The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  Quanah had other plans. He convinced Weckeah to run away with him the following evening. Some twenty younger warriors decided to join them. The rebels scattered in ten directions to throw off any pursuers, then met up near the headwaters of the Concho River.

  For several months Quanah and his comrades raided ranches in West Texas and built a portfolio of stolen horses. Within a year they had established themselves as an offshoot of the Quahadi band. When Yellow Bear tracked them down, elders intervened to prevent open warfare. In the end, Quanah paid twenty ponies to Yellow Bear and nineteen more to Tannap, then staged a two-day feast to smooth over hard feelings. He and Weckeah were allowed to return, and she became his first wife. Quanah’s legend had begun.

  This is the first known photograph of Quanah Parker, identified as “Quinine, or Cita, Qua-Ha-Da Comanche,” taken by Will Soule at Fort Sill.

  THE WORLD QUANAH WAS ENTERING had changed seismically from the one his father had known. Comanche society had been shattered from within and without by plague and continuous warfare. The old clans and traditions were dying out, with nothing to take their place. Meanwhile, the Texans, their mortal enemies, were growing in numbers and firepower. Not for the first time in human history, nor the last, a technologically advanced nation with a growing population and a muscular opinion of its own righteousness asserted its dominance over a smaller, more primitive one.

  The Civil War provided a curious hiatus for the Indians and a temporary respite in their demise. Native Americans looked on with amazement as white Unionists and Confederates killed each other with a fervor and determination once reserved for native peoples. Texas sent more than ninety thousand of its young men to fight on eastern battlefields, while the U.S. Army denuded its frontier forts to supply the Union side. Comanche and Kiowa raiders took advantage of the conflict to step up their attacks. More white captives were taken. One Indian agent, I. C. Taylor, reported that the Kiowa chief Satanta and his men boasted “that stealing white women is a more lucrative business than stealing horses.”

  Still, even as the war was ending, there was little taste in Washington for an all-out assault on the Lords of the Plains. For one thing, Indian fighting was no longer considered a noble undertaking. The slaughter by Union militia under Colonel James Chivington of more than one hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children in southern Colorado in November 1864—known as the Sand Creek Massacre—was a turning point. Chivington’s men, ignoring the American flag the Cheyenne villagers were flying, opened fire indiscriminately, then came back later in the day and finished off the wounded, scalping each corpse, cutting off hands and fingers to steal jewelry, and hauling mutilated body parts back to Denver for public display. In the ensuing investigation, witnesses reported having seen the sexual mutilation of men, women, and children’s corpses. “In going over the battleground the next day I did not see a body of man, woman or child but was scalped, and in many instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner—men, women and children’s privates cut out, etc.,” testified Lieutenant James Connor.

  With the Civil War grinding on to its ghastly conclusion and the public grown tired of bloodshed of any kind, Sand Creek caused a wave of popular revulsion and a surge of peace treaties. The first was the Treaty of the Little Arkansas in 1865, in which Kiowas and Comanches ceded their claim to most of East and South Texas in return for annuity payments and the right to continue roaming unfettered through the hunting grounds of the north and west. It was at best a cynical charade: the most warlike bands did not sign, and in any case the federal peace commissioners had no authority to cede Texas state land to Indians. By the following year the raiders were back in the field and so were the Texas Rangers. While the overall numbers of those killed, wounded, or abducted in these attacks were low, the psychological impact of terror was powerful and demoralizing. The Texans may have been winning the war: the forces of population growth and industrialization were firmly on their side. But in the interim they were losing many battles. The population of Wise County in North Texas fell from 3,160 in 1860 to 1,450 a decade later.

  If the oral legend is correct, Quanah capitalized on his prowess and his daring and the thinning of Comanche warrior ranks to quickly become a respected warrior. He joined raiding parties rampaging down the familiar trails through the heart of West Texas and into Mexico. Like all young Comanche men, he engaged in rites of passage, such as a vision quest. Every man had his special medicine and connection to the natural and spiritual world, often through animal spirits. Quanah’s personal connection was the bear. “Sometimes a Comanche man dreams and a big bear comes and tells him you do this—‘You paint your face this way. I help you,’ “ Quanah later explained. “If he sees bear in his dreams then he makes medicine that way.” In battle Quanah would wear a necklace with a bear claw.

  The only account Quanah ever gave of a raiding expedition makes the raiders sound like the gang who couldn’t shoot straight. As he described it, he and his companions rode south to the Mexican state of Chihuahua and a valley filled with cattle and horses. For nine nights they tried and failed to steal any livestock. “When the white man’s houses are thick, they keep the horses hidden and they are hard to find,” he explained, rather lamely.

  Finally on the tenth night they found some horses and spirited them away. They also stole a calf, which they roasted immediately and wolfed down because no one had eaten for two days. The raiders fled Mexico with a few dozen horses, no scalps, no captives, and no brave stories to tell.

  He was raiding in the Staked Plains when he met a small group of fellow Comanches who told him that soldiers were coming into southern Kansas with beef cattle, sugar, coffee, and other cherished goods for those Indians willing to participate in a great peace council. Putting his skepticism aside, Quanah and his small band of warriors rode to the site.

