Authors: Glenn Frankel
Marion avidly reported the details to her parents. She rather savored the prospect of discomfiting the newly elected governor of Texas. “
What will Sul Ross say about Puttack Nocona
?” Marion wrote. “I rather enjoy it myself. It will surprise people.” Indeed, it might have, but Marion Brown's account was not published until 1970. Her father, perhaps for political reasons, made no attempt to print her story, although he ambiguously altered his own
Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas
in its 1896 edition. In the section “The Fall of Parker's Fort,” he credits Ross with
killing “Mohee, chief of the band.” But in his portrait of Ross some 250 pages later, he writes that Ross “killed Peta Nocona, the last of the great Comanche chieftains.”
Marion was charmed by Quanah, but not taken in. The man she described was very much a performer. She noticed upon shaking hands that “his were softer than mine. He had his hair arranged in the Indian style, with an eagle feather standing up straight from his head, his face was painted, moccasins adorned his feet, the blanket was thrown carelessly around him and the remainder of his costume was strictly Indian with the exception of a neat pair of driving gloves.” He was so quiet and expressionless during their first meeting that Marion assumed he could not speak English. Then, after she told him she wanted to see him dressed as an Indian, he smiled widely, laughed, and replied, “
No like to come this way
. Come another time when can stay longer.” When one of her gentlemen friends called on her later that evening, he noted that Quanah already had five wives. “He asked if Quanah had asked me to be number six.”
Like any effective leader, Quanah intuitively grasped the importance of a clean public image. He was careful not to discuss the things he had seen and done as a warrior, and he discouraged other Comanches from talking about the past. He knew the state of Texas was conducting “depredation courts,” where residents could make claims for damages for destruction of property and loss of life and limb during the Indian wars. He feared such proceedings could evolve into criminal trials.
Quanah knew that Sul Ross's claim that he had killed Peta Nocona at the Pease River was a falsehood, that his father had not been present during the battle, but despite what he said privately to Marion Brown, he refused to publicly contradict Ross. “
Out of respect to the family of General Ross
, do not deny that he killed Peta Nocona,” he wrote to his daughter Neda, who served for a time as Quanah's personal secretary. “If he felt that it was any credit to him to have killed my father, let his people continue to believe that he did so.”
BY THE EARLY 1890S, Quanah was at the pinnacle of his success. His holdings consisted of a farm of 150 acres, 425 cattle, 200 hogs, 160 horses, 3 wagons, a buggy, and the newly completed Star House. He also controlled 44,000 acres of Big Pasture, thousands of which he privately leased to his rancher partners. He was presiding judge of the Court of Indian Offenses. He had outsmarted and outmaneuvered his opponents,
white and red. He possessed the title of Chief of the Comanches while keeping his peyote faith and his polygamous family intact. No Native American in the United States enjoyed the same level of respect and admiration. None was as welcome in the white world. Even the Parkers were beginning to embrace him as an exotic but useful member of their extended family.
But at that very moment, it all began to unravel. And at the heart of the matter, as was so often true in relations between whites and Native Americans, was land.
Indian Territory contained hundreds of thousands of untapped acres. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867 had pledged the land to the Indians of the reservations, but by and large they neither farmed nor raised livestock on most of the acreage. Meanwhile, thousands of aspiring white homesteaders and land agents saw it as the last frontierâsomething that should belong to them.
Some of the Indians' purported friendsâmen such as Indian affairs
commissioner
Thomas J. Morgan, Quanah's old nemesisâbelieved that the vast collective holdings were impeding the process of assimilation. They argued that reservation Indians possessed far more land than they knew what to do with and were plagued by unscrupulous white intruders who exploited their ignorance and naïveté. The best solution for native people, these critics argued, was to concentrate them on tracts sufficient for their personal use and sell off the rest. “
The Indian does not want to work
and he will not do so unless compelled,” Morgan pronounced.
