The Searchers (55 page)

As Herbert Woesner aged, he grew less able to maintain the Star House. The columns of the stately front porch began to sag, the porch skirt separated from its supports, and tree roots undermined its foundations. The roof dipped and leaked, and tree limbs punched holes in its skin, causing water damage to the second floor. Wind and rain loosened the shingles and peeled off the protective flashing. The ceiling of the dining room also leaked, staining the floor below.

When Herbert died of cancer in 2008 at age eighty-three, his funeral was held on the front porch. Ron Parker wept as he spoke of Woesner's warm deeds and friendship, and the following year's reunion was dedicated to his memory. Soon after the ceremony, the Parkers began to discuss how to save their famous ancestor's home from further deterioration. “
For us it's a sacred place
,” said Ron. “The Woesners have always treated us wonderfully, and we know they want to do the best for the house, but we worry about its future.”

Ron Parker in his great-grandfather's bedroom at the Star House, June 2008.

With his uncle gone, Wayne accepted the role of tour guide and custodian. He proudly showed the dining room where Quanah entertained Teddy Roosevelt: on the wall is a photo of Quanah in a dignified pose at the head of the table. In Quanah's bedroom was a photo of the chief sitting stiffly next to the picture taken in Fort Worth in 1861 of his mother and his sister, Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower, that Texas governor Sul Ross sent to his former enemy. The woodstove in the room next to Quanah's bedroom was original. So was some of the wallpaper. The old wheelchair of Topay, Quanah's last surviving widow—she lived until 1965—resided in a heap on the floor in the front foyer.

Ardith Parker Leming, one of Quanah's great-granddaughters, loved to give tours of the house in her down-to-earth manner. She said Neda Birdsong, one of her great-aunts, who lived there for nearly fifty years after her father's death in 1911, used to keep a wig in the top drawer of her dresser to show visitors when she got tired of people asking if there was a scalp in the house.

Like lots of visitors over the years, Ardith couldn't help but bring up Quanah's practice of polygamy. “
They say there was no jealousy
between the wives,” she told visitors. “Do you believe that? I don't believe it.”

Inside, there were dark stains on the worn red carpet, and a family of
bats had taken up residence in a downstairs hallway. The stairway leading to the second floor had been sealed off: the leaky roof had made the floor too treacherous for visitors. There was no fire alarm system or internal sprinklers, and it was clear that a mischievous juvenile delinquent with a box of matches could likely send the place to a fiery oblivion within minutes.

One contractor's report estimated that what it called “temporary stabilization measures” could be done for $20,000. It would likely cost hundreds of thousands more to restore and preserve the house. “
In the event these temporary measures
are not taken, we believe the structure will begin to accelerate and experience even greater damage,” the undated report concluded. “At this time it is becoming unsafe to enter the structure.”

The house has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972, and in recent years has been listed as one of Oklahoma's ten most endangered historic places. But there was no public funding attached to these designations.

“
Lots of people had wanted to buy it
,” Kathy Gipson Treadwell, Herbert's younger sister, told me in a 2009 interview. “They wanted to move it to the Fort Worth Stockyards, they wanted to move it to Quanah, Texas, they wanted to move it up here to the highway and make a visitors' center out of it. Herbert said the house is where it belongs and where it's going to stay. He just always wanted it to be left here, just as it was.”

Kathy was devoted to her brother and to the trading post. She worked in the kitchen of the restaurant seven days a week and 365 days a year, including Christmas Day, when the trading post fed the needy for free. It was one of the few places in town where white folks and red folks mingled freely. But Kathy died in 2011, leaving Wayne and his sister Ginger to search for a solution that would preserve the house while maintaining the Parker family connection. It was a burdensome legacy. Officials of the Comanche Nation asked to take control of the house. Some proposed moving it yet again, back to the main road, restoring it, and perhaps even turning it into a casino. The Parker family was horrified at the prospect. A Texas businessman again proposed moving it to Fort Worth.

“
There are people showing up
all the time offering to help us, telling us we need to preserve this and that, but no one gives us any practical advice,” said Wayne Gipson, who ruefully admitted he and his sister did not know what to do with the Star House.

* * *

SOME OF THE OTHER HISTORIC SITES connected to the Parker saga are far more secure. Isaac Parker's old log cabin in Birdville, west of Fort Worth, where he first brought his niece Cynthia Ann after she was recaptured from the Comanches, has survived for nearly 170 years. Like the Star House, it has been on the move. First built in the late 1840s, it was dismantled in 1920, restored to its original appearance, and moved to a ranch owned by Amon G. Carter, a wealthy Fort Worth newspaper publisher. After his death, it was dismantled once again—each log was numbered and photographed—and relocated to the Log Cabin Village, a city-owned living history museum, where it was painstakingly reconstructed.

Dorothy Poole, an eighty-eight-year-old widow, was working as a docent at the site in July 2008 when I paid a visit. A retired owner of a Baskin and Robbins franchise with her late husband, she recounted the story of Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower twice a day to visitors, most frequently to elementary school children who come in vast regiments to the Log Cabin Village escorted by their teachers. With her long calico pioneer dress, carved wooden cane, old-fashioned rocking chair, and silver braids, Dorothy looked as if she had stepped out of a Texas history book.

She told me that she had heard many legends about the Parkers. One day, after she recited Cynthia Ann's story to a group of visitors, a woman approached who said her name was Elizabeth Runyon. She said Dorothy had gotten only one part of the tale wrong: Prairie Flower had not died of smallpox but had been packed off by her relatives for her own well-being and renamed Minnie Sneed. “The reason I know this is because I'm her great-granddaughter,” the woman told Dorothy.

