The fierce Texas sun was incinerating its way toward another 101-degree day on a Saturday morning in early June as the procession began its solemn trek through the half-abandoned downtown of Quanah, Texas, population 2,437. A muscular young man named Ronnie McSwain led the way, dressed in a bright yellow vest and pants with white fringe and moccasins and a bristling array of eagle feathers, jingle-jangling up the broad, empty main street past a silent audience of boarded-up storefronts, artists’ galleries, and preservation projects. He was followed by Don Parker, one of Quanah’s great-grandsons, a dignified man of sixty-five riding erect on a handsome brown steed and gripping the red, blue, and yellow Comanche Nation flag in his left hand. Then came Don’s older brother Ron, in a white-feathered ceremonial war bonnet similar to the one his great-grandfather wore more than a century ago. Then a handful of others, friends and relatives, including Sarah McReynolds, director of the Parker’s Fort State Park, dressed in buckskins as a tribute to Quanah’s long-lost mother, the tragic, iconic Cynthia Ann.
Even at a slow pace, it took them only ten minutes to reach the town square. They were met there by Baldwin Parker Jr., who at age ninety-three was Quanah’s oldest surviving grandson, and a crowd of two hundred extended family members, local dignitaries, and onlookers. Baldwin, too, was wearing a bright red feathered chief’s bonnet. His son Ron took his arm and helped him to the microphone, where Baldwin recited the gentle blessing that Quanah himself had once bestowed upon the town that bears his name:
“May the Great Spirit smile on your little town, may the rain fall in season, and in the warmth of the sunshine after the rain may the earth yield bountifully. May peace and contentment be with you and your children forever.”
Baldwin was not a solemn man. When the mayor of Quanah handed him a key to the city, he asked if it opened any local bank vaults.
The story of Cynthia Ann Parker’s abduction by Comanches in 1836, her recapture by U.S. cavalrymen and Texas Rangers in 1860, and the rise to prominence of Quanah Parker, her surviving child, was re-created and reimagined over many generations, each for its own needs and reasons. But the story did not end with The Searchers. Like the legend itself, the two sides of Cynthia Ann’s family—Texan and Comanche—have endured. They hold separate annual family reunions each summer, send emissaries to each other’s events, and get together to honor their ancestors, retell their stories, and bask in their myths.
There are Texas towns named after Quanah and his father, Peta Nocona, a Cynthia Ann Parker Elementary School in Houston and a Cynthia Ann Parker College of Liberal Arts at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. Lone Star Trilogy, a homespun ballet featuring Cynthia Ann, Charles Goodnight’s wife, Molly, and Frenchy McCormick, a notorious saloon hall dancer, had its world premiere in Amarillo in April 2011. Country music star Larry Gatlin wrote the music, lyrics, and story for a musical called Quanah that had several public readings, including one at Pace University in Manhattan in January 2010. There are Cynthia Ann reenactors who tour Texas public schools, and a bay gelding named Quanah Parker who raced in the United Kingdom.
The year 2011 was the one hundredth anniversary of Quanah’s death, and the emphasis was on peace and friendship between white people and red. The story had acquired an added layer of significance since the election three years earlier of Barack Obama. Like Quanah, the American president was the talented child of a union between a man and a woman of different races and different worlds. And, like Quanah’s, his ascendancy was historic, holding out the possibility of reconciliation in a country founded on slavery, racial strife, and protracted warfare between whites and Indians on its limestone plains.
Ever since they first invited Quanah to the town’s founding celebration in 1886, the town fathers have periodically welcomed his heirs. Like many North Texas towns, Quanah’s downtown has suffered a steady economic decline, and city officials were hoping the family reunion might give their community a much-needed boost. There were storytelling sessions, a gourd dance, a chuck-wagon banquet in the local meeting hall, book talks, and field trips to places of significance in the saga of Cynthia Ann and Quanah, including the site of the Pease River massacre where she was recaptured by troopers in December 1860 and forced against her will to return to her white family after twenty-four years with the Comanches.
But there was one historic site seventy-one miles to the northeast in neighboring Oklahoma that was too far away to make the list. It was, however, the most significant and amazing place of all.
