Quanah’s surviving relatives sat down in May, three months after his death, and divided his assets. He had seventeen lawful heirs, including Tonarcy, his only legally recognized wife. The Star House and the property around it were appraised at $2,540. He had additional assets of $500.52 and debts of $347.12. Topay got the house, while she and Tonarcy split the land allotment. The possessions were divided among sixteen children.
The “richest Indian in America,” as he was often called, turned out to be worth less than three thousand dollars. It was just one fantasy among many that had shaped and defined Quanah’s image to white Americans.
The money may have been scarce, but the praise poured out in buckets. The Christian Herald extolled “the Indian Who Made Good,” in an article dripping with fantasy and condescension:
It was Quanah’s pride that he had been obedient to every order of the government since coming under their charge. The white settlers near him respected and esteemed him, while his sovereignty over the Comanches was absolute. He was to them as a father; his home was the spot towards which each Comanche set his face when he needed advice; they knew him as honest and just in all his dealings, therefore his word was their law.
Now that he has gone, it must be admitted that one at least of the too often despised race “made good,” and deserves the tardy recommendation, “well done.”
The Herald’s encomium was unusual in one respect: it made no reference to Quanah’s half-white parentage. Virtually every other tribute took pains to point out that what made this ordinary redskin such an extraordinary man was the blood and civilizing touch of his white mother. The state of Oklahoma dedicated a monument at his burial site, and James C. Nance, speaker of the state house of representatives, hailed Quanah as “a beacon of light to a wandering people. It was the loving touch of the white woman’s hand that developed the character of Quanah Parker.”
With few solid facts to go on, the saga of Cynthia Ann and Quanah evolved according to the needs and sensibilities of each succeeding generation. Olive King Dixon, a prominent Panhandle schoolteacher and newspaper reporter—and widow of the late buffalo hunter Billy Dixon of Adobe Walls fame—helped spread the legend with an article titled “Fearless and Effective Foe, He Spared Women and Children Always.” Far from being an outcast among the Comanches because he was an orphan with white blood, her Quanah was a full-fledged war chief who struck fear into the hearts of Texans even while playing the role of the ultimate Noble Savage. “He was never known to break a promise and if he said he would do a thing he did it,” she wrote. “He claimed he never allowed any woman or children to be killed in his battles. As the red blood in his veins dominated in his youth, so the white strain began to show itself more strongly as the years passed.”
A caption of a photo of the Star House published with the article reported that Quanah “is said to have possessed the cunning of a white man and the brutality of a savage.”
This little passage goes to the heart of Quanah’s appeal to whites. They were able to claim him as one of theirs. The brain was a white man’s brain, even if the body was all red. They took pride in his achievements and admired the clever way he managed to circumnavigate the white world after his surrender.
Inevitably he and his mother became easy subjects for melodrama. There were operas, choral symphonies, one-act plays, novels, and eventually a comic book called White Chief of the Comanches. Its cover depicts a massive Indian with bulging muscles swinging down from a tree to rescue a helpless blonde white woman in a canoe heading toward a waterfall.
The opera, Cynthia Parker by Julia Smith, first performed in 1939, is no less fanciful. The saga gets a full-bodied fictional treatment, as if the true story weren’t tragic enough. The first two acts are relatively straightforward. But Act III opens to the hoot of an owl and the cry of a wolf, signaling that Quanah and his men have come to rescue Cynthia Ann and his sister from their white captors. In the ensuing skirmish, Cynthia Ann is accidentally struck by an arrow from one of her putative rescuers. She dies in the arms of Quanah and Prairie Flower, after which the Indians carry her body back to Oklahoma.
The world premiere was held at North Texas State Teachers’ College in Denton. Quanah’s son White Parker attended, as did Topay, Quanah’s surviving wife, who was dressed in full Indian costume. James DeShields, the most ubiquitous purveyor of the Parker legend, nearing eighty but still mobile, was also on hand. The opera’s tale, after all, was not much more fanciful than his own published work.
