Indian Territory contained hundreds of thousands of untapped acres. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867 had pledged the land to the Indians of the reservations, but by and large they neither farmed nor raised livestock on most of the acreage. Meanwhile, thousands of aspiring white homesteaders and land agents saw it as the last frontier—something that should belong to them.
Some of the Indians’ purported friends—men such as Indian affairs commissioner Thomas J. Morgan, Quanah’s old nemesis—believed that the vast collective holdings were impeding the process of assimilation. They argued that reservation Indians possessed far more land than they knew what to do with and were plagued by unscrupulous white intruders who exploited their ignorance and naïveté. The best solution for native people, these critics argued, was to concentrate them on tracts sufficient for their personal use and sell off the rest. “The Indian does not want to work and he will not do so unless compelled,” Morgan pronounced.
As it happened, of course, this was also the best solution for land-hungry white homesteaders known as Boomers, and the phalanx of railroad interests, land speculators, lawyers, and politicians who forged an irresistible political and economic coalition of convenience as the Twin Territories of Oklahoma—the Indian half and the white half—lurched toward statehood. Congress agreed and, in 1887, passed the Dawes Severalty Act authorizing the allotment of small holdings to individual Indians while selling off the vast tracts around them. The profits were supposed to be used on the Indians’ behalf to build schools, purchase livestock, and fund other useful pursuits. Commissioner Morgan designated February 8, when the bill was signed, to be observed in Indian schools as “the possible turning point in Indian history” when “Indians may strike out from tribal and reservation life and enter American citizenship.”
As part of the new act, Congress established a three-man commission to adjudicate the process, chaired by former Michigan governor David H. Jerome. A solemn man with short clipped hair and a long, flowing beard, Jerome had been a forty-niner during the California gold rush and owner of a large hardware store in Saginaw. After a brief term as governor, he had settled into the role of Christian philanthropist, which made him prime material for a seat on the non-salaried federal Board of Indian Commissioners. Jerome and his three-man panel traveled throughout Indian Territory holding public hearings to determine the size and price of the acreage. Their mandate was to get control of the lands as cheaply as possible. They first pressured the Cherokees and the other so-called civilized tribes in the eastern half of the territory, then turned their attention to the Comanches and Kiowas in the southwest.
Quanah could see early on what was coming. He was not opposed in principle to allotting small parcels to individual Indians, but he knew that the sell-off of surplus land would mean the end of the grass money partnership with his cattlemen allies. They, too, were opposed to anything that would impinge on the special deal they had with Quanah and the Comanches. Both groups knew they lacked the political power to repeal the Dawes Act, but they had every intention of delaying its impact. The ranchers dispatched Quanah to Washington in 1889, accompanied by one of their lawyers, to stall the commission’s first planned visit to Comanche territory. He made eight more visits over the coming decade.
Quanah did his job so well that the commissioners did not get to Fort Sill until September 19, 1892. They held eight days of meetings haggling with Indian leaders. Chairman Jerome sought to portray the panel’s role in simple, paternalistic terms. “The Commissioners are not here to deal sharply with the Indians or to wring the Indians or do anything that a father would not do with his child,” Jerome solemnly declared on the session’s opening day. “But we are here to talk to you patiently, slowly and quietly to the end that you may know exactly what the wishes of the Great Father are and that we may know what the wishes of the Indians are.”
Although respectful in his tone, Quanah had no time for such platitudes. He told Jerome that he had advised his fellow Indians, “Do not go at this thing like you were riding a swift horse … do not go into this thing recklessly.” He said Indian commissioner Morgan had warned him that the commissioners “have not got any money but want to buy it with mouth-shoot.”
He demanded of Jerome, “How much will be paid for one acre, what the terms will be and when it will be paid?”
Jerome replied that the details would be revealed “by and by.”
Unimpressed, Quanah announced that he needed to supervise work on a new two-story porch for the Star House and would not be attending the next day’s session. He might return, he said, “in a few days.”
Various other Comanche and Kiowa leaders spoke up, most of them expressing extreme reluctance to sell their lands. One of the most revealing was White Eagle, the adopted name of Isatai, the former shaman of the battle of Adobe Walls. He and Quanah had been rivals ever since Isatai had botched the magic potion seventeen years earlier and caused the Indian defeat. But White Eagle now backed Quanah’s stand and neatly summed up the chief’s importance to the Comanche leadership: “What he learns from the Government he writes on his tongue and we learn from him.”