THERE IS NO ROAD SIGN for the Star House. Visitors knew to pull up at the Trading Post Restaurant and Indian Store on the main Cache road, just off State Highway 62—a four-lane designated as the Quanah Parker Trailway. You entered the coffee shop and asked for Wayne Gipson, a quiet man with curly blond hair, a rumpled T-shirt, and jeans. In the late afternoon, after the regulars had drained their final cups of coffee and cleared out, Wayne took visitors for a drive down a winding dirt road behind the trading post, past a collection of faded amusement rides and attractions. There was a rusted narrow-gauge railroad track, the sullen ruins of a wooden rodeo grandstand, an abandoned Ferris wheel and bumper cars, and a collection of old buildings: a church, a one-room schoolhouse, a newspaper office, a music hall, a drugstore, a livery stable, a ranger station, and a homesteader’s cabin where the outlaw Frank James took up residence after retiring from a career in the family crime business. But the largest and most impressive site presided alone in the back of the property: Quanah Parker’s aging two-story mansion.
After Herbert Woesner, Wayne’s uncle, saved the Star House from destruction in 1958 by purchasing it and moving it to this site, he worked hard to preserve it. He replastered many of the interior walls and found matching wallpaper for Quanah’s ground-floor bedroom and hallway. He nailed soda bottle caps to the soles of his shoes for traction and climbed the steep slanted roof to repair holes and replace missing shingles. He arranged for the return of some of the original furniture that had been sent to the Fort Sill Museum—including the long oak table on which Quanah had served dinner to Theodore Roosevelt—and found matching period pieces for the rest. When vandals threatened the property, he even slept on the premises. But Woesner was a fiercely independent man who followed his own code. He refused to accept government money for restoration or repair work, and he brooked no interference from outsiders. “I don’t believe in restoring,” he once said. “If you’re going to restore, you might as well just build new. I believe in preserving.”
Woesner loved history, and he made himself into the resident expert on Quanah Parker and the origins of the house. He also forged bonds of friendship and loyalty with the Parker family and encouraged Quanah’s heirs to hold their annual reunion and powwow at the site. Baldwin Parker Jr. said he could feel his grandfather’s spirit every time he visited there, and some of the Parkers reported seeing their illustrious ancestor on the porch at dusk. Herbert also considered it his personal obligation to give tours of the house to anyone who asked.
For a time Woesner saw the Star House as the centerpiece attraction for his grand vision of a family entertainment and historical center called Eagle Park, named in honor of Quanah. He purchased and installed the rides and the rodeo grandstands and a dance palace. And he began collecting orphaned historical buildings from around Oklahoma, jacking them up and hauling them to Eagle Park on the back of a long, low trailer truck just as he’d done the Star House. Woesner figured families would buy a day pass that included the historical sites as well as the rides. He believed they’d be as entranced as he was by the Star House and its neighbors. But few were interested. Eagle Park survived into the mid-1980s, when the combined forces of television, rising liability insurance rates, and demanding government safety inspectors finally shut it down. The buildings were now settling gently into irredeemable decay, all of them boarded up and seldom entered except for the Star House. Eagle Park was a ghost town.
As Herbert Woesner aged, he grew less able to maintain the Star House. The columns of the stately front porch began to sag, the porch skirt separated from its supports, and tree roots undermined its foundations. The roof dipped and leaked, and tree limbs punched holes in its skin, causing water damage to the second floor. Wind and rain loosened the shingles and peeled off the protective flashing. The ceiling of the dining room also leaked, staining the floor below.
When Herbert died of cancer in 2008 at age eighty-three, his funeral was held on the front porch. Ron Parker wept as he spoke of Woesner’s warm deeds and friendship, and the following year’s reunion was dedicated to his memory. Soon after the ceremony, the Parkers began to discuss how to save their famous ancestor’s home from further deterioration. “For us it’s a sacred place,” said Ron. “The Woesners have always treated us wonderfully, and we know they want to do the best for the house, but we worry about its future.”
Ron Parker in his great-grandfather’s bedroom at the Star House, June 2008.