But the main architects of the Cynthia Ann–Quanah legend have been the Parkers themselves, both the Comanche and Texan sides of the family. Quanah had tried and failed to bring them together during his lifetime, but after his death they began to coalesce.
In the 1890s, Araminta McClellan, the Reverend Daniel Parker’s great-great-granddaughter, met and married a young man named Joseph Taulman in Hubbard City in East Texas, just thirty-five miles from the site of Parker’s Fort. As a young man, Joe Taulman worked as a printer, saddle and harness maker, and cowboy. In 1893 he opened a photography studio in Hubbard City and remained in that business until 1919. He moved his family to Fort Worth in 1920, and he worked as a linotype operator for the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram from 1925 until his death in 1946. But Joe and Araminta’s true passion was collecting and recording family histories, and the vast, extended Parker family with its close ties to the founding and history of the state of Texas became their full-time passion.
In the early days before cars and telephones, they did it the old-fashioned way, with letters and telegrams. They constructed a family tree, collecting as many documents as possible, including the Articles of Faith of the Pilgrim Predestinarian Regular Baptist Church—signed at Lamotte, Illinois, in 1833 by Daniel Parker, his family, and other congregants—and Benjamin Parker’s original family Bible, discovered amid the wreckage of Parker’s Fort after the massacre. Other documents relate to the establishment of the church in Texas, where it was the first organized Baptist church. The Taulmans also collected property deeds from North Carolina, Illinois, and Tennessee, where the Parkers lived before coming to Texas, as well as original land grants from the Republic and the state of Texas, and a Mexican land grant to Daniel Parker. The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin has nearly forty feet of files, 2,800 photographs, and 600 negatives that Joe and Araminta collected over their lifetimes.
The Taulmans had little recorded information to work with. Joe carried on a regular correspondence with fellow amateur historians such as DeShields. Unlike Susan Parker St. John, there’s no record that the Taulmans ever ventured up to Cache to meet their famous Comanche cousin, although they encouraged Susan to do so. Later Joe pleaded with Mrs. Aubrey C. Birdsong, one of Quanah’s daughters, to help him piece together the true story. “So many wrong statements have been printed in the newspapers in the past, and are still being printed, in regard to Cynthia Ann and her family that I think it is time that an authentic history was prepared and published,” he told her.
It’s clear from her reply that the Comanche side of the family was still hoping to locate the elusive league of land that Texas legislators had promised Cynthia Ann in 1861. “I wonder if you are fortunate enough to have record or negative record of any kind of the ‘land grant’ given Cynthia Ann Parker by the state of Texas,” she wrote Joe. “After her death, who were next of kin?”
Araminta had her own aspirations. She wrote a manuscript titled Twice a Captive, a short account of Cynthia Ann’s life that she sent in 1935 to Adeline M. Alvord, a Hollywood agent. Alvord was encouraging at first, saying the studios were feverishly buying up good historical material. But nothing ever developed. A year later Alvord returned the manuscript. “The market for historical scenarios has been very inactive and shows little disposition to pick up,” she told Araminta.
Still, even though they never published their own account, the Taulmans managed to put together factual material that was often far more reliable than the feverish myth-spinning of James DeShields and his fellow historians. In 1925, Araminta tracked down and interviewed the women who had sat with Cynthia Ann in 1861 at the photographic studio in Fort Worth where her famous portrait was taken. The Taulmans also collected the various handwritten notes of Susan St. John, the cousin who interviewed Cynthia Ann’s white relatives after her death and first established that both she and Prairie Flower had lived well beyond 1864, the date recorded in DeShields’s unreliable saga. Susan had hoped to write her own book for the extended Parker family, but she never finished it; she died in a fire in a nursing home in Los Angeles in 1925.