The new porch, apparently, could wait. Quanah showed up for the next day’s session. Of all the Indian leaders who spoke during the meetings, he was the only one who demanded plain and simple answers in acres of land and dollars and cents.
Commissioner Warren G. Sayre had promised payments totaling $2 million for the surplus land—the equivalent of $665 for every man, woman, and child on the reservation. But Quanah insisted on breaking it down to simple terms.
“How much per acre?” he asked Sayre.
“I cannot tell you,” Sayre replied.
“How do you arrive at the figure of [two] million dollars if you do not know?”
“We just guess at it.”
Having wrung this startling admission, Quanah pointed out that some tribes in prior negotiations with the commission had received $1.25 per acre, while others had gotten only fifty cents. Sayre said the commission couldn’t say for sure how much the Comanches and Kiowas would get because the calculations depended on the quality of land, the number of owners, and other unknown factors. The meeting ended in stalemate.
Quanah invited the commissioners to the Star House, where he fed them dinner and put them up for the night. Jerome returned praising Quanah’s hospitality. He noted Quanah’s livestock holdings and implied that any Indian could enjoy similar prosperity in the future—ignoring the fact that much of Quanah’s wealth came from grass money he received from the cattlemen.
Eventually the commission offered $2 million for approximately 2.5 million acres of reservation lands and agreed to leave to Congress the question of an additional $500,000 payment to make up for the lost grass money. Each Indian was to receive four forty-acre tracts. Quanah had fought the Jerome Commission with every means at his disposal, but in the end he and his allies acquiesced. They signed on October 6, 1892. He felt he had gotten the best deal he could, but he continued to obstruct the final settlement for the next nine years.
The commission then needed to win approval from at least three-fourths of the adult male Indian population. To help it along, the commission stipulated that eighteen whites “be entitled to all the benefits of land and money conferred by this agreement.” The whites, who included Emmett Cox, Quanah’s son-in-law, were all influential and popular members of the reservation community. With their support, the commission managed to obtain signatures from 456 of 562 adult males.
One of Quanah’s advisers in this matter was Lieutenant Hugh L. Scott of the Seventh Cavalry, a West Point graduate who fancied himself an Indian expert. At Fort Lincoln, in the Dakota Territory, Scott had worked to cultivate the Sioux prisoners, win their confidence, and learn their sign language. After his unit was transferred to Fort Sill, he became commander of a troop of Indian scouts. He became an influential peacemaker and was often sent out to talk to malcontent tribesmen. He was considered a knowledgeable observer who took a rare interest in the Indians he oversaw. His notebooks include notes from one of the rare interviews with Quanah in which the chief seems to be speaking frankly about his past, his role in the Adobe Walls battle, and his views on leadership. But the two men fell out in the aftermath of the Jerome Commission.
By 1898, Quanah had come around to favoring ratification of the agreement and arranged for a congressional hearing in Washington to speak in favor. But the anti-Quanah forces among the Kiowas and Comanches decided to send their own delegation to Washington to speak out against the deal and appointed Scott as their spokesman. Quanah was outraged when Scott appeared to testify. “Quanah jumped up in a great rage and said he wouldn’t have any white man speak for him or his people,” Scott later recalled. After Scott testified, the two sides argued throughout the afternoon and the committee put off making a decision. When it was over, wrote Scott, “Quanah announced his intention of killing me before I could get back to Fort Sill.”
Scott survived, but his motives and loyalties remained in doubt. When the Jerome Commission’s report was ratified, Scott’s name appeared as one of the whites eligible for a 160-acre grant, although he later withdrew it. In 1901, he sold for $3,000 Quanah’s war bonnet and other valuable artifacts to the Bancroft collection at the University of California at Berkeley.
Kiowa opponents foolishly appealed the Jerome Commission’s ruling to the Supreme Court, which issued a disastrous ruling in 1903 that rendered Indian land rights as essentially nonexistent. In Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, the court affirmed the power of Congress to allot reservation lands in any way it saw fit, effectively endorsing the disenfranchisement of Native Americans. Big Pasture was carved up and allotted to white interests in 1906. The Kiowa chiefs had sought the protection of the white man’s judicial system, only to find it was no protection at all. Their failure vindicated Quanah’s less confrontational approach.
