Cynthia Ann Parker died believing that all her children were dead as well. But one of her sons survived. His name was Quanah Parker, and he became the next chapter in the Parker legend and the next great storyteller as well. Like the others, he told his mother’s story in large part to explain his own.
We know little about his life and times as a son and warrior. Comanches had no written language, and after his surrender in 1875 Quanah had good reasons not to discuss his career as an enemy combatant against the forces of the United States and the sovereign state of Texas. Instead, historians have been left to sort through scraps of information, liberally embroidered with myth and outright falsehood. Quanah emerges in many accounts as the most powerful and skilled of Comanche war chiefs. In some versions, he wreaks vengeance on whites for his white mother’s recapture; in others he instructs his followers not to kill white women and children for fear of harming her and his sister, Prairie Flower.
What we know comes from his own carefully selective memory and those of his companions and his foes, all of it recorded long after the events took place. Some of it seems plausible, most of it not. But the portrait of the early Quanah as a well-known and much-feared Comanche war chief is myth: as far as Texans were concerned, he was neither. The indisputable fact is that before 1875 there is no mention of Quanah in any official document or Indian agency record.
One thing he was always clear about: his father, Peta Nocona, was not killed at the Pease River Massacre. According to the most plausible Comanche accounts, Nocona and his two sons were on a hunting trip on the morning of the attack, too far from the besieged encampment to hear or see what was happening—hence Cynthia Ann’s extreme anxiety over the fate of her boys after she was captured by the troopers. Nocona heard nothing until a friend tracked him down with the terrible news.
Nocona and his sons made their way to a large Comanche winter encampment. He must have feared the Rangers would come seeking the boys, for he changed both their names to help conceal them. According to one Comanche account, Tseeta, meaning “Eagle,” became Quanah, meaning “Sweet Smell,” and Pecos became Pee-nah, or “Peanut.”
For the first time, Nocona explained to them that their mother was a white woman whom he had captured when she was a girl during a battle in Texas. Quanah said his father became “very morose and unhappy” over the loss of Cynthia Ann and a second wife, a Mexican captive, and “shed many tears.”
According to Quanah, his father lived for some five more years. Comanche oral tradition says he died of old war wounds somewhere in the Antelope Hills of Oklahoma.
Quanah would remember the times that followed his father’s death as a painful period in which he and his brother, two orphans with no close relatives, had to scrounge for food and clothing with little support from other Comanches. He attributed some of this hardship to the fact that his mother was white. Within a few years his brother died as well from one of the many epidemics that were ravaging the tribe. Quanah was truly on his own.
He was not exactly an outcast but neither was he a cherished member of the tribe. His father had been well respected among Comanches, even legendary, for his prowess as a warrior, but was called “the Wanderer” and was known as a loner with no close friends. The young Quanah, too, traveled alone.
The Staked Plains became his domain. The plains were a parched, brittle, limestone plateau on the western flank of Texas, some 250 miles long and 150 miles wide—as large as Maine. In summer they locked themselves inside a suffocating closet of gray haze—brown, yellow ground with shrubs and dwarfed trees sprinkled throughout like random afterthoughts before the curled blue edges of the hazy horizon. It was a land of high temperatures and low rainfall. Francisco Coronado, who had passed through the area in 1541 on his search for El Dorado, pronounced the plains “so vast that I did not find their limit anywhere I went … with no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea.”
The Spanish called them Llano Estacada—the “Stockade Plains”—a reference either to the fortresslike appearance of their blunt escarpments or to the stakes that one Spanish expedition hammered into the ground so that they could retrace their path through the vast swath of nothingness. On some Texan maps the plains were labeled the Great American Desert, and they might as well have been posted with a skull and cross-bones. There was precious little grass and even less water—nothing to keep a horse or a mule or a man alive for very long. Under a canopy of sullen gray sky, the plains were a theater of death. “The land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in its immensity,” wrote the author Timothy Egan.
