In End of the Trail (1915), James Earle Fraser’s doleful statue of a Native American rider and horse, the heads of both are bowed in defeat. This was the tragic and romantic portrait of the Noble but Doomed Savage at the beginning of the twentieth century, vanquished and displaced by the modern world, the tip of his war lance turned downward in submission. But its message was misleading: Indians did not vanish, their story was not over, and their trail did not end when they lost their struggle against white domination. Their struggle to survive continued, only in many ways it was harder and more complex than the one they had waged in battle.
The long, thin caravan of Quahadi men, women, and children—the last significant group of hostile Comanches on the High Plains—finally trickled into the Signal Station, six miles west of Fort Sill, on June 2, 1875. The official count was 427 people and 1,500 horses. The old people, women, and children proceeded to an appointed campground, while the men quietly laid down their arms and trudged under military escort to their place of confinement at the fort, a roofless icehouse with a stone floor, 150 by 40 feet, already crammed with 130 Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne prisoners. At meal times soldiers would throw chunks of raw meat over the high walls. “They fed us like we were lions,” said Gotebo, a Kiowa warrior. Quanah was spared this indignity and allowed to camp with his wives and children west of the fort, along the banks of Cache Creek.
Many of the Quahadis who rode into Fort Sill to surrender in the summer of 1875 likely believed they could ride out again and resume their nomadic warrior life whenever they chose to, as they had in the past. Quanah, by contrast, seemed to understand from the beginning that his life had been irrevocably altered, and he began to adjust accordingly.
For one thing, the Comanche population had been decimated by war, epidemic, starvation, and the grim realities of fugitive life on the unyielding plains. When the nineteenth century began, there had been between twenty thousand and thirty thousand Comanches. But James M. Haworth, head of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache agency at the fort, registered only 1,475 in 1877, along with 1,120 Kiowas and 344 Apaches. A few hundred more were huddled in remote corners of the Staked Plains or in the foothills of the Rockies. The assembly-line extermination of the buffalo over the past decade meant that the Comanches had lost not only most of their own community but also their sole traditional means of replenishing it.
Open resistance was futile. Quanah knew well the fate of Satank, Satanta, Big Tree, and the other chiefs who had been hunted down, imprisoned, or condemned to a never-ending life on the run. Quanah was a proud man but a practical one. He harbored no taste for martyrdom.
He decided to recast his own narrative. Not that he thought of it in exactly those terms, but Quanah was a storyteller. His old story was about a proud, independent warrior, beholden to no one, who had held out as long as he could. Now he had a different tale to tell—about a man who was half-white and half-Comanche, and who longed to bring those two worlds together, explaining each to the other and linking the two, just as they were linked in his own bloodstream. The Man of Peace. The White Comanche. The Noble Savage. It was, always, a work in progress. But almost from the moment his captivity began, it is clear that this was the role he had decided to play.
From the day he arrived at Fort Sill, Quanah chose to make himself useful to the men who were now in charge of his fate, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie and Indian agent Haworth. Twice that summer Quanah volunteered to round up Comanche stragglers and deliver them to the fort; each time Mackenzie sent along a document of authorization to give Quanah a modicum of protection from trigger-happy whites inclined to kill any Comanche they encountered.
Texas was a dangerous place for any Indian to venture into. A Texas congressman attached a rider to an appropriation bill that year forbidding Indian hunting parties from entering the state even when escorted by troops. Perhaps he was thinking of their safety. Five Indians who crossed into Jack County in northeastern Texas in April 1875 were surrounded by white settlers, gunned down, and beheaded. “I understand the heads are now preserved in alcohol in Jacksboro,” wrote Haworth in his annual report to Washington.
On his first run as an agent of the United States government, Quanah brought back a party of twenty-one Comanches whom he located on the Pecos River. This was “excellent conduct in a dangerous expedition,” Mackenzie reported to his superiors. The returned fugitives were stripped of their weapons and horses and dispatched to the icehouse. But Quanah insisted that they not be shipped off to a military prison. This earned him the gratitude of the former fugitives. Already he was learning how to serve as a bridge between the two sides, white and Indian.
