quanah brought fifty-seven Indians (probably no more than fifteen fighting men) and one white captive (Lehmann) into the reservation.10 When Lehmann first saw the bluecoats approaching, he panicked. “I was riding a black mare and a pretty swift horse,” he wrote in a memoir. “So I turned and rode for life back toward the Wichita Mountains.” But as a horseman he was no match for Quanah, who rode him down after four miles and gently persuaded him to return.11 (Lehmann, who was seventeen at the time, lived with Quanah and his family for three years and considered him his foster father. He was sent back to his mother in 1880.)12 Mackenzie was impressed that Quanah had been able to get everyone home without bloodshed, and praised the young chief’s “excellent conduct in a dangerous expedition.” Leveraging this goodwill—something he was quite good at—Quanah persuaded Mackenzie and Haworth that the renegades should not be sent off to prison in Fort Leavenworth. For that he also earned the gratitude of his tribe.

  He won even more political points when he successfully opposed the government’s plan to merge the Kiowa-Comanche agency with the Wichita agency, which would have meant a fifty-mile trek for some Comanches just to draw rations. By 1880 he had become the acknowledged leader of the Quahadis and the Indian leader most often consulted by the agent.13

  For all of his cooperation with the white man, however, and his commitment to the new road, Quanah was not yet quite ready to put aside all dreams of the old life. He and others lobbied hard for permission to go on a buffalo hunt. It is not clear whether this was to be one last buffalo hunt or merely the first of several, but in March 1878 a group of Comanches and Kiowas, including some women and children, were finally allowed to go out, unsupervised, on a hunt. This was cause for great excitement among the Indians. Perhaps it was the simple urge to validate their own past, or maybe a desire to show their children who they really were. They would ride out again into the great oceanic emptiness that so terrified the taibos. They would kill and eat, and use the gallbladder to salt the raw bloody liver, and drink the warm milk from the udders mixed with blood, and it would be, however briefly, like the old days. They rode west from Fort Sill toward the high plains, full of dreams and nostalgia. They understood that the hide hunters had taken a terrible toll on the buffalo. But they had never doubted that there were herds left to hunt.

  What they found shocked them. There were no buffalo anywhere, no living ones, anyway, only vast numbers of stinking, decaying corpses or bones bleached white by the sun. The idea of traveling a hundred miles and not seeing a buffalo was unimaginable. It had not been true at the time of their surrender. Disappointed—perhaps heartbroken might be a better word—Quanah and his cohort pushed deeper into the Texas Panhandle, certainly well beyond where the army and Indian agents had intended them to go. He led them back to the old Quahadi sanctuary, the magnificent rock battlements of Palo Duro Canyon in the upper Texas Panhandle, which had once teemed with bison herds. This, too, was an emotional moment. Most of them, who knew it affectionately as Prairie Dog, had never expected to see it again.

  Nor had it ever occurred to them that a white man might now own the second-largest canyon in the West. But in the three years since the end of the Red River War an enterprising white man had in fact managed to acquire it. Charles Goodnight�
�the ranger who had tracked Peta Nocona to the Pease River in 1860 and had later tracked Quanah and his brother to those same canyon lands—was now the sole proprietor of the Palo Duro. He was already one of the more prominent ranchers in the state, having given his name to one of its main cattle highways, the Goodnight-Loving Trail, which he opened in 1866 to bring cattle to markets in New Mexico and Colorado.

  On a bitter cold day, with snow on the ground, the Indians entered the canyon, and, still finding no buffalo, started killing Goodnight’s cattle. Goodnight rode out to meet them. The intruders were in an ugly mood, having just learned that their sacred canyons now “belonged” to someone else. They put Goodnight and an interpreter in the middle of a circle and asked him what he was doing there. “I am raising cattle,” he replied. They then asked, provocatively, did he not know that “the country was theirs.” He answered that he “had heard that they claimed the country but that the great captain of the Texans also claimed it.”14 A parley with Quanah followed. When Goodnight asked what his name was, he replied in his broken English: “Maybe so two names—Mr. Parker or Quanah.”15

  Then Quanah asked Goodnight where he came from, a loaded question intended to elicit the answer that he was one of the hated Texans. Comanches always drew a sharp distinction between Texans and everyone else. Texan encroachment, after all, had ended their way of life. Goodnight lied and said he was from Colorado, whereupon the Indians tried to prove him wrong, grilling him about every prominent landmark and river in Colorado. Since he had pioneered the cattle trail to Denver and beyond, he was able to answer all their questions correctly. Satisfied that he was not a Tejano, Quanah said he was ready to make a treaty. “We’re ready to talk business,” said Quanah. “What have you got?” Goodnight answered: “I’ve got plenty of guns and bullets, good men and good shots, but I don’t want to fight unless you force me. You keep order and behave yourself and I will give you two beeves every other day until you find out where the buffaloes are.”16 Quanah agreed, and thus was a “treaty” made between the legendary Comanche chief and the rancher they called the Leopard Coat Man. (Two generations hence, Texas schoolchildren would be required to study this odd agreement.) Several days later, twenty-five black soldiers under a white lieutenant, who had been summoned by Goodnight, arrived to deal with the Indian threat. Goodnight assured them that the problem had been solved, and the Indians remained camped there another three weeks.