Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (53 page)

Quanah understood that the way to power was through the white man and his power to designate and appoint leaders, as it was for the native populations in nineteenth-century British colonies in Malaysia, India, and elsewhere. Thus he cultivated both the Indian agent, the Quaker J. M. Haworth, and the army commander, who from April 1, 1875, until 1877 was the irascible and brutally competent Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. Mackenzie had been surprised to learn of his parentage, and had taken some trouble, starting with his May 19 letter, to find out what had happened to his mother and sister. In one of their early meetings, Mackenzie told Quanah what he had learned,
thus shattering Quanah’s immemorial dreams of a reunion with his beloved mother.

Still, Quanah had a fierce curiosity about his white family and continued to write, which meant having someone else write, letters seeking information. (Throughout the reservation years, Quanah’s apparent level of literacy varied with the educational level of whomever he got to write for him; he sounds alternately like a hillbilly, a pidgin-speaking Indian, and an English professor.) Evidence of his blossoming relationship with his new friend Mackenzie was a letter Mackenzie wrote on Quanah’s behalf to Cynthia Ann’s eighty-two-year-old uncle Isaac Parker in Fort Worth. In it, he explained to Isaac that Quanah was upset that the Parkers were apparently refusing to acknowledge him as a member of their family, and argued that Quanah “certainly should not be held responsible for the sins of a former generation of Comanches, and is a man whom it is worth trying to do something with.”
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Isaac never replied. The two men met on many other occasions. They lived for a while in close proximity to each other—Quanah in his tipi and Mackenzie in the row of houses that constituted the Fort Sill officers’ quarters. Quanah later told Charles Goodnight, after Goodnight complimented him on his manners, that it had been Mackenzie who had taken the time to teach him about white ways.
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This suggested that the two men spent significant time together. It would have been something to watch the etiquette lessons given by America’s greatest Indian fighter to the man who would turn out to be the last Comanche chief.

In a world of sullen, dispossessed Indians, camped disconsolately in tipis in the grassy, rolling hills and stream bottoms around Fort Sill, Quanah made a point of being cheerful, helpful, and cooperative. That was his nature anyway. He was naturally gregarious, the product of an intensely communal society where consensus-building was the most valued political skill and the particular skill that he possessed in abundance. A young war chief’s standing was based entirely on his ability to recruit warriors to go along with him on raids and military expeditions. Recruitment and consensus was what the Adobe Walls campaign was all about. Quanah volunteered to bring back several Comanches who had left the reservation to hunt buffalo. He also brought in a brave who was charged with murdering a soldier.
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His approach soon paid off. When agent Haworth divided up the tribes into “beef bands” in order to streamline the rationing process, he appointed
leaders of each band, and by 1878, Quanah had been named head of the third-largest band. Thus, like a ward boss in Chicago of a later day, he controlled the distribution of goods, and obviously guaranteed his own take. This was his first taste of power in the new political order, and it did not come without consequences. Some of the Comanche leaders despised him and his favored status with the
taibos
. They would force him to fight for whatever power he got for virtually his whole life on the reservation.

Just as important for the new politics of captivity, Quanah agreed to go on a special mission for his new friend Mackenzie. His task: to track down and bring back a small group of renegade Comanches and their families who remained outside the reservation. In July 1877, Quanah set out to find them with two older Comanche men, three women, and several government pack mules loaded with supplies. He carried a white flag and a stern letter from Colonel Mackenzie on army letterhead detailing Quanah’s mission and promising severe consequences for anyone who interfered with it. Still, it was an extremely dangerous undertaking. The land to the west of Fort Sill was loaded with buffalo hunters and other cold-eyed men in the hide business who sought revenge on Indians in general and specifically on Comanches. A lightly armed party of six consisting mostly of old men and women would have been easy prey. That Quanah, until his surrender one of the most arrogant warriors of the plains and at the height of his physical prowess, would undertake such a bloodless diplomatic mission with women as his outriders was extraordinary. It showed just how much he had changed his thinking. Or perhaps it showed how much he wanted to impress his new bosses.