It was not long before Mackenzie sent out Quanah again, this time to find and bring back a small band of Quahadis still lurking in the familiar, well-worn creases of the Texas Panhandle. Quanah left on July 12 with three men, three women, and several pack mules loaded with supplies. He carried a white flag and a stern letter from Mackenzie warning anyone they encountered not to interfere with him or his mission.
One of the renegades was Herman Lehmann, a teenage white captive turned Comanche warrior. He and his fellow warriors, determined to live by the old ways, scoured the desolate plateau for the last remnants of wild game while avoiding the soldiers and Texas Rangers who were in turn hunting for them. But their main enemies were the buffalo hunters who were engaged in eliminating the last of the herds. Everywhere they rode, the Quahadis came across stinking mounds of rotting carcasses. “The plains were literally alive with buffalo hunters,” Lehmann would recall.
Some of the warriors had fought in the debacle at Adobe Walls and did not yearn for another. For the most part they shied away from the hunters, who were armed with long-range Sharps rifles. But early in 1877 the nomads joined forces with warriors under Black Horse, a Quahadi chief who had obtained permission from Haworth for a hunting expedition in the Panhandle. When Black Horse and his increasingly frustrated followers could not find any buffalo to kill, they decided to hunt the hunters instead. One morning in early February they came across a lone buffalo man named Marshall Sewell, who was working the Salt Fork of the Brazos River. They watched unseen from a distance as Sewell brought down beast after beast in mechanical fashion with his rifle. When he finally ran out of bullets, they moved in. One of the Indians shot him in the thigh. Sewell frantically hobbled back toward his camp but Lehmann and the others cut him off and finished him.
The Comanches pillaged the camp, taking weapons, tools, and food, defacing the hides with their knives and setting them on fire. They scalped Sewell’s corpse, cut a gash in each temple and stuck a sharp stick through his stomach, then set fire to his wagon. No white hunter could miss the message.
Seeking revenge, about four dozen buffalo men set out in early March to hunt down the Comanches. They found the Indians camped in Yellow House Canyon, a few miles east of present-day Lubbock. The gun battle lasted all day—one hunter and three Indians were killed—until the badly outnumbered hunters were forced to withdraw. The skirmish constituted the last organized battle between whites and Indians in the state of Texas. A few weeks later a cavalry troop from Fort Griffin quietly rounded up most of the Quahadi stragglers and escorted them back to Fort Sill. Lehmann and a ragtag handful eluded capture and continued to roam the Staked Plains until Quanah tracked them down that summer along the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico.
To these hardened, defiant, but exhausted stragglers, Quanah did not try to preach peace, love, or reconciliation, just practical arithmetic. They were, he told them, outnumbered. He “told us that it was useless for us to fight longer,” Lehmann would recall, “for the white people would kill all of us if we kept on fighting … He said the white men had us completely surrounded; that they would come in on us from every side, and we had better give up.”
Some of the men, including Herman, wanted to hold out longer, but they all reluctantly agreed to come with Quanah. He moved them across the hostile Panhandle under cover of darkness, abandoning three hundred horses and mules along the way. During the daytime Quanah used a pair of army field glasses to search the landscape for buffalo hunters. In his past life as a warrior, he had ferociously hunted these men; now he sought to hide from them.
Lehmann came in with Quanah but refused to surrender. Quanah concealed him for a time among Quanah’s own household, but then told him he must return to his white family. Lehmann grew angry; he even threatened to kill Horace Jones, the Comanche interpreter, when Jones summoned him to Fort Sill for a talk. Quanah took Lehmann back to his lodge, fed him, and persuaded him to go home to Texas. Quanah promised to look after Lehmann’s horses and to welcome him back if things didn’t work out with his white relatives. This was a subject Quanah knew something about, for he had started searching for white relatives of his own.