To the casual observer, the Llano looks like one seamless, arid platform. But Quanah and his fellow Comanches knew that the plains concealed a network of deeply etched canyons like intimate secrets that provided shelter from the winter storms and fragile vegetation and water throughout the rest of the year. The largest is called Palo Duro—“Hard Pole”—a name said to originate in the hardwood wild cherry and plum trees scattered through the hidden valley. At the time of the Civil War no white man had ventured into the area for three hundred years.
Quanah knew intimately the Palo Duro and all of the small depressions, fissures, and hidden seasonal water holes of the Llano. For him each was a haven, a place he could linger and hide without challenge from red men or white. At times he even claimed to have been born on Cedar Lake, the alkaline sea on the eastern edge of the Llano. To an orphan like Quanah, something about the harsh empty desert must have felt like home.
A YOUNG COMANCHE MALE without standing or a patron faced a hard road in attaining stature, prosperity, and a desirable bride. Those fettered by poverty or low rank faced two choices: go along with subordination for an extended period until they could gain a foothold; or strike out on their own. Quanah chose the latter.
From his earliest days, according to oral legend, he showed an untamed romantic streak that violated the norms of Comanche society. After Peta Nocona’s death, it was said, a senior chief named Yellow Bear invited Quanah to join his camp. There Quanah fell in love with Yellow Bear’s daughter, Weckeah. Quanah knew that a fellow brave named Tannap had first call on Weckeah: Yellow Bear had already made arrangements with Tannap’s father, who had offered a string of ponies as a bride price. Yellow Bear pledged that in three nights Weckeah would join Tannap in his teepee to consummate the marriage.
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 Satanta 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.”
With Sherman’s blessing, Sheridan launched the Winter Campaign of 1868–69 against the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes in their winter quarters, seizing their supplies and livestock, killing those who resisted, and driving the rest back into the reservation. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the great mythmaker, marching under Sheridan’s orders, struck the biggest and most controversial blow in late November in a surprise attack on a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment on the Washita River near modern-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. Traveling through a foot of fresh snow, Custer and eight hundred men overran a winter village of fifty-one lodges, killing dozens of men, women, and children. Among the victims were Black Kettle, the Cheyenne chief who was a signatory at Medicine Lodge, and his wife. In an eerie premonition of Custer’s own demise at Little Big Horn eight years later, two officers and nineteen enlisted men were killed when they ran into a superior force of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa braves coming to Black Kettle’s aid. Custer burned the lodges and winter food supply, slaughtered hundreds of Indian ponies and mules, and brought back fifty prisoners.
Sheridan justified the slaughter of Indian women and children by accusing Black Kettle of engaging in the same deeds. Custer’s men had found the bodies of two white captives, Clara Blinn and her two-year-old son, Willie, both of whom had been killed by Cheyenne warriors. The troopers, Sheridan, wrote in his report, “had struck a hard blow, and wiped out old Black Kettle and his murderers and rapers of helpless women.”
He flung the most hideous of accusations, characterizing whites who sympathized with the Indians as accessories to murder and rape—“the aiders and abettors of savages who murdered, without mercy, men, women, and children; in all cases ravishing the women sometimes as often as forty and fifty times in succession, and while insensible from brutality and exhaustion forced sticks up their persons, and, in one instance, the fortieth or fiftieth savage drew his saber and used it on the person of the woman in the same manner. I do not know exactly how far these humanitarians should be excused on account of their ignorance …”
Sheridan believed such women were no longer worth rescuing, having suffered the classic “Fate Worse than Death,” and it might be best if they perished by murder, suicide “or the providentially directed bullet of a would-be rescuer.”
While it seemed like a deranged and twisted notion, Sheridan’s formula captured the nightmares and obsessions of many whites—their need for retribution, yet at the same time their deep-seated belief that women sexually abused in such a fashion were fit only for death. Nearly a century later, the director John Ford would take the same theme and build The Searchers around it.
PRESIDENT ULYSSES S. GRANT had seen enough. In an effort to end the Plains Indian wars, he met with a delegation of Quakers shortly after his election to the presidency in 1868 and agreed to appoint their clergy as Indian agents. Grant, as usual, put it simply: “If you can make Quakers out of the Indians it will take the fight out of them,” he told the group. “Let us have peace.”
