The Searchers (16 page)

According to Quanah, his father lived for some five more years. Comanche oral tradition says he died of old war wounds somewhere in the Antelope Hills of Oklahoma.

Quanah would remember the times that followed his father's death as a painful period in which he and his brother, two orphans with no close relatives, had to scrounge for food and clothing with little support from other Comanches. He attributed some of this hardship to the fact that his mother was white. Within a few years his brother died as well from one of the many epidemics that were ravaging the tribe.
Quanah was truly on his own
.

He was not exactly an outcast but neither was he a cherished member of the tribe. His father had been well respected among Comanches, even legendary, for his prowess as a warrior, but was called “the Wanderer” and was known as a loner with no close friends. The young Quanah, too, traveled alone.

The Staked Plains became his domain. The plains were a parched, brittle, limestone plateau on the western flank of Texas, some 250 miles long and 150 miles wide—as large as Maine. In summer they locked themselves inside a suffocating closet of gray haze—brown, yellow ground with shrubs and dwarfed trees sprinkled throughout like random afterthoughts before the curled blue edges of the hazy horizon. It was a land of high temperatures and low rainfall. Francisco Coronado, who had passed through the area in 1541 on his search for El Dorado, pronounced the plains “
so vast that I did not
find their limit anywhere I
went … with no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea.”

The Spanish called them Llano Estacada—the “Stockade Plains”—a reference either to the fortresslike appearance of their blunt escarpments or to the stakes that one Spanish expedition hammered into the ground so that they could retrace their path through the vast swath of nothingness. On some Texan maps the plains were labeled the Great American Desert, and they might as well have been posted with a skull and cross-bones. There was precious little grass and even less water—nothing to keep a horse or a mule or a man alive for very long. Under a canopy of sullen gray sky, the plains were a theater of death. “
The land is too much
, too empty, claustrophobic in its immensity,” wrote the author Timothy Egan.

To the casual observer, the Llano looks like one seamless, arid platform. But Quanah and his fellow Comanches knew that the plains concealed a network of deeply etched canyons like intimate secrets that provided shelter from the winter storms and fragile vegetation and water throughout the rest of the year. The largest is called Palo Duro—“Hard Pole”—a name said to originate in the hardwood wild cherry and plum trees scattered through the hidden valley. At the time of the Civil War no white man had ventured into the area for three hundred years.

Quanah knew intimately the Palo Duro and all of the small depressions, fissures, and hidden seasonal water holes of the Llano. For him each was a haven, a place he could linger and hide without challenge from red men or white. At times he even claimed to have been born on Cedar Lake, the alkaline sea on the eastern edge of the Llano. To an orphan like Quanah, something about the harsh empty desert must have felt like home.

A YOUNG COMANCHE MALE without standing
or a patron faced a hard road in attaining stature, prosperity, and a desirable bride. Those fettered by poverty or low rank faced two choices: go along with subordination for an extended period until they could gain a foothold; or strike out on their own. Quanah chose the latter.

From his earliest days, according to oral legend, he showed an untamed romantic streak that violated the norms of Comanche society. After Peta Nocona's death, it was said, a senior chief named Yellow Bear
invited Quanah to join his camp. There Quanah fell in love with Yellow Bear's daughter,
Weckeah
. Quanah knew that a fellow brave named Tannap had first call on Weckeah: Yellow Bear had already made arrangements with Tannap's father, who had offered a string of ponies as a bride price. Yellow Bear pledged that in three nights Weckeah would join Tannap in his teepee to consummate the marriage.

Quanah had other plans. He convinced Weckeah to run away with him the following evening. Some twenty younger warriors decided to join them. The rebels scattered in ten directions to throw off any pursuers, then met up near the headwaters of the Concho River.

For several months Quanah and his comrades raided ranches in West Texas and built a portfolio of stolen horses. Within a year they had established themselves as an offshoot of the Quahadi band. When Yellow Bear tracked them down, elders intervened to prevent open warfare. In the end, Quanah paid twenty ponies to Yellow Bear and nineteen more to Tannap, then staged a two-day feast to smooth over hard feelings. He and Weckeah were allowed to return, and she became his first wife. Quanah's legend had begun.

This is the first known photograph of Quanah Parker, identified as “Quinine, or Cita, Qua-Ha-Da Comanche,” taken by Will Soule at Fort Sill.

THE WORLD QUANAH WAS ENTERING had changed seismically from the one his father had known. Comanche society had been shattered from within and without by plague and continuous warfare. The old clans and traditions were dying out, with nothing to take their place. Meanwhile, the Texans, their mortal enemies, were growing in numbers and firepower. Not for the first time in human history, nor the last, a technologically advanced nation with a growing population and a muscular opinion of its own righteousness asserted its dominance over a smaller, more primitive one.

The Civil War provided a curious hiatus for the Indians and a temporary respite in their demise. Native Americans looked on with amazement as white Unionists and Confederates killed each other with a fervor and determination once reserved for native peoples. Texas sent more than ninety thousand of its young men to fight on eastern battlefields, while the U.S. Army denuded its frontier forts to supply the Union side. Comanche and Kiowa raiders took advantage of the conflict to step up their attacks. More white captives were taken. One Indian agent, I. C. Taylor, reported that the Kiowa chief Satanta and his men boasted “that
stealing white women is
a more lucrative business than stealing horses.”

