Quanah Parker, c. 1890
Quanah Parker on horseback wearing eagle feather headdress and holding a lance bottom-up.
Cavalrymen remember such moments: dust swirling behind the
pack mules, regimental bugles shattering the air, horses snorting and riders’
tack creaking through the ranks, their old company song rising on the wind:
“Come home, John! Don’t stay long. Come home soon to your own chick-a-biddy!”
The date was October 3, 1871. Six hundred soldiers and twenty Tonkawa scouts
had bivouacked on a lovely bend of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, in a rolling,
scarred prairie of grama grass, scrub oak, sage, and chaparral, about one
hundred fifty miles west of Fort Worth, Texas. Now they were breaking camp,
moving out in a long, snaking line through the high cutbanks and quicksand
streams. Though they did not know it at the time—the idea would have seemed
preposterous—the sounding of “boots and saddle” that morning marked the beginning
of the end of the Indian wars in America, of fully two hundred fifty years of
bloody combat that had begun almost with the first landing of the first ship on
the first fatal shore in Virginia. The final destruction of the last of the
hostile tribes would not take place for a few more years. Time would be yet
required to round them all up, or starve them out, or exterminate their sources
of food, or run them to ground in shallow canyons, or kill them outright. For
the moment the question was one of hard, unalloyed will. There had been brief
spasms of official vengeance and retribution before: J. M. Chivington’s and
George Armstrong Custer’s savage massacres of Cheyennes in 1864 and 1868 were
examples. But in those days there was no real attempt to destroy the tribes on
a larger scale, no stomach for it. That had changed, and on October 3, the
change assumed the form of an order, barked out through the lines of command to
the men of the Fourth Cavalry and Eleventh Infantry, to go forth and kill
Comanches. It was the end of anything like tolerance, the beginning of the
final solution.
The white men were grunts, bluecoats, cavalry, and dragoons;
mostly veterans of the War Between the States who now found themselves at the
edge of the known universe, ascending to the turreted rock towers that gated
the fabled Llano Estacado—Coronado’s term for it, meaning “palisaded plains” of
West Texas, a country populated exclusively by the most hostile Indians on the
continent, where few U.S. soldiers had ever gone before. The llano was a place
of extreme desolation, a vast, trackless, and featureless ocean of grass where
white men became lost and disoriented and died of thirst; a place where the
imperial Spanish had once marched confidently forth to hunt Comanches, only to
find that they themselves were the hunted, the ones to be slaughtered. In 1864,
Kit Carson had led a large force of federal troops from Santa Fe and attacked a
Comanche band at a trading post called Adobe Walls, north of modern-day
Amarillo. He had survived it, but had come within a whisker of watching his
three companies of cavalry and infantry destroyed.
The troops were now going back, because enough was enough,
because President Grant’s vaunted “Peace Policy” toward the remaining Indians,
run by his gentle Quaker appointees, had failed utterly to bring peace, and
finally because the exasperated general in chief of the army, William Tecumseh
Sherman, had ordered it so. Sherman’s chosen agent of destruction was a civil
war hero named Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, a difficult, moody, and implacable
young man who had graduated first in his class from West Point in 1862 and had
finished the Civil War, remarkably, as a brevet brigadier general. Because his
hand was gruesomely disfigured from war wounds, the Indians called him
No-Finger Chief, or Bad Hand. A complex destiny awaited him. Within four years
he would prove himself the most brutally effective Indian fighter in American
history. In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong
Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become
obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest
of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken,
stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns
that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of
what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians
in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the
one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was
new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming
weeks. He would learn from them.
For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had
been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six
years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and
bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a
place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where
Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war,
unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its
history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of
remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to
retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of
abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great
Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance
and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes,
and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the
obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan,
and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death.
None was even a close second.
