The Searchers (22 page)

Mackenzie soon left Fort Sill again for another assignment. His life would be cut short by illnesses both physical and mental. Haworth, too, was eventually reassigned. When Philemon B. Hunt, the new agent, arrived to take Haworth's place, Quanah was quick to curry his favor as well. “Even though I am here with my friends yet there is but one council I listen to, and that is yours,” he wrote Hunt in a letter. “
I do not listen to any foolish talks
. I wait and listen to you alone, you are my agent.”

Hunt soon fell under Quanah's spell, and even tried to help him claim his rightful share of his late mother's legacy: the league of land pledged to her by the Texas state assembly in 1861. The agent wrote to Benjamin Parker and engaged a lawyer and a land agent in Texas, all to no avail. The Texas land office ruled Cynthia Ann's warrant invalid because her uncle and brother, after originally applying for the land certificate in 1861, had failed to pursue the matter until the Civil War ended in 1865. “By then,
all acts
of the previous legislature had been considered void because they occurred during the rebellion,” the lawyer L. H. Miller told Hunt. The only way to obtain the land, Miller added, was by a new act of the legislature. Hunt had raised Quanah's expectations in vain.

Still, the former warrior was beginning to invoke his mother's story in telling his own—and in explaining why Comanches and whites must
learn to live together in peace. And he did something that was very un-Comanche-like: he began to use her last name.

From now on he was Quanah Parker.

EVEN IN THEIR NEW STATE of semicaptivity, the Comanches were not a displaced people. The reservation they had been allotted under the Treaty of Medicine Lodge was located on land that held deep meaning in their history. Its myths were just as strong for them as the myth of the frontier was for whites. Cache Creek, where most of the Comanches pitched their teepees, had been a favorite hunting and watering spot for more than a century. A few miles to the north were the Wichita Mountains, the place where they believed the world had begun. The largest of the Wichitas was Mount Scott, more than two thousand feet tall, which towered protectively like a somber, brooding sentinel above the animated prairie. The mountain was the sacred site from which, according to Kiowa legend, the buffalo had first emerged thousands of years ago to populate the earth—and had retreated to in recent years to escape the white hunters.
The buffalo would emerge again
someday once the danger had passed.

To the east was Medicine Bluff, a holy ground of sharp granite ridges and rocky outcroppings where priests communed with the Great Spirit and gathered their magic and power. And to the south was Big Pasture—nearly one million acres of flat, unpopulated grass and scrub suitable for grazing, an unruly kingdom of wild game, migratory birds, and wolves. This land, too, was part of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache preserve.

The reservation was a complex and treacherous place riddled with politics, corruption, and special interests. For predatory whites it was rich with possibilities for larceny and self-enrichment. Unscrupulous “squaw men” married Indian women and then claimed the right to a share of whatever allocations their wives were entitled to. White merchants exploited Indian ignorance about cash and credit. Quanah helped run down thieves who raided the four thousand Indian-owned horses grazing the unfenced pastures of greater Fort Sill as if it was their private preserve.

But outright theft was the least of the problems. The Kiowa-Comanche-Apache agency was beholden to Congress and to a byzantine bureaucracy, both of which had their own goals and imperatives; concern for the safety and welfare of its Indian wards was far down the list. As stipulated by the Medicine Lodge treaty, Indians were expected to embrace white schools, private property, and Christian values. Having defeated
the Indians in battle, the white world was now determined to obliterate their identity as well. The agency was supposed to ease their transition from nomadic warriors to gentleman farmers yet was stunningly ill equipped for the task. The land allotted for agriculture was barely arable, subject to regular drought and lurking insects, and unsuitable for growing corn, the main staple. Its poor quality served only to reinforce the traditional Comanche aversion to farming. Government rations, as promised at Medicine Lodge, were essential for the Indians' survival, yet Fort Sill was 165 miles from the nearest railhead. The government was supposed to deliver 10,000 pounds of flour, 2,000 pounds of bacon, 825 pounds of coffee, and 1,650 pounds of sugar as well as a beef ration to the 3,000 Indians each week.
But the supplies came erratically
, if at all, and were subject to profiteers who delivered maggot-riddled staples and spoiled meat. Medicine Lodge had also stipulated annuities worth $30,000 per year in useful goods such as axes, frying pans, and butcher knives, plus a special allotment of clothing. Indians desperate for cash promptly resold many of the items to whites at a fraction of their value.