Still, even as the war was ending, there was little taste in Washington for an all-out assault on the Lords of the Plains. For one thing, Indian fighting was no longer considered a noble undertaking. The slaughter by Union militia under Colonel James Chivington of more than one hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children in southern Colorado in November 1864—known as the
Sand Creek Massacre
—was a turning point. Chivington's men, ignoring the American flag the Cheyenne villagers were flying, opened fire indiscriminately, then came back later in the day and finished off the wounded, scalping each corpse, cutting off hands and fingers to steal jewelry, and hauling mutilated body parts back to Denver for public display. In the ensuing investigation, witnesses reported having seen the sexual mutilation of men, women, and children's corpses. “In going over the battleground the next day I did not see a body of man, woman or child but was scalped, and in many instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner—men, women and children's privates cut out, etc.,” testified Lieutenant James Connor.

With the Civil War grinding on to its ghastly conclusion and the public grown tired of bloodshed of any kind, Sand Creek caused a wave of popular revulsion and a surge of peace treaties. The first was the Treaty of the Little Arkansas in 1865, in which Kiowas and Comanches ceded their claim to most of East and South Texas in return for annuity payments and the right to continue roaming unfettered through the hunting grounds of the north and west. It was at best a cynical charade: the most warlike bands did not sign, and in any case the federal peace commissioners had no authority to cede Texas state land to Indians. By the following year the raiders were back in the field and so were the Texas Rangers. While the overall numbers of those killed, wounded, or abducted in these attacks were low, the psychological impact of terror was powerful and demoralizing. The Texans may have been winning the war: the forces of population growth and industrialization were firmly on their side. But in the interim they were losing many battles. The population of Wise County in North Texas fell from 3,160 in 1860 to 1,450 a decade later.

If the oral legend is correct, Quanah capitalized on his prowess and his daring and the thinning of Comanche warrior ranks to quickly become a respected warrior. He joined raiding parties rampaging down the familiar trails through the heart of West Texas and into Mexico. Like all young Comanche men, he engaged in rites of passage, such as a vision quest. Every man had his special medicine and connection to the natural and spiritual world, often through animal spirits. Quanah's personal connection was the bear. “
Sometimes a Comanche man dreams
and a big bear comes and tells him you do this—‘You paint your face this way. I help you,' “ Quanah later explained. “If he sees bear in his dreams then he makes medicine that way.” In battle Quanah would wear a necklace with a bear claw.

The only account Quanah ever gave of a raiding expedition makes the raiders sound like the gang who couldn't shoot straight. As he described it, he and his companions rode south to the Mexican state of Chihuahua and a valley filled with cattle and horses. For nine nights they tried and failed to steal any livestock. “When the white man's houses are thick, they keep the horses hidden and they are hard to find,” he explained, rather lamely.

Finally on the tenth night they found some horses and spirited them away. They also stole a calf, which they roasted immediately and wolfed down because no one had eaten for two days. The raiders fled Mexico with a few dozen horses, no scalps, no captives, and no brave stories to tell.

He was raiding in the Staked Plains when he met a small group of fellow Comanches who told him that soldiers were coming into southern Kansas with beef cattle, sugar, coffee, and other cherished goods for those Indians willing to participate in a great peace council.
Putting his skepticism aside
, Quanah and his small band of warriors rode to the site.

THE “GRAND COUNCIL” MET in a clearing
of tall elms near Medicine Lodge Creek in southern Kansas on the morning of October 19, 1867. Chiefs of the Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne nations sat on logs facing the peace commissioners, who sat in a semi-circle of stiff-backed chairs. Fishermore, a Kiowa crier, opened the proceedings at 10:00 a.m. with a loud call for everyone to “do right.”

The wily old Kiowa leader, Satanta, was seated on a camp chair in front of the other chiefs. Nearby was a white woman, Virginia Adams, interpreter for the Arapahos, dressed in a crimson gown made especially for the occasion.
Behind them was Ten Bears
, elder statesman of the Yamparika Comanches. “What I say is law for the Comanches,” Ten Bears proclaimed. “But it takes a half dozen to speak for the Kiowas.”

Kansas senator John B. Henderson spoke first. He accused the assembled warriors of violating the Treaty of the Little Arkansas forged two years earlier by attacking work crews laying railroad tracks across Indian territory and by killing white women and children. “These reports made the hearts of our people very sad,” Henderson told the assembled chiefs.

Nonetheless, said Henderson, the government in Washington wanted “to do justice to the Red Man.” He promised the chiefs “all the comforts of civilization, religion, and wealth,” including “comfortable homes upon our richest agricultural lands.” The government would provide schools and churches as well as livestock and farming tools. All it wanted in return was an Indian agreement to keep the peace and to live a “civilized” existence—in other words, to cease being Indians.

The first chief to respond was Satanta. A large, flamboyant performer who could leap nimbly from arrogance to servility and back again, he buried his hands in the ground, rubbed them with sand, and strolled around the circle shaking hands with each participant. Then he walked into the center and began to speak. Satanta used a timeworn strategy: he blamed other Indians. His young men and those of the Comanches had honored the treaty, he claimed, but the Cheyenne had not. They
were the ones responsible for the raids and the depredations. “They did it in broad daylight, so that all could see them,” he declared.

But Satanta was also blunt: he had no interest in reservation life. “I have heard that you intend to settle us on a reservation near the mountains,” he told the commissioners. “I don't want to settle there. I love to roam over the wide prairie, and when I do it I feel free and happy, but when we settle down, we grow pale and thin.”

The soon-to-be-famous British journalist Henry M. Stanley, who witnessed the ceremony, said Satanta's bald rejection “produced a rather blank look upon the faces of the Peace Commissioners.” The response they had been looking for from the chiefs was submission to the inevitable, if not gratitude. What they hadn't expected was defiance.