Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (22 page)

In this shadowy world of half knowledge and vague assessments, it was also impossible to see the principal side effect of Lamar’s war policy. Though he had driven the southern Comanches north of the Red River and thus pro
duced a temporary peace, he had not changed the nature of the Comanches. The culture was based on war: Young men still had to fight and kill and return with horses. Instead of riding for the Texas frontier, which was now seen as a dangerous place, the Penateka looped to the west, down the old Comanche Trace, which opened into the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Chihuahua. There was little effective government here, the legacy of the long, slow decline of Spanish Imperial power and Mexico’s lack of will to hunt down marauding Indians in its northern provinces. Its eighty-thousand-man army stayed in the south, and was mainly used against the Mexican people. The only real threat were the armed vaqueros. The result was a sort of raider’s paradise.

And now Buffalo Hump and Santa Anna and other Penateka chiefs cut a wide arc of bloody terror through the eastern provinces of Mexico. They left a long trail of bloated and charred corpses and burned-out villages. They tortured hundreds or thousands to death, no one would ever know how many. They took captive children by the dozen and cattle and horses, and in the summer months people reported seeing this remarkable procession heading back north along the Trace, through current Fort Stockton, a long dusty line of cattle and horses and captives, the spoils of a season’s raiding. Comanche raiders killed thousands more people south of the Rio Grande than they ever killed in Texas; much of this was done by Penatekas, and much of it was done in what history now sees as their dying days.

Peace in Texas was an illusion, too. How deeply the whites misunderstood the Comanches was evident in the peace treaty of 1844, the product of three years’ work by Sam Houston, who had returned to the presidency in 1841, bringing his pacifist notions back with him. Though the Texans were dealing with only a fraction of the Penateka—the treaty’s signers were only Old Owl and Buffalo Hump (Pah-hah-yuco and Santa Anna were not there)—they persisted in referring to the “Comanche tribe” and the “Comanche nation” as though all of the bands had been part of the negotiations. Sam Houston himself, old Indian hand that he was, persisted in the mistaken belief that Comanche chiefs wielded power over other bands and Kiowas.
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In this formulation, they could thus sign a treaty that all Comanches from eastern Colorado and western Kansas to the Mexican border would dutifully obey. The idea was preposterous. The camp headmen within the Penateka band were barely able to agree among themselves. The dangerous Comanches, the Comanches still riding free and unbeaten and unencumbered on the
more remote prairies, as yet undestroyed by war or disease, hadn’t signed anything.

But no one in Texas in the middle century could have told you that. Nor could they have imagined that getting rid of the Comanches was going to take another thirty years of war.

Colonel Williams’s visit to the Comanche camp put the Parker family back in the headlines—as much for the discovery that Cynthia Ann’s bones were not bleaching in an alkali creek somewhere as for her refusal to return. On June 1, 1846, the
Houston Telegraph and Texas Register
ran a story about the meeting. “Miss Parker has married an Indian chief,” it said, with the matter-of-factness of a social notice, “and is so wedded to the Indian mode of life that she is unwilling to return to her white kindred.” The story added that every possible effort had been made to reclaim her, but they had all been unsuccessful. “Even if she should be restored to her kindred here,” the story concluded ruefully, “she would probably take advantage of the first opportunity and flee away to the wilds of northern Texas.”

Not everyone was willing to accept this state of affairs. Robert Neighbors, a talented Indian agent who was Texas commissioner of Indian affairs at the time, was foremost among them. Believing that Cynthia Ann was the only white captive still alive among the plains tribes, he mounted a concerted effort in the summer of 1847 to get her back. That meant sending messengers to the villages bearing gifts and money. He had no more luck than Colonel Williams had. “I have used all means in my power during the last summer to induce those Indians to bring her in by offering large rewards,” he wrote in a November 18, 1847, report to the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs, “but I am assured by the friendly Comanche chiefs that I would have to use force to induce the party that has her to give her up.”

He also said something interesting. He noted that she was “with the Ten-na-wish band of Comanches . . . with whom we hold little or no intercourse. They reside on the headwaters of the Red River.”
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If he was right, and he very likely was, then Cynthia Ann and her husband had jumped bands, and in so doing had traveled well west of the normal Penateka ranges. Pah-hah-yuco himself was sometimes affiliated with the Tenawish,
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which might explain the jump. Whatever the cause, it was a clear move away from trouble, away from the death throes of the Penatekas. Cynthia and Peta Nocona were flee
ing the Texas frontier. They were refugees. Within a year, the couple changed bands again. They camped even farther north, on Elk Creek south of the Wichita Mountains in Indian Territory (Oklahoma).