Despite the best efforts of the Taulmans and Susan Parker St. John, other members of the Parker family were as prone as James DeShields to historical fantasy. When three of James Parker’s descendants reprinted Rachel Plummer’s narrative in 1926, they added a remarkable account in the foreword of Quanah’s bravery that manages to invoke the familiar trope of his white blood:
“On one occasion the Redmen declared war on the paleface; Quanah alone opposed the war and they held another council and because of the Paleface blood in his veins they declared him a traitor to the Redmen, and condemned him to be put to death. He told them, ‘the Palefaces have many braves; we have only a few braves; our braves will all be killed by the many Paleface braves …’”
Faced with Quanah’s courage, his enemies back down and peace triumphs: “In this one act, he no doubt averted war and preserved many lives of both tribes, as well as much suffering and distress.”
In this fable, the author of the Battle of Adobe Walls becomes the apostle of peace.
AFTER QUANAH’S DEATH, the white and Comanche Parkers generally kept their distance from each other. The big event that brought them together was the 1936 centennial marking both Texas independence and the raid on Parker’s Fort. The state funded a replica of the fort built on the original site on the outskirts of Groesbeck, and the town sponsored memorial festivities at which representatives of both sides of the family gathered to reenact both the raid and Cynthia Ann’s subsequent recapture twenty-four years later. “Cynthia Ann Parker Is Rescued from the Indians” proclaimed the full-page ad in the Groesbeck Journal’s Pioneer Edition of May 15, 1936. “Come See Texas History in the Making … A Gigantic, Stupendous Spectacle! You’ll Regret It All Your Life If You Miss It!”
The ad promised a cast of four hundred “depicting the strange life of Cynthia Ann Parker, famous Texas History Character.” Admission was twenty-five or fifty cents, with the added attraction of Jack Bothwell’s Famous Centennial Rodeo, featuring Miss Ruth Wood, “internationally known Cow Girl, riding the wildest of broncos.”
It was a curiously American celebration—after all, this was a vast and disparate family welded together by a traumatic moment when one side had pillaged, murdered, and raped the other. It was also a quintessential commercial opportunity: the local Texaco station, Dr. Cox’s Hospital, the R. E. Cox Dry Goods Company, and Palestine Pig Salt were among dozens of businesses that took out ads in the Journal welcoming visitors to town. Cayton’s Drug Store advertised “Cynthia Ann Ice Cream manufactured and sold exclusively at our fountain” in six varieties. It also offered a Cynthia Ann Frozen Malt and a Cynthia Ann Lime Cooler.
There was no mention of Quanah. Instead, the focus was on the brave pioneers who had made their stand against Indian barbarism. The Journal reprinted in full “The Fall of Parker’s Fort,” DeShields’s imaginative and hyperbolic account excerpted from his Border Wars of Texas, first published in 1912 and dedicated to “the Sons and Daughters of Those Noble Pioneer Fathers and Mothers who … battled so bravely for supremacy and … made possible all the glorious blessings that have followed.”
AFTER THE CENTENNIAL, the Parkers left Groesbeck and returned to their respective corners of Texas and Oklahoma. But in the early 1950s a primary school teacher in nearby Mexia, Texas, named Elsie Hamill had one of the young Parkers in her class. He told her the amazing tale of Cynthia Ann and Quanah. Hamill, who was fascinated, eventually wrote to Wanada Parker Page, another of Quanah’s daughters, to check the facts.
Elsie’s original letter no longer exists, but Wanada’s pencil-written reply is in a file in the Baylor University library in Waco. It’s easy to sense from her answers just how naïve Elsie’s questions were—and how by 1952 the perceptual gap between whites and Indians could often be far larger than the cultural one:
First I will begin by telling you that the Comanche Indians and most all Oklahoma Indians live and have practically the same customs of their white friends. Many of them have modern homes, drive good automobiles, and most of the young Indians are well-educated.
We do have a few “very few” of the older Indians who still clings to some of the old customs & beliefs, but they are passing away at a rapid pace and within a very short time we will not have a Comanche Indian who cannot understand and talk the English language.
According to my father he was about 12 years old when he last saw his mother.
I cannot tell you what was the cause of Cynthia Ann baby girls death.