Lawrie Tatum, a balding, bearded forty-seven-year-old teacher living on a farm in Iowa, was one of those pressed into government service in the name of Grant’s peace policy. Tatum was a prominent Iowan known for his involvement with helping runaway slaves before the Civil War. Despite having no experience in dealing with Indians, he was named Kiowa-Comanche agent in 1869.
Tatum came to the agency in Anadarko with few illusions. Kiowas and Comanches “were still addicted to raiding in Texas, stealing horses and mules, and sometimes committing other depredations …,” he wrote. “They were probably the worst Indians east of the Rocky Mountains.” The warriors saw themselves at war with Texans, not with the Army. But a prominent Comanche chief told Tatum flatly that “if Washington don’t want my young men to raid in Texas, then Washington must move Texas clear away, where my young men can’t find it.”
Tatum quickly figured out how the warriors were exploiting the reservation system. “They told me a number of times,” he wrote, “that the only way that they could get a large supply of annuity goods was to go out onto the warpath, kill some people, steal a good many horses, get the soldiers to chase them awhile, without permitting them to do much harm, and then the Government would give them a large amount of blankets, calico, muslin, etc. to get them to quit!”
From the beginning, the warriors taunted and exploited Tatum’s goodwill and naïveté. Comanches stole his horses and his mules. A raiding party killed a man at the agency’s beef corral, and killed and scalped another man six miles away. Tatum was forced to move the beef cattle sixty miles east to Chickasaw territory so they would be out of Comanche reach. All the Friends employees fled the agency, including Tatum’s wife.
As so often was the case, the showdown came over the question of white captives. In August 1869 a raiding party killed a Texas rancher named Koozier and abducted his wife and five children. The warriors returning to the agency demanded two mules and a carbine as ransom for the family. “I told them that I should give them nothing at that time, and they need not come again for their rations until the captives were brought to me,” wrote Tatum.
It was a tense moment. The Indians kept their bows and arrows at their sides as they spoke with Tatum, and one of them ostentatiously took the cartridges out of his breech-loading gun and put them back again. Another one took to whetting a butcher knife in full view, “turning it over from side to side, making all the noise he could with it,” Tatum recalled.
“After the council closed an Indian came over to me and ran his hand under my vest over my heart to see if he could ‘feel any scare,’ “ he recalled.
In the end, Tatum got back the captives. The Indians wanted large supplies of coffee and sugar and their usual supply of flour and beef, plus ammunition. He gave them only the usual amount, “and $100 for each captive, as approved by the department.” Working this way, bargaining for live bodies one family at a time, Lawrie Tatum recovered a total of twenty-six captives during his four years as Indian agent.
The Quahadis, Quanah’s band, did not play these games. For the most part they stayed away from the agency altogether. Their message, said Tatum, was that they “would never go to the agency and shake hands until the soldiers would go there and fight with them; if whipped, they would then go to the agency and shake hands.”
SHERMAN WAS INFURIATED by Tatum’s reports. After President Grant appointed him overall commander of the army in 1869, Sherman and Army Inspector General Randolph Marcy went to Texas to see the situation for themselves. They left San Antonio on May 1871 on a 430-mile fact-finding mission to the army’s freshly established Fort Sill, escorted by seventeen black soldiers from the Tenth Cavalry. Along the way, they observed burned-out ranch houses and abandoned farms. Sherman marveled at how anyone could live in such a dangerous area without expecting to be killed.
On May 18, Sherman’s party crossed Salt Creek Prairie under the watchful eyes of 150 Comanche and Kiowa braves led by Satanta, Satank, Big Tree, and a Kiowa medicine man named Mamanti, who was known as the Owl Prophet. The Indians had left the reservation at Fort Sill a few days earlier for their annual spring raiding season in Texas. The night before, Mamanti received a vision foretelling an encounter with two groups of whites the next day; the vision told him to let the first pass unharmed. Thus Sherman and his men rode free. An hour or so later, a small wagon train of a dozen teamsters hauling corn from the railway line to Fort Griffin passed the same spot. This time the warriors struck.
