The Searchers (21 page)

With the main body of Quahadis winding slowly through the plains, Sturm sent an advance party of three Comanches on ahead. They arrived at Fort Sill on May 13. With Horace Jones interpreting, the men told the colonel that the Quahadis would keep their word and surrender as promised. The main body was moving slowly because their horses were weak and there were women, children, and old people among them. But it would arrive in a few weeks.

After the warriors finished,
one of them
—an unusually tall and powerful-looking man with striking gray eyes—took Jones aside for a lengthy discussion, after which the interpreter turned to Mackenzie and conveyed a highly unusual request. Jones told him the warrior's name was Quanah and he wanted the colonel's help in locating his white mother and his sister. As a child he had been called Tseeta or Citra, and these were the names by which his mother might recognize him. Her white name, Jones added, was Cynthia Ann Parker. Jones, who had met Cynthia Ann after her recapture fifteen years earlier and had also spoken with her Comanche husband, Peta Nocona, knew her story well and filled in the details for the colonel.

Mackenzie respected the Quahadis. He admired the fact that, unlike his other Indian foes, they had never played the double game of camping at the reservation for food and shelter during the winter months and then returning to raiding in the spring and summer. He wanted to help them. “I think better of this band than of any other on the reservation as they have been steadily out and now come in at a most unusual time,” he wrote. “
I shall let them down as easily
as I can.”

Mackenzie listened carefully to Quanah's request. He said he would try to help.

In
End of the Trail
(1915), James Earle Fraser's doleful statue of a Native American rider and horse, the heads of both are bowed in defeat. This was the tragic and romantic portrait of the Noble but Doomed Savage at the beginning of the twentieth century, vanquished and displaced by the modern world, the tip of his war lance turned downward in submission. But its message was misleading: Indians did not vanish, their story was not over, and their trail did not end when they lost their struggle against white domination. Their struggle to survive continued, only in many ways it was harder and more complex than the one they had waged in battle.

The long, thin caravan of Quahadi men, women, and children—the last significant group of hostile Comanches on the High Plains—finally trickled into the Signal Station, six miles west of Fort Sill, on June 2, 1875. The official count was 427 people and 1,500 horses. The old people, women, and children proceeded to an appointed campground, while the men quietly laid down their arms and trudged under military escort to their place of confinement at the fort, a roofless icehouse with a stone floor, 150 by 40 feet, already crammed with 130 Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne prisoners. At meal times soldiers would throw chunks of raw meat over the high walls. “
They fed us like we were lions
,” said Gotebo, a Kiowa warrior. Quanah was spared this indignity and allowed to camp with his wives and children west of the fort, along the banks of Cache Creek.

Many of the Quahadis who rode into Fort Sill to surrender in the summer of 1875 likely believed they could ride out again and resume their nomadic warrior life whenever they chose to, as they had in the past.
Quanah, by contrast, seemed to understand from the beginning that his life had been irrevocably altered, and he began to adjust accordingly.

For one thing,
the Comanche population had been decimated
by war, epidemic, starvation, and the grim realities of fugitive life on the unyielding plains. When the nineteenth century began, there had been between twenty thousand and thirty thousand Comanches. But James M. Haworth, head of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache agency at the fort, registered only 1,475 in 1877, along with 1,120 Kiowas and 344 Apaches. A few hundred more were huddled in remote corners of the Staked Plains or in the foothills of the Rockies. The assembly-line extermination of the buffalo over the past decade meant that the Comanches had lost not only most of their own community but also their sole traditional means of replenishing it.

Open resistance was futile. Quanah knew well the fate of Satank, Satanta, Big Tree, and the other chiefs who had been hunted down, imprisoned, or condemned to a never-ending life on the run. Quanah was a proud man but a practical one. He harbored no taste for martyrdom.

He decided to recast his own narrative. Not that he thought of it in exactly those terms, but Quanah was a storyteller. His old story was about a proud, independent warrior, beholden to no one, who had held out as long as he could. Now he had a different tale to tell—about a man who was half-white and half-Comanche, and who longed to bring those two worlds together, explaining each to the other and linking the two, just as they were linked in his own bloodstream. The Man of Peace. The White Comanche. The Noble Savage. It was, always, a work in progress. But almost from the moment his captivity began, it is clear that this was the role he had decided to play.

