QUANAH PARKER LAST CHIEF OF THE COMANCHES. OIL

OIL ON CANVAS. 6 FEET X 4 FEET.

The Story
of Quanah Parker

Excerpts taken from the book, Empire of the summer moon by SC Gwynne. Edited by myself as explanation of why I chose this subject for my latest oil on canvas. Canvas six feet
by four feet.



On October 3. 1871. Six hundred soldiers were stationed on a lonely bend of the clear fork
of the Brazos, a huge prairie of about one hundred and fifty
miles west of Fort Worth Texas. They did not know it at that time but they were
about to mark the beginning of the end of the Indian wars in America, the end
of nearly two hundred and fifty years of the most brutal and bloody combat that
had begun with the journey of the first ship to arrive on the shores of
Virginia. The final demise of the last hostile tribes would not take place for
a few more years to come. It would take a little more time to either round them
up, starve them out, exterminate their sources of food or kill them outright,
any option was ok with the US government. On that date of October 3 there was
an order given to the men of the fourth cavalry and the eleventh infantry to go
and kill Comanche’s. It was the end to any show of tolerance to the
resistance of the Native Americans. The men who were to pursue the natives were
veterans of the wars between the states and they now found themselves on the
fabled Llano Estacado which were the plains of West Texas, a country populated
exclusively by the most hostile Indians on the continent, where very few US
soldiers had ever gone before. It was a huge vast desolate place where white
men became lost and disorientated and were known to die of thirst, it was a
place where the once imperial Spanish had marched so confidently to hunt
Comanche's, only to find that they were the ones to become hunted and slaughtered.
General William Sherman's agent of destruction was a civil war hero called Ranald Mackenzie. Within four years he
would prove himself the most brutal effective Indian fighter in American
history. In the same era as Colonel Custer would achieve world fame through
incompetence, failure and catastrophe. It was Mackenzie and not Custer who
would teach the army how to fight Indians. The Union of the united states now
found that they were unable to deal with the last remaining few hostile tribes
who had not been destroyed or forced to move onto a reservation where they
were quickly to learn that they were to completely submit to the will of the
white man or they simply died of starvation, the treatment of the Indians on
the reservations at this time can simply be called prolonged and torturous
deprivation. Mackenzie was new to this sort of fighting and would make many
mistakes, but unlike many before him, he would learn from them.



For now Mackenzie was to take retribution, he was ordered to kill Comanche’s, six years after the end of the
American civil war the frontier was a smoking ruin, littered with corpses, a
place where anarchy and mass murder and torture killings had replaced the rule
of law, where Indians , especially Comanche’s, raided, looted and killed at
will. Victorious in war, for the first time in history the union found itself
unable to deal with the remaining Indian tribes that had not been either
destroyed or forced to withdraw onto reservations. The last hostiles were the
last remaining Indians on the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed and
driven by vengeance and sheer desperation to survive. Nearly all of the early
settlers had been forced to flee eastwards, especially along the Texas frontier
where the raiding was at its most fearsome, no tribes had ever before been able
to resist the sheer might and armour and firepower that the white man had
bought to the frontier. The white, land greedy early settlers started
its destruction of the Native Americans with its complete disregard for
the people. Beginning with the subjection of the Atlantic coastal tribes,
hundreds of other tribes had either perished from the earth or been forced onto
reservations. This included the Iroquois and their enormous warlike
confederation that ruled what is now present day New York. The great nations of
the south were coerced westwards into lands given them by yet more treaties
which were violated before they were even signed, hounded along what has
now become to be known as the trail of tears until they reached present day
Oklahoma, a land controlled largely by Comanche’s, Cherokees and some other lesser
tribes. What was most strange at this time is that the Comanche's were still
achieving phenomenal success. In 1871 the buffalo still roamed the plains. Earlier
that year a herd of four million had been spotted near the Arkansas River. The
main body was fifty miles deep and twenty five miles wide, but the slaughter
had already begun. It would soon become the greatest mass destruction of
any warm blooded species of animal in the earth’s history. In Kansas alone the
bones of thirty one million buffalo were sold for fertiliser between 1868 and
1881. The nation was booming, a railroad now linked the entire nation and there
was only one obstacle left, the Indian tribes who inhabited the wastes of the Great
Plains.