Indians gathered twice a month at the commissary on Issue Day to receive their supplies. The most exciting moment came when the cattle were brought out for distribution. “
The steers were penned in
a big corral and the braves sat on horses outside, with their Winchesters resting across their saddle horn,” recalled R. A. Sneed, an Indian trader at Fort Sill. “When the big gate was opened and a steer came bolting out, they all started after it in hot pursuit, thus reproducing to some extent the thrill of the old buffalo hunting days.”

Once the men succeeded in shooting down the animal, women, children, and dogs descended in a mad rush. “
The herd rushes out
, scattering widely over the plain, each animal followed by half a dozen yelling Indians,” wrote Colonel Dodge. “In ten to twenty minutes all are down, riddled with bullets and arrows … No sooner are the cattle down, than the squaws are at them. An officer told me that he had seen the tongue cut out of a beef while it was yet alive.”

After the Indian affairs bureau banned these “hunts,” the Comanches developed a new name for the issue station at Cache Creek:
pesenahdumun
, “
the place of putrid meat
.”

THE MEDICINE LODGE TREATY entitled reservation Indians to hunt to supplement their rations, but the extermination of the buffalo, the decline of wild game due to overhunting, and the introduction of barbed-wire fencing made hunting increasingly futile. Quanah and his men found this out for themselves in the fall of 1878 when he organized a buffalo hunt around Palo Duro Canyon. The Indians were bored at Fort Sill, tired of the attempt to convert them into farmers and livestock herders, and eager to fill their bellies in the old-fashioned warrior manner. Fall traditionally was the time when they gathered meat and hides for the long winter. The Indians knew the buffalo herds had been greatly thinned, but they hoped to find remnants on the floor of the canyon, one of their ancient hunting grounds. A few dozen Comanche and Kiowas set out for the Panhandle, nearly a two-hundred-mile journey, without first seeking permission from the authorities at the fort. Many brought along their wives and children: they had no intention of returning to the reservation.

Palo Duro Canyon, the former Comanche stronghold in the Texas Panhandle.

Palo Duro had irrevocably changed. After Mackenzie had chased the Comanches from the canyon in the fall of 1874, former Texas Ranger Charles Goodnight and his business partner, John G. Adair, had moved in, staking claim to the property and renaming it the JA Ranch. It was one of the biggest spreads in Texas. Their ranch hands slaughtered or
drove off the remaining buffalo to make space for cattle to graze.
By the time Quanah and his hunting party arrived
in early December, there were no buffalo, just JA steers and an early layer of snow. Restless and hungry, the Indians began helping themselves to prime beef.

Goodnight was a crusty, irascible rancher: at forty-two he was already known far and wide as “the Old Man.” He had seen the worst of the Indian wars in North Texas and New Mexico and had fought without quarter, participating in the Pease River massacre eighteen years earlier in which Quanah's mother and little sister had been captured. But the Old Man had no interest in shedding more blood. He and his men approached the Comanche camp with their guns holstered. When Goodnight asked to speak to their leader, Quanah appeared, and when Goodnight asked his name, he replied, “Maybe so two names—Mr. Parker or Quanah.” Already Quanah was trying out his new hybrid identity on the white man.

The exchange did not start out well. The Indians formed a circle around Goodnight and his interpreter and pelted him with wary, hostile questions: What were they doing there? Had they killed off all of the Indians' buffalo?

“No,” he told them, “I have plenty of fat cattle, and buffaloes aren't much good.”

Didn't Goodnight know this country was the Indians'? the Comanches asked. Goodnight replied that he and Adair had bought the land from the state of Texas, and if the Indians had a complaint they should take it up with the state government.

Next they wanted to know if Goodnight was from Texas. Knowing their bitterness toward Texans, he figured it was safer to tell them he was from Colorado. They then asked him a number of questions about Colorado to see whether he knew the area. Goodnight didn't care for the belligerent tone. He told them he had weapons and bullets, “but I don't want to fight you unless you force me to.”