From the day he arrived at Fort Sill, Quanah chose to make himself useful to the men who were now in charge of his fate, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie and Indian agent Haworth. Twice that summer
Quanah volunteered
to round up Comanche stragglers and deliver them to the fort; each time Mackenzie sent along a document of authorization to give Quanah a modicum of protection from trigger-happy whites inclined to kill any Comanche they encountered.

Texas was a dangerous place for any Indian to venture into. A Texas congressman attached a rider to an appropriation bill that year forbidding Indian hunting parties from entering the state even when escorted by troops. Perhaps he was thinking of their safety. Five Indians who crossed into Jack County in northeastern Texas in April 1875 were surrounded
by white settlers, gunned down, and beheaded. “
I understand the heads are now preserved
in alcohol in Jacksboro,” wrote Haworth in his annual report to Washington.

On his first run as an agent of the United States government, Quanah brought back a party of twenty-one Comanches whom he located on the Pecos River. This was “excellent conduct in a dangerous expedition,” Mackenzie reported to his superiors. The returned fugitives were stripped of their weapons and horses and dispatched to the icehouse. But
Quanah insisted that they not be shipped off
to a military prison. This earned him the gratitude of the former fugitives. Already he was learning how to serve as a bridge between the two sides, white and Indian.

It was not long before Mackenzie sent out Quanah again, this time to find and bring back a small band of Quahadis still lurking in the familiar, well-worn creases of the Texas Panhandle. Quanah left on July 12 with three men, three women, and several pack mules loaded with supplies. He carried a white flag and a stern letter from Mackenzie warning anyone they encountered not to interfere with him or his mission.

One of the renegades was Herman Lehmann, a teenage white captive turned Comanche warrior. He and his fellow warriors, determined to live by the old ways, scoured the desolate plateau for the last remnants of wild game while avoiding the soldiers and Texas Rangers who were in turn hunting for them. But their main enemies were the buffalo hunters who were engaged in eliminating the last of the herds. Everywhere they rode, the Quahadis came across stinking mounds of rotting carcasses. “
The plains were literally alive
with buffalo hunters,” Lehmann would recall.

Some of the warriors had fought in the debacle at Adobe Walls and did not yearn for another. For the most part they shied away from the hunters, who were armed with long-range Sharps rifles. But early in 1877 the nomads joined forces with warriors under Black Horse, a Quahadi chief who had obtained permission from Haworth for a hunting expedition in the Panhandle. When Black Horse and his increasingly frustrated followers could not find any buffalo to kill, they decided to hunt the hunters instead. One morning in early February they came across
a lone buffalo man named Marshall Sewell
, who was working the Salt Fork of the Brazos River. They watched unseen from a distance as Sewell brought down beast after beast in mechanical fashion with his rifle. When he finally ran out of bullets, they moved in. One of the Indians
shot him in the thigh. Sewell frantically hobbled back toward his camp but Lehmann and the others cut him off and finished him.

The Comanches pillaged the camp, taking weapons, tools, and food, defacing the hides with their knives and setting them on fire. They scalped Sewell's corpse, cut a gash in each temple and stuck a sharp stick through his stomach, then set fire to his wagon. No white hunter could miss the message.

Seeking revenge, about four dozen buffalo men set out in early March to hunt down the Comanches. They found the Indians camped in Yellow House Canyon, a few miles east of present-day Lubbock. The gun battle lasted all day—one hunter and three Indians were killed—until the badly outnumbered hunters were forced to withdraw. The skirmish constituted the last organized battle between whites and Indians in the state of Texas. A few weeks later a cavalry troop from Fort Griffin quietly rounded up most of the Quahadi stragglers and escorted them back to Fort Sill. Lehmann and a ragtag handful eluded capture and continued to roam the Staked Plains until Quanah tracked them down that summer along the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico.

