Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (52 page)

On March 16, 1875, Mackenzie arrived to take command at Fort Sill. By mid-April he was aware that only one large band remained in the wild, and he knew who they were. On April 23 he dispatched a special delegation to try to persuade Quanah to come in peacefully. It consisted of a Dr. Jacob J. Sturm, a self-styled “physician” and translator who had married a Caddo woman, plus three Comanches including the Quahadi chief Wild Horse. They had only a vague idea of where they were going. They headed southwest from Fort Sill, crossed the Red River and traveled along the eastern edge of the caprock. Near the present town of Matador they came upon the small, fifteen-lodge village of the Quahadi chief Black Beard. The emissaries were received cordially, and Black Beard readily accepted Mackenzie’s offer to come in peace
ably with his fifty Comanches. The winter had been brutally hard. He said he was tired of war, and told the white men where Quanah’s camp was. It was “two sleeps” distant. On May 1, Sturm and his group found the camp more or less exactly where Mackenzie had thought it was. Sturm wrote:

On our arrival in camp the Indians rode up from every direction to see who we were and finding we were peace messengers they invited us to alight from our horses, which were taken care of by the squaws while we were escorted to a large tent by the men. Here we divided our tobacco, coffee, and sugar with them which pleased them immensely having had none of the luxuries for a long time.
²⁵

He spent the next two days in counsel with both Quanah and Isa-tai, who had somehow retained his influence and position in spite of his glaring failure at Adobe Walls. Sturm made an interesting observation about him.

The Medicine Man says he is no chief but admits that he has much influence over his people. . . . He further states that he has not acquired this influence by being a warrior and what influence he has he acquired by kind treatment of his people, never abusing them. He says he has a big heart, loves everybody and every living thing that he never gets mad or strikes even a beast.
²⁶

Quanah, unexpectedly, was preaching surrender. He had been foremost among the white-man haters; he had burned hottest for revenge for the death of his father, the capture of his mother and sister, and the death of his nephew and other friends and family. He had demonstrated a willful disregard of personal danger at Adobe Walls, and he had spent the early summer killing white people. He had long despised the Comanches who traveled the white man’s road. He also understood that he was a half-breed, and that his mother had been a white woman. Now he spoke passionately in favor of taking the white man’s road. Parker family legend has it that in order to make his decision, Quanah had gone to a mesa top to meditate. He had begun to pray to the Great Spirit for guidance when he saw a wolf that howled at him and ran off in the direction of Fort Sill. Then saw an eagle, who swooped down at him several times, and flew off to the northeast. He took these as signs that he should surrender.
²⁷
His people agreed. Isa-tai left a pictographic note for thirty men of the band who were out on a buffalo hunt, writing it on buffalo skin and sticking it on a pole, and on May 6, 1875, the entire group left for Fort Sill.

They traveled slowly. Their horses, weakened from lack of food and the harsh winter, were unable to do otherwise. The slowness of the travel lent a sort of wistfulness to the journey. There was a sense that they were performing what amounted to the last rites of freedom. The Comanches hunted every day. They killed buffalo and antelope and wild horses and feasted on food cooked in rock-lined pits. They stopped periodically while women dried and packed meat, the men raced horses, and the children chased prairie chickens. They drank the white man’s coffee, loaded with sugar. They danced the old dances. Sturm said that “they make it to be the last Medicine Dance they ever expect to have on these broad plains. They say they will abandon their roving life and try to learn to live as white people do.”
²⁸
Strangely, Sturm records no bitterness, no sadness. Perhaps this was simply a failure of imagination. Perhaps the People really had no idea what bean farming or sheep ranching was going to be like, or what it was like to live in a single place in a single dwelling and never move with the spring herds, or what Comanche men would find to do with themselves if there was no hunting or fighting and no way to prove their worth.

At noon on June 2, nearly a month after they left their camp, four hundred seven Quahadis arrived at Signal Station, a few miles west of Fort Sill, and surrendered themselves, their fifteen hundred horses, and their arms to the military authorities of the United States. They were treated well. Unlike the other tribes and bands before them, the warriors were not sequestered, under guard, in a roofless icehouse with a stone floor, where once a day a wagon stacked with raw meat came by, and soldiers threw chunks of it over the walls.
²⁹
The women, children, and old men, meanwhile, were taken off to their appointed campground. At the time there were only fifty holdouts remaining. They were all camped on the reservation.

From the moment of Quanah’s arrival, Colonel Mackenzie took an intense interest in him. In spite of his travails with them, Mackenzie admired the Quahadis. When he learned they were coming in, he wrote Sheridan: “I think better of this band than of any other on the reserve. . . . I shall let them down as easily as I can.” He did, in fact. The Quahadis were allowed to keep a large number of their horses, and he made sure that no one in Quanah’s band was confined in the icehouse or guardhouse at Fort Sill.
³⁰
There are no records of what happened when the two men first met, or what they said to each other. What is known is that before Quanah even arrived, Mackenzie had found out via messenger the identity of his mother and had written a letter, dated May 19, 1875, to the military quartermaster at Dennison, Texas, inquiring about the whereabouts of Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower. The letter was also published in a Dallas newspaper, and managed to elicit the information that both Quanah’s sister and his mother were dead.
³¹
He had not yet met Quanah, but the letter was the beginning of what history records as a remarkable friendship.