RANALD MACKENZIE HAD BEEN A TACTICIAN of brutal efficiency, but now he was keen to help his former Comanche foes survive. This was not purely altruism on his part. With winter approaching, he wrote to his superiors, “the emergency is pressing, and unless these Indians are fed and the obligations of the Indian Department to them fulfilled, we may expect certainly a stampede of the Kiowas and Comanches from their reservation.” Hungry Indians storming back onto the warpath was not a pleasant image to contemplate.
Mackenzie gave back to the Comanches more than five hundred of their horses and mules seized during the Red River campaign, and he sold the rest for $27,000 and established a Pony Fund. He used the money to buy 3,500 head of sheep, hoping the Comanches would learn to harvest the wool and eat the meat. The experiment was an utter failure: Comanches, it turned out, hated mutton. In any event, most of the sheep died of exposure that first winter. Cattle were the only realistic option.
Mackenzie’s efforts at family reunification were no more successful. Six days after Quanah first arrived at Fort Sill, Mackenzie wrote to the quartermaster at Denison, Texas, seeking information on Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower. The letter was published in several Texas newspapers and aroused much interest. Eventually Mackenzie received a reply from Benjamin Parker, one of Cynthia Ann’s first cousins and the son of the late Reverend Daniel Parker, informing him that she and Prairie Flower had died. There would be no mother and child reunion.
Mackenzie went off to the Dakotas to fight Dull Knife, chief of the northern Cheyenne. When he returned to Fort Sill two years later he wrote to Isaac Parker, Quanah’s uncle and the man who had taken Cynthia Ann home after she was recaptured in 1860, telling him of Quanah’s efforts to contact his Texas relatives. “He has been here two years, and none of his cousins or other relations have been here to see him,” Mackenzie told Isaac. “… He rather thinks that they do not wish to see him.”
He described Quanah as “a man whom it is worth trying to do something with,” and pleaded with Isaac that Quanah “certainly should not be held responsible for the sins of a former generation of Comanches.”
Quanah’s motives for a reunion with his Texas relatives were not just sentimental: he hoped they could rescue him from captivity and enrich him as well. “After an Indian custom,” Mackenzie’s letter added, Quanah wanted to receive a small gift from his relatives as a signal that they would welcome him for a visit. Mackenzie pleaded on Quanah’s behalf “that he has heard his uncle is well off, and that he is poor and trying to live like a white man, and that he would like him to give him a light wagon, if this is the case.”
There is no record that Isaac Parker ever responded. Cynthia Ann had been such an embarrassment to her white family that no one seemed willing to contemplate welcoming her wild Comanche son into their Texas home.
Still, in some ways, Quanah’s opportunities were better in the new world than in the old. As a half-white Comanche orphan, he had possessed limited stature in a shattered tribal community disintegrating under military pressure and disease. Now he had new patrons and potential allies. He frequently invoked Mackenzie and Haworth’s paternal advice: “Follow the white man’s path.”
Mackenzie soon left Fort Sill again for another assignment. His life would be cut short by illnesses both physical and mental. Haworth, too, was eventually reassigned. When Philemon B. Hunt, the new agent, arrived to take Haworth’s place, Quanah was quick to curry his favor as well. “Even though I am here with my friends yet there is but one council I listen to, and that is yours,” he wrote Hunt in a letter. “I do not listen to any foolish talks. I wait and listen to you alone, you are my agent.”
Hunt soon fell under Quanah’s spell, and even tried to help him claim his rightful share of his late mother’s legacy: the league of land pledged to her by the Texas state assembly in 1861. The agent wrote to Benjamin Parker and engaged a lawyer and a land agent in Texas, all to no avail. The Texas land office ruled Cynthia Ann’s warrant invalid because her uncle and brother, after originally applying for the land certificate in 1861, had failed to pursue the matter until the Civil War ended in 1865. “By then, all acts of the previous legislature had been considered void because they occurred during the rebellion,” the lawyer L. H. Miller told Hunt. The only way to obtain the land, Miller added, was by a new act of the legislature. Hunt had raised Quanah’s expectations in vain.