As it happened, of course, this was also the best solution for land-hungry white homesteaders known as Boomers, and the phalanx of railroad interests, land speculators, lawyers, and politicians who forged an irresistible political and economic coalition of convenience as the Twin Territories of Oklahomaâthe Indian half and the white halfâlurched toward statehood. Congress agreed and, in 1887, passed the Dawes Severalty Act authorizing the allotment of small holdings to individual Indians while selling off the vast tracts around them. The profits were supposed to be used on the Indians' behalf to build schools, purchase livestock, and fund other useful pursuits. Commissioner Morgan
designated February 8, when the bill was signed, to be observed in Indian schools as “the possible turning point in Indian history” when “Indians may strike out from tribal and reservation life and enter American citizenship.”
As part of the new act, Congress established a three-man commission to adjudicate the process, chaired by former Michigan governor David H. Jerome. A solemn man with short clipped hair and a long, flowing beard, Jerome had been a forty-niner during the California gold rush and owner of a large hardware store in Saginaw. After a brief term as governor, he had settled into the role of Christian philanthropist, which made him prime material for a seat on the non-salaried federal Board of Indian Commissioners. Jerome and his three-man panel traveled throughout Indian Territory holding public hearings to determine the size and price of the acreage. Their mandate was to get control of the lands as cheaply as possible. They first pressured the Cherokees and the other so-called civilized tribes in the eastern half of the territory, then turned their attention to the Comanches and Kiowas in the southwest.
Quanah could see early on what was coming. He was not opposed in principle to allotting small parcels to individual Indians, but he knew that the sell-off of surplus land would mean the end of the grass money partnership with his cattlemen allies. They, too, were opposed to anything that would impinge on the special deal they had with Quanah and the Comanches. Both groups knew they lacked the political power to repeal the Dawes Act, but they had every intention of delaying its impact. The ranchers dispatched Quanah to Washington in 1889, accompanied by one of their lawyers, to stall the commission's first planned visit to Comanche territory. He made eight more visits over the coming decade.
Quanah did his job so well that the commissioners did not get to Fort Sill until September 19, 1892. They held eight days of meetings haggling with Indian leaders. Chairman Jerome sought to portray the panel's role in simple, paternalistic terms. “The Commissioners are not here to deal sharply with the Indians or to wring the Indians or do anything that a father would not do with his child,” Jerome solemnly declared on the session's opening day. “But we are here to talk to you patiently, slowly and quietly to the end that you may know exactly what the wishes of the Great Father are and that we may know what the wishes of the Indians are.”
Although respectful in his tone, Quanah had no time for such platitudes. He told Jerome that he had advised his fellow Indians, “Do not
go at this thing like you were riding a swift horse ⦠do not go into this thing recklessly.” He said Indian commissioner Morgan had warned him that the commissioners “have not got any money but want to buy it with mouth-shoot.”
He demanded of Jerome, “How much will be paid for one acre, what the terms will be and when it will be paid?”
Jerome replied that the details would be revealed “by and by.”
Unimpressed, Quanah announced that he needed to supervise work on a new two-story porch for the Star House and would not be attending the next day's session. He might return, he said, “in a few days.”
Various other Comanche and Kiowa leaders spoke up, most of them expressing extreme reluctance to sell their lands. One of the most revealing was White Eagle, the adopted name of Isatai, the former shaman of the battle of Adobe Walls. He and Quanah had been rivals ever since Isatai had botched the magic potion seventeen years earlier and caused the Indian defeat. But White Eagle now backed Quanah's stand and neatly summed up the chief's importance to the Comanche leadership: “What he learns from the Government he writes on his tongue and we learn from him.”
The new porch, apparently, could wait. Quanah showed up for the next day's session. Of all the Indian leaders who spoke during the meetings, he was the only one who demanded plain and simple answers in acres of land and dollars and cents.
Commissioner Warren G. Sayre had promised payments totaling $2 million for the surplus landâthe equivalent of $665 for every man, woman, and child on the reservation. But Quanah insisted on breaking it down to simple terms.
“How much per acre?” he asked Sayre.
“I cannot tell you,” Sayre replied.
“How do you arrive at the figure of [two] million dollars if you do not know?”
“We just guess at it.”
