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

  There was one incident where Quanah’s inveterate warrior instincts flashed briefly. It is worth noting because there is nothing else in his reservation life that remotely resembled this sequence of events; he really had left just about everything behind; the ill-fated hunt had just seemed like a reasonable idea, a modest gesture to placate people who had lost everything else. Comanches and Kiowas had long been uneasy about black troops, whom they called “buffalo soldiers” because their tight, curly hair reminded them of a buffalo’s ruff. They considered them bad medicine and were the only adversaries they would not scalp. After a fight had broken out between the soldiers and the Indians, Goodnight gathered Quanah and the army lieutenant to discuss the problem. The lieutenant told the interpreter that if the Indians did not settle down he would take their guns away. Quanah replied, in Spanish: “You can have the guns.” Then he pointed to some lodge poles and said “We will use those on the negroes.” The idea was: He would not waste any bullets on the buffalo soldiers, and he would not need anything but the poles to defeat them.17 This was the old, snarling Comanche arrogance, now consigned to making idle threats. Quanah was never known for it in the reservation years; perhaps this outburst was his last indulgence. He and his party returned to Fort Sill without ever finding a buffalo. Any lingering notions that they could return to their ancient ways, even momentarily, were now forever dispelled. The buffalo were all dead, and the white man owned the sacred canyons.

  What really changed Quanah’s life on the reservation was the cattle business, which by the late 1870s was transforming the entire western frontier. While the Indian wars raged, the Texas cattle industry, which had its origins in the Spanish missions of the mid-eighteenth century, had been steadily increasing in size. In 1830 there were an estimated 100,000 head of cattle in the state; by 1860 there were between four and five million.18 Though the Civil War temporarily arrested the industry’s development, by the latter 1860s the state was fairly bursting with beef in search of markets. The big northerly drives started in earnest in 1866, taking Texas cattle north to the railheads in Kansas, and grew geometrically with the surrender of the Comanches and Kiowas. Many of these cattle traveled along the Western Trail, which led through Fort Griffin and across the Red River and north to Dodge City. That trail happened to lead through the heart of the Comanche-Kiowa Reservation in Oklahoma.

  Such intrusions were neither innocent nor coincidental. The cowboys would often linger on the reservation, sometimes for weeks, fattening thousands of their cattle on the lush grass that belonged to Indians. The contractors who supplied beef to the reservation also turned their animals out to graze on the Indian lands. None of this was legal, but there were no troops to police it. And many of the big ranchers south of the Red River, facing competition for grazing lands, now coveted the same reservation grass.

  The Indians’ response to the white incursions was to form what amounted to protection rackets. Quanah was the first to figure out how to make them work. Groups of armed Comanches, not exactly war parties but not terribly friendly, either, patrolled the southern and western parts of their reservation looking for trespassing herds. A drover named Julian Gunter recalled encountering “a large band of Indians” who rode slowly around Gunter’s herd. Quanah, who led them, lectured him: “Your government gave this land to the Indian to be his hunting ground,” said Quanah. “But you go through and scare the game and your cattle eat the grass so the buffalo leaves and the Indian starves.” Sensing what was required, Gunter let Quanah’s braves cut six “fat cows” from the herd for themselves and went on his way.19 On another occasion a cattleman named G. W. Roberson was similarly forced by Quanah “to give him a beef.” Roberson explained: “We had to kind of stand in with those scoundrels. If you didn’t they come in at night and run your horses off or stampede your cattle. And most any man would rather give them a beef than have them run his cattle off.”20 Some even reported that Quanah was charging fees in the form of a one-dollar tax per wagon and ten cents per head of stock.21 Once they had paid up, of course, the cattlemen enjoyed the protection of Quanah’s men while they crossed the reservation. That “protection” included advice on the best route to follow and on sources of water. Those who did not cooperate made payment in other ways: One outfit lost 295 head to the Comanches on a single drive. Nor was Quanah reluctant to play hardball politics inside the reservation. He was happy to report the Kiowas to the agent for taking cattle from herds heading north and assaulting cowboys while he himself managed to obtain official permission from the agent to practice what amounted to an identical form of blackmail.22

  But these were mere annoyances. The larger issue was whether or not the Indians should do what everybody else in America did: lease out their unused grazing lands. In this case, to white cattle outfits. This was a surprisingly controversial question, considering that the Indians were sitting on top of more than three thousand square miles of prime grazing land. Many Indians, including most of the Kiowas and a portion of the Comanches, thought it was a bad idea. They believed it would encourage white men to take over the land, jeopardizing the Indians’ future as stockmen. Such gratuitous income from “grass money,” moreover, would lead the young men to become lazy and gamble. The other side, represented by Quanah, saw it as a legitimate way for Indians to make money off what was happening anyway. The money could be used to build their own herds. There was plenty of land: Some two million acres were available, and thirty-five white cattle outfits were lining up for the privilege.

