Authors: Glenn Frankel
Men and women mingled freely. “They slept in cots under tents that had no sides. They took naps in chairs on the sidewalks; they spent the night upon the grass of the parkings, glad to find a place to rest.” Temperatures rose past one hundred degrees. On the morning of August 6, officials accompanied by witnesses and newspapermen arrived before a stunning sight, according to one observer.
Massed upon a sloping hillside, standing shoulder to shoulder, were people from every section of the Nation. Women, thousands of them, were in the eager throng ⦠On the edges of the crowd was a fringe of prairie schooners bearing the men and women who had made the greatest sacrifice to enter the lists. To them, or some of them, the drawing meant everything. Brooding over the mighty
gathering was a spirit of tense nervousness that affected even the members of the Commission, and the officer's hand trembled when he lifted up to view the first bits of paper by which Fate distributed fortune to her favorites.
The commissioners read out the list of 13,000 winners among 167,000 applicants. Those holding lucky numbers raced across the prairie in a mad marathon of horses, mules, wagons, and buggiesâanything with wheelsâto claim their homesteads. Quanah had made the best deal he could. But the reservation was history, and its dismantling shattered the last promise white men had made to red in what six years later became the state of Oklahoma.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
was a naturalist, historian, progressive, imperialist, and outdoorsman, the kind of president who ordered bison heads to be carved on the mantel in the state dining room at the White House. He was also a storyteller, mythmaker, and showmanâjust like Quanah Parker.
One thing he wasn't was an Indian lover. In his seven-volume opus,
The Winning of the West
, first published in 1894, the future president depicted the settling of the American frontier as
a contest between a superior white race
and inferior dark-skinned natives. For him the West was a Darwinian theater where the fittest triumphed and the losers were subordinated or destroyed. “Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of the Alleghenies should remain an un-peopled waste,
war was inevitable
â¦,” he wrote in the first volume. “It is wholly impossible to avoid conflicts with the weaker race.”
For Roosevelt, violence was a purifying act, both cleansing and mythical. He had no time for those “foolish sentimentalists” who sought to protect and preserve Indian culture.
Above all, he believed that character was destiny and that strong men made their own history. He loved natural men who could ride, shoot, hunt, and thrive in the wilderness. Thus a special man such as Quanah Parkerâan Indian, yet with his mother's Anglo-Saxon blood coursing through his veinsâappealed to Roosevelt's celebration of “
a race of heroes
.”
Quanah first came to Roosevelt's attention through Francis E. Leeup, a New York journalist and Indian rights lobbyist who became part of Roosevelt's inner circle. The president dispatched Leeup to the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache
agency in Anadarko in 1903 to investigate allegations of corruption against the Indian agent James Randlett, one of Quanah's closest allies. Leeup uncovered a nest of jealousy, double-dealing, theft, and vicious in-fighting among white merchants, land speculators, squaw men, and chiefs, but he exonerated the agent. As for Quanah, Leeup wrote approvingly that
the Comanche chief was
“always conscious that he is Indian, but never forgetful that the white civilization is supreme, and that the Indian's wisest course is to adapt himself to it as fast as he can.”
Leeup had observed politicians in Washington over the years and believed he knew leadership when he saw it. “If ever Nature stamped a man with the seal of headship she did it in his case,” he wrote. “Quanah would have been a leader and a governor in any circle where fate might have cast him. It is in his blood ⦠Even those who are restive under his rule recognize its supremacy.”
Quanah's national fame was cemented at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, where he participated in a celebration of the American West. It was followed by an invitation to Roosevelt's March 4, 1905, inauguration, along with Geronimo, Buckskin Charlie of the Utes, Hollow Horn Bear of the Rosebud Sioux, American Horse of the Brule Sioux, and Little Plume of the Blackfeet. In what the historian Douglas Brinkley called “
Roosevelt's own Buffalo Bill production
,” pioneers, cowboys, Rough Riders, the cowboy star Tom Mix, and the Indian chiefs all gathered to parade in a light snow.
