Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

by S.C. Gwynne

Texas was never supposed to be its own sovereign country. After their victory at San Jacinto the vast majority of Texans believed that their territory would be immediately annexed by the United States.

There were two main reasons it did not happen. First, Mexico had never recognized the independence of its renegade northern province. If the United States added Texas it risked war with Mexico, something that, in 1836, it was not prepared to do. Nor could it easily admit a slave territory.

The Texan solution to these problems—ranging companies—was unique in western military history. That was largely because, by anyone else’s standards, the companies made no sense at all.

They arose casually and by acclaim and solely on merit; the rank and file gave them their commissions. In the absence of provisions, Rangers hunted for themselves, often going into the field with only water and a mixture of sugar and parched corn they called “cold flour”;21 sometimes they were given food by the communities they defended. Sometimes they stole chickens. The only thing the government reliably provided, in its wisdom, was ammunition.

The western part of Texas in those years was awash in young, reckless, single men with a taste for wide open spaces, danger, and raw adventure.22 They were almost all in their twenties, and they came to San Antonio looking for something other than a comfortable, sedentary life on a farm. They liked the idea of killing Comanches and Mexicans. Most of the famous Ranger captains had completed their careers by the time they were thirty-two. They had no property other than their horses and often no steady jobs. Without them, the idea of ranging companies would never have worked. They were happy to stay in the field for three to six months, the usual length of a Ranger commission.

The new frontier folks, especially the Ranger types, were not literate, and they were not thinkers. They would rarely even acknowledge their victories

The Rangers were just a dirty, ill-clad, underfed squad of irregulars anyway. They didn’t write letters and didn’t keep diaries. They rarely issued reports of any kind; often they didn’t tell anyone at all what they had done. Nor were there any journalists around of the sort who would later chronicle, with detail and considerable fanfare, the Indian battles of the 1870s.

Though the idealized Ranger wore a leather hat with its brim turned up, a kerchief, cotton shirt, and plain britches, the reality was something else. They wore whatever pleased them. Sometimes that meant colorful Mexican serapes and wide-brimmed sombreros. Sometimes fur hats, bobtailed coats, or dirty panamas. Often it meant head-to-toe buckskins or bits and pieces of buffalo robes. Some went about naked to the waist, wearing the equivalent of Indian breechclouts over leggings.

John Coffee Hays. He was called Jack. The Comanches, who feared him greatly, called him “Capitan Yack,”30 as did the Mexicans, who put a high price on his head. He was the über-Ranger, the one everyone wanted to be like, the one who was braver and smarter and cooler under fire than any of the rest of them.

For one thing, the new breed of Ranger—the Hays Ranger—knew how to ride. And he was mounted on an agile and fast horse, the product of local breeding of mustangs with Kentucky, Virginia, and Arabian strains. Those horses were heavier than the Indian mounts, but they could run with mustangs and keep up with them over long distances.

the Battle of Walker’s Creek, a minor military engagement that became one of the defining moments in the history of Texas and of the American West. Indeed, it can be argued that before Jack Hays arrived in San Antonio, Americans in the West went about largely on foot and carried Kentucky rifles. By the time he left in 1849, anybody going west was mounted and carrying a holstered six-shooter. Walker’s Creek was the beginning of that change.

Still, the war managed to tear that frontier apart. It did so not with armies of men and rolling caissons but with simple neglect.

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which forced most tribes to give up all of their lands in the East and Midwest for a supposedly eternal plot of ground in the Indian Territory. By the 1860s the territory had become an intricate patchwork of aboriginal cultures, each with its own designated reserve. The larger reserves had been given to the Five Civilized Tribes (Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Seminole), as well as to the combined Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache tribes, the Cheyennes and Arapahos, and to the Wichitas and their affiliated tribes (Caddos, Anadarkos, Tonkawas, Tawakonis, Keechis, and Delawares). There were smaller areas for Kickapoos, Sac and Fox, Osages, Pawnees, Pottawotamies and Shawnees, Iowas, Peorias, Quapaws, Modocs, Ottawas, Wyandottes, Senecas, Poncas, and Otos and Missouris. It was, all in all, an astonishing collision of native interests and antagonisms, all jammed together by fiat of Congress on the rolling plains and timberlands north of the Red River. For

The trouble began in 1861, soon after the first shots of the war were fired, when the United States withdrew its troops from Indian Territory.2 Though there were a few ragtag confederates scattered through the territory, the agrarian tribes were mostly unprotected from the wild horse tribes, who had always hated them for encroaching on their hunting grounds and for what they saw as their fawning accommodation of the white man.

