Twilight of the Chiefs by Regina McLemore

From the ashes of massacre and captivity rose a fierce, complex leader— Quanah Parker, warrior, survivor, and the last warrior chief of the Comanche tribe.

Quanah Parker’s unique life story was forged in tragedy. His mother, Cynthia Parker, experienced great trauma when she was only nine-years-old. After watching family members and friends be brutally assaulted and killed during the Fort Parker Massacre, in East Texas, she, her six-year-old brother and other young people were carried away by their attackers.

Author Bill Neeley, in The Last Comanche Chief, the Life and Times of Quanah Parker, offers insight into the fate of captives. One young woman, Rachel Parker Plummer, Cynthia’s teenage cousin, captured with her, recalled their first night as captives. After being bound tightly, the prisoners were turned on their faces where they remained for hours as they were beaten and stomped. As they continued their five-day journey north, they were tied-up every night and only given enough food and water to sustain life. When they arrived at Grand Prairie, the Comanche split into three groups, and Rachel was separated from the Parker children.

Cynthia Ann Parker, pictured with one of her three children conceived with her Comanche husband in 1860.

Before she was rescued about twenty-one months later, Rachel served as a slave to a Comanche woman, who worked her constantly and often beat her. Besides doing hard chores essential to nomadic life, women captives were often sexually abused. Even though she was ransomed, Rachel never recovered her health and died a year after being brought home.

Children, on the other hand, were generally treated better, and most became assimilated in a short time, quickly learning the language and customs. For twenty-four years, Cynthia lived first as a Comanche daughter to her adoptive family and then as a wife to Peta Nocona, a Comanche chief of the Noconie band. They had three children together, one of whom was Quanah.

In the anthology, “Indian Leaders, Oklahoma’s First Statesmen,” H. Glenn Jordan and Peter MacDonald, Jr., related that Cynthia was forcibly rescued by Texas Rangers in the Pease River Battle on December 18, 1860, and never saw her husband or sons again. Cynthia spent her last years living with her biological family, who never understood why she mourned for her Comanche family. She escaped once but was soon recaptured by the Texas Rangers. After her daughter died from influenza, Cynthia quit accepting food and water and died in 1871.

Meanwhile, Quanah had grown to be a strong, muscular young man and a proven warrior, earning the name, “the Eagle.” He rode with several Comanche bands before being adopted by the vengeful Kwahati band, professed enemies of the buffalo hunters. Quanah soon caught the eye of Weakeah, Chief Yellow Bear’s daughter. Unfortunately, he had competition from another warrior, Tennap, whose father was wealthy. Quanah carried Weakeah off, along with twenty-one braves, and they formed their own band, the Quahada.

Quanah Parker, posing alongside with his three of his wives sometime in 1892.

Although Quanah led many raids and killed many men, he sometimes displayed unusual behavior for a fierce warrior. One captive, Mr. Butterfield, feared the slow, painful death he expected from Quanah’s hands. Instead he was told he wouldn’t be harmed unless he tried to escape. Six months passed, and one of Quanah’s wives advised him to escape by joining deer hunts and pretending to get lost. Since they would become accustomed to Butterfield getting lost and coming back late, they wouldn’t search when he ran away. It worked, and Butterfield escaped to tell of his captivity

According to 1920 interviews with Quanah’s family and friends by Texas pioneer, Olive King Dixon, Quanah was merciful to women and children. His men were told to spare them.

Even though Quanah, the man, followed his own rules, Quanah, the warrior, lived for the raid. After the Civil War, Quanah, and other Native leaders such as the Kiowa Chiefs, Satanta and Big Tree, went on a rampage across Texas and Mexico, burning dozens of homes, killing many citizens, and driving off thousands of head of horses and cattle. It was so bad that settlements like Jack County, Texas, reported a seventy-five per cent decline in population as inhabitants fled to escape the Comanche. Inspector General Randolph Marcy observed, “This rich and beautiful section does not contain as many people as it did when I lived here eighteen years ago, and if the Indian marauders are not punished, the whole country seems to be in a fair way of becoming totally depopulated.”

In October of 1867, some 4,000 Plains Indians met with the government’s Peace Commission at Medicine Lodge in southern Kansas to create a treaty. The Commission offered gifts and annuities in exchange for a guarantee of safe passage on transportation routes and an end to the Indian opposition to railroads and all warfare between the Indians and whites. In addition, the Comanche and Kiowa would live on a 3,000,000 acre permanent reservation and agree to become farmers and ranchers with government assistance.

Many Indians, including Quanah Parker, watched the proceedings but didn’t sign the treaty. He reportedly said, “My band is not going to live on a reservation. Tell the white chiefs that the Quahada are warriors and will surrender when the blue coats come and whip us on the Llano Estacado.”