  The question was hotly debated in a political fight that lasted from 1880 to 1884. Quanah soon emerged as the leader of the pro-leasing faction. He traveled several times to Washington to help build his case. In one of his audiences with the secretary of the interior, he dismissed the antileasers contemptuously, saying “I cannot tell what objection they have to it, unless they have not got sense. They are kind of old fogy, on the wild road yet, unless they have not got brains enough to sabe [sic] the advantage there is in it.” His rivals—Hears the Sunrise, Isa-tai, Lone Wolf, White Wolf, and many Kiowas—meanwhile, denounced Quanah as “bought by the cattlemen.”

  They were at least partly right. Quanah had been put on the payroll at $35 a month by one of the leading cattle outfits. The cattlemen, who were rabid advocates of the leasing of Indian lands, saw him as their spokesman, a job he performed very well because he believed his tribe’s interests were the same as theirs. The white ranchers also very likely contributed to Quanah’s own growing herd of cattle, and paid for his trips to Washington to counterbalance the lobbying done in the nation’s capital by Hears the Sunrise and the antileasers, who repeatedly demanded that Quanah be stripped of his authority as a tribal leader.23

  On its face, Quanah’s arrangement with the stockmen might seem like simple corruption. But it could only be seen that way against standards that did not exist on the frontier. Quanah was merely playing the game the way everyone else did. Almost everyone who was a party to leasing talks had a substantial conflict of interest. Isa-tai, who opposed leasing, was actually running his own protection racket for two thousand head of cattle that grazed continuously on Indian land, as was Permansu, the nephew of the famous Comanche chief Ten Bears.24 The Indian agent, the agency clerk, and other agency personnel all had received payments from cattlemen or had vested interests in the outcome. (The agent was eventually fired for his inside dealing.) Four other Comanches were also on the stockmen’s payroll, as were several “squaw men” (white men who had married Indian women) on the reservation. Bribes were being paid all around. This was the world in which Quanah was learning to operate: It was his introduction to how business was done in the rawboned American West of the latter nineteenth century, where corners were routinely cut and where conflicts of interest were the rule rather than the exception. Such behavior often resulted in the Indians being cheated or defrauded. No one ever cheated Quanah, as far as we know. He understood the game too well, and was always a step ahead of everyone else, including the white stoc
kmen. He played by the rules as he perceived them to be, and he was as good as most white men at playing the game. He also truly believed that making money off the unused land was best for his tribe.

  He was right. He won the fight outright in 1884, when Indians on the reservation voted to approve leasing. Rights to Indian grass were awarded to cattlemen who had been handpicked by him. When asked pointedly by the secretary of the interior whether he had been compensated, Quanah replied: “They have not paid me anything for the lease.” That was probably technically true: He was on the payroll long before the lease was negotiated. In the end the Indians got six cents per acre per year on a six-year lease. It was later increased to ten cents an acre. As part of the deal, the cattlemen also agreed to hire fifty-four Indians as cowboys, which could be seen as a form of patronage: Quanah taking care of his own.

  After the leases were signed, Quanah worked even harder to establish himself as the principal chief of the Comanches, a title that had never before existed. In the history of the tribe there had been no need for centralized political power, or for a single spokesman of any kind. Now there was. He was appointed to serve as judge on the Court of Indian Offenses, a curious body that dispensed justice that was somewhere between English common law and Comanche tribal tradition. His growing political power was instrumental in preventing the Ghost Dance cult from spreading to Comanches and Kiowas—the same cult that led to the infamous massacre of Miniconjou Sioux at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890—for which he received notice in the national press. The Ghost Dance was driven by an apocalyptic vision of the return of dead Indians and the annihilation or disappearance of whites. Quanah, having witnessed the destructive power of Isa-tai’s grand visions at Adobe Walls, opposed it from the start and spoke against it. In a letter to the agent he stated: “I hear the koway [Kiowas] and shianis [Cheyennes] say that there are Indians come from heaven and want to take me and my People and go see to see them. But I tell them that I want my People to work and pay no attention to that. . . . We depend on the government to help us and no [sic] them.”25

  Meanwhile, his own business was prospering. He built up his own cattle herd by gifts from the cattlemen, by outright purchase, and by selective breeding until he was running nearly five hundred head. His new friend Charles Goodnight gave him a prime Durham bull for breeding. He became a supplier to his own people: In 1884 alone he sold forty head to the agency, making $400 on the transaction. He also came to control a pasture of forty-four thousand acres (sixty-nine square miles) that was soon known as the Quanah Pasture, some of which he leased out to cattlemen who paid him directly. He had a hundred-fifty-acre farm that was tended by a white man and two hundred hogs, three wagons, and one buggy.

  A few years earlier, in 1886, something else had added to his growing celebrity: James DeShields published the first book about his mother, Cynthia Ann, which received wide circulation in the Southwest. Anyone who was not aware of Quanah’s origins now learned about them in minute detail. The book included Quanah’s photograph and a description of him that was both flattering and accurate.