Of these tribes, the most remote, primitive, and violently hostile were a band
of Comanche's known as the Quahadis. Like all Indians they were nomadic. They
occupied a huge territory from its northern boundary by the Canadian river to
the cap rock
escarpment, a cliff rising between two hundred and one thousand feet and
separated the high from the low plains, giving the Quahadis something resembling a huge
impregnable fortress. Unlike almost every other tribe on the American plains
the Quahadis had
almost entirely shunned the Anglos, they would not even trade with them, and
for this reason they had largely missed the cholera plagues which ravaged the
natives in 1816 and 1849 killing over half of the entire Comanche nation.
Virtually alone among all the tribes in North America the Quahadis had never
signed a treaty. Quahadis were the hardest, fiercest and had the reputation
as the most fearsome, violent and warlike on the entire continent. They were
also very rich, they counted their wealth in stolen horses of which they had
tens of thousands, and they also owned innumerable Texas cattle.



On that day in 1871 Mackenzie's troops were hunting Quahadis. One could only ever find
out about their general whereabouts as they were nomadic. If you were pursuing
them you would usually have your Tonkawa scouts out well in advance. The Tonks as they were known, were members
of an occasionally cannibalistic tribe who had almost been exterminated by the Comanche’s and whose remaining members
lusted for vengeance. Without them the army would have had little or completely
no chance of ever tracking Indians on the open plains. By the afternoon of the
second day the Tonks had found a trail. They reported to Mackenzie that they
were tracking a Quahadi band under the leadership of a brilliant young war
chief by the name of Quanah, a Comanche word that loosely translated meant
fragrance. The idea of Mackenzie was to find and destroy Quanah’s village. Mackenzie was the first
white man to try such a thing; it had never been done to the Quahadi, s before.



Mackenzie
and his men did not know much about Quanah, no one did. Quanah was simply too
young for anyone to know anything about him yet. Both Quanah and Mackenzie were
not to achieve their fame until the final brutal Indian wars of the mid 1870,s. Quanah was exceptionally young
to be a chief, he was reported to be ruthless, very clever and fearless in
battle. But there was something else about Quanah too. He was a
half-breed, the son of a Comanche chief and a white woman. People on the Texas frontier would soon learn
this about him because this fact was so exceptional. Comanche warriors for
centuries had taken female captives, and fathered children by them who were
raised as Comanche’s. But there is no record of any prominent half white
Comanche chief. By the time Mackenzie was hunting him in 1871, Quanah’s mother had been famous for a
long time. She was the best known of all the Indian captives of the era,
discussed in drawing rooms in New York and London and known as the "white
squaw" because she had refused on numerous occasions to return to her own
white people. The Christians of Europe of those times considered the Indians
savage, bloody and morally backwards and believed that no sane person would
choose them over white society. Few other than Quanah’s mother did. Her name was Cynthia
Ann Parker. She was the daughter of one of Texas’s most prominent families. In
1837 at the age of nine, she had been kidnapped in a raid on the Parkers fort,
ninety miles south of present day Dallas. She soon forgot her mother tongue and
learned Indian ways and became a full member of the tribe. She married Peta Nocoma, a prominent war chief, and had
three children by him, of whom Quanah was the eldest. In 1860 when Quanah was
12 she was recaptured during an attack by Texas rangers on her village, during which everyone except
Cynthia and her daughter Prairie Flower were killed. Mackenzie and his troops knew
the story of Cynthia Ann parker, most everyone did, but they had no idea her
blood ran in Quanah’s veins. They would not learn this until 1875. For now they knew only
that he was the target of the largest anti Indian expedition mounted since
1865, one of the largest ever undertaken.



On the
third day of the expedition to exterminate Quanah’s tribe the Tonkawa’s realised that they were being
shadowed by a group of four Comanche warriors who had been watching their every
move. The result being that while cavalry and dragoons had no idea where the Comanche’s were camped. Quanah knew
precisely where Mackenzie was and what he was doing. At around midnight the
regiment was awakened by a succession of unearthly high pitched war yells, and
suddenly the camp was alive with Comanche’s riding at full gallop. Exactly what
the Indians were doing would soon become apparent, mixed with the screams,
gunshots and general mayhem of the camp was another sound, only barely audible
at first, rising to something like rolling thunder. The men quickly realised to
their horror that it was the sound of stampeding horses. Their horses. Six
hundred panicked horses tore through the camp, rearing jumping and plunging at
full speed. Iron picket pins which moments before had been used to secure the
horses now whirled and snapped about their necks like airborne sabres. Men
tried to grab them and were thrown to the ground and dragged among the horses
broken and bleeding.



