Across the canyon, on another ledge, Quanah saw a slight movement, one of his own sentries. His men were on watch. Nevertheless, he felt alone and desolate. He had listened to the advice of the council, but he had to make the decision. That was why he had come up here. It was as though being above everything could give him a clearer view of the future as well as the past and present.
He looked down at the still, silent village. He knew there were people there, gathered inside around their fires and the kettles that were almost empty. The kettle of his own wives and children was almost empty too. They were rationing out the remains of their own dead ponies. Each morning the boys dug paths through the snow to the herds and retrieved those that had died. They had to saw limbs from the frozen bodies. At least up here Quanah couldn’t hear the babies crying with hunger.
It was March 1875. It had been the coldest winter anyone could remember. That afternoon a foraging party had brought in the body of Spaniard. They had found him, dressed in only a breechclout and moccasins, standing with one arm thrown across the back of his favorite war horse. Both he and the pony were frozen solid. The snow had shaken like powder from his frizzy gray hair as they lowered him from the pack pony. Now, in his mind, Quanah addressed him.
Greetings, my father’s old friend. You left the reservation and the whiskey and came here to die with us. You chose to surrender to winter, to the plains, rather than to the white men.
Quanah allowed himself the indulgence of briefly considering suicide. But he knew he couldn’t do it, as easy as it would be. His family needed him. His band needed him. And he felt helpless in the face of their desperate need.
Bad Hand and his soldiers had harried the Quohadi all fall and winter. Mackenzie’s own men froze and starved and thirsted and cursed him, but at least they had no women and children to protect. They were free to patrol constantly and keep the bands unsettled and fleeing before them even in the worst weather.
Quanah and his men had tied the weaker ones in the band to their ponies to keep them from falling into a stupor of cold and exhaustion and sliding off. As they traveled through howling northers Quanah lashed his men with his quirt or his bow when they lay down in the snow and refused to go on. During the day the snow melted, then refroze into a glittering hard crust of ice. Quanah rubbed soot around the children’s eyes to protect them from snow blindness, but it didn’t help much. Exposed parts of their faces became puffy and blistered. Their eyes swelled shut. Lips became parched and cracked, and skin peeled off in sheets. When the temperature dropped to twenty below, fingers arid toes froze and fell off.
As the drifts reached four feet deep, even the men could no longer break trails by walking upright. They had to crawl, putting their hands and knees in the holes left by those in front of them. After twenty or thirty men had crawled over a section of the trail, it was packed down enough for the horses and mules to pass. The cattle had died early in the winter. They had inhaled sleet and suffocated.
Somehow Quanah kept his people just ahead of Bad Hand’s relentless pursuit. The other bands hadn’t been as lucky or as resourceful. And they had all been betrayed by José Tafoya. The wizened little Comanchero hadn’t done it willingly. When Bad Hand caught him, he had feigned ignorance of the People’s whereabouts. But Mackenzie dispensed with the niceties of civilized behavior. He had ordered Tafoya strung high on a propped-up wagon tongue and strangled until his memory improved. José‘s wits had sharpened enough to remember the trails and hiding places of the Quohadi.
And Mackenzie had learned not to try to drive captured ponies back to the forts. When he had attacked the largest band of Quohadi left, he had ordered the ponies shot. Thousands of them. And he had burned the camp, lodges, food, robes, everything. Quanah had wept when he came across the destruction.
Had Coyote Dung cursed them all when he prophesied a winter such as they had never seen? His prediction for the summer certainly had come true. After the debacle at Adobe Walls, Coyote Dung had said that the rains would cease. And they had.
Quanah remembered how it had been. Even in the freezing cold of his perch he remembered. For two months the band had traveled across the dry, baked plains, with the ground cracking, the surface shriveling in the intense heat. Day after torturous day, the sun pulsed in a white sky and the horizon vibrated constantly. Waterholes and rivers and creeks dried up. The People dug in the dry beds for moisture. They filled their mouths with damp sand and tried to suck water from it.
