The Searchers (28 page)

THROUGH IT ALL, Quanah maintained a burning interest in his mother and her fate. His obsession stemmed from both a sincere longing and a canny assessment of the stature and protection white blood offered at a time when the white world was seeking to destroy what was left of Comanche culture and identity. It also gave him a soothing story to tell: the fierce Indian warrior now transformed into an ambassador for peace and reconciliation because of his love for his white mother.

His white relatives may not have been eager to welcome him to Texas, but he always welcomed them to Oklahoma. Adam Parker of Weatherford, Texas, one of Uncle Isaac's sons, spent two weeks at the Star House in 1902 and wrote to his cousin Susan Parker St. John that
Quanah was “a most interesting character
… He boasts of his ancestral white blood and delights in the entertainment of Cynthiann's [
sic
] relations.” He concluded: “You should visit him.”

Two years later, she took up the suggestion. Susan was a daughter of Nathaniel Parker, one of the sons of Elder John who chose not to migrate to Texas with his father and brothers. Thus she was a first cousin
of Cynthia Ann. She recalled growing up listening to her father tell stories of Cynthia Ann's capture. “Being a little girl myself Cynthia Ann's fate appealed most strongly of all to me,” she wrote.

Susan had married John P. St. John, who became governor of Kansas, and she ventured periodically from her home in Olathe, Kansas, to Oklahoma and Texas interviewing survivors and gathering firsthand accounts of the life and times of Cynthia Ann and Quanah for a family memoir she planned to publish.

She and a woman friend traveled to Lawton, where Quanah came to greet them at a local hotel. He himself drove his coach, drawn by four mules, up to the front entrance. “
Quanah is a man worth looking at
,” she later told an interviewer. “He is a magnificent-looking man and his bearing and manner is that of a cavalier. He was dressed in the latest style of civilization and, as he strode into the hotel, I was just proud of him.”

Quanah stared at her as she came forward.

“
Is this the cousin
?” he asked.

“This is the cousin,” she replied.

Then he took Susan's hand and kissed it, she recalled, “as cousinly and gently as if he had learned the art in some finishing school for gentlemen. And, only to think of it, not so many years ago this man was a bloodthirsty, scalping wild Indian.”

Later, he told her she looked like his mother.

Susan Parker St. John, first cousin of Cynthia Ann, interviewed family members and other sources and visited with Quanah Parker. Her unpublished notes are one of the most reliable sources of information about Cynthia Ann's life and death after her recapture in 1860.

He took the two women to the Star House. The house was handsomely furnished and scrupulously clean—“just as the house of any white man of wealth and refinement,” Susan would recall.

Susan was especially impressed with Quanah's kindness to his wife Topay. When a fierce storm lit up the evening sky, he ushered everyone inside for their safety. “Quanah showed us how the windows bolted and doors locked, said the big gate … was locked … [N]o one could get in. [He] told us he slept in the next room and if we needed anything or was afraid to rap on his door.” He asked Susan if Topay, who had recently lost a baby, could stay with her during the storm. “He seems so thoughtful of his wives. I suppose that's why he brought her in our room.”

Susan in her account captured Quanah's virtue and his vanity. “He is a fine looking man proud as a peacock and vain as a … pretty girl,” she recalled, “[who] likes to have you tell him what a great man he is.”

QUANAH HAD LOST his mother when she was alive; now he wanted to claim her in death by having her remains removed from Texas and reburied in the homeland of the native people she had embraced as her own. He knew he would never obtain permission from the Texas legislature for such a project, so instead he asked his rancher friends Burnett and Goodnight to lobby in Washington. In 1909, Congress passed a bill authorizing the transfer and appropriating $1,000 for the purpose.

On Department of Interior letterhead, Quanah petitioned Texas governor Thomas Mitchell Campbell for his personal protection: “
Dear Sir, Congress has set aside money
for me to remove the body of my mother Cynthia Ann Parker and build a monument and some time past I was hunting in Texas and they accused me [of] killing antelope and I was afraid to come for fear they might make some trouble for me because of a dislike to a friend of mine in Texas, would you protect me if I was to come to Austin and neighborhood to remove my mother's body some time soon.”

There is no record of a reply from Campbell. But Quanah did get an offer of help, handwritten in pencil, from J. R. O'Quinn, a first cousin:

Sir:

I see your advertisement
in reguard to your Mother Cytnia An Parkers grave and its where bouts I aught to no how she was.

She was my mothers sister that makes her my own aunt. And she was living with my father and mother when she died. You said you wanted to find her grave if you do we aught to no where it is and if you will come down I think we can site you to the place my father written to you some 8 or 10 days ago but miss address not doing the exact Post office the address to Lawton. Well I have written to a cousin that I never have seen, waiting to hear from you soon.

Yours Respectfully,
JR O'Quinn

Other members of the Texas Parkers were not so accommodating. “
The relatives of Cynthia Ann
and the friends of the Parkers did not want to see her removed, they said they thought she had suffered enough from the Indians, and they didn't want her taken up and buried among them,” recalled Ambrosia Miller, a cousin. “The Parkers helped make Texas and they thought they had more right to Cynthia Ann's body than the Indians.”

In the fall of 1910,
Quanah dispatched
son-in-law Aubrey C. Birdsong, who was married to his daughter Neda, to East Texas. Birdsong visited small-town cemeteries in Groesbeck, Canton, Mineola, Athens, and several other sites, but despite O'Quinn's offer of help, he could not locate Cynthia Ann's grave. At first he could not even find anyone who had attended her funeral. But eventually he found his way to a local judge named John Parker. The judge in turn sent him to the small town of Poynor to meet Bob and Joe Padgett.