Just how bad things were in 1871 along this razor edge of
civilization could be seen in the numbers of settlers who had abandoned their
lands. The frontier, carried westward with so much sweat and blood and toil,
was now rolling backward, retreating. Colonel Randolph Marcy, who accompanied
Sherman on a western tour in the spring, and who had known the country
intimately for decades, had been shocked to find that in many places there were
fewer people than eighteen years before. “If the Indian marauders are not
punished,” he wrote, “the whole country seems in a fair way of becoming totally
depopulated.” This phenomenon was not entirely unknown in the history of the
New World. The Comanches had also stopped cold the northward advance of the
Spanish empire in the eighteenth century—an empire that had, up to that point,
easily subdued and killed millions of Indians in Mexico and moved at will
through the continent. Now, after more than a century of relentless westward
movement, they were rolling back civilization’s advance again, only on a much
larger scale. Whole areas of the borderlands were simply emptying out, melting
back eastward toward the safety of the forests. One county—Wise—had seen its
population drop from 3,160 in the year 1860 to 1,450 in 1870. In some places
the line of settlements had been driven back a hundred miles.4 If General Sherman
wondered about the cause—as he once did—his tour with Marcy relieved him of his
doubts. That spring they had narrowly missed being killed themselves by a party
of raiding Indians. The Indians, mostly Kiowas, passed them over because of a
shaman’s superstitions and had instead attacked a nearby wagon train. What
happened was typical of the savage, revenge-driven attacks by Comanches and
Kiowas in Texas in the postwar years. What was not typical was Sherman’s
proximity and his own very personal and mortal sense that he might have been a
victim, too. Because of that the raid became famous, known to history as the
Salt Creek Massacre.
Seven men were killed in the raid, though that does not
begin to describe the horror of what Mackenzie found at the scene. According to
Captain Robert G. Carter, Mackenzie’s subordinate, who witnessed its aftermath,
the victims were stripped, scalped, and mutilated. Some had been beheaded and
others had their brains scooped out. “Their fingers, toes and private parts had
been cut off and stuck in their mouths,” wrote Carter, “and their bodies, now
lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of
recognition, were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines.”
They had clearly been tortured, too. “Upon each exposed abdomen had been placed
a mass of live coals. . . . One wretched man, Samuel Elliott,
who, fighting hard to the last, had evidently been wounded, was found chained
between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he
had been slowly roasted to death—‘burnt to a crisp.’ ”
Thus the settlers’ headlong flight eastward, especially on
the Texas frontier, where such raiding was at its worst. After so many long and
successful wars of conquest and dominion, it seemed implausible that the
westward rush of Anglo-European civilization would stall in the prairies of
central Texas. No tribe had ever managed to resist for very long the surge of
nascent American civilization with its harquebuses and blunderbusses and muskets
and eventually lethal repeating weapons and its endless stocks of eager,
land-greedy settlers, its elegant moral double standards and its complete
disregard for native interests. Beginning with the subjection of the Atlantic
coastal tribes (Pequots, Penobscots, Pamunkeys, Wampanoags, et al), hundreds of
tribes and bands had either perished from the earth, been driven west into
territories, or forcibly assimilated. This included the Iroquois and their
enormous, warlike confederation that ruled the area of present-day New York;
the once powerful Delawares, driven west into the lands of their enemies; the
Iroquois, then yet farther west into even more murderous foes on the plains.
The Shawnees of the Ohio Country had fought a desperate rearguard action starting
in the 1750s. The great nations of the south—Chicasaw, Cherokee, Seminole,
Creek, and Choctaw—saw their reservation lands expropriated in spite of a
string of treaties; they were coerced westward into lands given them in yet
more treaties that were violated before they were even signed; hounded along a
trail of tears until they, too, landed in “Indian Territory” (present-day
Oklahoma), a land controlled by Comanches, Kiowas, Araphoes, and Cheyennes.
Even stranger was that the Comanches’ stunning success was
happening amid phenomenal technological and social changes in the west. In 1869
the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, linking the industrializing east
with the developing west and rendering the old trails—Oregon, Santa Fe, and
tributaries—instantly obsolete. With the rails came cattle, herded northward in
epic drives to railheads by Texans who could make fast fortunes getting them to
Chicago markets. With the rails, too, came buffalo hunters carrying deadly
accurate .50-caliber Sharps rifles that could kill effectively at extreme
range—grim, violent, opportunistic men blessed now by both a market in the east
for buffalo leather and the means of getting it there. In 1871 the buffalo
still roamed the plains: Earlier that year a herd of four million had been
spotted near the Arkansas River in present-day southern Kansas. 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 warm-blooded
animals in human history. In Kansas alone the bones of thirty-one million
buffalo were sold for fertilizer between 1868 and 1881. All of these profound
changes were under way as Mackenzie’s Raiders departed their camps on the Clear
Fork. The nation was booming; a railroad had finally stitched it together.