With his uncle gone, Wayne accepted the role of tour guide and custodian. He proudly showed the dining room where Quanah entertained Teddy Roosevelt: on the wall is a photo of Quanah in a dignified pose at the head of the table. In Quanah’s bedroom was a photo of the chief sitting stiffly next to the picture taken in Fort Worth in 1861 of his mother and his sister, Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower, that Texas governor Sul Ross sent to his former enemy. The woodstove in the room next to Quanah’s bedroom was original. So was some of the wallpaper. The old wheelchair of Topay, Quanah’s last surviving widow—she lived until 1965—resided in a heap on the floor in the front foyer.
Ardith Parker Leming, one of Quanah’s great-granddaughters, loved to give tours of the house in her down-to-earth manner. She said Neda Birdsong, one of her great-aunts, who lived there for nearly fifty years after her father’s death in 1911, used to keep a wig in the top drawer of her dresser to show visitors when she got tired of people asking if there was a scalp in the house.
Like lots of visitors over the years, Ardith couldn’t help but bring up Quanah’s practice of polygamy. “They say there was no jealousy between the wives,” she told visitors. “Do you believe that? I don’t believe it.”
Inside, there were dark stains on the worn red carpet, and a family of bats had taken up residence in a downstairs hallway. The stairway leading to the second floor had been sealed off: the leaky roof had made the floor too treacherous for visitors. There was no fire alarm system or internal sprinklers, and it was clear that a mischievous juvenile delinquent with a box of matches could likely send the place to a fiery oblivion within minutes.
One contractor’s report estimated that what it called “temporary stabilization measures” could be done for $20,000. It would likely cost hundreds of thousands more to restore and preserve the house. “In the event these temporary measures are not taken, we believe the structure will begin to accelerate and experience even greater damage,” the undated report concluded. “At this time it is becoming unsafe to enter the structure.”
The house has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972, and in recent years has been listed as one of Oklahoma’s ten most endangered historic places. But there was no public funding attached to these designations.
“Lots of people had wanted to buy it,” Kathy Gipson Treadwell, Herbert’s younger sister, told me in a 2009 interview. “They wanted to move it to the Fort Worth Stockyards, they wanted to move it to Quanah, Texas, they wanted to move it up here to the highway and make a visitors’ center out of it. Herbert said the house is where it belongs and where it’s going to stay. He just always wanted it to be left here, just as it was.”
Kathy was devoted to her brother and to the trading post. She worked in the kitchen of the restaurant seven days a week and 365 days a year, including Christmas Day, when the trading post fed the needy for free. It was one of the few places in town where white folks and red folks mingled freely. But Kathy died in 2011, leaving Wayne and his sister Ginger to search for a solution that would preserve the house while maintaining the Parker family connection. It was a burdensome legacy. Officials of the Comanche Nation asked to take control of the house. Some proposed moving it yet again, back to the main road, restoring it, and perhaps even turning it into a casino. The Parker family was horrified at the prospect. A Texas businessman again proposed moving it to Fort Worth.
“There are people showing up all the time offering to help us, telling us we need to preserve this and that, but no one gives us any practical advice,” said Wayne Gipson, who ruefully admitted he and his sister did not know what to do with the Star House.
* * *
SOME OF THE OTHER HISTORIC SITES connected to the Parker saga are far more secure. Isaac Parker’s old log cabin in Birdville, west of Fort Worth, where he first brought his niece Cynthia Ann after she was recaptured from the Comanches, has survived for nearly 170 years. Like the Star House, it has been on the move. First built in the late 1840s, it was dismantled in 1920, restored to its original appearance, and moved to a ranch owned by Amon G. Carter, a wealthy Fort Worth newspaper publisher. After his death, it was dismantled once again—each log was numbered and photographed—and relocated to the Log Cabin Village, a city-owned living history museum, where it was painstakingly reconstructed.
Dorothy Poole, an eighty-eight-year-old widow, was working as a docent at the site in July 2008 when I paid a visit. A retired owner of a Baskin and Robbins franchise with her late husband, she recounted the story of Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower twice a day to visitors, most frequently to elementary school children who come in vast regiments to the Log Cabin Village escorted by their teachers. With her long calico pioneer dress, carved wooden cane, old-fashioned rocking chair, and silver braids, Dorothy looked as if she had stepped out of a Texas history book.