I do not know but we have heard many times that Cynthia Ann died of a broken heart longing to be back with the Indians again.
You can almost hear the walls of ignorance and prejudice crumbling as Wanada writes her amused and commonsense answers to Elsie’s questions. Elsie clearly isn’t certain whom she is dealing with; she asks in her letter whether Wanada might feel anxious about meeting with white people. “I’m not afraid of white people,” Wanada responds. “After all, I’ve been married to one for forty years.”
Wanada’s letter is a ringing antidote to the myths of prejudice and ignorance concerning Native Americans. “Yes Indians are very affectionate to their children,” she tells Elsie, putting to rest the old saw that Indians were anything but.
Elsie proved to be ready and willing to learn. She and her husband drove up to Cache that summer, visited Wanada, and stayed at her home. The two women put together a two-day family reunion for Indians and whites at the replica of Old Fort Parker in July 1953.
Since then, the two families have sent representatives to attend each other’s annual family events. Someone on the Texan side commissioned a silver bowl with the Texas and Oklahoma state flags and the legend “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” inscribed over a peace pipe. The bowl has been passed back and forth each year from one side to the other.
EVEN THE BODIES of Cynthia Ann, Quanah, and Prairie Flower, buried side by side in the modest cemetery at the Post Oak Mission near the Star House, were not allowed to rest in peace. A few years after the first reunion, the army decided it needed the land to build a firing range for its new atomic cannon and it seized a seven-square-mile strip on the west side of Fort Sill, a patch that included the Star House, the Post Oak Mission, several ranches, and the Craterville amusement park. It proposed jacking up the houses and relocating them to nearby Cache, and digging up and reburying the graves as well. The Parker family and the Comanche community in general were torn. Many had fought in World War Two, and they felt a deep sense of pride and respect for the military. At the same time, they revered the burial places of their tribal elders. General Thomas E. de Shazo, commander of Fort Sill, enlisted Gillett Griswold, director of the fort’s history museum, and Anne Powell, a civilian employee of the information office, to campaign among the Comanches for the reburial.
Neda Birdsong, one of Quanah’s surviving daughters, was the closest thing to a family leader. Educated at the Carlisle Indian School, she had composed the epitaph on Quanah’s granite gravestone, and she was deeply disturbed at the prospect of digging up her father’s and his mother’s remains. “If we were in a war … and I were asked to give my father’s house, I would walk out of this door without one word,” she told an interviewer at the time. “But in a time of peace it seems to me they could take a little more thought and make some better plans.”
The army eventually came up with a plan. Anne Powell made the first approach, offering to rebury Cynthia Ann and Quanah at Fort Sill’s main cemetery. After several visits, Mrs. Birdsong agreed to meet with de Shazo. She came along with a half-dozen family members to his office and inspected the proposed site. They agreed to the reinterment with full military honors, which took place in a public ceremony in August 1957.
New monuments of Wichita red granite were erected. The Parkers were given pride of place, in front of the graves for Santanta and other celebrated warriors in a spot now known as the Chiefs’ Knoll. It is the only military cemetery in the United States where whites and Indians are buried side by side.
But the new grave site was not yet complete. In 1965, Prairie Flower’s remains purportedly were disinterred and reburied at Fort Sill alongside those of her mother and her older brother. Nothing about the event was straightforward. Quanah’s son-in-law Aubrey Birdsong, now eighty-seven, insisted he had dug up Prairie Flower’s remains in Cynthia Ann’s grave site in 1910 when he had found her bones and those of a small child in the Fosterville Cemetery, and other accounts from that era supported his claim. But the disinterment permit from the Texas State Department of Health claimed Prairie Flower had died on or about December 15, 1863, of “influenza-pneumonia” and had been buried in the Asbury Cemetery near Edom in Van Zandt County, Texas. Where the date came from no one could say, and when the Rangers went to dig up and remove the remains, they found only a few strands of hair and sand, which they dropped into a cloth sack and carried off to Oklahoma.