The authorities ordered Quanah to appear “
fully equipped with Indian clothing
as gorgeous as possible in its make-up and complete in its representation of old Indian dress,” wrote Captain W. A. Mercer, superintendent at the Carlisle Indian School, to Randlett. Quanah was to epitomize “the progressive Indian, one who is in accord with the efforts of the Government to better the condition of the race.”
Not everyone approved of Quanah's place of honor. Retired Army captain Robert G. Carter, who had served in the Fourth Cavalry under Mackenzie during the Red River War, was incensed that Roosevelt had invited Quanah and the other “
good Indians
⦠most of whom had dipped their hands in many a white settler's blood.” Carter was equally angered that Texas towns had been named after Quanah and his father, Nocona. Had any towns been named for one of the cavalrymen, Carter wondered, “who risked their lives and sacrificed their health and future happiness here on earth in more than one effort to drive out that same Quahada Comanche band and open up that wild and desolate region to
settlement?” But Carter's was a minority view. Having been thoroughly vanquished and defanged, Native Americans were now fair subjects for popular admiration.
One month after the inauguration, Roosevelt decided to take up an invitation to go wolf hunting in southwestern Oklahoma, and he made the territory one of the stops on a five-week tour of the West. When he arrived at the train station in Frederick on April 8, Roosevelt invited
Quanah
to join him on the speaker's stand. “
Give the red man the same chance
as the white,” the president told the small crowd. “The country is founded on a doctrine of giving each man a fair show to see what there is in him.”
Quanah showed up with twelve of his men and wore his six-shooter strapped to his waistâ“afraid somebody might try to kill President,” he explained.
Burk Burnett and his son Tomâtwo of Quanah's white benefactorsâwere the president's main hosts, along with Guy Waggoner, Burnett's business partner. They brought with them Jack “Catch 'Em Alive” Abernathy, a Texas-born wolf hunter. They took the president and his party south to Big Pasture, setting up camp at Deep Red Creek, which empties into the Red River, under the shade of elms and pecan trees. They were
serenaded by cardinals and mockingbirds
â“the most individual and delightful of all birds in voice and manner,” declared Roosevelt.
“The weather was good, we were in the saddle from morning until night, and our camp was in all respects all that a camp should be,” the president exulted. “So how could we help enjoying ourselves?”
They spent four days there, killed seventeen wolves, and ate and slept outdoors. On the third day, three of Quanah's wives and two of his children joined them. “
It was a thoroughly congenial company
all through,” Roosevelt wrote. When it ended, Quanah invited Roosevelt to the Star House for dinner. While talking with Quanah that evening,
Roosevelt mentioned the idea
of establishing a bison refuge, populated by buffalo currently residing at the Bronx Zoo in New York, in the newly created Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, a few miles north of the Star House. Quanah was almost speechless with excitement at the prospect of seeing buffalo again near his home.
Anna Birdsong Dean, one of Quanah's granddaughters, recalled hearing from her mother about Roosevelt's visit to the house. “
My mother's job
was to see if everything was done properly,” Anna recalled. She checked the dining room table before the president was to arrive and chastised Quanah for filling large goblets to the brim with wine.
“Grandfather replied that when he went to Washington the President served wine in small glasses and he wanted to give the President more wine than Roosevelt gave him.”
It took more than two years for the paperwork to go through. But on October 11, 1907, seven bison bulls and eight cows were loaded onto fifteen padded compartments at Fordham Station, accompanied by three zoo officials for the two-thousand-mile journey to the Wichita refuge. Three of the bison were named for Lone Wolf, Geronimo, and Quanah.
Dressed in full war feathers, Quanah awaited their arrival in Cache. He and his men helped load the bison into wagons for the thirteen-mile journey to the refuge. It was as if the ancient Kiowa vision had been realized: the bison again came roaring out of Mount Scott, even if only a remnant.
BY NOW QUANAH HAD BECOME the most important and influential Native American of his generation. He was the Man to See when it came to Comanche affairs, a reliable ally and a formidable enemy. He was also the white man's favorite Indian, in no small part because he was the son of a white woman.