When Sherman heard about the attack, he ordered Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie, the new commander of the Fourth Cavalry based at Fort Griffin, to rush to the scene. It was a miserable rainy day when Mackenzie and his men arrived. “The poor victims were stripped, scalped, and horribly mutilated; several were beheaded and their brains scooped out,” Captain Robert G. Carter, one of Mackenzie’s subordinates, recalled. “Their fingers, toes, and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths, and their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled with arrows which made them resemble porcupines. Their bowels had been gashed with knives and carefully heaped upon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live coals …”
“One wretched man, Samuel Elliott … was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death …”
Sherman pushed on to Fort Sill, arriving May 23. When the Kiowa leaders arrived four days later, Satanta freely described to Lawrie Tatum what had happened. He was summoned to a meeting with Sherman at the post commander’s house. Standing on the front porch, Sherman signaled his men, and the windows of the house and nearby stables were thrown open. Soldiers trained their guns on Satanta and his followers. The Kiowa chief quickly shifted into servile mode, and sought to walk back his claim: he had only watched the massacre from a distance, he insisted, not participated in it. But Sherman ordered him, Big Tree, and Satank placed in irons.
Lone Wolf came riding up, eager for a showdown. He sat down on the porch with a Winchester cocked defiantly across his lap. For a moment, a replay of the Council House massacre of 1840 seemed imminent, and Sherman would have been caught in the crossfire. But Colonel Benjamin Grierson, Fort Sill’s commander, grabbed Lone Wolf’s carbine and warned the Indians they had no chance.
Satanta could not quite comprehend why Sherman was so upset, a fact that enraged the general even more. “I answered him that it was a cowardly act for a hundred professed Warriors to attack a dozen Citizen Teamsters, and that all his hundred in time would be hung up like dogs as he would be,” Sherman wrote in a letter to his son. “He begged me to take him out now & shoot him, but I told him he should hang in Texas. This they dread terribly.”
Sherman ordered Mackenzie to take Satank, Satanta, and Big Tree to Texas for trial. As the journey began, Satank told a Caddo escort named George Washington, “Tell my people that I am dead. I died the first day out from Fort Sill. My bones will be lying on the side of the road. I wish my people to gather them up and take them home.”
About a mile from the post, Satank sang a death song. Then, with his back to his guards, he pulled the shackles from his hands, scraping off the skin, drew a butcher knife he had somehow managed to conceal in his clothes, and attacked a guard. The other guards opened fire. “It took him twenty minutes to die,” Carter recalled. Mackenzie left the body on the side of the road.
MOODY, THIN-LIPPED, and hobbled by wounds that seemed both physical and emotional, Ranald Slidell Mackenzie came from a family of warriors. His father had been a naval commander, his uncle a Confederate commissioner. His mother was the granddaughter of Revolutionary War soldiers and his brother-in-law was no less than Commodore Matthew C. Perry, the man who opened Japan to the West. One of Mackenzie’s brothers attained the rank of lieutenant commander during the Civil War, and another was a navy rear admiral.
Born in New York City in 1840, Mackenzie graduated first in his class at West Point in 1862 and went directly into combat. Before the Civil War ended he received seven brevets for gallantry and was wounded six times, three of them at the battle of Cedar Creek in northern Virginia in October 1864, where he was shot in the heel, then hit again and temporarily paralyzed after his horse was shot in the head and catapulted him to the hard ground. Two fingers on his right hand were shot off during the siege of Petersburg—which led the Indians to call him “Bad Hand.” He was present at the Appomattox surrender at the request of Grant, who called him “the most promising young officer in the army.”
After the war Mackenzie was promoted to colonel and commanded one of the Buffalo Soldier regiments of black troops and fought Apaches. In February 1871 he took command of the Fourth Cavalry, based at Fort Concho and Fort Richardson in north Texas.
