The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  Quanah mocked and disparaged opponents of the agreement. “I cannot tell what objection they have to it, unless they have not got sense,” Quanah told officials in Washington. “They are kind of old fogy, on the wild road yet, unless they have not got brains enough to sabe the advantage there is in it.”

  By providing the entire reservation community with an annual payment, the leases gave Indians a small degree of prosperity, although not any real power or control. The terms and the amounts were dictated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. The money became a source of division among Kiowas and Comanches, and Quanah became a favorite target of the anti-leasing faction. His critics claimed Quanah had been “bought by the cattlemen, and don’t come and talk with the rest of us chiefs,” called him a “half-breed,” and demanded he be replaced as spokesman for the Comanches. Echoing bits and pieces of oral legend, they spread rumors that his father was not Nocona but a Mexican captive, and that therefore he lacked any Indian blood. Thirty-seven prominent Comanches signed a petition endorsing Quanah’s dismissal. But the anti-leasers lacked the support of the enterprising and politically adept white ranchers, nor did they have a leader with the energy and charisma of Quanah.

  Quanah returned to Washington the following February with a delegation that met with Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller. When the Department of the Interior formulated rules a year later for leasing the ranges through the agency in Anadarko, the Indians received six cents per acre per year for six years.

  Despite opposition from fellow tribesmen, Quanah emerged as the clear winner of the controversy over grass money. He was now accepted by whites and by many Indians as the spokesman for the reservation’s native population. He ordered new stationery. It read: “Principal Chief of the Comanche Indians.”

  9.

  The Chief (Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 1887–92)

  He was tall—at six foot two he towered over most Comanches—erect, and dignified, with piercing gray-blue eyes. The height and the eye color were inherited from his white mother, but the rest was all Comanche. In photographs, he always looks solemn and intense, posing on his horse or in the buggy he used to travel with his wives and children.

  “He was a fine specimen of physical manhood, tall, muscular and straight as an arrow … the envy of feminine hearts,” wrote his cousin Susan Parker St. John after meeting him in 1886. “Quanah looked you straight in the eyes; had dark copper skin, perfect white teeth with heavy raven black hair. This he wore hanging in two rolls wrapped around with red cloth. He parted his hair in the middle with a scalp-lock, the size of a dollar, plaited and tangled, hung down in front, signifying: If you want a fight, you can have it.”

  The grass money deals solidified Quanah’s position as a classic middleman between the two worlds—enriching himself even as he protected his community—and made him more of a magnet for resentment and criticism from fellow Comanches. The more they needed him, the less they liked him. And his racial origins—half-white, half-Comanche—compounded his rivals’ distaste.

  There were death threats: Quanah eventually built a barbed-wire fence around his home for protection. And he was quick to go on the offensive, seeking to taunt a rival chief into a showdown. “Quanah Parker started the fight by slapping Lone Wolf, but the latter did not move,” one newspaper reported. “Then Quanah hit Lone Wolf over the head with a six-shooter, but still the Kiowa chief refused to offer resistance or strike back at his assailant. Nothing Quanah would do would provoke Lone Wolf to fight.”

  There were many conflicts of interest: agents, squaw men, and interpreters who worked for the cattlemen directly or otherwise stood to profit from the deals—Quanah among them. He drew a minimum of thirty-five dollars per month on Colonel B. B. Groom’s payroll, plus Groom’s promise of five hundred head of cattle. The cattlemen also kept Quanah loyal by gifts and junkets to Dallas and Fort Worth. He shared this largesse, of course, with family members and with the tribe at large. But like a shrewd middleman, he always took his cut.

  Burk Burnett invited Quanah and his men frequently to Fort Worth to appear in the annual Fat Stock Show. “There is one thing that you can say to all the Indians,” Burnett wrote to Quanah. “That they will have a bully good time and not be out a cent of their money, as all expenses are to be paid coming and going and while they are here.”