Still, the former warrior was beginning to invoke his mother’s story in telling his own—and in explaining why Comanches and whites must learn to live together in peace. And he did something that was very un-Comanche-like: he began to use her last name.
From now on he was Quanah Parker.
EVEN IN THEIR NEW STATE of semicaptivity, the Comanches were not a displaced people. The reservation they had been allotted under the Treaty of Medicine Lodge was located on land that held deep meaning in their history. Its myths were just as strong for them as the myth of the frontier was for whites. Cache Creek, where most of the Comanches pitched their teepees, had been a favorite hunting and watering spot for more than a century. A few miles to the north were the Wichita Mountains, the place where they believed the world had begun. The largest of the Wichitas was Mount Scott, more than two thousand feet tall, which towered protectively like a somber, brooding sentinel above the animated prairie. The mountain was the sacred site from which, according to Kiowa legend, the buffalo had first emerged thousands of years ago to populate the earth—and had retreated to in recent years to escape the white hunters. The buffalo would emerge again someday once the danger had passed.
To the east was Medicine Bluff, a holy ground of sharp granite ridges and rocky outcroppings where priests communed with the Great Spirit and gathered their magic and power. And to the south was Big Pasture—nearly one million acres of flat, unpopulated grass and scrub suitable for grazing, an unruly kingdom of wild game, migratory birds, and wolves. This land, too, was part of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache preserve.
The reservation was a complex and treacherous place riddled with politics, corruption, and special interests. For predatory whites it was rich with possibilities for larceny and self-enrichment. Unscrupulous “squaw men” married Indian women and then claimed the right to a share of whatever allocations their wives were entitled to. White merchants exploited Indian ignorance about cash and credit. Quanah helped run down thieves who raided the four thousand Indian-owned horses grazing the unfenced pastures of greater Fort Sill as if it was their private preserve.
But outright theft was the least of the problems. The Kiowa-Comanche-Apache agency was beholden to Congress and to a byzantine bureaucracy, both of which had their own goals and imperatives; concern for the safety and welfare of its Indian wards was far down the list. As stipulated by the Medicine Lodge treaty, Indians were expected to embrace white schools, private property, and Christian values. Having defeated the Indians in battle, the white world was now determined to obliterate their identity as well. The agency was supposed to ease their transition from nomadic warriors to gentleman farmers yet was stunningly ill equipped for the task. The land allotted for agriculture was barely arable, subject to regular drought and lurking insects, and unsuitable for growing corn, the main staple. Its poor quality served only to reinforce the traditional Comanche aversion to farming. Government rations, as promised at Medicine Lodge, were essential for the Indians’ survival, yet Fort Sill was 165 miles from the nearest railhead. The government was supposed to deliver 10,000 pounds of flour, 2,000 pounds of bacon, 825 pounds of coffee, and 1,650 pounds of sugar as well as a beef ration to the 3,000 Indians each week. But the supplies came erratically, if at all, and were subject to profiteers who delivered maggot-riddled staples and spoiled meat. Medicine Lodge had also stipulated annuities worth $30,000 per year in useful goods such as axes, frying pans, and butcher knives, plus a special allotment of clothing. Indians desperate for cash promptly resold many of the items to whites at a fraction of their value.
Indians gathered twice a month at the commissary on Issue Day to receive their supplies. The most exciting moment came when the cattle were brought out for distribution. “The steers were penned in a big corral and the braves sat on horses outside, with their Winchesters resting across their saddle horn,” recalled R. A. Sneed, an Indian trader at Fort Sill. “When the big gate was opened and a steer came bolting out, they all started after it in hot pursuit, thus reproducing to some extent the thrill of the old buffalo hunting days.”