Mackenzie burned with ambition, but he was small, rheumatic, and awkward on horseback. Captain Carter, who became a loyal admirer, called him “fretful, irritable, often times irascible.” Lieutenant James Parker, another loyal subordinate, recalled the deep, uncomfortable silences when Mackenzie invited Parker to join him for dinner. “We are full of meditation,” wrote Parker, “and we meditate and eat and meditate.” Still, these same aides recalled how Mackenzie generously paid off the $500 debt of a junior officer, telling him to pay it back when he could.
In early October 1871, Mackenzie led the Fourth Cavalry into Blanco Canyon in the lower Panhandle, the heart of Quahadi territory, to punish the warriors who refused to submit to reservation rule. Few white men had ventured into this region ever since Coronado’s doomed expedition for gold in 1541. Every few miles the canyon widened into a broad valley hemmed in by impassable bluffs and pockmarked with ravines, sand hills, and narrow creeks that fed ponds and lagoons. There were herds of buffalo, flocks of wild ducks, and, according to Carter, “occasionally a majestic swan, whose trumpet notes sounded strange to our hunters.”
After several uncomfortable nights, the hungry and exhausted troopers bivouacked in a narrow gap between the canyon walls. Mackenzie allowed them to build campfires, tipping their location. Around midnight a dozen shots rang out in quick succession. Mounted Indians rushed the camp, riding by at full speed, ringing bells, screaming war whoops, and trying to stampede the six hundred horses and mules. The terrified animals strained at their ropes to break loose—“rearing, jumping, plunging, running, and snorting,” wrote Carter, “with a strength that terror and brute frenzy alone can inspire. They trembled and groaned in their crazed fright …” Officers shouted commands, “Get to your horses!” The panicked horses pulled up the iron picket pins from the ground, sending them hurtling and whistling like bullets. The troopers tried to grab the ropes, “only to be dragged and thrown among the heels of the horses with hands lacerated and burnt by the ropes running rapidly through their fingers.” The men secured all that they could as the raiders fled in triumph.
“The hissing and spitting of the bullets sounded viciously,” Carter would recall, “and the yells of the retreating Indians from the distance came back on the midnight air with a peculiar, taunting ring.” Carter thought to himself, “We found them at last!” And then he realized a more accurate and frightening truth: “They had found us!”
The Indians had taken some seventy of the army’s horses and mules, including Mackenzie’s own fine gray pacer.
At dawn Carter led a patrol to search for the lost horses. A shot rang out in the valley, and through the yellow morning haze Carter and his men spotted several Comanches attempting to make off with a dozen more animals. The troopers gave chase, vaulting an arroyo and pursuing the Indians onto a flat open prairie ascending toward a ridge. Suddenly, as the sun rose high enough to illuminate the plain, Carter made out the forms of dozens of mounted Indians galloping over the ridge straight at him and his twelve men. He had fallen into an ambush.
“It was like an electric shock,” he would recall. “All seemed to realize the deadly peril of their situation and to take it in at a glance. For a moment the blood seemed fairly congealed for we realized what the ruse of the Indians had been …”
Carter had to choose. He and his men could try to coax their tired mounts back to the ravine, where they could take cover. But Carter knew their horses were too spent to make it. The alternative was to stand and fight where they were and retreat slowly, firing at every step. Carter ordered the men to dismount.
The Comanches moved to encircle the small band of soldiers. The warriors, Carter wrote, “were naked to the waist; were arrayed in all their war paint and trinkets, with head dress or war bonnets of fur or feathers … Their ponies, especially the white, cream, dun and clay banks, were striped and otherwise artistically painted and decorated with gaudy stripes of flannel and calico. Bells were jingling, feathers waving, and with jubilant, discordant yells … and uttering taunting shouts, they pressed on to what they surely considered to be their legitimate prey.”
Somewhere behind the warriors, high up one of the canyon walls, Carter could hear Comanche women ululating in a high-pitched tremolo, urging on their men.
Carter and his men kept firing as they pulled back, then leapt on their horses and broke for the ravine. One of the men, Sergeant Seander Gregg, was riding an exhausted gray horse that stumbled. An Indian, taller and darker than most, came racing out of the pack on a coal-black horse. He was dressed in a full-length war bonnet and bear claw necklace. “His face was smeared with black war paint, which gave his features a satanic look,” Carter wrote. “A large, cruel mouth added to his ferocious appearance.”