The Treaty of Medicine Lodge was soon broken. On August 10, 1868, Colonel J.H. Leavenworth, in a letter to the Washington Chronicle, reported that the Comanche and Kiowa were raiding the Chickasaws in Indian Territory and the white settlements in Gainesville, Texas.

In the fall of 1871, Colonel Ranald Slidell Mackenzie set out with six hundred men to find and punish the Comanche leaders, Quanah, He Bear, Wild Horse, Bull Elk, and others. Accompanying him were Tonkawa scouts, sworn enemies of the Comanche.

U.S. Army Colonel Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, the officer assigned to track down and defeat Quanah and his band.

After a few days, the scouts discovered some Comanche spies. They chased them, but the Comanche got away. That night Quanah and his men stampeded seventy of the army horses, including Mackenzie’s personal mount, a magnificent gray pacer. At dawn the next day, while the soldiers were locating the missing horses, the Comanche came again, riding off with a dozen more horses. A group of soldiers pursued them into an arroyo where they were ambushed. One eye witness, Captain Carter, described Quanah’s appearance. “His face was smeared with black war paint, which gave his features a satanic appearance…. A full-length head-dress or war bonnet of eagle’s feathers, spreading out as he rode, and descending from his forehead, over head and back, to his pony’s tail, almost swept to the ground…”

Everyone shot at the fast-charging Quanah, but he was on the other side of his target, using him as a human shield. Just as Carter screamed at the man to use his six-shooter, Quanah shot him. All the soldiers would have likely been killed, but Quanah and his followers galloped away when they spied the rest of Mackenzie’s troops coming on fast.

For several days, Mackenzie tracked the Quahada only to be fooled several times by false trails. Finally, the Tonkawa led him to the trail of a large group of women and children. Just as the troops were closing in, the weather changed to a misty mixture of sleet, reducing visibility. To make things worse, Mackenzie was shot in the thigh with a barbed arrow. He continued to search for Quanah a few more days before his wound forced him to retreat.

Mackenzie did not give up and returned in the fall of 1872. This time Mackenzie found and attacked a camp of Kotsoteka and Quahada on McClellan Creek in Texas. Over two hundred teepees were destroyed with stores of meat, equipment, and clothing, 52 Comanche were killed, and 124 women and children were taken prisoner.

Perhaps as a reward, the Tonkawa were given charge of the many horses taken from the Comanche camp. That night, while the Tonkawa slept, all the horses, along with some of the army’s horses, were taken by the Comanche.

Quanah, who was away at the time of Mackenzie’s attack, continued to ride the war trail as he eluded capture on McKenzie’s stolen gray pacer. In May of 1874, Quanah called the Comanche together to have what would be their last sun dance to make medicine for themselves to battle the white man. A young medicine man, Esa-tai, persuaded Quanah and a war party of 200 to 500 warriors that his medicine would make them bullet-proof as they slaughtered the buffalo hunters and merchants of Adobe Walls in their sleep. After a two-day losing battle against the sharp-shooting buffalo hunters, the leaders held a council some distance away from Adobe Walls. While they were conferring, a long shot from the settlement struck Esatai’s horse in the forehead, completely disproving the medicine man’s claims. That night a few bands slipped away, and the next day another long-distance conference was held. It ended when one of the hunters, Billy Dixon, shot a rider from his horse. The conference ended, and so did the assault on Adobe Walls as the Indians admitted their defeat.

Undaunted, Quanah reportedly said, “I take all young men, go warpath to Texas.”

Later, in 1874, not only had McKenzie returned in full force, but several commanders joined him in an all-out assault on the warring Indians, including the Comanche, the Kiowa, and the Cheyenne. With troops attacking them from every direction, the Indians were driven to the canyon walls. Eventually, Mackenzie and Captain Gunther pinned them in Palo Duro Canyon and killed a few, but many more returned to their reservations where they surrendered. McKenzie also ordered all of the Indians’ captured horses be destroyed so their owners couldn’t steal them back.

In March and April of 1875, messengers were sent to the Comanche to persuade them to surrender. Dr. Jacob J. Sturm, a physician and interpreter, was sent, with a group of Comanche, to speak with Quanah and other Comanche leaders.

Quanah Parker in full ceremonial regalia, ca. 1890.

Somehow Quanah and his band had escaped the recent attacks and didn’t suffer the loss of their homes, food, and horses like many others experienced. However, these experiences affected him because one day he rode to a large mesa, which he climbed. After an intense time of soul searching, he saw two signs he believed came from the Great Spirit. A wolf turned his head toward Quanah, howled, and ran toward the northeast, where Fort Sill lay. Then an eagle, an animal associated with Quanah, appeared above him and flew toward Fort Sill. Quanah obeyed the signs by agreeing to go to Fort Sill when the messengers came.