There were “Confederate” Indians and “Union” Indians. Many members of the Five Civilized Tribes were slaveholders, which both angered Union Indians and caused deep rifts within their own ranks. The result was a series of massacres and retaliations, most of which are lost to history.

The outbreaks had their origins in the north in 1862, with an Indian revolt on the prairie plains of Minnesota. That year the Santee Sioux (the eastern Sioux, also known as Dakota) rose up in rebellion from their reservation along the Minnesota River. They killed as many as eight hundred white settlers, the highest civilian wartime toll in U.S. history prior to 9/11.

When bluecoat volunteers finally crushed the Santee rebellion, angry mobs screamed at the captives in their cages, castrated the few they got hold of, and demanded that the rebels be executed. If President Lincoln had not stepped in, hundreds would have died that way. As it was, thirty-eight were hanged, the largest one-day execution in American history. The following year the tribe was expelled from Minnesota, their reservations abolished.

They were allowed to leave the reservation to hunt, south of the Arkansas. But the treaty really meant that they would have to cease fighting and stop following the buffalo, which in turn meant that they would have to cease being Plains Indians.

They would have to reorder their entire social structure around a set of values and principles that were still largely unimaginable to them. The Comanches and Kiowas were to share a 2.9-million-acre reservation in what is now southwestern Oklahoma, north and east of the Red River and its north fork, south of the Washita, and west of the 98th meridian. This was actually very good land, huntable and arable and with decent water sources, and it was in traditional Comanche territory and included Medicine Bluffs and other sacred sites. But it was a tiny fraction of Comancheria, which at its peak held nearly 200 million acres. Nor did it include by far the richest of the old hunting grounds, the Texas bison plains.

The greatest threat of all to their identity, and to the very idea of a nomadic hunter in North America, appeared on the plains in the late 1860s. These were the buffalo men. Between 1868 and 1881 they would kill thirty-one million buffalo, stripping the plains almost entirely of the huge, lumbering creatures and destroying any last small hope that any horse tribe could ever be restored to its traditional life. There was no such thing as a horse Indian without a buffalo herd. Such an Indian had no identity at all.

Killing the Indians’ food was not just an accident of commerce; it was a deliberate political act.

The other thousand had refused to surrender. That group included no more than three hundred fighting men, all that was left of the most militarily dominant tribe in American history.

At noon on June 2, nearly a month after they left their camp, four hundred seven Quahadis arrived at Signal Station, a few miles west of Fort Sill, and surrendered themselves, their fifteen hundred horses, and their arms to the military authorities of the United States.

Comanches and Kiowas had long been uneasy about black troops, whom they called “buffalo soldiers” because their tight, curly hair reminded them of a buffalo’s ruff.

His home became known as Star House and still stands today, having been moved twice. One of the great, obscure treasures of the American West, it occupies the back lot of a defunct amusement park behind an Indian trading post in Cache, Oklahoma.

He had a total of eight wives (one of them was Weckeah, the woman with whom he had eloped), seven of whom he married during the reservation period. Between them he fathered twenty-four children, five of whom died in infancy.

He adopted and raised two white boys of his own, one of whom he found in a circus in San Antonio and adopted on the spot.

If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested in the early twentieth century, there are no second acts in American lives, then Quanah was an exception to the rule.

Two weeks later Crazy Horse and 889 Sioux surrendered to Mackenzie at the Red Cloud Agency, ending the Sioux and Cheyenne war.41 The surrender stands as a sort of bookend to the twinned fates of Custer and Mackenzie, the one destined for eternal fame and glory, the other for obscurity and oblivion.

When Roosevelt’s train arrived at Frederick, Oklahoma, he was met by a crowd of three thousand and then escorted by a mounted honor guard, which included Quanah, to a speaker’s stand in the middle of town. (Quanah said later that he had been afraid someone might try to shoot the president—McKinley had been assassinated four years earlier—and thus had worn a six-shooter for the occasion. The idea is unimaginable today.)9 Roosevelt made a few brief remarks, then invited Quanah, whom he called “a good citizen,” to come up on the stand with him. The two men shook hands, to rousing applause, and then Quanah gave a short speech.

The wolf hunt and his visit to Quanah are often cited as reasons Roosevelt became determined to create the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, which today is just north of Quanah’s