They had sliced their horses’ ears and drunk the blood. Finally some had gashed their own forearms to moisten their lips. Gaunt, hollow-eyed warriors doled the water out to the children. Quanah assigned a guard to the water paunches. His men threatened adults with death if they touched the supply being saved for the young ones. Many of their ponies died. Those that were left had backs raw and bloody from the constant traveling. Flocks of magpies swooped around the herd, diving and tearing at the horses’ exposed flesh until they screamed and rolled in a frenzy to escape.
It had seemed as though nature itself was trying to defeat the People that last summer. As though the whites had managed to turn Mother Earth against them. When the sky blackened to the east in August, they faced it, waiting for the first cool wind that meant rain.
But the blackness on the horizon wasn’t storm clouds. It was swarms of locusts. They covered the land in a living, seething mass. They ate every green plant that had managed to escape the drought, then they ate the nap from the blankets. The members of Quanah’s band roasted them for food. Quanah remembered their brittle shells crunching as he bit into them.
It had seemed then, when his skin was hot to the touch and the heat penetrated his bone marrow, that he would never again be cool. He would never feel cold water rushing over him, never run barefoot in the snow or tilt his head to catch snowflakes on his tongue. Now he shivered in the wind.
But worst of all had been the fall hunt. Or what should have been the hunt. There were no buffalo left to kill. The hunting parties rode for hundreds of miles across the plains, searching for signs. But all they found were carcasses and bones. The herds of millions of animals that had blackened the prairie were gone.
There were those who believed the buffalo would return, that they had only migrated as they had in years past. But Quanah knew better. And even he had to force himself to accept the fact that they were really gone. If the buffalo could disappear, then anything was possible, any horror, any tragedy.
More than Bad Hand, more than the terrible drought and locusts of the summer and the cold of winter, hunger drove band after band to surrender and seek refuge on the reservation.
“I would rather stay out on the prairie and eat dung,” Sun Name had said. The white men had made sure that there was no longer even that. Sun Name had been the last, but he had finally led his people eastward. Quanah had watched him go, his head bowed onto his chest.
Now Quanah knew they were alone on the Staked Plains, he and his small band of four hundred men, women, and children. They were the last of the People to taste freedom, as bitter as it was. A messenger had come from the reservation several days before. The word from Bad Hand was, “Surrender or watch your women and children die.” And Quanah knew that Kinzie could do it. The messenger had told Quanah that because he had never signed a peace treaty with the white men he had broken no promises; he had fought to defend his homeland. Bad Hand respected Quanah as a courageous foe and would not allow him to be punished as a criminal.
Even after he had made his decision, Quanah stayed awhile longer on the ledge. He felt the wind and the cold with all his senses, tasting it and smelling it and hearing it too. He looked down on the magnificent white kingdom of Palo Duro canyon for the last time. Then he stood and stretched his cramped muscles. He walked slowly down the twisting trail to the canyon floor. As he walked, he watched the lodges glow in the deepening twilight.
A month later, at the head of his ragged, starving band, he rode down from the Staked Plains. He held his head high,
his rifle cradled in his arms. His favorite wife, We-keah carried his shield and lance. Scouts must have seer them coming, because Bad Hand himself rode to meet them. Quanah advanced until he was knee to knee with the colonel. He stared him straight in the eye as he handed over his rifle. He said only one word.
“Suvate, it is finished.”
Author’s note
Quanah Parker’s starving band was the last to enter the reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory. They brought the total number of those who had surrendered to 1,597. Only one in every twelve of the People had survived the previous twenty-five years of warfare and disease.
The Comanche’s surrender and removal to Indian Territory opened their land to the Texans. The frontier advanced farther in the next eight years than it had in the previous forty when the People had ferociously opposed it. Soon the plains were swarming with farmers and ranchers. The countryside became overgrazed. Miles of waving grasslands were reduced to barren stretches of mesquite scrub. Plows exposed the rich soil to the constant wind, which blew away tons of it over the years. Rivers, diverted to irrigate crops, became muddy trickles.