Once the men succeeded in shooting down the animal, women, children, and dogs descended in a mad rush. “The herd rushes out, scattering widely over the plain, each animal followed by half a dozen yelling Indians,” wrote Colonel Dodge. “In ten to twenty minutes all are down, riddled with bullets and arrows … No sooner are the cattle down, than the squaws are at them. An officer told me that he had seen the tongue cut out of a beef while it was yet alive.”
After the Indian affairs bureau banned these “hunts,” the Comanches developed a new name for the issue station at Cache Creek: pesenahdumun, “the place of putrid meat.”
THE MEDICINE LODGE TREATY entitled reservation Indians to hunt to supplement their rations, but the extermination of the buffalo, the decline of wild game due to overhunting, and the introduction of barbed-wire fencing made hunting increasingly futile. Quanah and his men found this out for themselves in the fall of 1878 when he organized a buffalo hunt around Palo Duro Canyon. The Indians were bored at Fort Sill, tired of the attempt to convert them into farmers and livestock herders, and eager to fill their bellies in the old-fashioned warrior manner. Fall traditionally was the time when they gathered meat and hides for the long winter. The Indians knew the buffalo herds had been greatly thinned, but they hoped to find remnants on the floor of the canyon, one of their ancient hunting grounds. A few dozen Comanche and Kiowas set out for the Panhandle, nearly a two-hundred-mile journey, without first seeking permission from the authorities at the fort. Many brought along their wives and children: they had no intention of returning to the reservation.
Palo Duro Canyon, the former Comanche stronghold in the Texas Panhandle.
Palo Duro had irrevocably changed. After Mackenzie had chased the Comanches from the canyon in the fall of 1874, former Texas Ranger Charles Goodnight and his business partner, John G. Adair, had moved in, staking claim to the property and renaming it the JA Ranch. It was one of the biggest spreads in Texas. Their ranch hands slaughtered or drove off the remaining buffalo to make space for cattle to graze. By the time Quanah and his hunting party arrived in early December, there were no buffalo, just JA steers and an early layer of snow. Restless and hungry, the Indians began helping themselves to prime beef.
Goodnight was a crusty, irascible rancher: at forty-two he was already known far and wide as “the Old Man.” He had seen the worst of the Indian wars in North Texas and New Mexico and had fought without quarter, participating in the Pease River massacre eighteen years earlier in which Quanah’s mother and little sister had been captured. But the Old Man had no interest in shedding more blood. He and his men approached the Comanche camp with their guns holstered. When Goodnight asked to speak to their leader, Quanah appeared, and when Goodnight asked his name, he replied, “Maybe so two names—Mr. Parker or Quanah.” Already Quanah was trying out his new hybrid identity on the white man.
The exchange did not start out well. The Indians formed a circle around Goodnight and his interpreter and pelted him with wary, hostile questions: What were they doing there? Had they killed off all of the Indians’ buffalo?
“No,” he told them, “I have plenty of fat cattle, and buffaloes aren’t much good.”
Didn’t Goodnight know this country was the Indians’? the Comanches asked. Goodnight replied that he and Adair had bought the land from the state of Texas, and if the Indians had a complaint they should take it up with the state government.
Next they wanted to know if Goodnight was from Texas. Knowing their bitterness toward Texans, he figured it was safer to tell them he was from Colorado. They then asked him a number of questions about Colorado to see whether he knew the area. Goodnight didn’t care for the belligerent tone. He told them he had weapons and bullets, “but I don’t want to fight you unless you force me to.”
Finally they relented. What did Goodnight have to offer? one of them demanded.
Goodnight addressed his reply directly to Quanah. “You keep order and behave yourself, protect my property and let it alone, and I’ll give you two beeves every other day until you find out where the buffaloes are.” Quanah accepted.
The two men sat around the campfire and talked, sealing the arrangement and initiating a friendship in the process. Each filled in some of the blanks in the other’s knowledge. Quanah told Goodnight the true story of Peta Nocona’s death. Goodnight in turn could offer Quanah a detailed account of how the Rangers had captured his mother and of how she had been treated after she was taken prisoner.