Quahadi Comanche camp, 1869–74. The Quahadis were the last of the major Comanche groups to surrender to white military rule and take up reservation life.
Forty yards away, Gregg’s comrades tried to lay down covering fire. But the warrior pulled his horse behind the hapless sergeant, using him as a shield against the bullets. Carter shouted to Gregg to use his carbine or his six-shooter, but Gregg was too stunned and weakened to force a cartridge into the chamber. The Indian drew his own pistol and shot Gregg point-blank in the head.
Many years later Carter, in his detailed but melodramatic account of the skirmish, would claim that the warrior was Quanah. The claim might be categorized as just another post-incident Quanah myth, except for the fact that Quanah himself later affirmed publicly that he had killed Gregg.
He wheeled his horse around and galloped away with his warriors. At first Carter wondered why, but then he saw Tonkawa scouts riding to his rescue, bearing down toward his position; right behind them were Mackenzie’s troopers.
The Comanches, supplied with fresh mounts by their women atop the canyon walls, shouted down taunts and insults. But they did not attack. By the time Mackenzie’s troops made it to the top, the Quahadis had melted away.
The next few days were a game of cat and mouse. The Quahadis had fresh ponies and knew intimately the hidden folds and creases of the landscape, but they were carrying hundreds of women and children alongside the warriors. Mackenzie’s men and horses, meanwhile, were reaching the point of exhaustion. The day after the ambush the Tonkawas signaled from atop the bluff that they had found a trail. It took the troops hours to scale the narrow path on their spent mounts. When they reached the top, wrote Carter, they came upon “what appeared to be a vast, almost illimitable expanse of prairie. As far as the eye could reach, not a brush or tree, a twig or stone, not an object of any kind or a living thing, was in sight. It stretched out before us—one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared to the ocean in its vastness.”
The troopers had come to the edge of the Staked Plains, Quanah’s flat, arid, relentless kingdom. They were three thousand feet above sea level on the limestone plateau in mid-October with a cold north wind howling down the treeless prairie.
The Quahadis refused to engage, keeping a steady distance between themselves and the troopers as the afternoon faded to darkness and the wind blew in a cold rain mixed with sleet. The soldiers followed a trail of half-burned campfires and jettisoned lodge poles, stone hammers, mortars, pestles, and buffalo skins. Eventually Carter could see the main body of fleeing women and children about a mile in the distance. He awaited Mackenzie’s order to attack, but it never came. Perhaps, Carter surmised, the colonel feared risking his troops against a clever and ruthless enemy some one hundred miles beyond his supply lines, or perhaps he did not have the stomach for slaughtering women and children on a cold October night. Within minutes, the village was gone, its escape hidden by the darkness.
The soldiers were left to huddle in the storm. Mackenzie himself, suffering in immaculate silence from his old war wounds, shivered from exposure until someone threw a buffalo robe over his shaking body.
Faced with flagging morale, tired horses, and a dwindling supply of food, Mackenzie decided to turn back east to Fort Richardson. He was finished, for now, with Quanah, the Staked Plains, and the Quahadis.
But the Quahadis were not quite finished with him. As the column once again pushed its way through Canyon Blanco, someone cried out, “Indians! Indians!” The Tonkawa scouts broke away from the column, racing toward a small ravine where they had spotted two Comanches leading their horses up the canyon trail. The Tonkawas sealed off the area and went into the ravine for the kill. Mackenzie grew impatient and dismounted. “Just then, a sharp swish, a thud, and a spiked arrow buried itself in the upper fleshy part of Mackenzie’s leg,” wrote Carter. “He hurried back to the rear and had the spike cut out and the wound dressed.” The old warrior had been wounded again.
Mackenzie’s troop staggered back into Fort Richardson on November 18, 1871, in the midst of a blizzard. The men had been in the field since May 1 and they were cold, exhausted, and starving. Total war had faltered. Quanah and the Quahadis still roamed free.