Quanah and his party headed westward across the rolling plains, climbed the caprock, and crossed the dead-flat grasslands of the high plains under the scorching summer sun. Near the Texas–New Mexico border he encountered a unit of forty black soldiers from the Tenth Cavalry under Captain Nicholas Nolan, a white man. They were looking for the same group of runaway Comanches, who had apparently attacked some buffalo hunters. The bluecoats were anticipating considerable glory when they caught the renegades and were thus unhappy when they learned of Quanah’s commission and of Colonel Mackenzie’s plan to give the criminal Indians a free pass back to Fort Sill.
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Quanah told Nolan that he knew where the Indians were and that he was heading southeast to find them. This was a bald-faced lie, and had its intended effect. Nolan’s troops took off in hot pursuit, in the wrong direction. In their haste they also neglected to provision themselves adequately
for a trip across the plains in high summer. They soon ran out of water. The men were forced to drink their own and their horses’ urine, mixing it with sugar to make it more palatable. They killed and drank the blood of two of their horses. They somehow survived.
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They never found anybody.

Quanah had no such trouble, either with the searing heat and bone-dry land or in locating the runaway Indians. He found them camped on the Pecos River and met with the men in council over four days, laboring to convince them that they had to give up their lives on the open plains. “Quanah told us that it was useless for us to fight longer, for the white people would kill us all if we kept on fighting,” wrote Herman Lehmann, a former captive who had become a full-fledged, battle-hardened Comanche warrior and who was among the renegades. “If we went on the reservation the Great White Father at Washington would feed us, and give us homes, and we would in time become like the white man, with lots of good horses and cattle, and pretty things to wear.” This may sound disingenuous: Quanah knew as well as anyone what life on the reservation was like. But there is no reason to doubt his hope or his optimism. His entire career was based on his peculiarly sunny view of the future. He always genuinely believed things would get better, if he could only convince his people to change their old ways. Persuasive as always, and with unmatched credentials as a killer of white men, Quanah won the renegades over. Then he escorted them to their new home, a distance of two hundred fifty miles as the crow flies, across the same potentially lethal plains. Now, of course, his band was far more numerous and therefore much more visible. Quanah took no chances. He traveled by night. He abandoned three hundred horses. There were still several tense encounters with whites, but according to Lehmann, Quanah, speaking broken English, somehow managed to talk his way through.
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On August 20, Quanah brought fifty-seven Indians (probably no more than fifteen fighting men) and one white captive (Lehmann) into the reservation.
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When Lehmann first saw the bluecoats approaching, he panicked. “I was riding a black mare and a pretty swift horse,” he wrote in a memoir. “So I turned and rode for life back toward the Wichita Mountains.” But as a horseman he was no match for Quanah, who rode him down after four miles and gently persuaded him to return.
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(Lehmann, who was seventeen at the time, lived with Quanah and his family for three years and considered him his foster father. He was sent back to his mother in 1880.)
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Mackenzie was impressed that Quanah had been able to get everyone home without
bloodshed, and praised the young chief’s “excellent conduct in a dangerous expedition.” Leveraging this goodwill—something he was quite good at—Quanah persuaded Mackenzie and Haworth that the renegades should not be sent off to prison in Fort Leavenworth. For that he also earned the gratitude of his tribe.

He won even more political points when he successfully opposed the government’s plan to merge the Kiowa-Comanche agency with the Wichita agency, which would have meant a fifty-mile trek for some Comanches just to draw rations. By 1880 he had become the acknowledged leader of the Quahadis and the Indian leader most often consulted by the agent.
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For all of his cooperation with the white man, however, and his commitment to the new road, Quanah was not yet quite ready to put aside all dreams of the old life. He and others lobbied hard for permission to go on a buffalo hunt. It is not clear whether this was to be one last buffalo hunt or merely the first of several, but in March 1878 a group of Comanches and Kiowas, including some women and children, were finally allowed to go out, unsupervised, on a hunt. This was cause for great excitement among the Indians. Perhaps it was the simple urge to validate their own past, or maybe a desire to show their children who they really were. They would ride out again into the great oceanic emptiness that so terrified the
taibos
. They would kill and eat, and use the gallbladder to salt the raw bloody liver, and drink the warm milk from the udders mixed with blood, and it would be, however briefly, like the old days. They rode west from Fort Sill toward the high plains, full of dreams and nostalgia. They understood that the hide hunters had taken a terrible toll on the buffalo. But they had never doubted that there were herds left to hunt.