Dorothy said she did not know whether to believe such tales or not. “
I know there are a lot of missing pieces
in any of these stories,” she said. Still, it's the emotions behind the stories that she found most genuine and readily understandable. Like the Star House, the modest little cabin is a testament to human aspirations and shortcomings. Uncle Isaac tried and failed to restore his niece to his family here and heal part of the terrible wound from the massacre of 1836. But Cynthia Ann saw the house as a prison keeping her from reuniting with her real family, her Comanche sons and her adopted community.

Keeping watch over the old cabin day after day, Dorothy often thought about Cynthia Ann's agony. “They said she'd sit out on this porch and pray to the Indian gods to take her back to her children, and I often wonder, what she was thinking when she was sitting here?” said Dorothy. “Who knows what she felt? It must have been a terrible trauma. I can see how terribly
sad it would have been. It's a shame she never got to see her sons again.”

HIDDEN AMID THE FLAT ANONYMITY of the plains, Palo Duro Canyon is virtually indiscernible until you're right on top of it. It is the Texas Panhandle's supreme geological surprise: the second-largest canyon in the United States, after its big brother, the Grand Canyon. Palo Duro (the name means “hard wood” in Spanish) is 120 miles long, 600 to 800 feet deep, and 6 to 20 miles wide. The canyon has three distinct layers: the flat plains on the rim, the floodplain and river valley at the bottom, and the sharp cliffs and rugged slopes of reddish-brown clay that connect the two. For a dry desert, it is full of grasses, trees, and wildflowers: star thistles, sunflowers, widow's tears, cockleburs, and prickly poppies; juniper, cottonwood, mesquite, saltbush, sumac, and willows. There is also a virtual aviary of vultures, mockingbirds, woodpeckers, meadow-larks, wild turkeys, and red-tailed hawks, not to mention rattlesnakes, turtles, horned lizards, bobcats, and antelopes. So many creatures, yet no buffalo, its former rulers, which were methodically eliminated from the canyon floor by Charles Goodnight and his men more than a century ago. Still, in the winter it's an ideal shelter for man and beast, and in summer a good jumping-off point for grazing on the adjacent plains.

The Comanches certainly thought so. Palo Duro was their winter stronghold, the place where they came to seek shelter and hide from their enemies. It's the place where Quanah Parker and his dwindling band took refuge after the failed Adobe Walls attack in 1874 and the staging ground for the dour Colonel Ranald Mackenzie's invasion later in the year that became the deathblow to the Comanches as a guerrilla force.

Palo Duro is now a state park, and near the entrance is the Pioneer Amphitheatre, with its stunning view of the red canyon walls, which blaze with rugged beauty when the sun begins to set. Each summer the nonprofit Texas Panhandle Heritage Foundation puts on a musical comedy-drama called
Texas!
It has run since 1966 and is sold out most evenings. The show celebrated the ranchers and homesteaders who settled here after the Indians were vanquished. The original songs were an exercise in shameless boosterism:

We expect you all to come to Texas!
If you're willing to be bold,
You can get it back tenfold—in Texas!

This is popular history as written by the victors—a tale of hardship and triumph by courageous and enterprising pioneers. There is a brief scene in which an Indian chief in a war bonnet and white costume rides up on a white horse. Yes, it's the ghost of Quanah Parker, come to see what has happened to the land that used to be his domain and to ask whether whites and Indians can ever live together in peace. No problem, replies a glib young Texas homesteader: “Both sides have suffered for this land and we both have lost loved ones … Hate is not the way.”

It only remains to Quanah to agree. “My young brother speaks with the sweet call of running water,” he says, before he turns and rides away, concluding his role as a walk-on bit player in someone else's historical myth.

THE PILGRIM PREDESTINARIAN REGULAR BAPTIST CHURCH, organized in 1833 by the Reverend Daniel Parker as he prepared to move his family and his followers to East Texas, still occupies a one-room, whitewashed structure outside the town of Elkhart. The present building is the fourth in its long history. Nearby is a replica of the first, a tight one-room log cabin with a triangular roof and space for six small pews. Out back is the cemetery where Daniel and his tempestuous brother James were buried, along with succeeding generations of Parker sons and daughters. There is also a flagpole on the site that was erected in 2002 by John P. Parker, Daniel's great-great-great-great-grandson, as an Eagle Scout Service Project.

Pilgrim is part of a circuit of four small churches in the area; congregants have established a rotation for worshipping at each. They gathered here on the third Sunday of every month. On a scorching morning in mid-July, three open doors provided the only ventilation, a lazy hot breeze that licked the faces of the faithful. In the back of the room a Hotpoint refrigerator of uncertain vintage hummed fitfully alongside a small table with an old microwave oven and a well-traveled Mister Coffee machine.

A dozen congregants had gathered to listen to David Camp, a young preacher; most of them were members of his family. No Parkers were present, and Camp made no mention of Cynthia Ann or her family. But in its own emphatic way, Camp's sermon offered a religious explanation of what had happened to her, one that Daniel Parker would no doubt have endorsed.

“We are but lambs led to slaughter every day,” Camp told the congregants. “… Satan is a roaring lion, but, people, we're prisoners of God's
love. He made good and He made evil. He made peace and He made war. And it was perfect.”

BACK IN QUANAH, TEXAS, on Saturday evening, people heaped their paper plates with barbecue brisket, potato salad, baked beans, white bread, and brownies, and balanced it all on their way to tables in the Three Rivers Ballroom on Main Street. The last formal event of the Quanah Parker Family Reunion featured Native American dancing; flute playing by Rebecca Parker, one of Quanah's great-great-grand-daughters, who has named one of her own daughters after Quanah; a long poem commemorating Quanah's life by Paul Davis, a Texas rancher who was part of the extended Parker community; and the ritual exchange of the silver bowl from Ron Parker of the Comanche side to Scott Nicholson, representing the Texas side of the family.