There, with the world crashing down around the southern Comanches, a son was born to Cynthia Ann and Peta Nocona. According to later interviews with his descendants, they named him Kwihnai, “Eagle.” If that is true, then the name Quanah is a nickname. Its meaning, too, is far from clear. According to his son Baldwin Parker in a later interview, the name comes from the Comanche “kwaina,” meaning “fragrant.”
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Though this name is usually translated as “smell,” “odor,” “fragrance,” or “perfume,” the Shoshone root word
kwanaru,
meaning “stinking,” may suggest the real source of the name. In this theory, people modified his original name to mean “stink.”
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Within the next two years, Cynthia Ann gave birth to a second son whom she named “Peanuts.” From later interviews with Quanah, the name originated in his mother’s fond childhood memory of eating peanuts around the fireside at Parker’s Fort.
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Both names are unusual and suggest that Cynthia Ann, who family legend said was a “spirited squaw,” and her husband had defied Comanche custom by naming the children themselves.
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The first anyone knew of these events was in 1851, when a group of traders led by a man named Victor Rose, who would later write histories of the era, saw her in a Comanche village. When they asked her if she wanted to leave, she shook her head and pointed to her children, saying, “I am happily married. I love my husband, who is good and kind, and my little ones, who, too, are his, and I cannot forsake them.” Rose described Peta as a “great, greasy, lazy buck.”
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The account has an odd ring to it: Rose undoubtedly saw Cynthia Ann, because he was the first to report the existence of children. But it is unlikely that she uttered those grammatically perfect sentences. The timing is worth noting. The existence of the two brothers playing at her feet would seem to confirm that Quanah was born before 1850, and possibly as early as 1848. In any case, she was sincere. She was “Nautdah” now, “Someone Found,” the name given to her by Peta Nocona, whose name means “He Who Travels Alone and Returns.”
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The last anyone on the frontier heard of Cynthia Ann in the 1850s came in a report from the intrepid explorer Captain Randolph Marcy, a reliable chronicler of the frontier. “There is at this time a white woman among the Middle Comanches, who, with her brother, was captured while they were
young children from their father’s house in the Western part of Texas,” he wrote, confirming that she had changed bands and placing her with the Nokonis or the Kotsotekas, who were known as Middle Comanches. “This woman has adopted all the habits and peculiarities of the Comanches; has an Indian husband and children, and cannot be persuaded to leave them.”
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For the moment she was free again in the way that Comanches had always been free. In the way that the hapless Penateka no longer were. She was on the open plains, where the buffalo still roamed in their millions and Comanche power stood inviolate. Where the white man still did not dare to go.

CHASING THE WIND

T
HE REST OF
the Parker hostages—Rachel Plummer, Elizabeth Kellogg, John Richard Parker, and James Pratt Plummer—suffered very different fates. All were intertwined in some way with Rachel’s father and Cynthia Ann’s uncle James W. Parker, the man whose breathtaking lack of judgment had been largely to blame for the disaster that had befallen the clan in May of 1836. Like many other members of the Parker clan, James was a colorful figure. But he was much more than that. He was one of the most outrageous, extreme, obsessive, ambitious, violent, dishonest, morally compromised, reckless, and daring characters ever to stake a claim on the early Texas frontier. He was a man of more contradictions than anyone could keep track of: a prominent citizen who was accused at various times of being a murderer, counterfeiter, liar, drunk, horse thief, and robber. He was kicked out of two different churches for lying and drunkenness. And yet during his lifetime he was an elected justice of the peace, one of the original Texas Rangers, a representative at the legendary “consultation” that set the stage for the Texas revolution, and a friend of Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar. He was a preacher who once had his own church, a successful businessman who owned a sawmill and thousands of acres of land. Though an odor of impropriety, untruth, and general malfeasance haunts his life, he was never convicted of anything. Some of his neighbors believed that the raid itself had been the result of his shady business dealings. They alleged that
he had bought stolen horses from Indians with counterfeit money, and that the true purpose of the attack had been to avenge the fraud.
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Nothing was ever proven, and James himself mounted a spirited defense of his honor in a self-published pamphlet.
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He admitted to killing five people, but they were all Indians and there were no criminal penalties in the Republic of Texas for murdering redskins.

And yet that was not how James Parker was mainly known. For all of the obloquy and misadventure, he was famous throughout the West as
the man who searched for the Parker captives.
The man who refused to give up. He made five trips, alone, into Indian lands between 1836 and 1837, mostly acting on tips about young white women—like his daughter Rachel—who had been carried off by Indians. He made another four or five excursions from 1841 to 1844, based on information he believed would lead him to his niece Cynthia Ann Parker, his nephew John Richard Parker, or his grandson James Pratt Plummer.
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He logged perhaps five thousand miles, much of it alone. The only remotely comparable captive hunter in American history was a former slave named Britt Johnson, who made five trips into the wilderness starting in 1864 searching for his wife and children, who were also captured by Comanches.
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(If James’s story begins to sound familiar, it was the basis for John Ford’s magnificent western
The Searchers
starring John Wayne in the James Parker role and Natalie Wood as his niece, the screen version of Cynthia Ann.)

Parker’s first trip in search of his relatives, to Nacogdoches in East Texas, was a stunning and unexpected success. His sister-in-law Elizabeth Kellogg had been purchased by Delaware Indians and brought in to that city to trade. The Delawares, presumably marking up what they had paid the Kichais (who got her from the Comanches), wanted $150 for her. James was both overjoyed and, as would be the case at various times in his life, “penniless.” He somehow managed to convince his old friend Sam Houston to put up the money.

Thus was Elizabeth ransomed on August 20, 1836, three months after the raid. History does not record what happened to her after that, though the social position of returned female captives in nineteenth-century America was deeply compromised. People were under no illusions about what had happened to them. They knew with great specificity what Plains Indians did to adult women, and thus repatriated captives were usually objects of pity. If they were married, their husbands often would not take them back. In several cases unmarried women captives were wealthy enough to attract husbands in spite
of what had happened to them. Elizabeth probably lived out a life of quiet shame in the shadows, perhaps in the home of a Parker relative. She would have been an embarrassment: That may be why James says so little about her.