IN ANTICIPATION of the August 6, 1901, opening of the reservation’s surplus lands, some 50,000 Boomers poured into the reservation illegally, staking out land claims and wildcatting for minerals in the Wichita Mountains. Between July 10 and early August, more than 165,000 people registered at El Reno and Lawton for 13,000 homesteads. Tent cities of 10,000 people each sprang up outside Lawton and Anadarko, accompanied by crime, drunkenness, unsanitary conditions, and disease.
Men and women mingled freely. “They slept in cots under tents that had no sides. They took naps in chairs on the sidewalks; they spent the night upon the grass of the parkings, glad to find a place to rest.” Temperatures rose past one hundred degrees. On the morning of August 6, officials accompanied by witnesses and newspapermen arrived before a stunning sight, according to one observer.
Massed upon a sloping hillside, standing shoulder to shoulder, were people from every section of the Nation. Women, thousands of them, were in the eager throng … On the edges of the crowd was a fringe of prairie schooners bearing the men and women who had made the greatest sacrifice to enter the lists. To them, or some of them, the drawing meant everything. Brooding over the mighty gathering was a spirit of tense nervousness that affected even the members of the Commission, and the officer’s hand trembled when he lifted up to view the first bits of paper by which Fate distributed fortune to her favorites.
The commissioners read out the list of 13,000 winners among 167,000 applicants. Those holding lucky numbers raced across the prairie in a mad marathon of horses, mules, wagons, and buggies—anything with wheels—to claim their homesteads. Quanah had made the best deal he could. But the reservation was history, and its dismantling shattered the last promise white men had made to red in what six years later became the state of Oklahoma.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT was a naturalist, historian, progressive, imperialist, and outdoorsman, the kind of president who ordered bison heads to be carved on the mantel in the state dining room at the White House. He was also a storyteller, mythmaker, and showman—just like Quanah Parker.
One thing he wasn’t was an Indian lover. In his seven-volume opus, The Winning of the West, first published in 1894, the future president depicted the settling of the American frontier as a contest between a superior white race and inferior dark-skinned natives. For him the West was a Darwinian theater where the fittest triumphed and the losers were subordinated or destroyed. “Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of the Alleghenies should remain an un-peopled waste, war was inevitable …,” he wrote in the first volume. “It is wholly impossible to avoid conflicts with the weaker race.”
For Roosevelt, violence was a purifying act, both cleansing and mythical. He had no time for those “foolish sentimentalists” who sought to protect and preserve Indian culture.
Above all, he believed that character was destiny and that strong men made their own history. He loved natural men who could ride, shoot, hunt, and thrive in the wilderness. Thus a special man such as Quanah Parker—an Indian, yet with his mother’s Anglo-Saxon blood coursing through his veins—appealed to Roosevelt’s celebration of “a race of heroes.”
Quanah first came to Roosevelt’s attention through Francis E. Leeup, a New York journalist and Indian rights lobbyist who became part of Roosevelt’s inner circle. The president dispatched Leeup to the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache agency in Anadarko in 1903 to investigate allegations of corruption against the Indian agent James Randlett, one of Quanah’s closest allies. Leeup uncovered a nest of jealousy, double-dealing, theft, and vicious in-fighting among white merchants, land speculators, squaw men, and chiefs, but he exonerated the agent. As for Quanah, Leeup wrote approvingly that the Comanche chief was “always conscious that he is Indian, but never forgetful that the white civilization is supreme, and that the Indian’s wisest course is to adapt himself to it as fast as he can.”
Leeup had observed politicians in Washington over the years and believed he knew leadership when he saw it. “If ever Nature stamped a man with the seal of headship she did it in his case,” he wrote. “Quanah would have been a leader and a governor in any circle where fate might have cast him. It is in his blood … Even those who are restive under his rule recognize its supremacy.”
Quanah’s national fame was cemented at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, where he participated in a celebration of the American West. It was followed by an invitation to Roosevelt’s March 4, 1905, inauguration, along with Geronimo, Buckskin Charlie of the Utes, Hollow Horn Bear of the Rosebud Sioux, American Horse of the Brule Sioux, and Little Plume of the Blackfeet. In what the historian Douglas Brinkley called “Roosevelt’s own Buffalo Bill production,” pioneers, cowboys, Rough Riders, the cowboy star Tom Mix, and the Indian chiefs all gathered to parade in a light snow.