When it
was all over the men discovered that Quanah had made off with seventy of their
best horses and mules including Colonel Mackenzie’s magnificent grey pacer. In
west Texas in 1871, stealing someone’s horse was equivalent to a death
sentence. It was an old Indian tactic, especially on the high plains, to steal
the horses and leave the men to die of either thirst or
starvation. Comanche’s had used it to lethal effect against the Spanish
in the early eighteenth century; an unmounted regular stood no chance against a
mounted Comanche.



This
midnight raid was Quanah’s message. He wanted the men to know that hunting him and his Comanche
warriors in their homeland was going to be a treacherous and very difficult
business. Thus began what would become known in history as the battle of Blanco
Canyon, which was in turn the opening salvo in a bloody Indian war in the
highlands of west Texas which would last four years, and culminate in the final
destruction of the Comanche nation. Blanco Canyon would also provide the US
army with its first look at Quanah. Captain Carter who would later win the
congressional medal for his bravery offered this description to his peers
after seeing the young chief on the night of the stampede, he wrote thus



A large
and powerfully built chief led the bunch, on a coal black racing pony, leaning
forward upon his mane, his heels working into the animals sides, with his six
shooter in the air, he seemed the incarnation of savage, brutal joy. His face
was smeared with black war paint, which gave his features a satanic look. A
full length headdress of eagle feathers spreading out as he rode. Large brass
hoops were in his ears, he was naked to the waist, wearing simply leggings and
moccasins. A necklace of bear’s claws hung from his neck, bells jingled as he
rode at break neck speed, followed by the leading warriors, all eager to outstrip
him in the race. It was Quanah, principal chief of the Quahadis. Moments later Quanah wheeled
his horse in the direction of an unfortunate private named Seander Gregg, as
Carter and his men watched, Quanah blew Greggs brains out.



Thus did
Quanah Parker the son of a white woman from an invading civilization, begin to fulfil
an intricate destiny. He would soon become the main target of forty six
companies of US army and infantry-the largest ever deployed to hunt down and
destroy Indians. He was to become the last chief of the most dominant and influential
tribe in American history. The two opposing forces came together in his mother,
Cynthia Ann. Behind all the story is the rise and fall of the Comanche nation.
Quanah was merely the final product of everything the Indians had believed and
fought for over a span of two hundred and fifty years.

And so
began the final battles against the Native Americans. As more and more tribes
were decimated by either killing or forced onto reservations, their numbers
inevitably dwindled further and further until Sheridan’s great campaign led by
Mackenzie was nearly over. Larger and larger amounts of Indians gave themselves
up at fort Sill, most starving. In February Lone Wolf and the last of the Kiowa’s
came in. In March 825 southern Cheyenne gave up. Small groups and individuals
streamed in continuously. In April several other Comanche bands lead by Shaking
Hand, Hears the Sunrise and Wild Horse surrendered with just 35 warriors, but
with them were one hundred and forty women and children and seven hundred
horses. By the end of April there were only a few bands of plains Indians who
had not surrendered. By far the largest were Quanah’s Quahadis. As far as the white man could
tell this band had completely disappeared after the battle of Adobe Walls. They
were aware that this band was four hundred strong and contained one hundred
able bodied fighting warriors of distinction. In a later interview Quanah
confirmed that he had played cat and mouse for the entire fall with the
federals, moving camp continuously. On March 16, 1875 Mackenzie himself
returned to take command of fort sill. he was only to 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. The
delegation left with three Comanche’s including the other Quahadi chief Wild
Horse. They had only a vague idea of where they were going. Finally near the
present day town of matador they came across small fifteen lodge village of the Quahadi lead by the chief Black Beard.
Black Beard readily accepted Mackenzie’s offer to come in peacefully. he said
he was tired of war and told the delegation where Quanah’s camp was, some two
days away. On May 1, the leader of the delegation Sturm found Quanah’s camp.
Sturm spent the next two days in council with Quanah. Quanah unexpectedly was
preaching surrender. He had been foremost among the white man haters; he had
seeked most revenge after the death of his father, the capture of his mother
and sister. He had demonstrated a wilful disregard for his own safety at
the battle of Adobe Falls, and he had spent the early summer killing the enemy.
He was known to despise the Comanche’s who travelled the white man’s road. On 6
may 1875 the entire group left for fort Sill, where they arrived on June 2,
nearly a month later.



