The Searchers (25 page)

Still, to many whites, peyote was just another way for Indians to get high. J. J. Methvin, a Methodist missionary who befriended Quanah, approached a teepee near the agency one evening and found two of Quanah's wives stretched out on the grass. When he asked what was going on, one of them motioned for him to enter the tent. He took a seat among a circle of worshippers who had their eyes shut tight and were beating tomtoms, rattling gourds, and chanting wildly. “Quanah opened his eyes and discovered me; he smiled his recognition and welcome.”

Quanah explained that peyote helped Indians be inspired by the Great Father, just as whites were inspired from the Bible. “All the same God, both ways good,” he told Methvin. But the preacher was not buying this line. “This is not the Indian's old religion and indeed cannot properly be called a religion at all,” Methvin wrote. “
It is a drug habit
under the guise of religion.”

When the Oklahoma territorial legislature proposed banning peyote, Quanah led a delegation of chiefs in opposition. He told the lawmakers that peyote use was healthy and helped some Indians quit drinking. “
My Indians use what they call pectus
; some call it mescal. All my Indian people use that for medicine … It is no poison and we want to keep that medicine. I use that and I use the white doctor's medicine, and my people use it too … My ways in time will wear out, and in time this medicine will wear out too.

“… I do not think this Legislature should interfere with a man's religion,” he concluded. The lawmakers agreed: the bill failed.

QUANAH SELDOM GAVE INTERVIEWS: early on he seemed to grasp the danger of speaking freely to white people. But in 1901 he sat down with an anonymous correspondent from the
Oklahoman
newspaper.
The reporter was clearly fixated
on the number of Quanah's wives. He noted that each wife had her own bedroom and sewing machine, and that they took turns attending Quanah in the master bedroom. The reporter could not conceal his surprise to learn that a former Comanche nomad kept carpets on the floors, as well as bureaus, chiffoniers, lamps, and other articles of furniture.

The article reported that Quanah had many enemies among Comanches who spread rumors about him. “Some of the old people among the Comanches do not like me,” he acknowledged to the man from the
Oklahoman.
“They call me a white man. They are like all old people … They want to do now what they did fifty years ago. That's no good anymore.”

Quanah dressed in traditional garb that day: a white eagle feather in his hair, his scalp painted yellow and parted in the middle, his long hair braided and wrapped in rich beaver skin on both sides of his head. He wore a colorful blanket around his waist, a standing linen collar, and a heavy silk tie fastened to the collar with a sunburst amethyst pin. But when the reporter asked to take his photo, Quanah asked if he could first change into modern clothes.

As the generation that had experienced the Comanche wars began to die off and the wars themselves became enshrined in myth, Quanah became a familiar figure at state fairs, rodeos, and parades, where he and his former warriors would stage “raids” and entertain the same whites whose parents they had once terrorized. A new Texas town near the Oklahoma border, just a few miles north of the site of the Pease River massacre, was named for him, as was the local railroad line. Quanah gave his namesake town his blessing: “May the Great Spirit smile on your town; may the rains fall in season; and under the warmth of the sunshine after the rain may the earth yield bountifully; may peace and contentment be with you and your children forever.”

He returned to Quanah, Texas, a few years later to attend Fourth of July celebrations, along with 225 braves, women, and children; they rode in the parade and he gave a speech. “
I am not a bad man
and have not done many of the things told about me,” he told the crowd. “My mother raised me like your mothers raised their children, but my father taught me to be brave and learn to fight to become chief of my people. But we want to fight no more.”

Even old enemies became allies. Sul Ross, the former Texas Ranger captain who had helped recapture Cynthia Ann at the Pease River, became a benefactor. Ross was elected governor of Texas in 1886 and re-elected two years later in part because of his reputation as the legendary Indian fighter who had rescued Cynthia Ann Parker. When Ross saw the advertisement for a photo of Cynthia Ann that Quanah had placed in the
Fort Worth Gazette
, he sent Quanah a copy of the daguerreotype of her nursing Prairie Flower that she had reluctantly posed for at A. F. Corning's studio in Fort Worth in 1861. Quanah framed the picture, struck it on an easel, placed it in his parlor, and posed for photos sitting next to it.

By this time a new generation of Texas historians had rediscovered the Parker saga. John Henry
Brown
had first met Cynthia Ann in Austin in 1861 when her uncle Isaac brought her to the secessionist legislative session seeking an annuity for her and Prairie Flower, and his wife had helped dress her and escorted her to the gallery during the session. Brown, a former Texas Ranger, state legislator, newspaper publisher, and collector of pioneer tales, later wrote a brief history of the Parker family after being asked to introduce Isaac at a political gathering in Dallas in 1874. And he later recounted the tale of Parker's Fort in his 762-page magnum opus,
Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas
, originally published in 1880. Brown, who by then was mayor of Dallas, wrote that
Ross had killed a warrior named Mohee
, “chief of the band,” at the Pease River.

Quanah Parker in his bedroom with the photograph of his mother, Cynthia Ann, and sister, Prairie Flower, a photo sent to him by Texas governor Sul Ross.

Next came James T. DeShields, a twenty-three-year-old book salesman and amateur historian who contacted and collected material from Brown, Ross, Ross's newspaper friend Victor M. Rose, Quanah, and Quanah's cousin Ben Parker, and put together the first detailed account of the massacre, the fate of Cynthia Ann, and the emergence of her surviving child.
Cynthia Ann Parker: The Story of Her Capture
, first published in 1886, became the definitive version of her life. DeShields put
the declaration “Truth is Stranger than Fiction” on the title page and dedicated the book to Ross.