The authorities ordered Quanah to appear “fully equipped with Indian clothing as gorgeous as possible in its make-up and complete in its representation of old Indian dress,” wrote Captain W. A. Mercer, superintendent at the Carlisle Indian School, to Randlett. Quanah was to epitomize “the progressive Indian, one who is in accord with the efforts of the Government to better the condition of the race.”
Not everyone approved of Quanah’s place of honor. Retired Army captain Robert G. Carter, who had served in the Fourth Cavalry under Mackenzie during the Red River War, was incensed that Roosevelt had invited Quanah and the other “good Indians … most of whom had dipped their hands in many a white settler’s blood.” Carter was equally angered that Texas towns had been named after Quanah and his father, Nocona. Had any towns been named for one of the cavalrymen, Carter wondered, “who risked their lives and sacrificed their health and future happiness here on earth in more than one effort to drive out that same Quahada Comanche band and open up that wild and desolate region to settlement?” But Carter’s was a minority view. Having been thoroughly vanquished and defanged, Native Americans were now fair subjects for popular admiration.
One month after the inauguration, Roosevelt decided to take up an invitation to go wolf hunting in southwestern Oklahoma, and he made the territory one of the stops on a five-week tour of the West. When he arrived at the train station in Frederick on April 8, Roosevelt invited Quanah to join him on the speaker’s stand. “Give the red man the same chance as the white,” the president told the small crowd. “The country is founded on a doctrine of giving each man a fair show to see what there is in him.”
Quanah showed up with twelve of his men and wore his six-shooter strapped to his waist—“afraid somebody might try to kill President,” he explained.
Burk Burnett and his son Tom—two of Quanah’s white benefactors—were the president’s main hosts, along with Guy Waggoner, Burnett’s business partner. They brought with them Jack “Catch ’Em Alive” Abernathy, a Texas-born wolf hunter. They took the president and his party south to Big Pasture, setting up camp at Deep Red Creek, which empties into the Red River, under the shade of elms and pecan trees. They were serenaded by cardinals and mockingbirds—“the most individual and delightful of all birds in voice and manner,” declared Roosevelt.
“The weather was good, we were in the saddle from morning until night, and our camp was in all respects all that a camp should be,” the president exulted. “So how could we help enjoying ourselves?”
They spent four days there, killed seventeen wolves, and ate and slept outdoors. On the third day, three of Quanah’s wives and two of his children joined them. “It was a thoroughly congenial company all through,” Roosevelt wrote. When it ended, Quanah invited Roosevelt to the Star House for dinner. While talking with Quanah that evening, Roosevelt mentioned the idea of establishing a bison refuge, populated by buffalo currently residing at the Bronx Zoo in New York, in the newly created Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, a few miles north of the Star House. Quanah was almost speechless with excitement at the prospect of seeing buffalo again near his home.
Anna Birdsong Dean, one of Quanah’s granddaughters, recalled hearing from her mother about Roosevelt’s visit to the house. “My mother’s job was to see if everything was done properly,” Anna recalled. She checked the dining room table before the president was to arrive and chastised Quanah for filling large goblets to the brim with wine. “Grandfather replied that when he went to Washington the President served wine in small glasses and he wanted to give the President more wine than Roosevelt gave him.”
It took more than two years for the paperwork to go through. But on October 11, 1907, seven bison bulls and eight cows were loaded onto fifteen padded compartments at Fordham Station, accompanied by three zoo officials for the two-thousand-mile journey to the Wichita refuge. Three of the bison were named for Lone Wolf, Geronimo, and Quanah.
Dressed in full war feathers, Quanah awaited their arrival in Cache. He and his men helped load the bison into wagons for the thirteen-mile journey to the refuge. It was as if the ancient Kiowa vision had been realized: the bison again came roaring out of Mount Scott, even if only a remnant.
BY NOW QUANAH HAD BECOME the most important and influential Native American of his generation. He was the Man to See when it came to Comanche affairs, a reliable ally and a formidable enemy. He was also the white man’s favorite Indian, in no small part because he was the son of a white woman.
A certificate from Indian commissioner W. A. Jones recognized his power and authority even while reflecting just how fragile the entire arrangement was: “This is to certify that Quanah Parker is recognized as the chief of the Comanches, and has promised his Great Father to be always friendly towards white men, and any white man to whom he may show this Paper is requested by the Government to treaty him in a friendly manner, and to be careful to give him no cause to break his promise.”