  In 1883 the Fort Worth Gazette reported on one such visit. Its correspondent noticed a large, swarthy, well-dressed man with flowing black hair sitting by the fireplace of the Commercial Hotel. The man was dressed in a black cashmere suit, and wore a large white hat, a fine pair of boots, wrist-warmers, a gold watch and chain, and a stiff collar and cravat. He sat for an hour and spoke not a word, until the hotel owner’s little girl came up to him, “when he commenced stroking her hair softly and speaking in a low soft tone to her.”

  Quanah had just been to visit with his cousin I. D. Parker, the oldest son of Isaac Parker, the uncle who brought Cynthia Ann “home” to Texas. Isaac had died eight months earlier, at age eighty-nine. This visit marked the first time a white member of the far-flung Parker clan had agreed to meet with Quanah. After they met, I.D. placed a newspaper notice on Quanah’s behalf seeking a copy of the photograph taken of Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower in Fort Worth in 1861. The legend of Cynthia Ann Parker, dormant for more than a decade, was beginning to reassert its power, thanks to the ardent efforts of her surviving son.

  Quanah extended his personal generosity to all his white relatives. Knox Beal’s mother was one of Cynthia Ann’s cousins. As a young man Beal worked for a traveling circus and was suffering from a bout of extreme homesickness when he met Quanah outside San Antonio in 1884. Quanah invited Beal to come live with him in Oklahoma, and Beal remained there for some six years, eventually settling permanently in the area. “He certainly was a wonderful friend and counselor to me,” Beal would recall, “and I have never regretted the day I came home with him.”

  Soon after, with Indian agent Hunt’s enthusiastic support, the Bureau of Indian Affairs formally recognized Quanah as “chief” of the Comanche nation. Comanches had always been a loosely knit group of communities that shared language, customs, and kinship ties, but they had never recognized any one leader as their chief. Many were not happy when Quanah accepted this role; some denounced him as a usurper and a white stooge. None of this deterred him. But he yearned for a substantive symbol of his new position.

  A great chief, Quanah decided, needed a great house.

  QUANAH FIRST PROPOSED the idea to Philemon Hunt in 1882. Originally he had in mind a simple two-room structure like the ones many Comanches were building in the pastures near Cache Creek. But as Quanah’s stature grew, his idea evolved into something far grander: a house of unprecedented size for an Indian that would overlook the cabins, teepees, and lodges of his fellow Comanches. His repeated efforts to extract money from Washington for the project were rejected or ignored. Indian commissioner Thomas J. Morgan, a fervent Baptist, told the new Indian agent, Charles E. Adams, that the idea was a nonstarter. “While at your agency I stated to you personally that I did not deem it wise for the government to contribute money to assist in building a house for an Indian who has five wives,” Morgan wrote. “I do not think the proposition admits of discussion.”

  For the next eight years Quanah remained in his teepee, moving to the traditional bush arbor in summer. But he never abandoned the idea of presiding over a big house. With Burk Burnett’s help, Quanah bought a thousand dollars’ worth of lumber in Texas, had it shipped in wagons across the Red River, and contracted for a grand two-story, ten-room house. It took two years to build, and Quanah estimated the cost at $2,000. No one ever offered a definitive account of who paid for what.

  The Star House became Quanah’s showcase and seat of power. Sitting by itself atop a slight ridge on an empty stretch of pasture, it was an unmistakable monument to the man who lived within. He insisted upon painting twelve stars on the roof so that he could outrank any general who came to visit
. Each year the two wings of the house seemed to grow in length as Quanah added rooms for his seven wives and nineteen children and also for the many hangers-on, white and red, whom he collected as he and his entourage traveled through Oklahoma and Texas.

  The Star House, built by Quanah Parker, on the grounds of Fort Sill, outside Cache, Oklahoma, ca. 1911.

  Quanah wined and dined countless guests in the long dining room, including Theodore Roosevelt and James Bryce, the British ambassador to the United States. He even played host to Geronimo after the old Apache war chief was transferred to Fort Sill from a prison camp in Florida. Neda Parker Birdsong, one of Quanah’s daughters, recalled Geronimo’s first visit to the Star House: “On the table at dinner was a big bucket of molasses. Geronimo dipped in and liked it so much that he appropriated the bucket and spooned every bit of it up.”

