The Last Comanche Chief , livre ebook

T HE L AST C OMANCHE C HIEF
T HE L AST C OMANCHE C HIEF

T HE L IFE AND T IMES OF Q UANAH P ARKER
B ILL N EELEY

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright © 1995 by Bill Neeley
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in Canada.
Reproduction or translation of any part of this work beyond that permitted by Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act without the permission of the copyright owner is unlawful. Requests for permission or further information should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Neeley, Bill.
The last Comanche chief : the life and times of Quanah Parker / Bill Neeley,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-471-16076-2
1. Parker, Quanah, 1845?–1911. 2. Comanche Indians—Biography. 3. Comanche Indians—Kings and rulers. 4. Comanche Indians—History. I. Title.
E99.C85P385 1995
976′.004974–dc20
[B]
94-38101
10 9 8
For Poppy Hulsey

C ONTENTS

Foreword
Acknowledgments
1. The Birth of a Native American: The Attack on Parker’s Fort
2. Comanchería
3. The Capture of Naudah
4. The Comanche War Trail
5. The Battle of CañBlanco
6. Fort Sill
7. Peyote
8. Cattle
9. Statesmanship
Notes
Bibliography
Index
F OREWORD

by James M. Cox, grandson of Quanah Parker and former chairman of the Comanche Tribe
M any views have been written about my grandfather, Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches, who guided the Comanche people at a most perilous time in the history of the tribe. Like him, I was also a chief of my people, having been elected chairman of the Comanche Tribe in 1976. One of the Comanche’s greatest needs, I realized, was a tribal complex composed of offices, meeting rooms, coffee shop, and gymnasium, to bring the tribe together to plan for the preservation of our culture. It was my destiny to build the Comanche Tribal Complex during my tenure as chairman.
My mother, Nau-Noc-Ca Parker Cox, was the firstborn child of Quanah and Weckeah Parker. It is to her credit that I speak the Comanche language. I must add that my father, E. E. Cox, taught me English. Having lost his eyesight, he taught me to spell and read before I started school, so I would be able to read the newspapers to him.
Bill Neeley has gathered a vast amount of research on Quanah and his people, which allowed him to view Quanah from many angles. Neeley concluded that Quanah was a great war chief who made the change to become an effective civil chief because Quanah was a man of great intellect and personal integrity. Quanah observed how the non-Indian transacted business and became a successful rancher and cattleman. Through it all, he did not lose his Indian identity.
Through Bill Neeley’s book runs a theme of preserving Quanah and his people. To show appreciation for a positive written document, I gave Mr. Neeley a Comanche name of “Chatuh-bohtuh”—meaning “good writer.”
It is my hope that Bill Neeley’s book will cause others to realize there is another side of Comanche life that is beautiful and caring.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

T o all who have supported this study of Chief Quanah Parker and the Comanche people, I express my deepest gratitude.
Especially helpful to me in compiling this volume have been Mr. and Mrs. James M. Cox of Midwest City, Oklahoma. Mr. Cox is Quanah’s grandson and a former chairman of the tribe. Many other members of the Parker family, along with other Comanches, particularly present Comanche Chairman Wallace E. Coffey, have provided me with valuable insight and information. To all of them I am grateful.
This work, which is built upon the careful analysis of many pieces of data, owes its existence largely to the archivists and librarians who directed my path along this journey through time. Claire Kuehn of the Panhandle–Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, was my principal mentor. Another of my teachers was Towana Spivey of the Fort Sill Museum at Lawton, Oklahoma. In Amarillo, Texas, I was blessed with the dutiful attention of Art Bort and the rest of the staff of the Amarillo Public Library. Professionals at the following institutions also contributed to the body of knowledge encompassed in this book: Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma; Archives and Manuscript Division, Oklahoma Historical Society; Museum of the Great Plains, Lawton, Oklahoma; Barker Texas History Center, the University of Texas at Austin; Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University; Archives Division, Texas State Library; Cornette Library, West Texas A&M University; Wichita Falls Times and Record News; Quanah Tribune-Chief; and the Library of Congress and the National Archives.
Thanks also to Shirley Yarnall for helping to bring this book to its final form.
For all those, Indian and non-Indian, who taught me important parts of the story through personal interviews, I am truly indebted. At this writing, more than one has since slipped into the spirit world, but their words live on in print and in our hearts.
Certainly, this book would never have become a reality without the presence of a Higher Power. Father Bill Brashears and my fellow parishioners in Amarillo prayed, along with members of my family, to Him who makes all things possible. My final thank you, therefore, is to all who prayed.
1