His relations with the long parade of white officials who ran the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Indian agency were friendly but measured. Many developed a genuine affection for Quanah and his family. James Randlett, who became his closest ally among the agents, arranged to have one of the first telephones in the Oklahoma territory installed at the Star House and helped with jobs and housing for many of Quanah’s vast brood. When one of the periodic smallpox epidemics broke out, Randlett wrote one of his subordinates: “I wish you to go over to Quanah’s to find out how he is fixed and if anything can be done for him … After you get this I want you to write me every day so long as smallpox is in Quanah’s family, and tell me how they are and if anything can be done for them.”
Yet, while the agents sought to respect Quanah’s pride and dignity, the portrait that emerges from the agency’s files is of a man who was still a ward of the state. Every expense, no matter how trivial, was scrutinized. Quanah could not spend his own private funds to buy building materials for his house or purchase a new cow without agency permission. Often the agent had to pass these requests up the chain of command to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. Nor could Quanah travel to Washington without permission from the commissioner of Indian Affairs. Once when Quanah sought fifty dollars’ reimbursement for the expenses of his wife Pohpondy for a trip to Washington, an Interior Department bureaucrat rejected the request by noting he had not seen proof that Pohpondy was Quanah’s legal spouse.
For Quanah, there were two worlds: the Comanche world he came from and identified with, and the white world that found him fascinating and acceptable so long as he was careful and obsequious. He alone moved between these worlds, yet at the same time he knew to keep them separate, and he seldom let his guard down in either one.
“My grandfather never trusted a white man,” Baldwin Parker Jr., a grandson, once told an interviewer. “He was smart enough to live with them. He could live in both worlds at the same time. His whiteness and red-ness worked for him instead of against him. The two had become one.”
Quanah’s celebrity continued to grow. He hosted two major powwows near his home that attracted thousands of visitors. The highlight in 1903 was a staged attack by three hundred warriors on a Frisco passenger train just arriving at the station in Cache. “Painted, brandishing their bows and arrows and shrieking their war cries, the Indians produced near-panic on the train, and passengers screamed and fainted in the coaches,” reported one newspaper account.
His fame became a passport that allowed him to enter worlds that other Indians were not welcome in. Once in Texas, he recalled to his cousin Susan St. John, he had sat down in a train coach across from some white businessmen. He was always careful when he rode the train to dress in his finest dark wool suit from the haberdashers in Electra, Texas, but he never hid his warrior’s braids, which gave him away as a Comanche just as his pale blue eyes betrayed his white origins. The men wanted this obvious Indian evicted from the coach and some of them went to get a conductor, who proceeded to inform them that the man in question was the famous Quanah Parker. Suddenly the mood changed. The men shook his hand and engaged him in conversation. As far as they were concerned, Quanah Parker was a celebrity.
Still, some doors remained closed. When Quanah sought to enroll one of his sons in the Cache public schools, the boy was rejected by order of the Republican-dominated school board. The board ruled the boy was not a bona fide resident of Cache, but a personal investigation by the Oklahoman’s special correspondent reported, “The real reason is because he is an Indian.”
Quanah went to J. A. Johnson, an old friend who was superintendent of schools in Comanche County, and asked Johnson to organize a new school district in Quanah’s area. The chief donated the land, built the school, and ensured that residents paid a school tax. Quanah was elected head of the board in June 1908.
Cache held a “great Quanah Parker celebration” that same year, with bronco busting, horse races, Indian dances, stagecoach robbery enactments, and oratory. Quanah loved the hoopla, but he insisted upon his dignity. When two businessmen approached him the following year and offered him $5,000 for six months if he agreed to appear in a Wild West show in New York, he said no. “You put me in little pen,” he told them. “I no monkey.”
THROUGH IT ALL, Quanah maintained a burning interest in his mother and her fate. His obsession stemmed from both a sincere longing and a canny assessment of the stature and protection white blood offered at a time when the white world was seeking to destroy what was left of Comanche culture and identity. It also gave him a soothing story to tell: the fierce Indian warrior now transformed into an ambassador for peace and reconciliation because of his love for his white mother.
His white relatives may not have been eager to welcome him to Texas, but he always welcomed them to Oklahoma. Adam Parker of Weatherford, Texas, one of Uncle Isaac’s sons, spent two weeks at the Star House in 1902 and wrote to his cousin Susan Parker St. John that Quanah was “a most interesting character … He boasts of his ancestral white blood and delights in the entertainment of Cynthiann’s [sic] relations.” He concluded: “You should visit him.”