Finally they relented. What did Goodnight have to offer? one of them demanded.

Goodnight addressed his reply directly to Quanah. “You keep order and behave yourself, protect my property and let it alone, and I'll give you two beeves every other day until you find out where the buffaloes are.” Quanah accepted.

The two men sat around the campfire and talked, sealing the arrangement and initiating a friendship in the process. Each filled in some of the blanks in the other's knowledge. Quanah told Goodnight the true
story of Peta Nocona's death. Goodnight in turn could offer Quanah a detailed account of how the Rangers had captured his mother and of how she had been treated after she was taken prisoner.

Quanah told Goodnight that the Indians at Fort Sill were not given half the beef that was due them and what they did receive was often inedible. And so Quanah and his men had decided to flee to the Staked Plains. But over days of talking around the campfire, Quanah mellowed. When a detachment of cavalry from Fort Sill arrived at the JA in early January with a wagonload of rations, Quanah accepted the food and agreed to accompany the troops back to the fort. “He told me that if his people were not properly fed he would leave again,” Goodnight recalled.

Quanah quickly saw that Goodnight could serve as a powerful ally, someone with influence in the white world because of his wealth and connections. Perhaps Quanah could also see that the old former warrior shared with him a similar outlook. There was much irony here; after all, it was Goodnight and the other megaranchers of North Texas who were moving into the lands vacated by the Comanches and other nomadic tribes, prospering from the destruction of the Indian way of life. Yet these illegitimate heirs were in some ways the Indians' most natural allies. It was a partnership of profit and convenience, but underlying it was a deep, almost mystical respect for the land and those who roamed it.

QUANAH NEXT STRUCK up a friendship with S. B. “Burk” Burnett, an enterprising Fort Worth cattleman. Like Goodnight, Burnett took advantage of the newly opened lands from which the Comanches had been driven to establish a cattle empire with his business partner, W. T. Waggoner. They worked the 1,200-mile Chisholm Trail, which passed through Indian Territory just east of Big Pasture. They would cross the Red River in spring and graze their cattle for weeks in the grasslands, fattening the steers for the long haul to Abilene and Topeka. Indian bands roaming the area would steal a beeve or two or demand gifts and bribes to allow the cattle drive to pass without interference. Quanah was one of the original offenders. Even while he was reporting to Philemon Hunt on those Kiowas who were extorting cattle from the herds, he obtained a letter from the agent enabling him to practice a similar form of extortion. He would doff his hat, show the paper, identify himself as a Comanche chief, offer advice on the best route with good grass and water, and then, by the way, politely demand a few head in payment.

Like Goodnight before him, Burnett found in Quanah a kindred spirit. Early on, Burnett gave Quanah a Model 1873 Colt .45 with an ornate hand-tooled leather holster and belt. It hung from Quanah's bedpost throughout his lifetime. Burnett also gave Quanah a dignified and elaborate horse-drawn carriage that the chief used for his trips to Fort Sill and the Indian agency offices. “
I got one good friend, Burk Burnett
,” Quanah once told a crowd. “He big heart, rich man, cow man. Help my people good deal.”

Between 1880 and 1883, competition among white ranchers for the right to graze their herds on reservation grass became the dominant issue in tribal politics. A bad drought in 1881 forced matters: the ranchers parked thousands of steers on the grasslands and kept them there all summer. At first Quanah strongly opposed this practice, demanding that the cattle trails be closed off. But Burnett and his fellow
cattlemen went to work cultivating
relationships with the Indian agent, influential squaw men, and Indian leaders such as Quanah. In 1883 the Harrold & Ikard outfit out of Illinois hired Quanah and three other Quahadis and gave them some three hundred head of cattle over eighteen months in payment. Other ranchers followed suit. Quanah became particularly close to the Big Five: Burnett, Waggoner, E. C. Sugg, J. P. Addington, and C. T. Herring. At his urging, they came up with a scheme to lease annual grazing rights for more than a million acres from the Comanches and Kiowas who were its ostensible owners.