A certificate from Indian commissioner W. A. Jones recognized his power and authority even while reflecting just how fragile the entire arrangement was: “
This is to certify that Quanah
Parker is recognized as the chief of the Comanches, and has promised his Great Father to be always friendly towards white men, and any white man to whom he may show this Paper is requested by the Government to treaty him in a friendly manner, and to be careful to give him no cause to break his promise.”
His relations with the long parade of white officials who ran the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Indian agency were friendly but measured. Many developed a genuine affection for Quanah and his family. James Randlett, who became his closest ally among the agents, arranged to have one of the first telephones in the Oklahoma territory installed at the Star House and helped with jobs and housing for many of Quanah's vast brood. When one of the periodic smallpox epidemics broke out, Randlett wrote one of his subordinates: “
I wish you to go over to Quanah's
to find out how he is fixed and if anything can be done for him ⦠After you get this I want you to write me every day so long as smallpox is in Quanah's family, and tell me how they are and if anything can be done for them.”
Yet, while the agents sought to respect Quanah's pride and dignity, the portrait that emerges from the agency's files is of a man who was still a ward of the state. Every expense, no matter how trivial, was scrutinized. Quanah could not spend his own private funds to buy building materials for his house or purchase a new cow without agency permission. Often the agent had to pass these requests up the chain of command to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. Nor could Quanah travel to Washington without permission from the commissioner of Indian Affairs. Once when Quanah sought fifty dollars' reimbursement for the expenses of his wife Pohpondy for a trip to Washington,
an Interior Department bureaucrat rejected the request
by noting he had not seen proof that Pohpondy was Quanah's legal spouse.
For Quanah, there were two worlds: the Comanche world he came from and identified with, and the white world that found him fascinating and acceptable so long as he was careful and obsequious. He alone moved between these worlds, yet at the same time he knew to keep them separate, and he seldom let his guard down in either one.
“
My grandfather never trusted a white man
,” Baldwin Parker Jr., a grandson, once told an interviewer. “He was smart enough to live with them. He could live in both worlds at the same time. His whiteness and red-ness worked for him instead of against him. The two had become one.”
Quanah's celebrity continued to grow. He hosted two major powwows near his home that attracted thousands of visitors. The highlight in 1903 was a staged attack by three hundred warriors on a Frisco passenger train just arriving at the station in Cache. “
Painted, brandishing their bows
and arrows and shrieking their war cries, the Indians produced near-panic on the train, and passengers screamed and fainted in the coaches,” reported one newspaper account.
His fame became a passport that allowed him to enter worlds that other Indians were not welcome in. Once in Texas, he recalled to his cousin Susan St. John,
he had sat down in a train coach
across from some white businessmen. He was always careful when he rode the train to dress in his finest dark wool suit from the haberdashers in Electra, Texas, but he never hid his warrior's braids, which gave him away as a Comanche just as his pale blue eyes betrayed his white origins. The men wanted this obvious Indian evicted from the coach and some of them went to get a conductor, who proceeded to inform them that the man in question was the famous Quanah Parker. Suddenly the mood changed.
The men shook his hand and engaged him in conversation. As far as they were concerned, Quanah Parker was a celebrity.
Still, some doors remained closed. When Quanah sought to enroll one of his sons in the Cache public schools, the boy was rejected by order of the Republican-dominated school board. The board ruled the boy was not a bona fide resident of Cache, but a personal investigation by the
Oklahoman
's special correspondent reported, “
The real reason is because he is an Indian
.”
Quanah went to J. A. Johnson, an old friend who was superintendent of schools in Comanche County, and asked Johnson to organize a new school district in Quanah's area. The chief donated the land, built the school, and ensured that residents paid a school tax. Quanah was elected head of the board in June 1908.
Cache held a “great Quanah Parker celebration” that same year, with bronco busting, horse races, Indian dances, stagecoach robbery enactments, and oratory. Quanah loved the hoopla, but he insisted upon his dignity. When two businessmen approached him the following year and offered him $5,000 for six months if he agreed to appear in a Wild West show in New York, he said no. “
You put me in little pen
,” he told them. “I no monkey.”