  Quanah, who prided himself on following the traditions of Comanche hospitality, used the Star House to prove to his white guests that he was indeed “civilized.” C. H. Detrick, a prosperous Kansas merchant, arrived unexpectedly late one evening with a party of fellow businessmen. Quanah invited them in and, hearing they had had no dinner, roused his household and ordered up a hearty meal of steak, potatoes, biscuits, honey, and butter. He put the men up for the night and then fed them breakfast the next morning. “In doing the honors of his home, his manners were as finished and courteous as those of a grand gentleman, which he, indeed, was,” Detrick would recall.

  Some whites never overcame the suspicion that the hostile Indian raiders who had once ruled the plains and their nightmares were waiting for an opportunity to rise up and strike again. New Indian uprisings became a staple of press coverage. “Comanches on the War-Path” read a typical dispatch in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in March 1886, accusing Quanah and an alleged band of 1,300 men, women, and children of invading North Texas, setting wildfires and killing 40 to 50 cattle.

  Quanah Parker on the porch of his new house, ca. 1890.

  To allay white fears, Quanah was willing to play the role of enforcer of the white man’s laws and rules on the reservation. When it suited his purpose, he even played the informer. In a note dated April 7, 1887, handwritten for him by his son-in-law Emmett Cox, Quanah warned Captain Lee Hall, the chief Indian agent in Anadarko, that Kiowa leaders “had been making medicine on Elk Creek” and had decided “to make a war break on Fort Sill in the middle of the summer.” They asked Quanah to join with them. “Me and my people have quit fighting long ago and we have no desire to join anyone in war again,” wrote Quanah, who signed the note “respectfully, Quanah Parker.” Two years later, when the government established a “Court of Indian Offenses,” Quanah was appointed presiding judge, a position that gave him formal police powers and the right to adjudicate disputes.

  In the early 1890s the Ghost Dance craze, which began among Sioux Indians in the Dakotas, set off a wave of panic in Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. Indians, despite their recent exposure to Christianity, reverted to their barbaric, animistic past, or so many whites believed. One night in 1891 a group of ranch hands in Collingsworth County, Texas, fired off several shots to kill a steer, which rampaged blindly through their encampment and toppled the campfire. A woman in a nearby settler’s dugout heard the shots and the yelling and saw the smoke. Assuming it was Indians, the panic-stricken woman saddled her horse, took her two babies to a nearby farm, and triggered an alarm that spread from Clarendon to Amarillo. Townsfolk built barricades and wagonloads of settlers poured into towns from the rural areas seeking shelter from a Red Peril that did not exist. It took several days for calm to return.

  Quanah and his moderate Kiowa ally, Apiatin, worked hard to convince their fellow Indians that the Ghost Dance had no value. Apiatin even journeyed to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota to meet the purported messiah behind the movement, and reported back to Oklahoma that the man was a fraud.

  The same kind of panic occurred in 1898 at the start of the Spanish-American War, when most of the garrison at Fort Sill was ordered to report to the Gulf Coast on short notice, leaving only twenty-one soldiers at the fort. A rumor soon spread that Geronimo and the handful of Apaches who were living on the grounds were planning to rise up and seize the fort. In response, Quanah rounded up his own men and set up a protective ring around the fort’s corral and guardhouse. The panic soon dissipated. But the Apaches were bemused to see Comanches—the former Lords of the Plains—mobilized to protect a U.S. Army facility from other Indians.

  THE SAD TRUTH was that when it came to whites, Indians had more to fear from their friends than from their enemies. It was their friends, after all, who sought to destroy Native American culture, belief systems, language, and family structures, and seize control of the upbringing and education of Native American children, all in the name of progress and the Indians’ own best interests.