She told me that she had heard many legends about the Parkers. One day, after she recited Cynthia Ann’s story to a group of visitors, a woman approached who said her name was Elizabeth Runyon. She said Dorothy had gotten only one part of the tale wrong: Prairie Flower had not died of smallpox but had been packed off by her relatives for her own well-being and renamed Minnie Sneed. “The reason I know this is because I’m her great-granddaughter,” the woman told Dorothy.
Dorothy said she did not know whether to believe such tales or not. “I know there are a lot of missing pieces in any of these stories,” she said. Still, it’s the emotions behind the stories that she found most genuine and readily understandable. Like the Star House, the modest little cabin is a testament to human aspirations and shortcomings. Uncle Isaac tried and failed to restore his niece to his family here and heal part of the terrible wound from the massacre of 1836. But Cynthia Ann saw the house as a prison keeping her from reuniting with her real family, her Comanche sons and her adopted community.
Keeping watch over the old cabin day after day, Dorothy often thought about Cynthia Ann’s agony. “They said she’d sit out on this porch and pray to the Indian gods to take her back to her children, and I often wonder, what she was thinking when she was sitting here?” said Dorothy. “Who knows what she felt? It must have been a terrible trauma. I can see how terribly sad it would have been. It’s a shame she never got to see her sons again.”
HIDDEN AMID THE FLAT ANONYMITY of the plains, Palo Duro Canyon is virtually indiscernible until you’re right on top of it. It is the Texas Panhandle’s supreme geological surprise: the second-largest canyon in the United States, after its big brother, the Grand Canyon. Palo Duro (the name means “hard wood” in Spanish) is 120 miles long, 600 to 800 feet deep, and 6 to 20 miles wide. The canyon has three distinct layers: the flat plains on the rim, the floodplain and river valley at the bottom, and the sharp cliffs and rugged slopes of reddish-brown clay that connect the two. For a dry desert, it is full of grasses, trees, and wildflowers: star thistles, sunflowers, widow’s tears, cockleburs, and prickly poppies; juniper, cottonwood, mesquite, saltbush, sumac, and willows. There is also a virtual aviary of vultures, mockingbirds, woodpeckers, meadow-larks, wild turkeys, and red-tailed hawks, not to mention rattlesnakes, turtles, horned lizards, bobcats, and antelopes. So many creatures, yet no buffalo, its former rulers, which were methodically eliminated from the canyon floor by Charles Goodnight and his men more than a century ago. Still, in the winter it’s an ideal shelter for man and beast, and in summer a good jumping-off point for grazing on the adjacent plains.
The Comanches certainly thought so. Palo Duro was their winter stronghold, the place where they came to seek shelter and hide from their enemies. It’s the place where Quanah Parker and his dwindling band took refuge after the failed Adobe Walls attack in 1874 and the staging ground for the dour Colonel Ranald Mackenzie’s invasion later in the year that became the deathblow to the Comanches as a guerrilla force.
Palo Duro is now a state park, and near the entrance is the Pioneer Amphitheatre, with its stunning view of the red canyon walls, which blaze with rugged beauty when the sun begins to set. Each summer the nonprofit Texas Panhandle Heritage Foundation puts on a musical comedy-drama called Texas! It has run since 1966 and is sold out most evenings. The show celebrated the ranchers and homesteaders who settled here after the Indians were vanquished. The original songs were an exercise in shameless boosterism:
We expect you all to come to Texas!
If you’re willing to be bold,
You can get it back tenfold—in Texas!
This is popular history as written by the victors—a tale of hardship and triumph by courageous and enterprising pioneers. There is a brief scene in which an Indian chief in a war bonnet and white costume rides up on a white horse. Yes, it’s the ghost of Quanah Parker, come to see what has happened to the land that used to be his domain and to ask whether whites and Indians can ever live together in peace. No problem, replies a glib young Texas homesteader: “Both sides have suffered for this land and we both have lost loved ones … Hate is not the way.”
It only remains to Quanah to agree. “My young brother speaks with the sweet call of running water,” he says, before he turns and rides away, concluding his role as a walk-on bit player in someone else’s historical myth.