There was only this one obstacle left: the warlike and unreconstructed Indian
tribes who inhabited the physical wastes of the Great Plains.
Of those, the most remote, primitive, and irredeemably
hostile were a band of Comanches known as the Quahadis. Like all Plains
Indians, they were nomadic. They hunted primarily the southernmost part of the
high plains, a place known to the Spanish, who had been abjectly driven from
it, as Comancheria. The Llano Estacado, located within Comancheria, was a
dead-flat tableland larger than New England and rising, in its highest
elevations, to more than five thousand feet. For Europeans, the land was like a
bad hallucination. “Although I traveled over them for more than 300 leagues,”
wrote Coronado in a letter to the king of Spain on October 20, 1541, “[there
were] no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the
sea . . . there was not a stone, nor a bit of rising ground, nor
a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.” The Canadian River formed its
northern boundary. In the east was the precipitous Caprock Escarpment, a cliff
rising somewhere between two hundred and one thousand feet that demarcates the
high plains from the lower Permian Plains below, giving the Quahadis something
that approximated a gigantic, nearly impregnable fortress. Unlike almost all of
the other tribal bands on the plains, the Quahadis had always shunned contact
with Anglos. They would not even trade with them, as a general principle,
preferring the Mexican traders from Santa Fe, known as Comancheros. So aloof
were they that in the numerous Indian ethnographies compiled from 1758 onward
chronicling the various Comanche bands (there were as many as thirteen), they
do not even show up until 1872. For this reason they had largely avoided the
cholera plagues of 1816 and 1849 that had ravaged western tribes and had
destroyed fully half of all Comanches. Virtually alone among all bands of all
tribes in North America, they never signed a treaty. Quahadis were the hardest,
fiercest, least yielding component of a tribe that had long had the reputation
as the most violent and warlike on the continent; if they ran low on water,
they were known to drink the contents of a dead horse’s stomach, something even
the toughest Texas Ranger would not do. Even other Comanches feared them. They
were the richest of all plains bands in the currency by which Indians measured
wealth—horses—and in the years after the Civil War managed a herd of some
fifteen thousand. They also owned “Texas cattle without number.”
On that clear autumn day in 1871, Mackenzie’s troops were
hunting Quahadis. Because they were nomadic, it was not possible to fix their
location. One could know only their general ranges, their hunting grounds,
perhaps old camp locations. They were known to hunt the Llano Estacado; they
liked to camp in the depths of Palo Duro Canyon, the second-largest canyon in
North America after the Grand Canyon; they often stayed near the headwaters of
the Pease River and McClellan’s Creek; and in Blanco Canyon, all within a
roughly hundred-mile ambit of present-day Amarillo in the upper Texas
Panhandle. If you were pursuing them, as Mackenzie was, you had your Tonkawa
scouts fan out far in advance of the column. The Tonks, as they were called,
members of an occasionally cannibalistic Indian tribe that had nearly been
exterminated by Comanches and whose remaining members lusted for vengeance,
would look for signs, try to cut trails, then follow the trails to the lodges.
Without them the army would never have had the shadow of a chance against these
or any 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 named Quanah—a Comanche word that
meant “odor” or “fragrance.” The idea was to find and destroy Quanah’s village.
Mackenzie had a certain advantage in that no white man had ever dared try such
a thing before; not in the panhandle plains, not against the Quahadis.
