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

What happened to the tribe between roughly 1625 and 1750 was one of the great social and military transformations in history. Few nations have ever progressed with such breathtaking speed from the status of skulking pariah to dominant power. The change was total and irrevocable, and it was accompanied by a complete reordering of the balance of power on the American plains.

There were behavioral codes, to be sure—a man could not steal another man’s wife without paying penalties, for example. But there was no ultimate good and evil: just actions and consequences; injuries and damages due.

Now, instead of securing the peace, white men in south Texas were about to be targets of the greatest mobilization in Comanche history.

Buffalo Hump had one of those Comanche names—there were a large number of them—that the prudish whites could not quite bring themselves to translate. His Nermernuh name, properly transliterated, was Po-cha-na-quar-hip, which meant “erection that won’t go down.”9

The fact that they had absolutely no lawful authority outside of Texas did not seem to bother them.

Four days later, and several hundred miles to the north, a former Methodist preacher turned territorial officer named J. M. Chivington presided over the bloodiest, most treacherous, and least justified slaughter of Indians in American history. It would pass into legend and infamy under the name of the Sand Creek Massacre. Cheyennes were the victims.

coincidental. The cowboys would often linger on the reservation, sometimes for weeks, fattening thousands of their cattle on the lush grass that belonged to Indians. The contractors who supplied beef to the reservation also turned their animals out to graze on the Indian lands. None of this was legal, but there were no troops to police it. And many of the big ranchers south of the Red River, facing competition for grazing lands, now coveted the same reservation grass. The Indians’ response to the white incursions was to form what amounted to protection rackets. Quanah was the first to figure out how to make them work. Groups of armed Comanches, not exactly war parties but not terribly friendly, either, patrolled the southern and western parts

of their reservation looking for trespassing herds. A drover named Julian Gunter recalled encountering “a large band of Indians” who rode slowly around Gunter’s herd. Quanah, who led them, lectured him: “Your government gave this land to the Indian to be his hunting ground,” said Quanah. “But you go through and scare the game and your cattle eat the grass so the buffalo leaves and the Indian starves.” Sensing what was required, Gunter let Quanah’s braves cut six “fat cows” from the herd for themselves and went on his way.19 On another occasion a cattleman named G. W. Roberson was similarly forced by Quanah “to give him a beef.” Roberson explained: “We had to kind of stand in with those scoundrels. If you didn’t they come in at night and run your horses off or stampede your cattle. And most any man would rather give them a beef than have them run his cattle off.”20 Some even reported that Quanah was charging fees in the form of a one-dollar tax per wagon and ten cents per head of stock.

Once they had paid up, of course, the cattlemen enjoyed the protection of Quanah’s men while they crossed the reservation. That “protection” included advice on the best route to follow and on sources of water. Those who did not cooperate made payment in other ways: One outfit lost 295 head to the Comanches on a single drive. Nor was Quanah reluctant to play hardball politics inside the reservation. He was happy to report the Kiowas to the agent for taking cattle from herds heading north and assaulting cowboys...

But these were mere annoyances. The larger issue was whether or not the Indians should do what everybody else in America did: l...

Many Indians, including most of the Kiowas and a portion of the Comanches, thought it was a bad idea. They believed it would encourage white men to take over the land, jeopardizing the Indians’ future as stockmen. Such gratuitous income from “grass money,” moreover, would lead the young men to become lazy and gamble. The other side, represented by Quanah, saw it as a legitimate way for Indians to make money off what was happening anyway. The money could be used to build their own herds. There was plenty of land: Some two million acres were available, and thirty-five white cattle outfits were lining up for the privilege. The question was hotly debated in a political fight that lasted from 1880 to 1884. Quanah soon emerged as the leader of the pro-leasing faction. He traveled several times to Washington to help build his case. In one of his audiences with the secretary of the interior, he dismissed the antileasers contemptuously, saying “I cannot

tell what objection they have to it, unless they have not got sense. They are kind of old fogy, on the wild road yet, unless they have not got brains enough to sabe [sic] the advantage there is in it.” His rivals—Hears the Sunrise, Isa-tai, Lone Wolf, White Wolf, and many Kiowas—meanwhile, denounced Quanah as “bought by the cattlemen.” They were at least partly right. Quanah had been put on the payroll at $35 a month by one of the leading cattle outfits. The cattlemen, who were rabid advocates of the leasing of Indian lands, saw him as their spokesman, a job he performed very well because he believed his tribe’s interests were the same as theirs. The white ranchers also very likely contributed to Quanah’s own growing herd of cattle, and paid for his trips to Washington to counterbalance the lobbying done in the nation’s capital by Hears the Sunrise and the antileasers, who repeatedly demanded that Quanah be stripped of his authority as a tribal leader.23

On its face, Quanah’s arrangement with the stockmen might seem like simple corruption. But it could only be seen that way against standards that did not exist on the frontier. Quanah was merely playing the game the way everyone else did. Almost everyone who was a party to leasing talks had a substantial conflict of interest. Isa-tai, who opposed leasing, was actually running his own protection racket for two thousand head of cattle that grazed continuously on Indian land, as was Permansu, the nephew of the famous Comanche chief Ten Bears.24 The Indian agent, the agency clerk, and other agency personnel all had received payments from cattlemen or had vested interests in the outcome. (The agent was eventually fired for his inside dealing.) Four other Comanches were also on the st...

The Ghost Dance was driven by an apocalyptic vision of the return of dead Indians and the annihilation or disappearance of whites. Quanah, having witnessed the destructive power of Isa-tai’s grand visions at Adobe Walls, opposed it from the start and spoke against it.

He also came to control a pasture of forty-four thousand acres (sixty-nine square miles) that was soon known as the Quanah Pasture, some of which he leased out to cattlemen who paid him directly. He had a hundred-fifty-acre farm that was tended by a white man and two hundred hogs, three wagons, and one buggy.

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.

On one of his many trips to Fort Worth, a gaslight nearly killed him. He was sharing a hotel room with his father-in-law Yellow Bear. Before retiring, Yellow Bear “blew out” the gaslight before going to bed, a mistake Indians often made. Before the night was over, he was dead of asphyxiation, and Quanah, who remained unconscious for two days, barely survived.7

A month later, Roosevelt traveled west on a special train to participate in a much-publicized “wolf hunt” on lands belonging to the Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas in southwestern Oklahoma.

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 old home.

Quanah, who came under fire from time to time for his involvement in these rituals, once defended his religion by saying: “The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.”