To these hardened, defiant, but exhausted stragglers, Quanah did not try to preach peace, love, or reconciliation, just practical arithmetic. They were, he told them, outnumbered.
He “told us that it was useless
for us to fight longer,” Lehmann would recall, “for the white people would kill all of us if we kept on fighting … He said the white men had us completely surrounded; that they would come in on us from every side, and we had better give up.”

Some of the men, including Herman, wanted to hold out longer, but they all reluctantly agreed to come with Quanah. He moved them across the hostile Panhandle under cover of darkness, abandoning three hundred horses and mules along the way. During the daytime
Quanah used a pair of army field glasses
to search the landscape for buffalo hunters. In his past life as a warrior, he had ferociously hunted these men; now he sought to hide from them.

Lehmann came in with Quanah but refused to surrender. Quanah concealed him for a time among Quanah's own household, but then told him he must return to his white family. Lehmann grew angry; he even threatened to kill Horace Jones, the Comanche interpreter, when Jones summoned him to Fort Sill for a talk. Quanah took Lehmann back to his lodge, fed him, and persuaded him to go home to Texas. Quanah promised to look after Lehmann's horses and to welcome him
back if things didn't work out with his white relatives. This was a subject Quanah knew something about, for he had started searching for white relatives of his own.

RANALD MACKENZIE HAD BEEN A TACTICIAN of brutal efficiency, but now he was keen to help his former Comanche foes survive. This was not purely altruism on his part. With winter approaching, he wrote to his superiors, “
the emergency is pressing
, and unless these Indians are fed and the obligations of the Indian Department to them fulfilled, we may expect certainly a stampede of the Kiowas and Comanches from their reservation.” Hungry Indians storming back onto the warpath was not a pleasant image to contemplate.

Mackenzie gave back to the Comanches more than five hundred of their horses and mules seized during the Red River campaign, and he sold the rest for $27,000 and established a Pony Fund. He used the money to buy 3,500 head of sheep, hoping the Comanches would learn to harvest the wool and eat the meat. The experiment was an utter failure: Comanches, it turned out, hated mutton. In any event, most of the sheep died of exposure that first winter. Cattle were the only realistic option.

Mackenzie's efforts at family reunification were no more successful. Six days after Quanah first arrived at Fort Sill, Mackenzie wrote to the quartermaster at Denison, Texas, seeking information on Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower.
The letter was published
in several Texas newspapers and aroused much interest. Eventually Mackenzie received a reply from Benjamin Parker, one of Cynthia Ann's first cousins and the son of the late Reverend Daniel Parker, informing him that she and Prairie Flower had died. There would be no mother and child reunion.

Mackenzie went off to the Dakotas to fight Dull Knife, chief of the northern Cheyenne. When he returned to Fort Sill two years later he wrote to Isaac Parker, Quanah's uncle and the man who had taken Cynthia Ann home after she was recaptured in 1860, telling him of Quanah's efforts to contact his Texas relatives. “He has been here two years, and none of his cousins or other relations have been here to see him,” Mackenzie told Isaac. “… He rather thinks that they do not wish to see him.”

He described Quanah as “a man whom it is worth trying to do something with,” and pleaded with Isaac that Quanah “certainly should not be held responsible for the sins of a former generation of Comanches.”

Quanah's motives for a reunion with his Texas relatives were not just sentimental: he hoped they could rescue him from captivity and enrich him as well. “
After an Indian custom
,” Mackenzie's letter added, Quanah wanted to receive a small gift from his relatives as a signal that they would welcome him for a visit. Mackenzie pleaded on Quanah's behalf “that he has heard his uncle is well off, and that he is poor and trying to live like a white man, and that he would like him to give him a light wagon, if this is the case.”

There is no record that Isaac Parker ever responded. Cynthia Ann had been such an embarrassment to her white family that no one seemed willing to contemplate welcoming her wild Comanche son into their Texas home.

Still, in some ways, Quanah's opportunities were better in the new world than in the old. As a half-white Comanche orphan, he had possessed limited stature in a shattered tribal community disintegrating under military pressure and disease. Now he had new patrons and potential allies. He frequently invoked Mackenzie and Haworth's paternal advice: “Follow the white man's path.”