Having wrung this startling admission, Quanah pointed out that some tribes in prior negotiations with the commission had received $1.25 per acre, while others had gotten only fifty cents. Sayre said the commission couldn't say for sure how much the Comanches and Kiowas would get because the calculations depended on the quality of land, the number of owners, and other unknown factors. The meeting ended in stalemate.
Quanah invited the commissioners to the Star House, where he fed them dinner and put them up for the night. Jerome returned praising
Quanah's hospitality. He noted Quanah's livestock holdings and implied that any Indian could enjoy similar prosperity in the futureâignoring the fact that much of Quanah's wealth came from grass money he received from the cattlemen.
Eventually the commission offered $2 million for approximately 2.5 million acres of reservation lands and agreed to leave to Congress the question of an additional $500,000 payment to make up for the lost grass money. Each Indian was to receive four forty-acre tracts. Quanah had fought the Jerome Commission with every means at his disposal, but in the end he and his allies acquiesced. They signed on October 6, 1892.
He felt he had gotten the best deal
he could, but he continued to obstruct the final settlement for the next nine years.
The commission then needed to win approval from at least three-fourths of the adult male Indian population. To help it along, the commission stipulated that eighteen whites “be entitled to all the benefits of land and money conferred by this agreement.” The whites, who included Emmett Cox, Quanah's son-in-law, were all influential and popular members of the reservation community. With their support, the commission managed to obtain signatures from 456 of 562 adult males.
One of Quanah's advisers in this matter was Lieutenant Hugh L. Scott of the Seventh Cavalry, a West Point graduate who fancied himself an Indian expert. At Fort Lincoln, in the Dakota Territory, Scott had worked to cultivate the Sioux prisoners, win their confidence, and learn their sign language. After his unit was transferred to Fort Sill, he became commander of a troop of Indian scouts. He became an influential peacemaker and was often sent out to talk to malcontent tribesmen. He was considered a knowledgeable observer who took a rare interest in the Indians he oversaw. His notebooks include notes from one of the rare interviews with Quanah in which the chief seems to be speaking frankly about his past, his role in the Adobe Walls battle, and his views on leadership. But the two men fell out in the aftermath of the Jerome Commission.
By 1898, Quanah had come around to favoring ratification of the agreement and arranged for a congressional hearing in Washington to speak in favor. But the anti-Quanah forces among the Kiowas and Comanches decided to send their own delegation to Washington to speak out against the deal and appointed Scott as their spokesman. Quanah was outraged when Scott appeared to testify. “
Quanah jumped up in a great rage
and said he wouldn't have any white man speak for him or his people,” Scott later recalled. After Scott testified, the two sides argued
throughout the afternoon and the committee put off making a decision. When it was over, wrote Scott, “Quanah announced his intention of killing me before I could get back to Fort Sill.”
Scott survived, but his motives and loyalties remained in doubt. When the Jerome Commission's report was ratified, Scott's name appeared as one of the whites eligible for a 160-acre grant, although he later withdrew it. In 1901, he sold for $3,000 Quanah's war bonnet and other valuable artifacts to the Bancroft collection at the University of California at Berkeley.
Kiowa opponents foolishly appealed the Jerome Commission's ruling to the Supreme Court, which issued a disastrous ruling in 1903 that rendered Indian land rights as essentially nonexistent. In
Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock
, the court affirmed the power of Congress to allot reservation lands in any way it saw fit, effectively endorsing the disenfranchisement of Native Americans. Big Pasture was carved up and allotted to white interests in 1906. The Kiowa chiefs had sought the protection of the white man's judicial system, only to find it was no protection at all. Their failure vindicated Quanah's less confrontational approach.
IN ANTICIPATION of the August 6, 1901, opening of the reservation's surplus lands, some 50,000 Boomers poured into the reservation illegally, staking out land claims and wildcatting for minerals in the Wichita Mountains. Between July 10 and early August, more than 165,000 people registered at El Reno and Lawton for 13,000 homesteads.
Tent cities of 10,000 people each sprang up
outside Lawton and Anadarko, accompanied by crime, drunkenness, unsanitary conditions, and disease.