From the
moment of Quanah’s arrival Colonel Mackenzie took an extreme interest in him.
In spite of his battles with them Mackenzie admired the Quahadis. He wrote to Sheridan, I think
more of this band than any other on the reservation; I shall let them down as
easily as I can. He kept his word. The quahadis were allowed to keep a large
number of their horses. It is also known that before Quanah arrived Mackenzie
had found out about the identity of Quanah’s mother and had written a letter
dated <May 19, 1875 to the military quartermaster in Texas enquiring about
the whereabouts of Cynthia Ann and prairie flower. The letter was published in
a Dallas newspaper, and managed to receive the information that Prairie flower
had died of illness and shortly thereafter Cynthia Ann after several attempts
to return to the Native Americans had starved herself to death. Mackenzie had
not yet met Quanah, but the letter was the beginning of a remarkable friendship.



The reservations
were a shattering experience, it was bad enough having to bend to the white man’s
will let alone having to line up meekly to receive his charity for food and
clothing. The system was cruel and humiliating, the white man had taken away
everything that had defined the Native American existence and left them in
nothing but crude squalor. Strange then that this despondent, crippled post
destruction world became the stage for the remarkable career of Quanah parker,
the name he insisted on being called, the man who became the most successful
and influential native American of the late nineteenth century. His rise was
even stranger given the fact that 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 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,
probably the toughest of his generation of Comanche’s, which was saying something
given the details of the ruthlessness of some of these individuals over a
period of years. He had killed many Indians and white people in his short life,
a statistic that will remain forever unknown because in his reservation years
he quite intelligently refused to discuss the subject. His new beginning began
with his attitude towards his captivity. He would take the white man’s road,
there was no other choice other than death, he would play them at their own
game, he would also strive to lead other Native Americans down this road. That
meant white man’s farming and ranching, white man’s schools for children, white
man’s commerce, politics and language. The void that other Comanche’s were staring at was turned on
its head by Quanah and treated as an opportunity. He would remake himself as a
prosperous, taxpaying citizen of the United States. Quanah saw the future
clearly. On the high and low plains he had been a fierce fighting warrior of
extreme renown aggressiveness, now he would move just as resolutely from a life
of a late stone age barbarian into the mainstream of industrial American
culture.



As Quanah’s
standing became more and more integrated into the mainstream American way he
was called upon to settle disputes and to diplomatically deal with fights and arguments
between whites and natives. he was sent out on several expeditions when renegade
Indians had murdered white men guarding fort sill and brought them back to what
was known as justice. Quanah was sent out to bring back a group of over fifty
renegades, a very dangerous expedition at this time. On August 20 Quanah bought
back fifty seven Indians and one white captive called Lehmann back to the
reservation. When Lehmann first saw the blue coats approaching he panicked and
ran. He wrote in his memoir that he was riding an extreme fast horse but that
he was no match for Quanah who rode him down after a four miles chase and
gently persuaded him to return to the reservation. Lehmann who was seventeen at
the time upon his return lived with Quanah and his family for three years
and considered him his foster father. He was sent back to his mother in 1880.
Mackenzie was impressed that Quanah had been able to get everyone home without
bloodshed and his conduct during a dangerous expedition. Leveraging his
goodwill, something Quanah was particularly good at; Quanah persuaded Mackenzie
that the renegades should not be sent to prison. For that he earned the
gratitude and respect of the tribes who he was trying to integrate into the
ways of the white man



What
really changed Quanah’s life on the reservation was the cattle business, which
in the late 1870,s was transforming the entire western frontier? In the latter stages of
the 1860.s there were over five million cattle in Texas. The big northerly drives
of cattle travelled the western trail, which led through fort griffin, across
the red river and north to Dodge City. This trail leads straight through the
heart of the Comanche-Kiowa reservation in Oklahoma. Quanah organised grazing
on the lands of the herds and in response ensured that the Indian owners of the
land which was once nothing more than grass, now provided valuable food and way
of passage for the cattle, they were also advised where the best watering
places were for the cattle and if they did not pay for the grazing then some of
their cattle went mysteriously missing, for this the Indians received corrupt
payments which began to ensure that they could now afford supplies of their own
instead of relying on the meagre supplies afforded them by the US government.
It eventually lead to the Indians legally leasing out their grazing lands, in
this case, to white cattle outfits. The Indians now found themselves sitting on
a thousand square miles of prime grazing land. Quanah advised them to legally lease
this land in the future. This they did. In 1884 the Indians on the reservation
voted their approval of this leasing. The Indians got six cents per acre; it
was later increases to ten cents per acres. As part of the deal cattlemen
agreed to hire fifty four Indians as cowboys, a great example of Quanah talking
care of his own.