Quanah told Goodnight that the Indians at Fort Sill were not given half the beef that was due them and what they did receive was often inedible. And so Quanah and his men had decided to flee to the Staked Plains. But over days of talking around the campfire, Quanah mellowed. When a detachment of cavalry from Fort Sill arrived at the JA in early January with a wagonload of rations, Quanah accepted the food and agreed to accompany the troops back to the fort. “He told me that if his people were not properly fed he would leave again,” Goodnight recalled.
Quanah quickly saw that Goodnight could serve as a powerful ally, someone with influence in the white world because of his wealth and connections. Perhaps Quanah could also see that the old former warrior shared with him a similar outlook. There was much irony here; after all, it was Goodnight and the other megaranchers of North Texas who were moving into the lands vacated by the Comanches and other nomadic tribes, prospering from the destruction of the Indian way of life. Yet these illegitimate heirs were in some ways the Indians’ most natural allies. It was a partnership of profit and convenience, but underlying it was a deep, almost mystical respect for the land and those who roamed it.
QUANAH NEXT STRUCK up a friendship with S. B. “Burk” Burnett, an enterprising Fort Worth cattleman. Like Goodnight, Burnett took advantage of the newly opened lands from which the Comanches had been driven to establish a cattle empire with his business partner, W. T. Waggoner. They worked the 1,200-mile Chisholm Trail, which passed through Indian Territory just east of Big Pasture. They would cross the Red River in spring and graze their cattle for weeks in the grasslands, fattening the steers for the long haul to Abilene and Topeka. Indian bands roaming the area would steal a beeve or two or demand gifts and bribes to allow the cattle drive to pass without interference. Quanah was one of the original offenders. Even while he was reporting to Philemon Hunt on those Kiowas who were extorting cattle from the herds, he obtained a letter from the agent enabling him to practice a similar form of extortion. He would doff his hat, show the paper, identify himself as a Comanche chief, offer advice on the best route with good grass and water, and then, by the way, politely demand a few head in payment.
Like Goodnight before him, Burnett found in Quanah a kindred spirit. Early on, Burnett gave Quanah a Model 1873 Colt .45 with an ornate hand-tooled leather holster and belt. It hung from Quanah’s bedpost throughout his lifetime. Burnett also gave Quanah a dignified and elaborate horse-drawn carriage that the chief used for his trips to Fort Sill and the Indian agency offices. “I got one good friend, Burk Burnett,” Quanah once told a crowd. “He big heart, rich man, cow man. Help my people good deal.”
Between 1880 and 1883, competition among white ranchers for the right to graze their herds on reservation grass became the dominant issue in tribal politics. A bad drought in 1881 forced matters: the ranchers parked thousands of steers on the grasslands and kept them there all summer. At first Quanah strongly opposed this practice, demanding that the cattle trails be closed off. But Burnett and his fellow cattlemen went to work cultivating relationships with the Indian agent, influential squaw men, and Indian leaders such as Quanah. In 1883 the Harrold & Ikard outfit out of Illinois hired Quanah and three other Quahadis and gave them some three hundred head of cattle over eighteen months in payment. Other ranchers followed suit. Quanah became particularly close to the Big Five: Burnett, Waggoner, E. C. Sugg, J. P. Addington, and C. T. Herring. At his urging, they came up with a scheme to lease annual grazing rights for more than a million acres from the Comanches and Kiowas who were its ostensible owners.
Quanah parlayed his growing influence with Burnett and the other cattlemen into his first trip to Washington in August 1884, paid for by the ranchers, to witness the signing of the first lease agreement. He assured Interior Department and Indian Bureau officials that a majority of Kiowas and Comanches favored leasing. He shrewdly insisted that the “grass money,” as the scheme became known, be paid directly to Indians so that it would not get mixed in with the government’s annuity payments. The Kiowa-Comanche-Apache agency’s own informal poll on the reservation indicated that, contrary to Quanah’s claim, the anti-leasing faction had a clear majority. But when the lease agreement was drawn up, most Indians signed on.
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.”