Mackenzie and his men did not know much about Quanah. No one
did. Though there is an intimacy of information on the frontier—opposing sides
often had a surprisingly detailed understanding of one another, in spite of the
enormous physical distances between them and the fact that they were trying to
kill one another—Quanah was simply too young for anyone to know much about him
yet, where he had been, or what he had done. Though no one would be able to
even estimate the date of his birth until many years later, it was mostly
likely in 1848, making him twenty-three that year and eight years younger than
Mackenzie, who was also so young that few people in Texas, Indian or white,
knew much about him at the time. Both men achieved their fame only in the
final, brutal Indian wars of the mid-1870s. Quanah was exceptionally young to
be a chief. He was reputed to be ruthless, 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, partly because the fact was so
exceptional. Comanche warriors had for centuries taken female captives—Indian,
French, English, Spanish, Mexican, and American—and fathered children by them
who were raised as Comanches. But there is no record of any prominent
half-white Comanche war chief. By the time Mackenzie was hunting him in 1871,
Quanah’s mother had long been famous. She was the best known of all Indian captives
of the era, discussed in drawing rooms in New York and London as “the white
squaw” because she had refused on repeated occasions to return to her people,
thus challenging one of the most fundamental of the Eurocentric assumptions
about Indian ways: that given the choice between the sophisticated,
industrialized, Christian culture of Europe and the savage, bloody, and morally
backward ways of the Indians, no sane person would ever choose the latter. Few,
other than Quanah’s mother, did. Her name was Cynthia Ann Parker. She was the
daughter of one of early Texas’s most prominent families, one that included
Texas Ranger captains, politicians, and prominent Baptists who founded the
state’s first Protestant church. In 1836, at the age of nine, she had been kidnapped
in a Comanche raid at Parker’s Fort, ninety miles south of present Dallas. She
soon forgot her mother tongue, learned Indian ways, and became a full member of
the tribe. She married Peta Nocona, a prominent war chief, and had three
children by him, of whom Quanah was the eldest. In 1860, when Quanah was
twelve, Cynthia Ann was recaptured during an attack by Texas Rangers on her
village, during which everyone but her and her infant daughter, Prairie Flower,
were killed. Mackenzie and his soldiers most likely knew the story of Cynthia
Ann Parker—most everyone on the frontier did—but they had no idea that 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.
Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry, which he would soon build into a
grimly efficient mobile assault force, for the moment consisted largely of
timeservers who were unprepared to encounter the likes of Quanah and his
hardened plains warriors. The soldiers were operating well beyond the ranges of
civilization, beyond anything like a trail they could follow or any landmarks
they could possibly have recognized. They were dismayed to learn that their
principal water sources were buffalo wallow holes that, according to Carter,
were “stagnant, warm, nauseating, odorous with smells, and covered with green
slime that had to be pushed aside.” Their inexperience was evident during their
first night on the trail. Sometime around midnight, above the din of a West
Texas windstorm, the men heard “a tremendous tramping and an unmistakable
snorting and bellowing.” That sound, as they soon discovered, was made by
stampeding buffalo. The soldiers had made the horrendous mistake of making camp
between a large herd of buffalo and its water source. Panicked, the men emerged
from their tents in darkness, screaming and waving blankets and trying
desperately to turn the stampeding animals. They succeeded, but by the smallest
of margins. “The immense herds of brown monsters were caromed off and they
stampeded to our left at breakneck speed,” wrote Carter, “rushing and jostling
but flushing only the edge of one of our horse herds. . . . one could
hardly repress a shudder of what might have been the result of this nocturnal
visit, for although the horses were strongly ‘lariated out,’ ‘staked,’ or
‘picketed,’ nothing could have saved them from the terror which this headlong
charge would have inevitably created, had we not heard them just in time to
turn the leading herds.”
Miraculously spared the consequences of their own ignorance,
the bluecoats rounded up the stray horses, broke camp at dawn, and spent the
day riding westward over a rolling mesquite prairie pocked with prairie-dog towns.
The latter were common in the Texas Panhandle and extremely dangerous to horses
and mules. Think of enormous anthills populated by oversized rodents,
stretching for miles. The troopers passed more herds of buffalo, vast and
odorous, and rivers whose gypsum-infused water was impossible to drink. They
passed curious-looking trading stations, abandoned now, consisting of caves
built into the sides of cliffs and reinforced with poles that looked like
prison bars.