THE PILGRIM PREDESTINARIAN REGULAR BAPTIST CHURCH, organized in 1833 by the Reverend Daniel Parker as he prepared to move his family and his followers to East Texas, still occupies a one-room, whitewashed structure outside the town of Elkhart. The present building is the fourth in its long history. Nearby is a replica of the first, a tight one-room log cabin with a triangular roof and space for six small pews. Out back is the cemetery where Daniel and his tempestuous brother James were buried, along with succeeding generations of Parker sons and daughters. There is also a flagpole on the site that was erected in 2002 by John P. Parker, Daniel’s great-great-great-great-grandson, as an Eagle Scout Service Project.
Pilgrim is part of a circuit of four small churches in the area; congregants have established a rotation for worshipping at each. They gathered here on the third Sunday of every month. On a scorching morning in mid-July, three open doors provided the only ventilation, a lazy hot breeze that licked the faces of the faithful. In the back of the room a Hotpoint refrigerator of uncertain vintage hummed fitfully alongside a small table with an old microwave oven and a well-traveled Mister Coffee machine.
A dozen congregants had gathered to listen to David Camp, a young preacher; most of them were members of his family. No Parkers were present, and Camp made no mention of Cynthia Ann or her family. But in its own emphatic way, Camp’s sermon offered a religious explanation of what had happened to her, one that Daniel Parker would no doubt have endorsed.
“We are but lambs led to slaughter every day,” Camp told the congregants. “… Satan is a roaring lion, but, people, we’re prisoners of God’s love. He made good and He made evil. He made peace and He made war. And it was perfect.”
BACK IN QUANAH, TEXAS, on Saturday evening, people heaped their paper plates with barbecue brisket, potato salad, baked beans, white bread, and brownies, and balanced it all on their way to tables in the Three Rivers Ballroom on Main Street. The last formal event of the Quanah Parker Family Reunion featured Native American dancing; flute playing by Rebecca Parker, one of Quanah’s great-great-grand-daughters, who has named one of her own daughters after Quanah; a long poem commemorating Quanah’s life by Paul Davis, a Texas rancher who was part of the extended Parker community; and the ritual exchange of the silver bowl from Ron Parker of the Comanche side to Scott Nicholson, representing the Texas side of the family.
Nicholson was a lawyer who lived in Palestine, eleven miles north of Elkhart, one of the triangle of East Texas towns where the Parkers settled and still resided. He could trace his roots back seven generations to Daniel Parker via Daniel’s son Dickinson, who fought with Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto; to “Virginia John” Parker, a Confederate soldier who surrendered at Appomattox and walked all the way home to Texas; to Ben J. Parker, the sheriff and part-time farmer who had met with Alan LeMay in 1952, and to Joe Bailey Parker, who was president of the Elkhart State Bank, and to Jo Nell Parker, Scott’s mother, who was also in attendance.
The Comanche descendants of Quanah Parker at a pow-wow during their annual family reunion in Cache, Oklahoma, June 2008.
The Texan descendants of Cynthia Ann Parker at their annual family reunion in Ft. Parker State Park near Groesbeck, Texas, in July 2008.
“We’re proud to have our Comanche cousins and we look forward every year to our Comanche cousins and to many years of reunions,” Scott Nicholson told the crowd.
Next up was Sarah McReynolds in her Cynthia Ann Parker outfit of buckskins, fringe, moccasins, and long earrings. “I’ll never forget May 19, 1836; the gates were open …,” she began, channeling Cynthia Ann as she retold the story of the original abduction and all that followed. It was a tale she had recited many times at gatherings over the years.
“It’s horrible to be kidnapped; no one comes for you. I kept looking and looking but no one ever came …
“By the time I’m twelve years old white traders came and I made my mind up that day: I would not leave. By the time I was seventeen I was courted by a man named Peta Nocona … The man loved me. He never took another wife.
“They sent Sul Ross out to hunt down my husband and kill him. Quanah was twelve, Pecos nine. They were with their father. The same scenario happens again [as in 1836]. They took me away from my family.
“I sealed my fate that day when I said, ‘I’m Cynthia Ann! I’m Cynthia Ann!’ “
Sarah was close to tears as she finished. But she ended on a note of romantic optimism. “This is a tragic story,” she concluded, “but it’s a wonderful love story in many ways.”
Paul Carlson told it very differently. A retired professor of history at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Carlson was coauthor of a scrupulously researched, myth-busting account of the Pease River massacre in December 1860, and he sought to deflate a few more myths in his keynote address. He told the audience that Cynthia Ann was only one of Peta Nocona’s several wives—and “a chore wife, not a favored wife.” That was why she was at the Pease River encampment, working the dreary winter buffalo meat detail, up to her elbows in greasy entrails, body parts, and blood.