When he arrived at Fort Sill, he met with his old enemy, Mackenzie, who, learning of his connection with Cynthia Parker, took an immediate interest in Quanah. Over time, Quanah gained favor with Fort Sill officials and was recognized as the Chief of the Comanche. Some Comanche resented this and claimed Quanah received special favors because he had white blood. Some whites also resented his quick rise to the top and attributed it to corruption. An investigator from Washington answered these charges by saying, “If ever nature stamped a man with the seal of headship, she did in his case. Quanah would have been a leader and a governor in any circle where fate may have cast him—it is in his blood.”

In 1878, the Comanche and Kiowa were granted permission to leave the reservation to hunt buffalo. By this time, most of the buffalo had been slaughtered, and Quanah was forced to go clear to Palo Duro Canyon to find even a small herd. Quanah didn’t know that Charles Goodnight now claimed Palo Duro and would not be happy with a trespass on his land.

What could have been a confrontation turned into an agreeable meeting, and Goodnight overlooked the forty cattle the Indians had killed and eaten before he found them. Goodnight addressed Quanah directly, “…I don’t want to fight unless you force me…you keep order and behave yourself…protect my property and let it alone, and I’ll give you two beeves every other day until you can find out where the buffaloes are…”

This agreement was the beginning of a long friendship between Quanah and Goodnight. The Indians remained on the ranch about three weeks until orders came from Fort Sill for them to return.

Goodnight wrote a letter to Agent Hunt at Fort Sill in 1880, asking for permission for Quanah to come to Palo Duro Canyon to get a good Durham bull Goodnight had promised him in 1878 for breeding the “cattle which General Mackenzie gave him.” Thanks to Mackenzie and Goodnight, Quannah became a cattleman, and through Charles Goodnight, he developed strong personal friendships with the cattle barons and political figures of the time.

Charles Goodnight, rancher and close friend of Quanah Parker.

Quanah was criticized for earning money for the tribe by leasing reservation land to cattlemen for cattle grazing. He was criticized again when one of his cattleman friends, Burk Burnett, built him a beautiful twelve-room home, which was called “Star House.”

Quanah lived happily on the reservation in his big house with his multiple wives and children until 1892, when a movement began to open reservation land for settlement. Quanah and other Indian leaders fought this proposal by meeting with the leaders of the Cherokee Commission. This commission proposed that all Comanche and Kiowas tribe members be given a 160 acre land allotment, along with a payment for the remaining land they were giving up.

Over the next several years, Quanah went to Washington many times to protest against the proposed action, but when the Rock Island Railroad joined the large number of people clamoring for land and statehood, Quanah knew he was defeated. In July 1901, 21,000 homesteaders registered at Fort Sill. The only land left to the Indians was their little 160-acre tracts and the Big Pasture reserved for the younger generation.

In 1905, Parker invited President Theodore Roosevelt to the Great Pasture to join in a wolf hunt. Roosevelt and Quanah became fast friends. In part due to his experience, Roosevelt vetoed a bill authorizing the opening of the Big Pasture for settlement.

Quanah made good political use of the Big Pasture when he invited President Theodore Roosevelt to join him there for a wolf hunt in April of 1905. Roosevelt had a great time, killing a five-foot rattlesnake, helping catch seventeen coyotes and wolves, and racing his horse across the fields. Roosevelt described Quanah as “the Comanche chief, in his youth, a bitter foe of the whites, now painfully teaching his people the white man’s stony road.”

He and Quanah became fast friends. Perhaps because of his experience at the Big Pasture, Roosevelt vetoed a bill authorizing the opening of the Big Pasture for settlement.

Quanah’s last battle was with Texas over his mother’s remains. He finally won, and on December 4, 1910, Quanah reburied his mother’s remains at Post Oak Cemetery. His last wish was to live until the marble monument was placed over his mother’s grave. Only two weeks before he died, he had watched it being put into place. He had a heart attack on a train, coming back from a visit with some Cheyenne near Harmon, Oklahoma. He held on to life until he reached his home where his last rites were administered by a Comanche medicine man on February 23, 1911. Quanah was buried beside his mother, reunited at last.

Regina McLemore is a Will Rogers Medallion Award-winning author and retired educator of Cherokee heritage. Her great, great grandmother, Susie Christie Clay, survived the Trail of Tears in 1839. Regina’s Young Adult Trilogy, Cherokee Passages, is a fictional retelling of her family’s history from the Trail of Tears down through the modern day.