On the second day they ran into more trouble. Mackenzie
ordered a night march, hoping to surprise the enemy in its camps. His men
struggled through steep terrain, dense brush, ravines, and arroyos. After hours
of what Carter described as “trials and tribulations and much hard talk verging
on profanity” and “many rather comical scenes,” they fetched up bruised and
battered in the dead end of a small canyon and had to wait until daybreak to
find their way out. A few hours later they reached the Freshwater Fork of the
Brazos, deep in Indian territory, in a broad, shallow thirty-mile-long valley
that averaged fifteen hundred feet in width and was cut by smaller side
canyons. The place was known as Blanco Canyon and was located just to the east
of present-day Lubbock, one of the Quahadis’ favorite campgrounds.
Whatever surprise Mackenzie had hoped for was gone. On the
third day the Tonkawa scouts realized they were being shadowed by a group of
four Comanche warriors, who had been watching their every move, presumably
including what must have seemed to them the comical blunders of the night
march. The Tonks gave chase, but “the hostiles being better mounted soon
distanced their pursuers and vanished into the hills.” This was not surprising:
In two hundred years of enmity, the Tonkawas had never been close to matching
the horsemanship of the Comanches. They always lost. The result was that, while
the cavalrymen and dragoons had no idea where the Comanches were camped, Quanah
knew precisely what Mackenzie was doing and where he was. The next night
Mackenzie compounded the error by allowing the men the indulgence of campfires,
tantamount to painting a large arrow in the canyon pointing to their camp. Some
of the companies blundered yet again by failing to place “sleeping parties”
among the horses.
At around midnight, the regiment was awakened by a
succession of unearthly, high-pitched yells. Those were followed by shots, and
more yells, and suddenly the camp was alive with Comanches riding at full
gallop. Exactly what the Indians were doing was soon apparent: Mingled with the
screams and gunshots and general mayhem of the camp was another sound, only
barely audible at first, then rising quickly to something like rolling thunder.
The men quickly realized, to their horror, that it was the sound of stampeding
horses. Their horses. Amid shouts of “Every man to his lariat!” six hundred
panicked horses tore loose through the camp, rearing, jumping, and plunging at
full speed. Lariats snapped with the sound of pistol shots; iron picket pins
that a few minutes 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, their hands lacerated and
bleeding.
When it was all over, the soldiers discovered that Quanah
and his warriors had made off with seventy of their best horses and mules,
including Colonel Mackenzie’s magnificent gray pacer. In west Texas in 1871,
stealing someone’s horse was often equivalent to a death sentence. It was an
old Indian tactic, especially on the high plains, to simply steal white men’s
horses and leave them to die of thirst or starvation. Comanches had used it to
lethal effect against the Spanish in the early eighteenth century. In any case,
an unmounted army regular stood little chance against a mounted Comanche.
This midnight raid was Quanah’s calling card, a clear
message that hunting him and his Comanche warriors in their homeland was going
to be a difficult and treacherous business. Thus began what would become known to
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 that would last four years
and culminate in the final destruction of the Comanche nation. Blanco Canyon
would also provide the U.S. Army with its first look at Quanah. Captain Carter,
who would win the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery in Blanco
Canyon, offered this description of the young war chief in battle on the day
after the midnight stampede:
A large and powerfully
built chief led the bunch, on a coal black racing pony. Leaning forward upon
his mane, his heels nervously working in the animal’s side, with six-shooter
poised in the air, he seemed the incarnation of savage, brutal joy. His face
was smeared with black warpaint, which gave his features a satanic
look. . . . A full-length headdress or war bonnet of eagle’s
feathers, spreading out as he rode, and descending from his forehead, over head
and back, to his pony’s tail, almost swept the ground. Large brass hoops were
in his ears; he was naked to the waist, wearing simply leggings, moccasins and
a breechclout. A necklace of beare’s claws hung about his
neck. . . . Bells jingled as he rode at headlong speed, followed
by the leading warriors, all eager to outstrip him in the race. It was Quanah,
principal warchief of the Qua-ha-das.
Moments later, Quanah wheeled his horse in the direction of
an unfortunate private named Seander Gregg and, as Carter and his men watched,
blew Gregg’s brains out.