  Quanah speaks English, is considerably advanced in civilization, and owns a ranch with considerable livestock and a small farm; wears a citizen’s suit and conforms to the customs of civilization—withal a fine-looking and dignified son of the plains. . . . He is tall, muscular, as straight as an arrow; look-you-straight-through eyes, very dark skin, perfect teeth, and heavy, raven-black hair—the envy of feminine hearts. . . . He has a handsome carriage and drives a pair of matched grays.26

  This was the image—that of a prosperous burger—that Quanah increasingly sought to convey to the rest of the world. For all of his desire to walk the white man’s road, however, there were compromises he never made. He wore his hair long and plaited and never cut it. He kept his wives. He was once asked by the Indian commissioner why he refused to get rid of his surplus wives. Quanah replied:

  A long time ago I lived free among the buffalo on the staked plains and had as many wives as I wanted, according to the laws of my people. I used to go to war in Texas and Mexico. You wanted me to stop fighting and sent messages all the time “You stop, Quanah.” You did not say then “How many wives you got, Quanah?” Now I come and sit down as you want. You talk about wives. Which one do I throw away? You, little girl, you go away, you got no Papa. You, little fellow, you go away. You pick him?27

  His crowning glory, and the thing he was most proud of, was the extraordinary house he built for himself in 1890. The story behind it is so purely Quanah, so revelatory of the man he was, that it is worth noting. While many others in his tribe had gotten government funding to build the typical $350 shotgun shacks that dotted the reservation, he had been content to live in a tipi, spending his summers outdoors in the traditional Comanche “brush arbor.” But by the late 1880s his status in the tribe was such that he needed something better. Something much better. What he wanted, once he had thought about it, was a ten-room, two-story clapboard house, the sort of grand and stately plains home that any white rancher would have been proud to own and that absolutely no reservation Indian had ever owned.

  The problem was where to get the money. There were the stockmen, of course, Quanah’s old friends like Burk Burnett and Daniel Waggoner who could be counted on to help. Better still, there was the government, which surely owed him something. Even better than that was the ploy he eventually concocted. He sent his white tenant farmer and adoptive son, David Grantham,28 to tell the agent that he wanted a subsidy and that if he did not get it “he will see the stock men and get the money,” a curious sort of threat but one that clearly hit its mark. Indian Agent Charles Adams applied to the Indian affairs office for $500 to help Quanah build his house, saying that “he is an Indian who deserves some assistance from the government.” He was turned down by Commissioner T. J. Morgan, a staunch Baptist who strongly disapproved of Quanah’s polygamy.

  Quanah did not give up. He and Adams peppered Washington with more letters, even bypassing Morgan and appealing to his boss, the secretary of the interior. Quanah had almost every ranking person at Fort Sill sign his pleas, including the commandant. He argued that other polygamous Indians had received grants; that a lesser Penateka chief had received funds for a house; that he was being treated unfairly because of an ancient custom of his tribe. He would not agree to jettison his multiple wives, or offer any sort of compromise. This was the quintessential Quanah: hustling, demanding, always looking for an angle, always negotiating yet unwilling to compromise his own principles. Morgan never changed his mind. He wrote: “As it is against the policy of this office to encourage or in any way countenance polygamy, no assistance will be granted Parker in the erection of his house, unless he will agree, in writing, to make a choice among his wives and to live only with the one chosen and to fully provide for his other wives without living with them.”29 Quanah of course refused.

  So the privilege of helping to finance Quanah’s new home went to the stockmen, after all, mainly to Burk Burnett. They were happy to oblige, though it is not known how much they contributed. Quanah certainly had substantial resources of his own. In 1890, Quanah’s new house was finished. It was indeed a ten-room, two-story clapboard affair, and it cost more than $2,000. The interior was finished beaded board, with ten-foot ceilings. There was a formal, wallpapered dining room with a long table and a wood-burning stove. The house sat on a splendid piece of high ground in the shadow of the Wichita Mountains. He later added a wide, colonnaded two-story porch to it and painted enormous white stars on the roof. His home became known as Star House and still stands today, having been moved twice. One of the great, obscure treasures of the American West, it occupies the back lot of a defunct amusement park behind an Indian trading post in Cache, Oklahoma.

  The scene at Quanah’s splendid new house had no precedent in Comanche history; it could have existed only in the weird half-world of the reservation. No one had ever seen anything like it. He had a total of eight wives (one of them was Weckea
h, the woman with whom he had eloped), seven of whom he married during the reservation period. Between them he fathered twenty-four children, five of whom died in infancy. Photographs of his wives taken in the 1880s and 1890s reveal women who are strikingly attractive. Quanah liked women, and somehow managed to keep them even though he infuriated existing wives by constantly courting new ones.30 In spite of Quanah’s arguments to the contrary, multiple wives no longer had a real place in the Comanche culture. Polygamy had been mainly a way of providing extra labor in tanning and processing buffalo. Those days were gone. Quanah had wives now simply because he wanted them and could afford them. His enormous family soon contained white members: two of Quanah’s daughters married white men. He adopted and raised two white boys of his own, one of whom he found in a circus in San Antonio and adopted on the spot.31 He had adopted Herman Lehmann for three years, and Lehmann was so fond of his Comanche family that in 1901 he applied for full status as a tribe member.32 One young white man, Dick Banks, showed up at Star House just because he wanted to meet Quanah; he was given a bed and invited to stay indefinitely.33 Family members lived either at the house or in tipis in the front yard, which was surrounded by a white picket fence. Photographs from the era show the place with its double porches literally spilling over with people.