T HE B IRTH OF A N ATIVE A MERICAN : T HE A TTACK ON P ARKER’S F ORT
At the eventful period of the discovery of America, the whole continent was inhabited by numerous tribes of red men who were destitute of the arts and sciences that distinguish the present age, and were also exempt from most of the vices that now corrode and canker what is popularly called civilized life.
– Colonel Edward Stiff, 1839 1
S ometime around 1850, in a Comanche tepee, Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches, was born. He was the son of Peta Nocona, chief of the Quahada band of the Comanches, and Cynthia Ann Parker, a white girl whom the Quahada warriors had captured in 1836. Parker was a name Quanah would not know, acknowledge, or assume for many years, years that would see him grow from great war chief Quanah to Quanah Parker, the man who understood the necessity of Indians’ adapting to the white man’s culture and who came to play a prominent role in the politics of the emerging United States of America. Quanah the chief would lead his warriors against the U.S. Army and the Texas Rangers, and then in the late nineteenth century become a rancher and cattleman, a capitalist in the tradition of the Gilded Age. The birth of this child to an Indian father from a doomed culture and a white mother from the encroaching one is peculiarly symbolic of the times that led up to the birth of the new nation.
The Comanche raid that led to Cynthia Ann Parker’s capture took place on a quiet morning in late May of 1836. The Parkers, farmers and preachers of the hard-shell Baptist faith, had established a settlement along the banks of the Navasota River in what was later to be known as Limestone County, Texas. In 1836, the area was part of Comanchería, a vast territory claimed by the several bands of “The People” (the Comanches) and their allies. Elder John Parker, along with his wife and sons, daughters, in-laws, grandchildren, and friends, had made a tactical error in locating their “Parker’s Fort” farther west and north into Comanchería than any American immigrants had ever settled. They might have taken a lesson from the Spanish who had preceded them. In their centuries-long effort to populate Texas, the Spanish had in 1774 established a village called Pueblo de Bucareli along the banks of the Trinity at the crossing of the San Antonio road. It prospered until the Comanches swept down in 1778. The settlers armed themselves and managed to kill three of the Indians, but the warriors returned and stole over two hundred horses. Now the terrorized inhabitants dared leave the village only to hunt, and even then they had to do so in large parties. They could not plant their crops and had to guard their remaining stock night and day. Soon Bucareli was a ghost town, as these settlers moved back to safer territory.
Two generations later, the Parkers chose a spot north and west of the old site of Bucareli, even deeper into Comanchería. They had no fear of Indians; they had fought Indians from Georgia to Tennessee to Illinois. Also, the Parkers had a mission: to bring their Baptist doctrine to the wilderness. “The elect,” said Elder Daniel Parker, son of patriarch Elder John, “are a wrathful people because they are the natural enemies of the non-elect.” 2
So the Parkers, confident in their ability to subdue Indians in Texas as they had in previous locations, set to work in late spring of Texas’s first year as a republic to raise crops, enjoy their families, and propagate the gospel according to the Articles of Faith in the Pilgrim Church. Article 8 states that “. . . it is the duty of the Church of God to distinguish herself from all false sects.” Fellowship or Christian union with anyone who disagreed with the Pilgrim Doctrine was forbidden. The church’s attitude toward natural man, as stated in Article 10, was, “We believe that the Church or kingdom of God set up in the world is a spiritual kingdom—that MEN IN A STATE OF NATURE cannot see it. . .” 3
This doctrine accorded with that of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the territorial expansion of the United States was divinely destined. To the men in Parker’s Fort and in the surrounding tree-ringed fields, the red man was a savage, a heathen. Each Sunday, the Parkers engaged in the exercise of making “. . . the home of the savage . . . vocal with hymns of praise.” 4 God’s power, they believed, would sustain the energy of his children and direct them through the Holy Scriptures in the way they were to live. Among the millions of Americans along the edge of the frontier who were slowly inching we