  THE “GRAND COUNCIL” MET in a clearing of tall elms near Medicine Lodge Creek in southern Kansas on the morning of October 19, 1867. Chiefs of the Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne nations sat on logs facing the peace commissioners, who sat in a semi-circle of stiff-backed chairs. Fishermore, a Kiowa crier, opened the proceedings at 10:00 a.m. with a loud call for everyone to “do right.”

  The wily old Kiowa leader, Satanta, was seated on a camp chair in front of the other chiefs. Nearby was a white woman, Virginia Adams, interpreter for the Arapahos, dressed in a crimson gown made especially for the occasion. Behind them was Ten Bears, elder statesman of the Yamparika Comanches. “What I say is law for the Comanches,” Ten Bears proclaimed. “But it takes a half dozen to speak for the Kiowas.”

  Kansas senator John B. Henderson spoke first. He accused the assembled warriors of violating the Treaty of the Little Arkansas forged two years earlier by attacking work crews laying railroad tracks across Indian territory and by killing white women and children. “These reports made the hearts of our people very sad,” Henderson told the assembled chiefs.

  Nonetheless, said Henderson, the government in Washington wanted “to do justice to the Red Man.” He promised the chiefs “all the comforts of civilization, religion, and wealth,” including “comfortable homes upon our richest agricultural lands.” The government would provide schools and churches as well as livestock and farming tools. All it wanted in return was an Indian agreement to keep the peace and to live a “civilized” existence—in other words, to cease being Indians.

  The first chief to respond was Satanta. A large, flamboyant performer who could leap nimbly from arrogance to servility and back again, he buried his hands in the ground, rubbed them with sand, and strolled around the circle shaking hands with each participant. Then he walked into the center and began to speak. Satanta used a timeworn strategy: he blamed other Indians. His young men and those of the Comanches had honored the treaty, he claimed, but the Cheyenne had not. They were the ones responsible for the raids and the depredations. “They did it in broad daylight, so that all could see them,” he declared.

  But Satant
a was also blunt: he had no interest in reservation life. “I have heard that you intend to settle us on a reservation near the mountains,” he told the commissioners. “I don’t want to settle there. I love to roam over the wide prairie, and when I do it I feel free and happy, but when we settle down, we grow pale and thin.”

  The soon-to-be-famous British journalist Henry M. Stanley, who witnessed the ceremony, said Satanta’s bald rejection “produced a rather blank look upon the faces of the Peace Commissioners.” The response they had been looking for from the chiefs was submission to the inevitable, if not gratitude. What they hadn’t expected was defiance.

  The next morning, they heard even more of it. Ten Bears, the old Comanche warrior chief, gave a ringing address—one of the most poignant and memorable in the history of Native American oratory. Ten Bears said he was glad to come and talk peace because his people had suffered from fighting and the loss of many braves and warriors. He said soldiers had begun the hostilities two years earlier by attacking his young men. The warriors had merely fought back. “The Comanches are not weak and blind like the pups of a dog when seven sleeps old. They are strong and farsighted, like grown horses. We took their road and we went on it. The white women cried, and our women laughed.”

  Ten Bears had visited Washington recently and said the Great White Father had promised that he and his people could roam free in designated land. But he found unacceptable the puny size of the area now on offer. “If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace,” he told the commissioners. “But that which you now say we must live on is too small.”

  Ten Bears also rejected the demand that his people move permanently to reservations and live in houses. “I was born upon the prairie,” he declared, “where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls.”

  Senator Henderson replied as bluntly as Satanta and Ten Bears. The Indian “must change the road his father trod, or he must suffer, and probably die,” he warned. “The whites are settling up all the good lands … When they come, they drive out the buffalo. If you oppose them, war must come. They are many, and you are few.”

  Despite their strong misgivings, both Satanta and Ten Bears did indeed bow to the inevitable by signing the treaty at Medicine Lodge. It allotted large portions of the area south of the Arkansas River—most of Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle—to the tribes. They were given to understand that white hunters would be prevented from crossing the Arkansas into their designated territory, although this was not put in writing. The treaty’s first article was more a promise than an enforceable reality: “From this day forward all war between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease.”

  The tribes relinquished the right to occupy permanently the territories outside their reservation. They were to allow the peaceful completion of railway lines throughout the region. And they promised to cease raiding white settlements and families. “They will never capture or carry off from the settlement white women or children … [and] never kill or scalp white men nor attempt to do them harm.” In return, they were allowed “the right to hunt on any lands south of the Arkansas River, so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.”

  Article Three of the treaty committed up to 320 acres for each Kiowa and Comanche family head to be recorded in a land book. The notion was to push the Indians into the alien realm of private property and farming. The nomads of the plains overnight were to become gentlemen farmers—the treaty pledged to each head of family up to $100 in seeds and agricultural implements for the first year and $25 each for the next three, as well as a suit of clothes. And educated as well: Article Seven stated that all the Indian signatories “pledge themselves to compel their children, male and female, between the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school.”