Bad Hand McKenzie kept his promise to Quanah. Because the young chief had signed no peace treaties, and so had never gone back on his word, he was not punished or imprisoned. He was not among the rebel leaders caged in an unfinished stone icehouse and fed meat that was thrown over the roofless walls. Nor was he sent to Florida in long, lonely exile, as many were.
But life was hard for the People on the reservation. The promised rations continued to be in short supply or of poor quality. Much of the food was unfit to eat. There were stones in the sacks of bacon and coal in the barrels of pork. Even with the best of intentions, transportation of the goods was a serious problem. Freight had to be hauled three hundred miles, often through deep mud and across swollen streams. Oxen caught Texas cattle fever and died, stranding entire wagon trains.
General Miles reported that “the pitiful annual allowances given them by the government were usually exhausted in six months.” And the handouts were degrading, given grudgingly and accepted with resentment. Soldiers hunted the already scarce game on the reservation. It was an illegal practice that the fort’s commander allowed to continue.
Even the benevolent administration of the Quaker agents was cruel. At least the People could understand and respect the soldiers who had governed them. But the men of God stripped the warriors of their very reason for living, war. They no longer had any way to attain status within their tribe. Whiskey, the “stupid water” that the People had always scorned, became their solace.
The People and their Kiowa allies had to set up their lodges on the west side of Cache Creek, where the water was polluted after passing through the fort. While the officers and their wives gathered in the evenings for small talk and lawn croquet, the Indians suffered malaria in the mosquito-infested swamp where they camped. Quanah himself came down with the fever in 1875.
When he recovered, he asked permission to seek his white relatives and to see where his mother had lived out the last few years of her life. Dressed in the buckskins of the People, speaking almost no English, and armed only with a letter of introduction from the Indian agent, he set out through Texas to find the Parkers. The agent’s letter said, “This young man is the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, and he is going to visit his mother’s people. Please show him the road and help him as you can.”
One can only imagine his thoughts as he traveled through what had once been the country of his people, or the reception he received from the Texans, his former enemies. It is said that some treated him well, proud to have met the famous chief, and that others were hostile. But his mother’s family made him welcome. His great-uncle Isaac taught him something of the white man’s ways while he stayed with him. Some stories say that Quanah also traveled to Mexico to visit his mother’s brother, John Parker.
When Quanah returned to the reservation, he began to lead his people along the peace trail. But adjustment for the Comanche was difficult. The houses that the government built for the Indians meant that the old villages were broken up and families lived isolated from each other. The houses were not of much use anyway, except for storage. The Comanche said there were too many snakes in them. However, they did like to go inside and whoop, enjoying the echoes in the empty rooms. One Comanche child asked his mother to set up his bed in the fireplace so he could look up the chimney at the stars.
In 1878 the People begged the agent for passes to hunt the buffalo. With good intentions, the agent complied. The entire tribe, 1500 people, prepared for the event. They celebrated as in the old days, remembering the stories and the dances and the medicine they had used not many years before. They all set out joyously for the plains to the west. A small military escort went with them to see that no one was tempted to steal the Texans’ horses.
Scouts were sent out, and the rest of the band watched for their signal fires. But none appeared. The hunters rode for days. All they encountered were the bare skulls and the bleached bones of the buffalo. Weeks passed. The leaves blew from the trees and the wind grew colder. But the old men swore that the buffalo would return as they always had. They made more medicine. Finally, unable to stand the hunger, many of the People returned to the reservation and the meager rations that awaited them there.
Others stubbornly refused to leave their old hunting grounds, and the military didn’t have the heart to point out that their passes had expired. As it grew colder, the agent sent wagons of food to them. His emissaries found them huddled and starving in their lodges in a snowstorm. They were finally persuaded to return to the agency. In a long, shivering, silent column, they left the graveyard that had once been their home.