Meanwhile
his own business was prospering. He had built up his own herd of cattle to
almost five hundred head. His new friend Charles Goodnight had given him a prime
Durham bull for breeding. He became a supplied to his own people. A few years
earlier in 1886 something else had happened to fuel his growing celebrity. James
DeShields published the first book about his mother Cynthia Ann. Anyone who had
not heard about Quanah’s origins now knew about them in minute detail. The book
also included Quanah’s photograph.



His crowning
glory and the thing he was most proud of is the house he built for himself in
1890. While almost all other Indians had taken the government grant to build
shotgun shacks at three hundred and fifty dollars a time, Quanah still favoured
a tipi. But by the late 1880,s his status was such that he needed something better, in true Quanah
tradition, much better. He set about getting government grants by petitions
which were refused several times, until he had the authority and grants and his
own personal money to build a ten room, two story clapboard house, the sort of
grand stately plains home any rancher would have been proud of. The scene in Quanah’s
new two thousand dollar home held no precedent in Comanche history. he had
eight wives, seven whom he married during the reservation period. Between them
he fathered twenty four children, five of whom died in infancy. Quanah managed
against all odds and opposition to keep his wives even though he infuriated
existing wives by courting new ones. In spite of Quanah’s arguements, multiple
wives no longer had a place in the Comanche culture. Polygamy had mainly been a
way to provide extra labour in the tanning and processing of buffalo hides. Those
days were gone. Quanah had wives now simply because he wanted and could afford
them. His enormous family soon contained white members. Two of Quanah’s
daughters married white men. he adopted and raised two white boys as his own.
Family members either stayed in the house or lived in tipis in the front yard,
which was surrounded by a white picket fence. This remarkable scene also
consisted of more than just his own family. there were many other Comanche
tipis around the house too. This was because of Quanah’s unfailing generosity,
he fed many a hungry person over the years and was said to never turn anyone
away needing food. According to people who knew him feeding members of his tribe
was the main use to which he put his private herd.



There was
also a constant stream of guests to his famous dining table. he hired white
women to teach his wives to cook. Over the years guests included general Nelson
Miles, Geronimo, Lone Wold, Charles Goodnight, British ambassador Lord Brice
and eventually the man himself, president Roosevelt. Quanah built up a
noteworthy friendship with Teddy Roosevelt. In March 1895 he rode in an open
car in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in buckskins and war bonnet, accompanied by
Geronimo, two Sioux chiefs and a Blackfeet chief.



In later
years when Roosevelt’s train arrived at Frederick Oklahoma, he was met by a
crowd of three thousand and escorted by a minor guard which included Quanah to
a speakers stand in the middle of town. Roosevelt made a brief speech and then
invited Quanah whom he introduced as a good citizen to come up and stand with
him. The two men shook hands to rousing applause and then Quanah gave a short speech.
After this occasion Roosevelt travelled north to visit Quanah, a truly
momentous occasion ion tiny Cache Oklahoma. Thus was Quanah’s fame complete.



Quanah
never forgot his mother. He kept. the photo Sul Ross had given him above his
bed. The photo was taken in 1862 with Prairie Flower nursing at her breast. She
had been taken from him when he was only twelve and forced back into the world
of the white man. He later learned that she had been extremely unhappy and had
tried on several occasions to escape to find him. In 1908 he places ads in a Texas
newspaper to try to locate her grave. he was contacted by a cousin and soon
they were to become friends. he found his mother’s grave through members of his
family, he now lobbied for the money to move her grave from Texas to
Oklahoma. Persistent and persuasive as always he convinced a congressman to
sponsor a bill for £1000 to locate his mother’s bones. He travelled to Texas
and found the cemetery where she lay. On December 10, 1910 she was reinterred
at the Post oak Mission in Cache. At a ceremony over her grave Quanah performed
a small speech.



He
himself had less than three months to live. In February 1911 Quanah was returning
by train from a visit to some of his Cheyenne friends. He knew he was sick.
When he arrived home in Cache he was taken to the house of his son in law Emmer
Cox. He died there on February of rheumatism-induced heart failure. On his
grave are the words written by his daughter



Resting here
until daybreaks

And
shadows fall

And
darkness disappears

Is Quanah
Parker, the last chief of the Comanche’s