What they found shocked them. There were no buffalo anywhere, no living ones, anyway, only vast numbers of stinking, decaying corpses or bones bleached white by the sun. The idea of traveling a hundred miles and not seeing a buffalo was unimaginable. It had not been true at the time of their surrender. Disappointed—perhaps heartbroken might be a better word—Quanah and his cohort pushed deeper into the Texas Panhandle, certainly well beyond where the army and Indian agents had intended them to go. He led them back to the old Quahadi sanctuary, the magnificent rock battlements of Palo Duro Canyon in the upper Texas Panhandle, which had once teemed with bison herds. This, too, was an emotional moment. Most of them, who knew it affectionately as Prairie Dog, had never expected to see it again.

Nor had it ever occurred to them that a white man might now
own
the second-largest canyon in the West. But in the three years since the end of the Red River War an enterprising white man had in fact managed to acquire it. Charles Goodnight—the ranger who had tracked Peta Nocona to the Pease River in 1860 and had later tracked Quanah and his brother to those same canyon lands—was now the sole proprietor of the Palo Duro. He was already one of the more prominent ranchers in the state, having given his name to one of its main cattle highways, the Goodnight-Loving Trail, which he opened in 1866 to bring cattle to markets in New Mexico and Colorado.

On a bitter cold day, with snow on the ground, the Indians entered the canyon, and, still finding no buffalo, started killing Goodnight’s cattle. Goodnight rode out to meet them. The intruders were in an ugly mood, having just learned that their sacred canyons now “belonged” to someone else. They put Goodnight and an interpreter in the middle of a circle and asked him what he was doing there. “I am raising cattle,” he replied. They then asked, provocatively, did he not know that “the country was theirs.” He answered that he “had heard that they claimed the country but that the great captain of the Texans also claimed it.”
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A parley with Quanah followed. When Goodnight asked what his name was, he replied in his broken English: “Maybe so two names—Mr. Parker or Quanah.”
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Then Quanah asked Goodnight where he came from, a loaded question intended to elicit the answer that he was one of the hated Texans. Comanches always drew a sharp distinction between Texans and everyone else. Texan encroachment, after all, had ended their way of life. Goodnight lied and said he was from Colorado, whereupon the Indians tried to prove him wrong, grilling him about every prominent landmark and river in Colorado. Since he had pioneered the cattle trail to Denver and beyond, he was able to answer all their questions correctly. Satisfied that he was not a Tejano, Quanah said he was ready to make a treaty. “We’re ready to talk business,” said Quanah. “What have you got?” Goodnight answered: “I’ve got plenty of guns and bullets, good men and good shots, but I don’t want to fight unless you force me. You keep order and behave yourself and I will give you two beeves every other day until you find out where the buffaloes are.”
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Quanah agreed, and thus was a “treaty” made between the legendary Comanche chief and the rancher they called the Leopard Coat Man. (Two generations hence, Texas schoolchildren would be required to study this odd agreement.) Several days later, twenty-five black soldiers under a white lieutenant, who
had been summoned by Goodnight, arrived to deal with the Indian threat. Goodnight assured them that the problem had been solved, and the Indians remained camped there another three weeks.

There was one incident where Quanah’s inveterate warrior instincts flashed briefly. It is worth noting because there is nothing else in his reservation life that remotely resembled this sequence of events; he really had left just about everything behind; the ill-fated hunt had just seemed like a reasonable idea, a modest gesture to placate people who had lost everything else. Comanches and Kiowas had long been uneasy about black troops, whom they called “buffalo soldiers” because their tight, curly hair reminded them of a buffalo’s ruff. They considered them bad medicine and were the only adversaries they would not scalp. After a fight had broken out between the soldiers and the Indians, Goodnight gathered Quanah and the army lieutenant to discuss the problem. The lieutenant told the interpreter that if the Indians did not settle down he would take their guns away. Quanah replied, in Spanish: “You can have the guns.” Then he pointed to some lodge poles and said “We will use those on the negroes.” The idea was: He would not waste any bullets on the buffalo soldiers, and he would not need anything but the poles to defeat them.
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This was the old, snarling Comanche arrogance, now consigned to making idle threats. Quanah was never known for it in the reservation years; perhaps this outburst was his last indulgence. He and his party returned to Fort Sill without ever finding a buffalo. Any lingering notions that they could return to their ancient ways, even momentarily, were now forever dispelled. The buffalo were all dead, and the white man owned the sacred canyons.