  Quanah listened, but he lacked the standing of the Comanche chiefs and was not asked to speak. “I went and heard it—there were many soldiers there,” he would recall. “… The soldier chief said, ‘… You must remember one thing and hold fast to and that is you must stop going on the warpath …’ “

  The treaty in essence was a story of peace and reconciliation that each side told the other but neither truly believed. Quanah listened to it, but he had no intention of honoring it. Neither he nor any of the Quahadi band signed on. The raiding continued.

  AMONG THE PEACE COMMISSIONERS sitting in their hard, stiff-backed wooden chairs that week in southern Kansas was another warrior who was just as skeptical and contemptuous of the proceedings as Quanah. General William T. Sherman, the Civil War’s ruthless apostle of total war, was placed in command of the Military Division of the Mississippi in July 1865, three months after the war ended. The position gave him responsibility for military affairs and domestic security from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, all except for Texas. The Plains Indians—from the Lakota Sioux in the north down through the Comanches and Kiowas in the south—were his special burden. Sherman felt sorry for Indians, but they exasperated him. He had no patience with their recalcitrance nor with the sympathy they engendered back east among those who knew them only from newspaper articles, James Fenimore Cooper novels, and the new phenomenon of dime novels. “He viewed them as stubborn children who needed disciplining,” wrote one of Sherman’s biographers.

  Sherman was widely attributed to have first uttered the saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” although he always claimed Miles Standish deserved the credit. Still, he firmly adhered to the idea. He believed the Indian way of life was anarchic and slovenly. Although he did not seek their extermination, he was repelled by their culture. For them to survive in the modern world, he insisted, they would have to become productive and orderly members of society. Indians, he told a graduating class at West Point, refused “to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.” They were a barrier to progress. Some twenty thousand Indians could barely manage to subsist in Nebraska, “while whites will be able to feed two million off its soil.”

  Still, while they might be living at a mere subsistence level, Indians were a powerful military threat. There were after the Civil War some 100,000 potentially hostile Indians out of a native population of 270,000 nationwide, and they were highly mobile and increasingly well armed. Sherman had but 20,000 soldiers. He knew he had to stay on the offensive and keep his enemy on the run. He had in mind a winter campaign to destroy Indian horses and supplies and harass them into surrender. It was the same strategy that had crippled Georgia and the Deep South during the Civil War. “In the end they must be removed to small and clearly defined reservations or must be killed,” Sherman wrote.

  Sherman and his soldiers were not exterminationists. Unlike the Texans, they would fight until their enemy was subdued, not destroyed. For the cavalry, the war against the Comanches was a military campaign with strategies and tactics, not a blood feud. Their methods could be brutal and ruthless: soldiers killed women and children, destroyed livestock, and torched homes. But they operated out of a sense of professional duty more than personal hatred. The Comanches themselves could tell the difference.

  Some, like Quanah, maintained their fiercely independent, nomadic lives and kept their distance from the reservations and agencies. But other bands settled on the outskirts of the agency, living off government beef and grain in winter. While the older warriors preached peace, many of the young men fed and sheltered over the winter months, fattening their ponies, and then set off south in spring to raid in Texas and Mexico. In a two-and-one-half-year period between 1865 and 1867, thirty-five counties in Texas reported a total of 162 people killed, 24 wounded, and 43 captured, along with more than 30,000 stolen livestock.

  The year after Medicine Lodge, 1868—the same year in which the novelist Alan LeMay would later set The Searchers—was typical, according to the agents and scouts. The official reports read like a
depressing frontier police blotter. In a raid in January, Kiowas killed “several families and took seven children prisoners, who all froze to death,” according to Indian scout Phil McCusker’s report. In February they killed several people in another raid and took five captives, all of whom were later freed. In May, Comanches plundered and burned a local trading post and warned residents not to cut down any more trees or erect new buildings. That same month Kiowas hauled out to the prairie Colonel Jesse H. Leavenworth, the agent who helped arrange the Medicine Lodge treaty, tied a rope around his neck, and ordered him to abandon his post. He did so promptly, failing to inform his deputy, S. T. Walkley, of his sudden departure. Walkley himself reported that three raiding parties returned from Texas over the summer with a total of thirteen scalps, three captive children, and an unspecified number of horses and mules. In August Comanche bands killed eight Texans, three of them children.

  Walkley recovered five white captives over the summer. The older chiefs were “doing all they can to keep not only their own bands but all wild Indians from committing depredations … and when their young men have stolen away in the night to go on marauding expeditions to Texas, they have sent after them and brought them back in the morning,” Walkley reported to Major General William B. Hazen, the regional commander.

  Hazen forwarded these reports on to General Phil Sheridan, Sherman’s deputy, along with two letters from grief-stricken parents in Texas seeking the whereabouts of their abducted children. In an accompanying note, Hazen proposed “to hang all the principal participants in this outlawry, and to disarm and dismount the rest.” This, he said, was “the mildest remedy that promises a certain cure.”

  Sheridan agreed. “If a white man commits murder or robs, we hang him or send him to the penitentiary,” he wrote. “If an Indian does the same, we have been in the habit of giving him more blankets.”