The Padgetts had known Cynthia Ann in the last year of her life; Bob and Joe told Birdsong they had assisted in her burial. Joe's wife recalled dressing the body and pinning up Cynthia Ann's hair with a bone hairpin. The brothers escorted Birdsong to an unmarked grave in the nearby Fosterville cemetery, described by one relative as “the most desolate and forsaken cemetery I have ever seen.” Birdsong located the grave on Thanksgiving Day.

When he dug up Cynthia Ann's remains, Birdsong was surprised to find a small skeleton in the grave lying beside her. He surmised that this was Prairie Flower. Although he had no legal authority to do so,
Birdsong decided to put the bones
in the same casket with Cynthia Ann “with the little girl's remains placed as if she were in the arms of her mother.”

“
I felt that this meant so much to Quanah
Parker that I was doing a most humane act, a sort of an unwritten law,” Birdsong recalled in an
interview with a Fort Sill archivist forty-nine years later. He worked surreptitiously. “I knew if I'd try to obtain permission from Texas authorities I would be arrested for going as far as I did without permission, and I'd never get the remains out of the State.”

Birdsong spirited the remains to Oklahoma, where they were placed in a coffin that was displayed at the Post Oak Mission near the Star House. A photograph taken inside the Post Oak Mission hall shows a somber Quanah Parker staring down at a small white coffin strewn with flowers and propped between two chairs. Quanah, dressed in a formal dark suit, stands stiffly, hands by his side.

“
Are you sure this is my little white mother
?” Quanah asked his son-in-law.

Birdsong said he was sure.

“I look for her long time,” Quanah told him. “Now I'm done.”

At the funeral Quanah spoke twice about Cynthia Ann, once in Comanche and once in English. His mother, Quanah said, “love Indians so much she no want to go back folks. All same people anyway, God say.”

Then he explained himself by evoking Cynthia Ann. “
I love my mother
. I like white folks. Got great heart. I want my people to follow after white way, get educate, know work, make living. When people die today, tomorrow, ten years, I want them be ready like my mother. Then we all lie together again.

“That's why when government give money for monument and new grave, I have this funeral and ask whites to help. Me glad so many Indians and white people come. That's all.”

After a ceremony, the casket was lifted by four pallbearers to the grave site. Quanah solemnly followed. He lingered at the site for a long time. He “stood in tears and deep agony over the lowered casket,” wrote his daughter Neda.

Man and myth had finally come together.

OVER THE DECADES, Quanah's partnership with ranchers such as Charles Goodnight and Burk Burnett never faded. Burnett felt especially protective and paternalistic toward his Comanche friend. Each November he invited Quanah to bring his warriors to the Matador Ranch in East Texas for hunting. But he warned the chief to be careful when traveling into the state, because “
as you know there is considerable prejudice
among the white people of that country against your Indians hunting out there.”

Burnett helped arrange for what turned out to be Quanah's last foray into Texas. When the construction of the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific Railway was complete, the company held a “Quanah Route Day” celebration at the Texas State Fair in Dallas in October 1910. Although no one could say for certain, Quanah by this time was probably around sixty-five years old, and he had suffered for several years from rheumatism, a painful inflammation of the joints. Still, he dressed in full Comanche war regalia for the event and entered the fairgrounds on horseback, followed by his extended family and a collection of aging former warriors.

Quanah spoke to the crowd
. Sul Ross had died twelve years earlier, and Quanah was no longer quite so reticent about discussing his past life as a warrior. He stated explicitly that the old story that Sul Ross had killed his father was pure fiction. “The Texas history says General Ross killed my father. The old Indian told me no so. He no kill my father … After that—two year, three year maybe—my father sick. I see him die. I want to get that in Texas history straight up.”

For the first time, he also publicly described his killing of Trooper Gregg at Blanco Canyon in 1871. “I tell my men stand up behind hill, holler, shoot, and run.
I run to one side and use this knife
. I came up right side and killed man sergeant and scalp. You see how bad man I at that time?”

But his message now was one of peace and reconciliation. And he emphasized that despite their bloodstained past and all the wrongs that had been done, Comanches and Texans shared a common identity and a common national enterprise. “You look at me,” he told them. “I put on this war bonnet. This is my war trinket. Ladies and gentlemen, I used to be a bad man. Now I am a citizen of the United States. I pay taxes the same as you people do. We are the same people now. We used to give you some trouble, but we are the same people now.”

He never stopped searching for his mother's long-lost legacy of land in Texas. No doubt this quest was partly because the land had monetary value. But there was more to it than that. A piece of Texas land from his mother would have objectified his connection to her and to the state he and his fellow Comanches had fought against for so long. It would have resolved the conflict in a meaningful material way. And for a man who had been orphaned by history, it could have provided the home he never had. His father had been a loner and a wanderer by choice, his mother by force of violent circumstances. Quanah, too, was a man apart—never a white man but never quite a full Comanche, either. Viewed from this
angle, his life was a quest to find for himself, his family, and his people a place to call home. Quanah was a searcher.

In a letter to Goodnight dated January 7, 1911, Quanah again asked his rancher friend's help in taking up the matter, He also promised to visit Goodnight's ranch in the near future. “
I am going to bring some old Indians
to your place and see your buffalo and make these old Indians glad.”

He never made it.

FOR SEVERAL WEEKS Quanah had been feeling sick to his stomach as well as aching in his joints, and
Laura
Parker Birdsong, his devoted eldest daughter, believed the rheumatism had spread to his heart. Still, he insisted on making a train trip to participate in a peyote ceremony with Cheyenne friends. He must have stayed up all night for the ritual before boarding a train home. On the way back he had trouble breathing and his temperature spiked. By the time Emmet Cox met the train at nearby Indiahoma, Quanah was unconscious.