  Former warriors and hunters were expected to become docile farmers. Their children were required to attend government schools where their Comanche identity, culture, and language were banned or denigrated. Christian ministers, seeking to save souls, challenged the Comanche animistic faith and their practice of polygamy. Even their diet came under attack: Thomas J. Morgan, the chief Indian commissioner, sought to ban the eating of blood and intestines—“a savage and filthy practice,” he wrote in a letter to subordinates. “It serves to nourish brutal instincts and … [is] a fruitful source of disease.”

  For Quanah, Morgan was a formidable opponent. A devout Baptist schoolteacher from Indiana, he had served as a commander of African-American troops during the Civil War, and he saw himself as a champion of racial equality. But his notion of equality was total assimilation: Indians, like Negroes, needed to lose their identity as a distinctive ethnic group and become proper little white folks. He even banned Indian participation in Wild West shows, believing that the exhibitions helped sustain the stereotype of the bloodthirsty savage that Indians needed to overcome.

  “The Indians are destined to be absorbed into the national life, not as Indians but as Americans,” Morgan wrote to Indian agents and school superintendents throughout the country. “In all proper ways teachers in Indian schools should endeavor to appeal to the highest elements of manhood, and womanhood in their pupils … and they should carefully avoid any unnecessary reference to the fact that they are Indians.”

  Reformers such as Richard Henry Pratt, a former army officer placed in charge of Kiowa and Comanche prisoners sent to Florida after the Red River War, were openly determined to destroy Indian culture. As Pratt put it, the goal was to “kill the Indian and save the man.” Pratt founded the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania, which became the best-known of the many Indian boarding schools. He dressed his charges in “civilized” outfits—high-buttoned coats and stove-pipe trousers for the boys, dresses and smocks for the girls—chopped off their braids, and banned their native languages. This was ruthless pragmatism in the service of a higher good, according to Pratt: “The sooner all tribal relations are broken up; the sooner the Indian loses all his Indian ways, even his language, the better it will be for him and for the government and the greater will be the economy for both.”

  Faced with this cultural onslaught, Quanah fought a careful rearguard action. He was willing to accept white religion and education, but was determined to preserve Comanche culture and identity. He authorized Christian missionaries to open churches and schools in Comanche territory, but only those who first came to seek his permission. He eventually sent his own children to white-organized schools, both the Fort Sill Indian School locally and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

  In time, Quanah came to believe that Indian children needed to learn the same skills as whites if they were to survive in a white-dominated world. “Me no like Indian school for my people,” he said. “Indian boy go to Indian school, stay like Indian; go white school, be like white …”

  All of this became part of the image that Quanah carefully constructed as a reformed warrior who was ready and willi
ng to travel the white man’s road. “Like slaves on a plantation, the Comanches quickly learned, and none better than Quanah, the necessity of telling the white man what he wanted to hear, while preserving as much of the old way of life as possible,” wrote the historian William Hagan.

  Still, there were parts of Quanah’s life that he refused to compromise or change. While he wore business suits in public, he would not cut off his warrior braids. Similarly, he refused to abandon polygamy, arguing that it was an essential part of the Comanche way of life. When asked by an official to provide leadership by choosing one among his wives, Quanah teased that he himself was willing to pick one, “but you must tell the others.”

  His first wife was To-ha-yea, a Mescalero Apache, but the marriage quickly unraveled. Next he married Weckeah (“Hunting for Something”), the woman he had eloped with back in the 1860s. Their daughter Nahmukuh married Emmett Cox, the white ranch hand whom Quanah helped to get a job at the Indian agency and who became one of Quanah’s most trusted advisers. Then came Cho-ny (“Going with the Wind”), followed by A-er-wuth-takum (“She Fell with a Wound”), each of whom had four children. By 1892, Quanah had six wives and seventeen children. Each wife had a specific set of household duties focused on the Star House. One handled his personal papers, one took care of his riding horses, one was in charge of his clothing, one ran the kitchen, and one carried water, chopped wood, and cleaned the yard. Each had her own room on the main floor and took turns sharing Quanah’s bed, while the children slept upstairs dormitory-style.