The gravestones of Wichita red granite for Quanah Parker, Cynthia Ann, and Prairie Flower on the Chief’s Knoll at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. It is reputedly the only U.S. military cemetery where whites and Indians are buried side by side.
“To tell the truth, Captain,” wrote Stan Redding, a Ranger historian who was part of the reburial detail, to his commanding officer, “I didn’t really deliver no body, just some east Texas sand and a legend. The sand and some bits of wood that might have been part of her coffin was all that was left when we dug her up …”
The army had no solution for the slowly rotting Star House. The Corps of Engineers offered to buy it for demolition, or to move it. Mrs. Birdsong and the family chose the latter. Engineers divided it into two sections, jacked it up onto two flatbed trucks, and deposited it on the main road. They left it there for a winter, then moved it to a vacant lot in Cache. The house caught fire twice during the next two years, and volunteer firemen rushed out to save it. But with no concrete foundation to provide stability, it seemed doomed to collapse. Then, on Easter Sunday, 1958, Mrs. Birdsong drove to the house of a local businessman named Herbert Woesner, whom she had known for many years. She did not get out of her car, just honked until he came out to greet her. “She told him, ‘Son, if this house is to be saved, it looks like it’s going to be up to you,’ “ recalled Woesner’s sister Kathy. He agreed to buy it from her in trade for the house of the high school basketball coach, who was leaving town for another job. They drew up the papers the following day. Woesner’s men jacked up the house again and moved it a half mile to a large lot in the back of his property, just a few dozen feet from Cache Creek. “It was one of the happiest moments in my life,” Herbert Woesner said at the time.
Like the Star House and the remains of the principals themselves, the legend of Cynthia Ann and Quanah was transplanted to fresher soil and reconsecrated. She remained the tragic figure, unable to bridge the gap between two warring civilizations. But her son had managed to build a bridge between the two worlds, and his children strengthened and deepened those links.
AROUND THE SAME TIME Elsie Hamill was making contact with Wanada Parker Page, a Western novelist and screenplay writer showed up in East Texas asking questions about the original abduction of Cynthia Ann and the events that followed.
Alan LeMay had known about the Parkers and Cynthia Ann at least since his sojourn to the Texas Panhandle, once the heart of Comancheria, to shoot a B Western titled The Sundowners in 1950. As a new novel began to take shape in his mind, he journeyed to Elkhart, where the Parkers had built their Baptist church in the 1830s and where descendants of Cynthia Ann’s family still lived. He visited there with Ben Parker, the eighty-four-year-old patriarch of the family and keeper of the blue trunk that had held family documents for generations.
Ben was born in 1868, which made him old enough to have met as a boy some of the survivors of the original massacre, including Abram Anglin, who was still alive and recounting the story well into the 1880s. A farmer, Ben became deputy sheriff of Anderson County and worked for a time in a sawmill, for which he showed no particular talent, as evidenced by his nickname, “Five Finger Ben,” because by the time he left its employ that was all the fingers he had left on his two hands.
Ben had helped with the reconstruction of Parker’s Fort for the centennial of the massacre in 1936, basing his knowledge of the size and shape of the fort on what he had heard as a child. He also helped build a replica of the original Pilgrim Church, the first Protestant church established in the colony of Texas, founded by his great-uncle Daniel Parker. Each day after Ben retired, his son would come pick him up and drive him to town, where he would hold court at the lone grocery store on Parker Street. In tolerable weather, he would plant himself atop an old tin bread box in front of the store, smoking his pipe and talking to anyone who came by. Ben was a proud Parker: his relatives reckoned that 90 percent of his conversation in his later years centered around family history and lore.
LeMay visited Ben at his modest farmhouse, where Ben sat in his rocking chair near the fireplace. There are no surviving notes of their conversation, but Ben said later he was surprised that LeMay wasn’t so much interested in Cynthia Ann but rather in the problematic and long-forgotten character who had searched for her for eight years after her abduction: her angry, vindictive, self-justifying uncle James.