Two years later, she took up the suggestion. Susan was a daughter of Nathaniel Parker, one of the sons of Elder John who chose not to migrate to Texas with his father and brothers. Thus she was a first cousin of Cynthia Ann. She recalled growing up listening to her father tell stories of Cynthia Ann’s capture. “Being a little girl myself Cynthia Ann’s fate appealed most strongly of all to me,” she wrote.
Susan had married John P. St. John, who became governor of Kansas, and she ventured periodically from her home in Olathe, Kansas, to Oklahoma and Texas interviewing survivors and gathering firsthand accounts of the life and times of Cynthia Ann and Quanah for a family memoir she planned to publish.
She and a woman friend traveled to Lawton, where Quanah came to greet them at a local hotel. He himself drove his coach, drawn by four mules, up to the front entrance. “Quanah is a man worth looking at,” she later told an interviewer. “He is a magnificent-looking man and his bearing and manner is that of a cavalier. He was dressed in the latest style of civilization and, as he strode into the hotel, I was just proud of him.”
Quanah stared at her as she came forward.
“Is this the cousin?” he asked.
“This is the cousin,” she replied.
Then he took Susan’s hand and kissed it, she recalled, “as cousinly and gently as if he had learned the art in some finishing school for gentlemen. And, only to think of it, not so many years ago this man was a bloodthirsty, scalping wild Indian.”
Later, he told her she looked like his mother.
Susan Parker St. John, first cousin of Cynthia Ann, interviewed family members and other sources and visited with Quanah Parker. Her unpublished notes are one of the most reliable sources of information about Cynthia Ann’s life and death after her recapture in 1860.
He took the two women to the Star House. The house was handsomely furnished and scrupulously clean—“just as the house of any white man of wealth and refinement,” Susan would recall.
Susan was especially impressed with Quanah’s kindness to his wife Topay. When a fierce storm lit up the evening sky, he ushered everyone inside for their safety. “Quanah showed us how the windows bolted and doors locked, said the big gate … was locked … [N]o one could get in. [He] told us he slept in the next room and if we needed anything or was afraid to rap on his door.” He asked Susan if Topay, who had recently lost a baby, could stay with her during the storm. “He seems so thoughtful of his wives. I suppose that’s why he brought her in our room.”
Susan in her account captured Quanah’s virtue and his vanity. “He is a fine looking man proud as a peacock and vain as a … pretty girl,” she recalled, “[who] likes to have you tell him what a great man he is.”
QUANAH HAD LOST his mother when she was alive; now he wanted to claim her in death by having her remains removed from Texas and reburied in the homeland of the native people she had embraced as her own. He knew he would never obtain permission from the Texas legislature for such a project, so instead he asked his rancher friends Burnett and Goodnight to lobby in Washington. In 1909, Congress passed a bill authorizing the transfer and appropriating $1,000 for the purpose.
On Department of Interior letterhead, Quanah petitioned Texas governor Thomas Mitchell Campbell for his personal protection: “Dear Sir, Congress has set aside money for me to remove the body of my mother Cynthia Ann Parker and build a monument and some time past I was hunting in Texas and they accused me [of] killing antelope and I was afraid to come for fear they might make some trouble for me because of a dislike to a friend of mine in Texas, would you protect me if I was to come to Austin and neighborhood to remove my mother’s body some time soon.”
There is no record of a reply from Campbell. But Quanah did get an offer of help, handwritten in pencil, from J. R. O’Quinn, a first cousin:
Sir:
I see your advertisement in reguard to your Mother Cytnia An Parkers grave and its where bouts I aught to no how she was.
She was my mothers sister that makes her my own aunt. And she was living with my father and mother when she died. You said you wanted to find her grave if you do we aught to no where it is and if you will come down I think we can site you to the place my father written to you some 8 or 10 days ago but miss address not doing the exact Post office the address to Lawton. Well I have written to a cousin that I never have seen, waiting to hear from you soon.
Yours Respectfully,
JR O’Quinn
Other members of the Texas Parkers were not so accommodating. “The relatives of Cynthia Ann and the friends of the Parkers did not want to see her removed, they said they thought she had suffered enough from the Indians, and they didn’t want her taken up and buried among them,” recalled Ambrosia Miller, a cousin. “The Parkers helped make Texas and they thought they had more right to Cynthia Ann’s body than the Indians.”