FORWARD, IN DEFEAT

T
HE RESERVATION WAS
a shattering experience. It was bad enough that the Comanches, having bent to the white man’s will, had to line up meekly to receive his beneficence. Like small, helpless children they were now unable to feed or clothe themselves. But as usual—to layer nightmare upon nightmare—much of this desperately needed welfare never came. The system was both cruel and humiliating: The
taibos
had taken away everything that had defined Comanche existence and offered nothing but crude squalor in its place. From the moment the People arrived, there was only a great yawning void of hunger and desperation and dependency. There was no way out and no way back.
¹

The white man’s charity came in two forms: food rations and annuities. The latter consisted of $30,000 worth of goods each year for the combined Comanche and Kiowa tribes. Divided by three thousand residents, that meant $10 per person. The goods included axes, frying pans, thimbles, tin plates, butcher knives, and basic clothing. A lot of it was shoddy, if not completely worthless. The Comanches usually sold it cheap to white men. The beef ration of 1.5 pounds per person per day, on which the Indians mainly survived, turned out to be a bureaucratic and logistical disaster. The beef was issued
on the hoof,
and the government’s assumption was that an animal would produce edible food in the amount of 50 percent of its weight. This was a fine notion in a wet, fertile season when there was plenty of grass.
But in winter many of the range-fed cattle lost so much weight that many had value only as hides. Since the reservation’s game was nearly hunted out, and the buffalo rarely came into range, and the nonbeef components of the ration (flour, coffee, sugar, salt) were less than half of what a soldier got—when they came at all—many families went hungry. The weekly issue did at least provide a diversion, if a pathetic one. The ration cows would be released from their pens, and then the Comanche warriors, whooping and yelling, would run them down and kill them with bows, arrows, and pistols.
²

Strange, then, that this despondent, crippled, post-cataclysmic world became the staging ground for the remarkable career of Quanah Parker, as he would insist on being called, the man who became the most successful and influential Native American of the late nineteenth century and the first and only man ever to hold the title Principal Chief of the Comanches. His rise was doubly strange since he had been the hardest of the hard cases, the last holdout of the last band of the fanatical Quahadis, the only band of any tribe in North America that had never signed a treaty with the white man. At the time of his surrender he was twenty-seven years old. He was known as a fierce and charismatic warrior, a true killer, probably the toughest of his generation of Comanches, which was saying something. He had killed many Indians and white people in his short life, a statistic that will remain forever unknown because in the reservation years he quite intelligently refused to address the subject. He had led his own band in the wilderness after his elopement with Weckeah and was famous for having done so; along with Isa-tai he was the most prominent and the fastest rising of the young war chiefs. His surrender to Mackenzie in June 1875 ended such traditional career prospects forever.

But it also marked the beginning of something. His attitude toward his captivity had completely changed by the time he arrived at Fort Sill.
³
He would take the white man’s road. He would leave the glories of the free life on the plains behind and he would not look back. Just as important, he would strive to lead his often recalcitrant, retrogressive tribe down that road. That meant the white man’s farming and ranching, white man’s schools for the children, white man’s commerce and politics and language. The void that loomed before the pitiable remnant of the Comanches was for Quanah Parker a grand opportunity. He would remake himself as a prosperous, tax-paying citizen of the United States of America who dressed in wool suits and Stetson hats and attended school board meetings. And he would try to haul
the rest of the Comanche nation along with him. In the dreary, hopeless winter of 1875–76, the notion of bourgeois citizen-Comanches was just short of ridiculous; no one would have wanted it anyway. But Quanah saw the future clearly. On the high and wild plains he had been a fighter of jaw-dropping aggressiveness; now he would move just as resolutely from the life of a late Stone Age barbarian into the mainstream of industrial American culture.

Quanah arrived on the harsh shores of the American nation like many other immigrants: in abject poverty. When he reached Fort Sill he had two wives, a daughter, a degree of standing in the tribe, and little more. He was a ration-drawer like everyone else, living in a tipi near the agency, waiting patiently in long lines for food. Whatever wealth he had possessed in the way of horseflesh was gone. Killing or dispersing Comanche horse herds was an integral part of the whites’ economic and military destruction of the Comanche tribe. In both white and Comanche terms, he was destitute.

Quanah was, moreover, only one of a number of chiefs with a claim on band or tribal leadership. There were older leaders like Horseback (Nokoni), Milky Way (Penateka), Shaking Hand (Kotsoteka), Wild Horse (Quahadi), and most especially Hears the Sunrise (Yamparika), all of whom wielded more influence than he did. But he was undeterred. From his first days on the reservation he plotted to advance himself and was not shy about it. Perhaps he had discovered something about his true nature in the days when he and Isa-tai had recruited Indians from five tribes to attack the buffalo hunters, a feat unprecedented in plains history, and one that caused him to be deferred to even by such great chiefs as the Kiowas’ Lone Wolf. Up until that disastrous first morning at Adobe Walls, when Isa-tai’s magic failed and the buffalo guns roared, they had been stunningly successful.