DeShields promised his readers a “
narrative of plain, unvarnished facts
,” but he could not resist fanciful details and commentary. He claimed the Indian attack on Fort Parker involved five hundred warriors who, despite their vast numbers, used treachery against the worthy pioneers, making “such pleas with all the servile sycophancy of a slave, like the Italian who embraces his victim ere plunging the poniard into his heart.”

The young self-styled historian also used his imagination to portray Cynthia Ann's “budding charms” as the white captive of dark-skinned savages.

“Doubtless the heart of more than one warrior was pierced by the Ulyssean darts from her laughing eyes, or charmed by the silvery ripple of her joyous laughter,” he wrote. No doubt she had fallen in love with Peta Nocona, “performing for her imperious lord all the slavish offices which savageism and Indian custom assigns as the duty of a wife. She bore him children and we are assured loved him with a species of fierce passion and wifely devotion.”

DeShields even claimed that Cynthia Ann rode alongside Peta Nocona and five hundred Comanches who sought to rescue the warriors trapped by Rip Ford's raiders in Indian Territory in 1858. “Doubtless,” DeShields quotes Victor Rose, “Cynthia Ann rode from this ill-starred field with her infant daughter pressed to her bosom and her sons … at her side.”

By now a politician aspiring for the governor's mansion, Ross assured DeShields that “my early life was one of constant danger from [Indian] forays.” He changed the identity of the warrior he killed at the Pease River from the little-known Mohee to “the chief of the party, Peta Nocona, a noted warrior of great repute.”

“It was a short but desperate conflict,” wrote DeShields of Ross's clash with the Comanche chief. “Victory trembled in the balance … The two chiefs engaged in a personal encounter, which must result in the death of one or the other. Peta Nocona fell, and his last sigh was taken up in mournful wailings on the wings of defeat.”

Victor Rose, who served as Ross's campaign strategist and biographer, undoubtedly had a hand in the rewrite. DeShields helped the campaign by transforming a brief, tawdry massacre into a heroic triumph: “the great Comanche confederacy was forever broken.” He also
stated as fact I. D. Parker's claim that Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower, “her little barbarian,” had died in 1864.

Despite its many inaccuracies,
DeShields's account became enshrined
in one of the most enduring of the Indian war histories,
Indian Depredations in Texas
, published in 1889. John Wesley Wilbarger's 691-page book is an exhaustive compendium of Indian attacks on pioneers and their families, most of them drawn from firsthand accounts and previously published stories. He reprinted DeShields's version of events without fact-checking a single sentence. The book helped establish DeShields's work as the accepted official account of the Cynthia Ann saga, handed down through the generations and incorporated into the state of Texas's public school history curriculum.

Brown, DeShields, and Wilbarger all depicted Comanches as savage killers shorn of all humanity—“these wild Ishmaelites of the prairie,” in DeShields's words. Wilbarger was especially scornful of “
maudlin, sentimental writers
” who failed to recognize the brutality of the Indians. Such writers, he surmised, “never had their fathers, mothers, brothers, or sisters butchered by them in cold blood; never had their little sons and daughters carried away by them into captivity, to be brought up as savages … and certainly they never themselves had their own limbs beaten, bruised, burnt, and tortured with fiendish ingenuity by ‘ye gentle savages,' nor their scalps ruthlessly torn from their bleeding heads.”

His own view of the Indian, said Wilbarger, was: “We are glad he is gone, and that there are no Indians now in Texas except ‘good ones,' who are as dead as Julius Caesar.”

At the same time, each author praised Quanah, and their books contributed to his growing celebrity as the Noble Savage. Brown's book includes a photo of Quanah and describes him as “
a popular and trustworthy chief
of the Comanches … a fine looking and dignified son of the plains.”

Each of these male authors created and buffed the macho frontier legend using whatever facts fit their vision and discarding those that were less convenient. But occasionally someone came along who gathered a more modest, fact-based account.

John Henry Brown's daughter Marion spent three months at Fort Sill beginning in November 1886. Marion was a vivacious and unmarried twenty-nine-year-old seeking to restore her health in the dry climes of central Oklahoma, and she spent a lot of her time at parties, playing
whist with the officer's wives, and attending “hops” on the arms of various young officers. But
her father
had another mission in mind for her. “
I sent you plenty of paper
, pens, etc. and hope you will go into the Fort Sill history with a will to succeed,” he wrote in a letter addressed to “Dear Baby” just before Christmas. “The main point is to get the facts in clear shape.”

After the Christmas holidays ended, Marion Brown set out to do just that. She was introduced to Quanah through the old scout Horace Jones. In letters home, Marion expressed her surprise at hearing from both Jones and Quanah that Sul Ross had not killed Peta Nocona at the Pease River. Jones complained that Ross was getting too much glory for the massacre. Marion wrote of Jones, “I think him an old —— but everyone here seems to consider him reliable in all Indian history …
I can scarcely understand anything he says
, everything ends in a grunt.”

Still, Jones provided Marion with her most important evidence that Peta Nocona had survived the Pease River massacre. He told her that Nocona, hearing that Jones had seen and talked with Cynthia Ann after her recapture by the Texas Rangers, had sought him out at Fort Cobb, one of the northern stockades, where Jones was working as an interpreter after the army abandoned the ruined Camp Cooper.
The two men sat out in the yard
at Fort Cobb under a large walnut tree. Before they spoke, Nocona rubbed his hands in the dust, then on his chest, took out a pipe, lit it, and took a few puffs before passing it to Jones. “Now I want to hear the truth,” he declared.

Jones told him of Cynthia Ann's capture and how she had been taken to her uncle's house to live. Jones in turn asked Nocona about his two sons. His answer was suitably elusive. “They are way out on the prairie where you cannot see them,” Nocona replied, “but some day you may.”

Jones reckoned that the meeting took place in either the fall of 1861 or 1862. He never saw Peta Nocona again, but later heard that Nocona had lived several more years.