In the fall of 1910, Quanah dispatched son-in-law Aubrey C. Birdsong, who was married to his daughter Neda, to East Texas. Birdsong visited small-town cemeteries in Groesbeck, Canton, Mineola, Athens, and several other sites, but despite O’Quinn’s offer of help, he could not locate Cynthia Ann’s grave. At first he could not even find anyone who had attended her funeral. But eventually he found his way to a local judge named John Parker. The judge in turn sent him to the small town of Poynor to meet Bob and Joe Padgett.
The Padgetts had known Cynthia Ann in the last year of her life; Bob and Joe told Birdsong they had assisted in her burial. Joe’s wife recalled dressing the body and pinning up Cynthia Ann’s hair with a bone hairpin. The brothers escorted Birdsong to an unmarked grave in the nearby Fosterville cemetery, described by one relative as “the most desolate and forsaken cemetery I have ever seen.” Birdsong located the grave on Thanksgiving Day.
When he dug up Cynthia Ann’s remains, Birdsong was surprised to find a small skeleton in the grave lying beside her. He surmised that this was Prairie Flower. Although he had no legal authority to do so, Birdsong decided to put the bones in the same casket with Cynthia Ann “with the little girl’s remains placed as if she were in the arms of her mother.”
“I felt that this meant so much to Quanah Parker that I was doing a most humane act, a sort of an unwritten law,” Birdsong recalled in an interview with a Fort Sill archivist forty-nine years later. He worked surreptitiously. “I knew if I’d try to obtain permission from Texas authorities I would be arrested for going as far as I did without permission, and I’d never get the remains out of the State.”
Birdsong spirited the remains to Oklahoma, where they were placed in a coffin that was displayed at the Post Oak Mission near the Star House. A photograph taken inside the Post Oak Mission hall shows a somber Quanah Parker staring down at a small white coffin strewn with flowers and propped between two chairs. Quanah, dressed in a formal dark suit, stands stiffly, hands by his side.
“Are you sure this is my little white mother?” Quanah asked his son-in-law.
Birdsong said he was sure.
“I look for her long time,” Quanah told him. “Now I’m done.”
At the funeral Quanah spoke twice about Cynthia Ann, once in Comanche and once in English. His mother, Quanah said, “love Indians so much she no want to go back folks. All same people anyway, God say.”
Then he explained himself by evoking Cynthia Ann. “I love my mother. I like white folks. Got great heart. I want my people to follow after white way, get educate, know work, make living. When people die today, tomorrow, ten years, I want them be ready like my mother. Then we all lie together again.
“That’s why when government give money for monument and new grave, I have this funeral and ask whites to help. Me glad so many Indians and white people come. That’s all.”
After a ceremony, the casket was lifted by four pallbearers to the grave site. Quanah solemnly followed. He lingered at the site for a long time. He “stood in tears and deep agony over the lowered casket,” wrote his daughter Neda.
Man and myth had finally come together.
OVER THE DECADES, Quanah’s partnership with ranchers such as Charles Goodnight and Burk Burnett never faded. Burnett felt especially protective and paternalistic toward his Comanche friend. Each November he invited Quanah to bring his warriors to the Matador Ranch in East Texas for hunting. But he warned the chief to be careful when traveling into the state, because “as you know there is considerable prejudice among the white people of that country against your Indians hunting out there.”
Burnett helped arrange for what turned out to be Quanah’s last foray into Texas. When the construction of the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific Railway was complete, the company held a “Quanah Route Day” celebration at the Texas State Fair in Dallas in October 1910. Although no one could say for certain, Quanah by this time was probably around sixty-five years old, and he had suffered for several years from rheumatism, a painful inflammation of the joints. Still, he dressed in full Comanche war regalia for the event and entered the fairgrounds on horseback, followed by his extended family and a collection of aging former warriors.
Quanah spoke to the crowd. Sul Ross had died twelve years earlier, and Quanah was no longer quite so reticent about discussing his past life as a warrior. He stated explicitly that the old story that Sul Ross had killed his father was pure fiction. “The Texas history says General Ross killed my father. The old Indian told me no so. He no kill my father … After that—two year, three year maybe—my father sick. I see him die. I want to get that in Texas history straight up.”