Quanah must have realized that herding, not farming-, would suit his people best. As one warrior expressed it, farming put yet another burden on their overworked wives. Quanah became a cattleman and an influential leader of his people. He was progressive where economics were concerned and arranged for the leasing of Comanche lands to the Texas ranchers. Prosperous cattlemen like Charles Goodnight and Burk Burnett became his close friends.
They and other Texas ranchers had lumber hauled from Wichita Falls and built Quanah a handsome two-story, twenty-two room house at the foot of the Wichita mountains. Quanah had huge stars painted on the roof and identical apartments set up for each of his five wives. One of his wives commented that Quanah’s greatness lay not in the fact that he was a diplomat and a chief among his people and the whites, but that he managed to maintain peace and order in a house with five women.
In 1884, the government appointed him chief of the Comanches. In 1886, while in Fort Worth, he advertised in the newspaper for a picture of his mother. Sul Ross, the man who had led the attack on Naduah’s village in 1864, obtained a copy of the daguerreotype that had been made a few days after that raid, and he sent it to her son. In it she was shown nursing her daughter and staring sadly at the camera. Quanah had a large painting made from the picture and hung it in his house.
Little by little, white settlers crowded the Indians’ territory. Pressure mounted for the tribes to sell their land. In 1889, President Harrison authorized the opening of the unoccupied Indian lands, and the “Boomers” moved onto it by the thousands. Then, a few years later, the Indians each received 160 acres, and 100,000 people lined up for the “run” to claim what was left.
Quanah met Teddy Roosevelt in Oklahoma City and arranged a wolf hunt for him. In 1905, he was invited to appear in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade. He was chosen president of the local school district and deputy sheriff of Lawton, Oklahoma. In 1897, however, Quanah lost his judgeship on the reservation’s Court of Indian Offenses because of his many wives. When an official explained that polygamy was illegal and that Quanah would have to choose his favorite wife and tell the others to go, he looked at the man solemnly. “You tell ‘em,” he said. The subject was dropped.
Although Quanah became a celebrity and worked closely with the whites, he
was always a Comanche. He may have worn an occasional derby and boots and tailored suits, but he kept his hair in braids. Many of his children converted to Christianity, but Quanah never did. He used peyote extensively and upheld the Indians’ right to take advantage of the cactus’ dream-producing qualities. He is recognized as the founder of the peyote cult among the plains Indians and the beginner of the American Indian Church.
In 1910, he wrote to the Parkers of east Texas, requesting that his mother’s bones be sent to him. The Texans refused, until his letter was read to them from the pulpit one Sunday. It said in part,
My mother, she fed me, carry me in her arms, pat me to sleep. I play, she happy. I cry, she sad. She love her boy. They took my mother away, took Texas away. Not let her boy see her. Now she dead. Her boy want to bury her, sit by her mound. My people, her people, we now all one people.
The bones were sent to Oklahoma, and Quanah cut his braids in mourning over them. He died a short time afterward, on February 11, 1911. He was buried in full Comanche dress. When he died, there were even fewer Comanche in Oklahoma than when he had surrendered thirty-five years earlier. White man’s diseases were still taking their toll.
For many years after Quanah Parker led his band onto the reservation, long furrows could be seen in the surface of the prairie. The grooves undulated with the swells of the plains and stretched to the horizon. Even though overgrown with grass, they
continued to mark the trails made by thousands of hooves, moccasined feet, and travois passing back and forth, following the seasons and the buffalo. The furrows were the paths of a people who were happiest when they were moving.
Perhaps if the wind is just right, and one listens carefully, the laughter and talk, the shouts and the songs of the People can still be heard there. Perhaps they still wander those trails free, as they always were, in spirit.
Suvate.
“I just wanted to tell a good story, because that’s what life is all about, I think.”
Robson, Lucia St. Clair Page 75