This was not the version that most of the Comanche Parkers believe in, but no one seemed angry or tried to challenge Carlson’s account. The legend of Cynthia Ann was so entrenched in their minds that no one could harm it. It had sustained them for generations, honored their name, and made them special through good times and bad. “We’re not just Native Americans, we’re a cross section of America because of Cynthia Ann Parker,” Ron Parker had told me when I first met him in 2008. “I’m a Parker because my great-grandfather loved his mother. He never forgot her after they took her away, and he took his mother’s name.”
Baldwin Parker Jr., age ninety-three, at the family reunion in Quanah, Texas, marking the hundredth anniversary of his grandfather’s death.
Paul Carlson continued. Sul Ross and his Texas Rangers didn’t capture her at the Pease River battle, he insisted; U.S. Cavalry troopers did, but Ross took all the credit. The battle itself was a massacre that Ross and his supporters managed to repackage as a glorious military triumph. Carlson said he and his coauthor, Tom Crum, studied nineteen separate accounts from nine alleged participants, all of them partial and contradictory. Ross himself gave six different versions over the years, he added. Several of the most vivid accounts came from men who were not even at the site when the fight occurred. “But not having participated did not prevent them from reporting what they did not see,” said an indignant Paul Carlson.
The argument could never end because it was not about specific facts so much as their larger meaning. Were the Comanches noble warriors or murderers and rapists? Were the bloody clashes between them and the Texans battles or massacres? Was Cynthia Ann Parker the ultimate Texas heroine or the ultimate victim? Were Comanches the victims or the perpetrators of their own demise? Was the Savage War of Peace and the Conquest of the American Frontier justified or immoral? Whose myth is real?
“We are shape shifters in the national consciousness, unwanted reminders of disagreeable events,” writes Paul Chaat Smith, a Comanche who is associate curator of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. “Indians have to be explained and accounted for, and somehow fit into the creation myth of the most powerful, benevolent nation ever; the last best hope of man on earth … We’re trapped in history. No escape.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Don and Ron Parker and their cousin Bruce traveled out to the Pease River with a small entourage consisting of Lucia St. Clair Robson, author of a romantic historical novel called Ride the Wind about Cynthia Ann; Tom Crum, the retired Texas judge who co-wrote the Pease River massacre book with Paul Carlson; and Tom’s son Carl, a documentary filmmaker based in Fort Worth.
The caravan bounced down narrow dirt lanes, past the site of a Texas state marker located in the wrong place and inscribed with the wrong date for the battle, past salt cedar trees, bear grass, sagebrush, dove weed, prickly pear cactus, sand drop seed, and windmill grass, all of it going brown and brittle from the June heat invasion. Virtually none of this vegetation existed 150 years ago when waves of buffalo regularly swept through the area like Noah’s flood, stomping or devouring every growing thing in their path. “It would have been bare and flat as a billiard table,” said Tom Crum, who led the way. “You could see everything.”
The drought had sucked dry most of the wide bed of the Pease River, and Mule Creek was just a memory. Crum stood in the middle where a freshwater stream once flowed and told the story one more time: how Ross and Spangler in the early morning rain had observed the nine grass huts of the Comanche encampment from a ridge two hundred yards away; how Ross led his tired men forward while Spangler and his troopers flanked the camp from behind; how the Comanche women and children panicked and ran from the surprise attack; how Ross and his men ran down and shot the old warrior on horseback; how Cynthia Ann cried out “Americano! Americano!” as the trooper pointed his gun in her face.
Don Parker lit a small clump of sage and sent the smoke in four directions. Then he reached into the cedar case he carried like a doctor’s kit for rituals and solemn occasions and pulled out eagle feathers and a gourd. He gently shook the rattle as he sang the “Bull Eagle Song,” about an eagle who flew so high it went into orbit around the earth. “This is holy ground to me,” said Don when he had finished.
Then he put the items back in the case and snapped it shut. The participants climbed into their pickup trucks and cars and roared away. The Quanah Parker Family Reunion was over for another year.