For the first time, he also publicly described his killing of Trooper Gregg at Blanco Canyon in 1871. “I tell my men stand up behind hill, holler, shoot, and run. I run to one side and use this knife. I came up right side and killed man sergeant and scalp. You see how bad man I at that time?”
But his message now was one of peace and reconciliation. And he emphasized that despite their bloodstained past and all the wrongs that had been done, Comanches and Texans shared a common identity and a common national enterprise. “You look at me,” he told them. “I put on this war bonnet. This is my war trinket. Ladies and gentlemen, I used to be a bad man. Now I am a citizen of the United States. I pay taxes the same as you people do. We are the same people now. We used to give you some trouble, but we are the same people now.”
He never stopped searching for his mother’s long-lost legacy of land in Texas. No doubt this quest was partly because the land had monetary value. But there was more to it than that. A piece of Texas land from his mother would have objectified his connection to her and to the state he and his fellow Comanches had fought against for so long. It would have resolved the conflict in a meaningful material way. And for a man who had been orphaned by history, it could have provided the home he never had. His father had been a loner and a wanderer by choice, his mother by force of violent circumstances. Quanah, too, was a man apart—never a white man but never quite a full Comanche, either. Viewed from this angle, his life was a quest to find for himself, his family, and his people a place to call home. Quanah was a searcher.
In a letter to Goodnight dated January 7, 1911, Quanah again asked his rancher friend’s help in taking up the matter, He also promised to visit Goodnight’s ranch in the near future. “I am going to bring some old Indians to your place and see your buffalo and make these old Indians glad.”
He never made it.
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS Quanah had been feeling sick to his stomach as well as aching in his joints, and Laura Parker Birdsong, his devoted eldest daughter, believed the rheumatism had spread to his heart. Still, he insisted on making a train trip to participate in a peyote ceremony with Cheyenne friends. He must have stayed up all night for the ritual before boarding a train home. On the way back he had trouble breathing and his temperature spiked. By the time Emmet Cox met the train at nearby Indiahoma, Quanah was unconscious.
A doctor at the station revived him with a heart stimulant, and Cox rushed him to the Star House in his car. Tonarcy and Topay were waiting for him there. They laid him down on the couch. He got up unaided while Knox Beal helped remove his outer garments.
The two wives seemed to understand the end was near. They had Beal and the white doctor leave the room, then summoned a medicine man named Quasei. “Father in heaven, this is our brother coming,” he prayed. Placing an arm around Quanah, Quasei flapped his hands and imitated the call of the Great Eagle. He thrust an eagle bone down Quanah’s throat to open it, and Tonarcy squirted water into his mouth. “He coughed, gasped, moved his lips feebly, and died, just twenty minutes after his arrival,” reported the Lawton Daily News.
They laid out his body in full Indian costume. His wives cut the buttons from their moccasins, burned their quilts, and threw away their new clothing while his body lay in state in a casket in his bedroom.
He was buried next to his mother’s grave, just as he had planned. There were perhaps 1,200 people at the ceremony, evenly divided between Indians and whites—far too many for the small sanctuary of the Post Oak Mission church. “Every automobile that could be rented in Lawton” was at the site, reported the Cache Register. The mourners sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and the Indian women wailed.
Quanah Parker’s funeral in Cache, Oklahoma, February 24, 1911.
Laura fainted and had to be carried outside. “It just seemed as if my heart was cut from my body to give him up,” she said later. Tonarcy, the “show wife” whom he always took with him on his trips to Washington, rode in an automobile, while other wives and family members squatted in the bed of a horse-drawn farm wagon.
It was a day of powerful contrasts and strange juxtapositions, the reflection of a man who had straddled two worlds, two cultures, and two centuries. Motorcars puffed and puttered alongside cow ponies and horse-drawn wagons. White men in stiff black suits mingled with Indian women with papooses on their backs. At a restaurant in Cache an Indian couple ate dinner before the ceremony, the man dressed in a neatly pressed black serge suit with white shirt and collar, the woman in blankets and buckskins. Before they ate, the woman offered a Christian prayer for Quanah’s soul.
His red granite headstone, quarried from the sacred Wichita Mountains, read: “Resting Here Until Day Breaks and Shadows Fall and Darkness Disappears Is Quanah Parker Last Chief of the Comanches.”
The man was dead. But the legend of the last Comanche warrior and his beloved white mother was just beginning.
